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Statistics and Computing

Wolfgang Karl Härdle

Cathy Yi-Hsuan Chen
Ludger Overbeck Editors

Applied
Quantitative
Finance
Third Edition
Statistics and Computing

Series editor
Wolfgang Karl Härdle, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Statistics and Computing (SC) includes monographs and advanced texts on
statistical computing and statistical packages.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/3022

Wolfgang Karl Härdle Cathy Yi-Hsuan Chen
•

Ludger Overbeck
Editors

Applied Quantitative Finance

Third Edition

123
Editors
Wolfgang Karl Härdle Ludger Overbeck
C.A.S.E.—Center for Applied Statistics Department of Mathematics
and Economics University of Giessen
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Giessen
Berlin Germany
Germany

Cathy Yi-Hsuan Chen

School of Business and Economics
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Berlin
Germany

ISSN 1431-8784 ISSN 2197-1706 (electronic)

Statistics and Computing
ISBN 978-3-662-54485-3 ISBN 978-3-662-54486-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-54486-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940533

1st edition: © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002

2nd edition: © Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2008
3rd edition: © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017, corrected publication 2017
Originally published under: Härdle, W., Hautsch, N., Overbeck, L. (Eds.)
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part
of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission
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The registered company address is: Heidelberger Platz 3, 14197 Berlin, Germany
With the kind permission of MFO: Ludger Overbeck, Cathy Chen, Wolfgang Karl Härdle
Preface to the Third Edition

The third edition of Applied Quantitative Finance moves the focus to risk
management. As a consequence, we changed the basic structure from four to three
chapters with many more contributions to market and credit risk. We revisit
important market risk issues in Chap. 1. Chapter 2 introduces novel concepts in
credit risk along with renewed quantitative methods being proposed accordingly.
A wider range of coverage in recent development of credit risk and its management
is presented in this version. The last chapter is on dynamics of risk management and
includes risk analysis of energy markets and for cryptocurrencies. Digital assets,
such as block chain-based currencies, become popular but are theoretically
challenging when based on conventional methods. A modern text mining method
called Dynamic Topic Modelling is introduced in detail and applied to the message
board of Bitcoins. A time-varying LASSO technique for tail events is at the heart of
a new financial risk meter. This third edition brings together modern risk analysis
based on quantitative methods and textual analytics for the need of the new
challenges in banking and finance.

Berlin/Giessen, Germany Wolfgang Karl Härdle

April 2017 Cathy Yi-Hsuan Chen
Ludger Overbeck

vii
Contents

Part I Market Risk

1 VaR in High Dimensional Systems—A Conditional
Correlation Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
H. Herwartz, B. Pedrinha and F.H.C. Raters
2 Multivariate Volatility Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
M.R. Fengler, H. Herwartz and F.H.C. Raters
3 Portfolio Selection with Spectral Risk Measures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
S.F. Huang, H.C. Lin and T.Y. Lin
4 Implementation of Local Stochastic Volatility Model
in FX Derivatives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
J. Zheng and X. Yuan

Part II Credit Risk

5 Estimating Distance-to-Default with a Sector-Specific
Liability Adjustment via Sequential Monte Carlo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
J.-C. Duan and W.-T. Wang
6 Risk Measurement with Spectral Capital Allocation . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
L. Overbeck and M. Sokolova
7 Market Based Credit Rating and Its Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
R.S. Tsay and H. Zhu
8 Using Public Information to Predict Corporate
Default Risk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
C.N. Peng and J.L. Lin
9 Stress Testing in Credit Portfolio Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
M. Kalkbrener and L. Overbeck

ix
x Contents

10 Penalized Independent Factor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

Y. Chen, R.B. Chen and Q. He
11 Term Structure of Loss Cascades in Portfolio Securitisation . . . . . . 207
L. Overbeck and C. Wagner
12 Credit Rating Score Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Wolfgang Karl Härdle, K.F. Phoon and D.K.C. Lee

Part III Dynamics Risk Measurement

13 Copulae in High Dimensions: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Ostap Okhrin, Alexander Ristig and Ya-Fei Xu
14 Measuring and Modeling Risk Using High-Frequency
Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
Wolfgang Karl Härdle, N. Hautsch and U. Pigorsch
15 Measuring Financial Risk in Energy Markets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
S. Žiković
16 Risk Analysis of Cryptocurrency as an Alternative
Asset Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
L. Guo and X.J. Li
17 Time Varying Quantile Lasso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
Wolfgang Karl Härdle, W. Wang and L. Zboňáková
18 Dynamic Topic Modelling for Cryptocurrency Community
Forums . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
M. Linton, E.G.S. Teo, E. Bommes, C.Y. Chen
and Wolfgang Karl Härdle
Erratum to: Copulae in High Dimensions: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . E1
Ostap Okhrin, Alexander Ristig and Ya-Fei Xu
 Part I
Market Risk
Chapter 1
VaR in High Dimensional Systems-A
Conditional Correlation Approach

H. Herwartz, B. Pedrinha and F.H.C. Raters

Abstract In empirical finance, multivariate volatility models are widely used to

capture both volatility clustering and contemporaneous correlation of asset return
vectors. In higher dimensional systems, parametric specifications often become
intractable for empirical analysis owing to large parameter spaces. On the contrary,
feasible specifications impose strong restrictions that may not be met by financial
data as, for instance, constant conditional correlation (CCC). Recently, dynamic
conditional correlation (DCC) models have been introduced as a means to solve the
trade off between model feasibility and flexibility. Here, we employ alternatively
the CCC and the DCC modeling framework to evaluate the Value-at-Risk associated
with portfolios comprising major U.S. stocks. In addition, we compare their perfor-
mances with corresponding results obtained from modeling portfolio returns directly
via univariate volatility models.

