Continued from Part 1.

Haeckel, like Gibbon, gets his distinction reduced in the grim need of curtailing the old articles: a need which looks peculiar when, a few pages later, General Smuts is invited to contribute a four-page article on his ridiculous “philosophy” (Holism), which has never been taken seriously. But it favors religion and—not to put too fine a point on it—Smuts rendered high political service to Britain. However, while space is so precious, the reviser of the Encyclopædia finds it necessary to add this to the decimated article on Haeckel:

“Although Haeckel occupies no serious position in the history of philosophy, there can be no doubt that he was very widely read in his own day and that he is very typical of the school of extreme evolutionary thought.”

The last three words give the writer away. It is only the Catholic writer who makes a distinction between schools of “evolutionary thought.” As to his having been widely read, no scientific work since Darwin’s Origin had anything like the circulation of Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe. It sold millions of copies in more than 20 languages. And a serious modern writer on Haeckel would have pointed out that while he despised philosophers and never claimed to be one, he remarkably anticipated modern thought in insisting that matter and energy are just two aspects of one reality. Of this fundamental doctrine of his, the writer says not a word.

Even the article “Heresy” of the old edition, though certainly not written by a heretic, suffers the usual discriminating process of curtailment. The writer had said:

“As long as the Christian Church was itself persecuted by the pagan empire, it advocated freedom of conscience . . . but almost immediately after Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire, the persecution of men for religious opinions began.”

That of course is cut out. Then a long list of Catholic persecutions in the Middle Ages is cut out and replaced by this grossly misleading sentence:

“The heresies of the Middle Ages were not matters of doctrine merely (however important), but were symptoms of spiritual movements common to the people of many lands and in one way or another threatening the power of the Roman Catholic system.”