H. Herwartz · F.H.C. Raters (B)

Department of Economics, University of Göttingen, Humboldtallee 3,
37073 Göttingen, Germany
e-mail: raters@uni-goettingen.de
H. Herwartz
e-mail: hherwartz@uni-goettingen.de
B. Pedrinha
WINGAS GmbH, Königstor 20, 34117 Kassel, Germany
e-mail: bruno.pedrinha@wingas.de

© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2017 3

W.K. Härdle et al. (eds.), Applied Quantitative Finance, Statistics and Computing,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-54486-0_1
4 H. Herwartz et al.

1.1 Introduction

Volatility clustering, i.e. positive correlation of price variations observed on spec-

ulative markets, motivated the introduction of autoregressive conditionally het-
eroskedastic (ARCH) processes by Engle (1982) and its popular generalizations
by Bollerslev (1986) (Generalized ARCH, GARCH) and Nelson (1991) (Exponen-
tial GARCH). Being univariate in nature, however, these models neglect a further
stylized feature of empirical price variations, namely contemporaneous correlation
over a cross section of assets, stock or foreign exchange markets (Engle et al. 1990a;
Hamao et al. 1990; Hafner and Herwartz 1998; Lee and Long 2009).
The covariance between asset returns is of essential importance in finance. Effec-
tively, many problems in financial theory and practice, such as asset allocation,
hedging strategies or Value-at-Risk (VaR) evaluation, require some formalization
not merely of univariate risk measures but rather of the entire covariance matrix
(Bollerslev et al. 1988; Cecchetti et al. 1988). Similarly, pricing of options with
more than one underlying asset will require some (dynamic) forecasting scheme for
time varying variances and covariances as well (Duan 1995).
When modeling time dependent second order moments, a multivariate model is
a natural framework to take cross sectional information into account. Over recent
years, multivariate volatility models have been attracting high interest in econometric
research and practice. Popular examples of multivariate volatility models comprise
the GARCH model class recently reviewed by Bauwens et al. (2006). Numerous
versions of the multivariate GARCH (MGARCH) model suffer from huge parameter
spaces. Thus, their scope in empirical finance is limited since the dimension of vector
valued systems of asset returns should not exceed five (Ding and Engle 2001). Factor
structures (Engle et al. 1990b) and so-called correlation models (Bollerslev 1990)
have been introduced to cope with the curse of dimensionality in higher dimensional
systems. The latter start from univariate GARCH specifications to describe volatility
patterns and formalize in a second step the conditional covariances implicitly via
some model for the systems’ conditional correlations. Recently, dynamic conditional
correlation models have been put forth by Engle (2002), Engle and Sheppard (2001)
and Tse and Tsui (2002) that overcome the restrictive CCC pattern (Bollerslev 1990)
while retaining its computational feasibility.
Here, we will briefly review two competing classes of MGARCH models, namely
the half-vec model family and correlation models. The latter will be applied to eval-
uate the VaR associated with portfolios comprised by stocks listed in the Dow Jones
Industrial Average (DJIA) index. We motivate the idea for VaR backtesting and ref-
erence the recent literature on (un)conditional VaR coverage tests. We compare the
performance of models building on constant and dynamic conditional correlation.
Moreover, it is illustrated how a univariate volatility model performs in comparison
with both correlation models.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The next section introduces
the MGARCH model and briefly mentions some specifications that fall within the
class of so-called half-vec MGARCH models. Correlation models are the focus
1 VaR in High Dimensional Systems-A … 5

of Sect. 1.3 where issues like estimation or inference within this model family are
discussed in some detail. In Sect. 1.4, we motivate and discuss VaR backtesting by
means of (un)conditional coverage. An empirical application of basic correlation
models to evaluate the VaR for portfolios comprising U.S. stocks is provided in
Sect. 1.5.

1.2 Half-Vec Multivariate GARCH Models

Let εt = (ε1t , ε2t , . . . , ε N t ) denote an N -dimensional vector of serially uncorrelated

components with mean zero. The latter could be directly observed or estimated from a
multivariate regression model. The process εt follows a multivariate GARCH process
if it has the representation

εt |Ft−1 ∼ N (0, t ), t = [σi j,t ], (1.1)

where t is measurable with respect to information generated up to time t − 1, for-

malized by means of the filtration Ft−1 . The N × N conditional covariance matrix,
t = E[εt ε t |Ft−1 ], has typical elements σi j,t with i = j (i  = j) indexing condi-
tional variances (covariances). In a multivariate setting, potential dependencies of
the second order moments in t on Ft−1 become easily intractable for practical
purposes.
The assumption of conditional normality in (1.1) allows to specify the likeli-
hood function for observed processes εt , t = 1, 2, . . . , T . In empirical applications
of GARCH models, it turned out that conditional normality of speculative returns
is more an exception than the rule. Maximizing the misspecified Gaussian log-
likelihood function is justified by quasi maximum likelihood (QML) theory. Asymp-
totic theory on properties of the QML estimator in univariate GARCH models is well
developed (Bollerslev and Wooldridge 1992; Lee and Hansen 1994; Lumsdaine 1996
and a few results on consistency Jeantheau 1998) and asymptotic normality Comte
and Lieberman (2003); Ling and McAleer (2003) have been derived for multivariate
processes.
The so-called half-vec specification encompasses all MGARCH variants that are
linear in (lagged) second order moments or squares and cross products of elements
in (lagged) εt . Let vech(B) denote the half-vectorization operator stacking the ele-
ments of a (m × m) matrix B from the main diagonal downwards in a m(m + 1)/2
dimensional column vector. We concentrate the formalization of MGARCH models
on the MGARCH(1,1) case which is, by far, the dominating model order used in the
empirical literature (Bollerslev et al. 1994). Within the half-vec representation of the
GARCH(1, 1) model t is specified as follows:

vech(t ) = c + A vech(εt−1 ε
t−1 ) + G vech(t−1 ). (1.2)
6 H. Herwartz et al.

In (1.2), the matrices A and G each contain {N (N + 1)/2}2 elements. Deterministic

covariance components are collected in c, a column vector of dimension N (N +
1)/2. On the one hand, the half-vec model in (1.2) allows a very general dynamic
structure of the multivariate volatility process. On the other hand, this specification
suffers from huge dimensionality of the relevant parameter space which is of order
O(N 4 ). In addition, it might be cumbersome or even impossible in applied work to
restrict the admissible parameter space such that the time path of implied matrices
t is positive definite.
To reduce the dimensionality of MGARCH models, numerous avenues have been
followed that can be nested in the general class of half-vec models. Prominent exam-
ples in this vein of research are the Diagonal model (Bollerslev et al. 1988), the
BEKK model (Baba et al. 1990; Engle and Kroner 1995), the Factor GARCH (Engle
et al. 1990b), the orthogonal GARCH (OGARCH) (Alexander 1998, 2001) or the
generalized OGARCH model put forth by Van der Weide (2002). Evaluating the
merits of these proposals requires to weight model parsimony and computational
issues against the implied loss of generality. For instance, the BEKK model is con-
venient to allow for cross sectional dynamics of conditional covariances, and weak
restrictions have been formalized keeping t positive definite over time (Engle and
Kroner 1995). Implementing the model will, however, involve simultaneous estima-
tion of O(N 2 ) parameters such that the BEKK model has been rarely applied in
higher dimensional systems (N > 4). Factor models build upon univariate factors,
such as an observed stock market index (Engle et al. 1990b) or underlying principal
components (Alexander 1998, 2001). The latter are assumed to exhibit volatility
dynamics which are suitably modeled by univariate GARCH-type models. Thereby,
factor models drastically reduce the number of model parameters undergoing simul-
taneous estimation. Model feasibility is, however, paid with restrictive correlation
dynamics implied by the (time invariant) loading coefficients. Moreover, it is worth-
while mentioning that in case of factor specifications still O(N ) parameters have to
be estimated jointly when maximizing the Gaussian (quasi) likelihood function.

1.3 Correlation Models

1.3.1 Motivation

Correlation models comprise a class of multivariate volatility models that is not

nested within the half-vec specification. Similar to factor models, correlation models
circumvent the curse of dimensionality by separating the empirical analysis in two
steps. First, univariate volatility models are employed to estimate volatility dynamics
of each asset specific return process εit , i = 1, . . . , N . In a second step t is obtained
imposing some parsimonious structure on the correlation matrix (Bollerslev 1990).
Thus, in the framework of correlation models we have
1 VaR in High Dimensional Systems-A … 7

t = Vt (θ)Rt (φ)Vt (θ), (1.3)

√ √
where Vt = diag( σ11,t , . . . , σ N N ,t ) is a diagonal matrix having as typical ele-
ments the square roots of the conditional variances estimates σii,t . The latter could
be obtained from some univariate volatility model specified with parameter vectors
θi stacked in θ = (θ1 , . . . , θ 
N ) . If univariate GARCH(1,1) models are used for the
conditional volatilities σii,t , θi will contain 3 parameters such that θ is of length 3N .
Owing to its interpretation of a correlation matrix, the diagonal elements in R(φ) are
unity (rii = 1, i = 1, . . . , N ). From the general representation in (1.3) it is apparent
that alternative correlation models particularly differ with regard to the formalization
of the correlation matrix Rt (φ) specified with parameter vector φ.
In this section, we will highlight a few aspects of correlation models. First, a log-
likelihood decomposition is given that motivates the stepwise empirical analysis.
Then, two major variants of correlation models are outlined, the early CCC model
(Bollerslev 1990) and the DCC approach introduced by Engle (2002) and Engle and
Sheppard (2001). Tools for inference in correlation models that have been applied
in the empirical part of the paper are collected in an own subsection. Also, a few
remarks on recent generalizations of the basic DCC specification are provided.

1.3.2 Log-Likelihood Decomposition

The adopted separation of volatility and correlation analysis is motivated by a decom-

position of the Gaussian log-likelihood function (Engle 2002) applying to the model
in (1.1) and (1.3):
 T 
1   −1
l(θ, φ) = − N log(2π) + log(|t |) + εt t εt
2 t=1
 T 
1   −1
=− N log(2π) + 2 log(|Vt |) + log(|Rt |) + εt t εt
2 t=1

T
= lt (θ, ϕ),
t=1

lt (θ, φ) = ltV (θ) + ltC (θ, φ), (1.4)

1 
ltV (θ) = − N log 2π + 2 log(|Vt (θ)|) + εt Vt (θ)−2 εt (1.5)
2
1 
ltC (θ, φ) = − log |Rt (φ)| + vt Rt (φ)−1 vt − vt vt . (1.6)
2
8 H. Herwartz et al.

According to (1.5) and (1.6), the maximization of the log-likelihood function may
proceed in two steps. First, univariate volatility models are used to maximize the
volatility component, ltV (θ), and conditional on first step estimates θ̂, the correlation
part ltC (θ, φ) is maximized in a second step. To perform a sequential estimation
procedure efficiently, it is required that the volatility and correlation parameters
are variation free (Engle et al. 1983) meaning that there are no cross relationships
linking single parameters in θ and φ when maximizing the Gaussian log-likelihood
function. In the present case, the parameters in θ will impact on vt = Vt−1 εt , vt =
(v1t , v2t , . . . , v N t ) , and, thus, the condition necessary to have full information and
limited information estimation equivalent is violated. Note, however, that univariate
GARCH estimates (θ̂) will be consistent. Thus, owing to the huge number of available
observations which is typical for empirical analyses of financial data, the efficiency
loss involved with a sequential procedure is likely to be smaller in comparison with
the gain in estimation feasibility.

1.3.3 Constant Conditional Correlation Model

Bollerslev (1990) proposes a constant conditional correlation (CCC) model

√
σi j,t = ri j σii,t σ j j,t , i, j = 1, . . . , N , i = j. (1.7)

Given positive time paths of the systems’ volatilities, positive definiteness of t is

easily guaranteed for the CCC model (|ri j | < 1, i = j). As an additional objective of
this specification, it is important to notice that the estimation of the correlation pattern
may avoid iterative QML estimation of the {N (N − 1)/2} correlation parameters ri j
comprising Rt (φ) = R. Instead, one may generalize the idea of variance targeting
(Engle and Mezrich 1996) towards the case of correlation targeting. Then, D =
E[vt vt ] is estimated as the unconditional covariance matrix of standardized returns,
vt = Vt−1 εt , and R is the correlation matrix implied by D. With   denoting matrix
multiplication by element, we have formally

1  
T
R̂ = D̂ ∗−1/2 D̂ D̂ ∗−1/2 , D̂ = vt vt , D̂ ∗ = D̂  I N . (1.8)
T t=1

The price paid for the feasibility of CCC is, however, the assumption of a rather
restrictive conditional correlation pattern which is likely at odds with empirical sys-
tems of speculative returns. Applying this model in practice therefore requires at
least some pretest for constant correlation (Tse 2000; Engle 2002).
1 VaR in High Dimensional Systems-A … 9

1.3.4 Dynamic Conditional Correlation Model

The dynamic conditional correlation model introduced by Engle (2002) and Engle
and Sheppard (2001) preserves the analytic separability of the models’ volatilities and
correlations, but allows a richer dynamic structure for the latter. For convenience, we
focus the representation of the DCC model again on the DCC(1,1) case formalizing
the conditional correlation matrix Rt (φ) as follows:

Rt (φ) = {Q ∗t (φ)}−1/2 Q t (φ){Q ∗t (φ)}−1/2 , Q ∗t (φ) = Q t (φ)  I N , (1.9)

with

Q t (φ) = R(1 − α − β) + αvt−1 vt−1 + β Q t−1 (φ) (1.10)

and R is a positive definite (unconditional) correlation matrix of vt .

Sufficient conditions guaranteeing positive definiteness of the time path of con-
ditional covariance matrices t implied by (1.3), (1.9) and (1.10) are given in Engle
and Sheppard (2001). Apart from well known positivity constraints to hold for the
univariate GARCH components, the DCC(1,1) model will deliver positive definite
covariances if α > 0, β > 0 while α + β < 1 and λmin , the smallest eigenvalue of
R, is strictly positive, i.e. λmin > δ > 0. It is worthwhile to point out that the DCC
framework not only preserves the separability of volatility and correlation estimation,
but also allows to estimate the nontrivial parameters in R via correlation targeting
described in (1.8).
Given consistent estimates of unconditional correlations ri j , i = j, the remaining
parameters describing the correlation dynamics are collected in the two-dimensional
vector ϕ = (α, β) . Note that making use of correlation targeting the number of
parameters undergoing nonlinear iterative estimation in the DCC model is constant
(= 2), and, thus, avoids the curse of dimensionality even in case of very large systems
of asset returns.
Instead of estimating the model in three steps, one could alternatively estimate
the unconditional correlation parameters in R and the coefficients in ϕ jointly. Note
that the number of unknown parameters in R is O(N 2 ). Formal representations of
first and second order derivatives to implement the two step estimation and inference
can be found in Hafner and Herwartz (2008). We prefer the three step approach here,
since it avoids iterative estimation procedures in large parameter spaces.

1.3.5 Inference in the Correlation Models

QML-inference on significance of univariate GARCH parameter estimates is dis-

cussed in Bollerslev and Wooldridge (1992). Analytical expressions necessary to
evaluate the asymptotic covariance matrix are given in Bollerslev (1986). In the
1 VaR in High Dimensional Systems-A … 21

The Stata software package provides the user with comfortable fitting algorithms
for conditional correlation models and diagonal half-vec models by means of the
function mgarch. Its optimized program code proceeds rapidly and, at the same time,
computes common metrics. The Stata documentation of the implemented methods
is exemplary and might be a good complement while studying publicly available
code examples of the volatility model implementations which are investigated in this
chapter.

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and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their
church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March;
The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran
by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers
of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels
by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians,
Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be
permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic.
Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of
taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be
found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice.
The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice,
has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A
state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength,
and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of
manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts”
naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social
intercourse. Those contracts need not always be [139]specified by
written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech.
Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of
social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every
man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are
international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social
instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of
preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea
Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed
to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were
almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial
fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An
islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a
common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would
hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as
the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next
morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful
breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-
rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler
Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his
ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their
winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman
adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the
primitive German woodlands. The natives of San Salvador received
their Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and scrupulously
abstained from purloining, or even [140]touching, any article of their
ship-stores; and a similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba
and San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable to conceive
the idea that their guests could repay good with evil. “Fair play” is the
motto of boyish sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than on
the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary sense of justice
manifests itself even among social animals. A baboon who wantonly
attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the
whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an immediate retreat
under penalty of being attacked by all the winged neighbors and
relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman
methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of gratuitous cruelty.
They may resign themselves to a system of consistent severity, but
refuse to submit to evident injustice.

[Contents]

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable

crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior
strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do
unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a
tyrant,” says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is
the rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive
from heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen
beaks, but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And
it is not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the
[141]justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.”
History has more than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The
reputation of incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and
even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.

King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike

neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage
(Ibn Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed
to decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a
synonyme of an “honorable,” i.e., honest, reputation. The
commercial integrity of Hebrew merchants has overcome race-
jealousies and religious prejudices, and in America the worship of
wealth does not prevent an upright judge from ranking high above a
wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.

The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than

once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power.
It biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it
enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King
Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and
Burgundy. A just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union,
surpasses the value of common interests, which a slight change of
circumstances is apt to turn into conflicting interests and
disagreement. Strict adherence to the principles of political equity
has preserved small states in the midst of powerful neighbors,
whose greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to incur the
odium of wanton aggression. Belgium, [142]Holland, and Denmark
have thus preserved their national independence in Europe, as
Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty and
simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has proved a match for the
cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly pillage their
neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils,
and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again and again been
obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised “heathen.”

The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the

proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs of
commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best policy,”
even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to
promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a
wealthy knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and
ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in
direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes
may miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of
prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.

[Contents]

C.—PERVERSION.

Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and
too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of
Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has
condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of
man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed
that “every nation makes its [143]gods the embodiments of its own
ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is
better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the
moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly
prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is
equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can
be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral
characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted
doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God
seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic
license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend.
The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the
omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human
nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture
nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a
voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with
every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The
God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate
share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma,
nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an
“unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The
most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the
supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny,
but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic
Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the
cruel murder of a [144]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The
doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments
and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of
predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by
their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous
act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an
eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of
immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the
eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even
children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no
doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants,
only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a
doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so
atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it
would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its
insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in
danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such
infamies to their creator.

[Contents]

D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit
of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and
scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and
Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The
worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children
and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the
[145]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded
fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots
could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty
“sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to
himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; the Faust-
Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the
Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent)
ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments
of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage
duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates,
and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that
power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian
citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no
place in that code of revealed ethics.

Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the

Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by
the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the
inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to
be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.

“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the

Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is
disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the
intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last
experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution. [146]There,
too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the
strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many
generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests
and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts
learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were
mangled by the fangs of those beasts.

The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice

for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the
consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly
every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of
his conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let
scholars starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with
chains. His successors who lavished the treasures of their vast
empire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in
penury. The sovereign protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates
refused to relieve the last distress of John Kepler. The moralists who
thought it a grievance that the church should be denied the right of
tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of
the men whose labor had made those lands blossom like the
gardens of paradise, and who were exiled by thousands for the
crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the trinitary gods
of the New Testament.

[Contents]

E.—REFORM.

The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an

antinatural creed is still glaringly evident [147]in the prevailing notions
of natural justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern
Crœsus who deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a
Christian to contribute an ample subvention to the support of an
orthodox seminary, has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated
income by reducing the wages of a hundred starving factory children
and taking every sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of
helpless tenants and dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who
doom their poor neighbors to an earthly Gehenna and premature
death by depriving them of every chance for healthful recreation,
lavish their luxuries and their endearments on the caged cutthroat
who edifies his jailer by renouncing the vanities of this worldly sphere
and ranting about the bliss of the New Jerusalem. The bank cashier
who would never be pardoned for kicking the hind-parts of a
mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin of such
secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few hundred
widows and orphans.
Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of
departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common
honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men.
Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral
reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious
atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible
for his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims
of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of
Secularism should insist on a truth not [148]unknown to the moralists
of antiquity, that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a
virtue, and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness
by failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud
and endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.

[Contents]
CHAPTER XII.
 TRUTH.

[Contents]

A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.

The enemies of Nature have for ages based the favorite arguments
of their creed on the doctrine of Natural Depravity. According to the
theories of that tenet the natural instincts of the human heart are
wholly evil, and its every nobler impulse is due to the redeeming
influence of theological education. The baseness of the
“unregenerate soul” is their favorite antithesis of “holiness by grace;”
and the best test of that dogma would be a comparison of the moral
characteristics of a young child of Nature with the moral results of
theological training. We need not adduce the extreme case of a child
like Kaspar Hauser or the ape-nursed foundling of Baroda, whose
propensities had been modeled in communion with solitude or the
dumb denizens of the wilderness. For, even in the midst of “Christian
civilization,” thousands of peasants and mechanics are practically
pure Agnostics, and ignore the absurdities of the New Testament as
persistently as their deer-hunting ancestors ignored the absurdities
[149]of pagan mythology. At the end of his sixth or seventh year the
offspring of such parents would still represent a fair specimen-child
of unregenerate Nature, and the normal bias of that Nature is
revealed in the honesty, the trusting innocence, the purity, and the
cheerfulness of the young Agnostic, and the absence of every
appreciable germ of the secret vices, the rancorous spites, and the
joy-hating bigotries of the representative Christian convent-slave.

But the most characteristic features of that contrast would perhaps

be the double-tongued hypocrisy of the old Jesuit and the artless
candor of the young peasant boy. The truthfulness of young children
antedates all moral instruction. Its motives are wholly independent of
theological, or even abstract-ethical, influences, and are based
merely on a natural preference for the simplest way of dealing with
the problems of intellectual communication. Truth is uniform,
falsehood is complex. Truth is persistent and safe; falsehood is
unstable, fragile, and precarious. Children instinctively recognize the
difficulties of plausibly maintaining the fictions of deceit, and dread
the risk of incurring the suspicion of habitual insincerity. Hence their
uncompromising loyalty to facts; their innocence of artifice and
mental reservation; hence also their extreme reluctance in
conforming to the conventional customs of social hypocrisy and
polite prevarication.

“Are you not glad Mrs. D. is gone?” Master Frank once asked his
mother in my presence. “Well, yes, I am.” “Then what’s the use
asking her to call [150]again and stay for supper? She could not help
seeing that we were tired of her gabble.” “Well, it wouldn’t do to insult
her, you know.” “Oh, no, but what’s the use telling her something she
cannot believe?”

That last remark, especially, recurs to my memory whenever the

expedience of hypocrisy is defended by the conventional sophisms
of Christian civilization. That prevarications are unprofitable as well
as unpardonable is a truth which Jesuitry has shrouded with a veil of
its choicest cant, but the clear vision of childhood penetrates that
cant, and the “natural depravity” of unregenerate souls may reach
the degree of doubting the merit of simulation even in the interest of
an orthodox creed, as the reverend dogmatist might ascertain by
happening to overhear the recess comments of our American
Sabbath-school youngsters.
[Contents]

B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.

The Utilitarians hold that motives of enlightened self-interest would

be sufficient to make a man perfectly virtuous. With the conventional
definition of “virtue,” that tenet might require certain qualifications;
but it is more than probable that perfect prudence would insure a
voluntary devotion to perfect truthfulness. In its most aggressive form
the hatred of falsehood may imperil the temporary interests of the
aggressor, but in every other sense the path of truth is the path of
safety. All the ultimate tendencies of the moral and physical universe
conspire to vindicate truth and discredit fraud. [151]

Assertions based on fact stand erect, upheld by the evidence of

experience as an upright building by the law of gravity; deception,
with all its props of plausible sophisms, is tottering like a wall out of
plumb, or a rotten tree upheld by artificial supports which in their turn
must yield to the test of time.

Even from a standpoint of purely secular considerations, truth, like

honesty, is in the long run the best policy. Abstinence from insidious
poisons is easier than temperance, and the lessons of experience
have at all times convinced the most clear-sighted of our fellow-men
that consistent abstinence from the vice of hypocrisy is preferable to
any compromise with the interests of imposture. The non-clerical,
and almost Agnostic, education of the American wilderness seems to
favor that type of moral teetotalism, and among the hardy hill-
farmers of our New England highlands, and Southern mountain
states, one may find men almost constitutionally incapable of
conscious deceit in deed or word, and practicing veracity without the
least pretense to superior saintliness, in a quite untheological and
often, indeed, decidedly profane medium of speech. They stick to
truth from habit, rather than from moral principles, yet among their
simple-hearted neighbors they enjoy a respect withheld from
unctuous hypocrisy, and in emergencies can always rely on the
practical value of a life-long reputation for candor. Their word is
sufficient security; their denial of slanderous imputations is accepted
without the aid of compurgators.

The simple religion of Mohammed has favored the development of a

similar disposition, and on the [152]Austrian-Turkish frontier the word
of a Mussulman generally carries the weight of a casting vote. On
the Indian ocean, too, the verdict of international opinion favors a
preference for Unitarian testimony. “Wish to heaven we could fall in
with some Acheen fishermen,” Captain Baudissin heard his pilot
mutter among the reefs of the Sunda Islands, “it’s no use asking
such d—— liars as those Hindoos and Chinese.”

The love of truth compels the respect even of impostors and of

professional hypocrites, as in the case of that curate mentioned by
the German Freethinker, Weber (author of the philosophical
cyclopedia, “Democritus”). Professor Weber passed his last years in
the retirement of a small south-German mountain village, where his
undisguised skepticism made him the bugbear of the local
pharisees; yet on moonless evenings he was more than once
honored by the visits of a neighboring village priest, who risked
censure, and, perhaps, excommunication, for the sake of enjoying
the luxury of a respite from the sickening cant of his colleagues, and
devoting a few hours to intellectual communion with a champion of
Secular science.

Lessing’s allegory of “Nathan” is founded on something more than

fiction, and there is no doubt that even in the midnight of the Middle
Ages the gloomy misery of the Hebrew pariahs was often cheered by
the secret visits of some intelligent Christian whom the thirst for truth
impelled to defy the vigilance of the heretic-hunter, and to prefer an
intellectual symposium in the garret of a Jewish slum [153]alley to a
feast in the banquet hall of a Christian prelate.

“It is lucky for you that your opponents have not learned to utilize the
advantage of truth,” Mirabeau replied to the taunt of an insolent
Jesuit; and in logic that advantage can, indeed, hardly be overrated.
“They find believers who themselves believe,” and, as the
philosopher Colton observes, a sort of instinct often enables the
simplest countryman to distinguish the language of honest conviction
from the language of artful sophistry. “Our jurymen seem to
appreciate a first-class lie only from an artistic standpoint,”
confessed a lawyer of my acquaintance, “for some of them privately
hinted that they could tell it every time.”

Others, no doubt, lack that degree of acumen; but first-class orators,

as well as first-class authors, have always recognized the wisdom of
not relying on such mental defects of the public. Charles Darwin’s
works, for instance, owe their popularity to their erudition and their
grace of style, hardly more than to the absolute candor of the author,
who reviews the evidence for and against his theories with the
fairness of a conscientious judge, and by that very impartiality has
succeeded in prevailing against the partisan arguments of his
adversaries. For similar reasons our “Christian” temperance
societies can date their triumphs only from the time when they
frankly repudiated the sophisms of their predecessors, who hoped to
reconcile the lessons of science with the teachings of the alcohol-
brewing Galilean. For truth [154]prevails against half-truth, as well as
against absolute untruth.

[Contents]
C.—PERVERSION.

Since the dawn of rationalism perhaps no other literary product of

Freethought has provoked the enemies of Nature to that degree of
rancorous fury excited by the appearance of Moliere’s “Tartuffe.” The
hero of that famous drama is an old pharisee whose resolve to
renounce the “vanities of earth” is constantly tripped by the
promptings of his physical instincts, and who resorts to all kinds of
ludicrous sophisms to palliate the antagonism of two ever
irreconcilable principles:

Le ciel défend, de vrai, certain contentements,

Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements—

and the drama never failed to attract a jubilant audience; but the
French priesthood moved heaven and earth to stop the performance,
and can, indeed, hardly be blamed for rejecting the apologies of the
author’s friends; for the irony of Tartuffe ridicules the shams, not only
of the Catholic clergy, but of their creed and the creed of their
Protestant colleagues: it is, in fact, a scathing satire on the
absurdities of Christian Antinaturalism. The impossibility of
reconciling the demands of Nature with the precepts of a world-
renouncing fanatic has, indeed, made the worship of that fanatic a
systematic school of hypocrisy and subverted the moral health of its
victims as effectually as the unnatural restraints of convent life
subverted the basis of physical health. [155]

God is paid when man receiveth;

To enjoy is to obey;

says Nature with the poet of reason. “God delights in the self-torture
of his creatures—crucify your flesh, despise your body, disown the
world; renounce! renounce!” croaks the chorus of Christian
dogmatists, and can silence protest only by turning health into
disease or candor into hypocrisy.

The dogma of salvation by faith offers an additional premium on

mental prostitution. By punishing honest doubt as a crime and
inculcating the merit of blind submission to the authority of reason-
insulting doctrines, the defenders of those doctrines struck a deadly
blow at the instinct of free inquiry, and for a series of generations
actually succeeded in eradicating that instinct from the mental
constitution of their victims.

“The persecutor,” says W. H. Lecky, “can never be certain that he is

not persecuting truth rather than error, but he may be quite certain
that he is suppressing the spirit of truth. And, indeed, it is no
exaggeration to say that the doctrines I have reviewed represent the
most skilful and at the same time most successful conspiracy against
that spirit that has ever existed among mankind. Until the
seventeenth century, every mental disposition which philosophy
pronounces to be essential to a legitimate research was almost
uniformly branded as a sin, and a large proportion of the most deadly
intellectual vices were deliberately inculcated as virtues.… In a word,
there is scarcely a disposition that marks the love of abstract truth
and scarcely a rule which [156]reason teaches as essential for its
attainment that theologians did not for ages stigmatize as offensive
to the Almighty.”

And those perversions culminated in the miracle-mongery of the

wretched superstition. If the material universe was at the mercy of
witches and tricksy demons, no man could for a moment trust the
evidence of his own senses and was naturally driven to complete his
mental degradation by an absolute surrender of common sense to
dogma. The history of Christian dogmatism is the history of an
eighteen hundred years’ war against Nature and Truth.
[Contents]

D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.

The drift sand of the deserts covering the site of once fertile empires
still attests the physical consequences of a thousand years’ reign of
Antinaturalism, but, happily, the time has already come when many
of our fellow-men almost fail to credit the degree of mental
abasement realized during the most orthodox centuries of that reign.
It would be no overstatement to say that for nearly six hundred years
the priests of the Galilean miracle-monger persuaded a plurality of
the Caucasian nations to risk their lives in defense of dogmas the
mere profession of which would start a modern Christian on a
galloping trip to the next lunatic asylum.

Decapitated saints were believed to have emerged from their tombs

and paid their respects to a newly appointed bishop; flying dragons
descended through the air to snatch the bodies of unbelievers and
disappeared with screams that frightened orthodox [157]neighbors to
take refuge in their cellar-holes; swarms of angels carried bones,
crosses, and whole buildings from Bethlehem to Loretto; King Philip
the Second paid a thousand doubloons for a skeleton of St.
Laurentius, and having been informed that a complete skeleton of
the same saint was for sale in the south of Italy, he at once ratified
the bargain and blessed heaven for having favored him with a
duplicate of the precious relic. Thousands of unfortunates were tried
and executed on a charge of having taken an aerial excursion on a
broomstick or a black he-goat; of having caused a gale by churning a
potful of froth and water; of having turned themselves into foxes,
wolves, and tomcats.

The instinct of recognizing the absurdity of even the most glaring

superstitions seems to have become wholly extinct in the minds of
the forty generations from the middle of the tenth to the end of the
fourteenth century; and during that millennium of madness the
suppression of free inquiry encouraged thousands of pious tract-
mongers to devote their lives to the wholesale forgery of saintly
biographies and miracle legends, and disseminate under the name
of historical records insanities too extravagant even for the readers
of a modern nursery-tale.

The war against Truth was carried to the length of suppressing not
only the skeptical inferences of science, but science itself; chemists,
astronomers, physiologists, mathematicians, and bona fide
historians could pursue their inquiries only at the risk of an
inquisitorial indictment; and a cloud of ignorance, which in the days
of Horace and Pliny would [158]have been thought disgraceful to the
obscurest hamlet of the Roman empire, brooded for ages over the
face of the entire Christian world.

For a series of centuries the encouragement of credulity and

imposture almost annulled the value of contemporary records.
Travelers and chroniclers, as well as biographers, accommodated
the popular taste by dealing, not in marvels only, but in miracles;
witchcraft anecdotes, preternatural resurrections, prodigies of skill
and physical prowess, giants, dragons, were-wolves, and no end of
spectral manifestations. It is no exaggeration to say that for a period
of more than nine hundred years the dogma of the Galilean
antinaturalist systematically favored the survival of the unfit, by
offering a premium on mental prostitution and making common
sense a capital crime.

[Contents]
E.—REFORM.

The triumph of the Protestant revolt has ushered in a dawn which, in

comparison with the preceding night, may justly vaunt its era as an
Age of Reason; but the thousand years’ perversion of our moral
instincts has not been wholly redeemed by the educational
influences of a short century. For even eighty years ago the
educational reforms of the Protestant nations attempted little more
than a compromise between reason and dogma, while their southern
neighbors revolted against the political influence, rather than against
the dogmatical arrogance, of their priesthood. Nay, even at present
the fallacies of the compromise plan still hamper the [159]progress of
reform in manifold directions. As an American Freethinker aptly
expresses it: “Truth is no longer kept under lock and key, but is kindly
turned loose to roam at large—after being chained to a certain
number of theological cannon-balls.” Evolution may pursue its
inquiries into specific phases of organic development, but must not
question the correctness of the Mosaic traditions; rationalists may
inveigh against the insanities of the Middle Ages, but must pretend to
overlook the fact that the doctrine of the New Testament contains the
germs of all those insanities; the science of health may denounce
modern fallacies, but must beware to mention the anti-physical
precepts of the body-despising Galilean; Materialists must attack the
hobgoblins of the Davenport brothers, but ignore the hog-goblins of
Gadara; historical critics may call attention to the inconsistencies of
Livy and Plutarch, but must not mention the self-contradictions of the
New Testament.

Yet logic and philosophy will be little more than a farce till the axiom
of a great biologist can be applied to the pursuit of every human
science. “Inquiries of that sort” (the “Descent of Man”), he says,
“have nothing whatever to do with personal tastes or vested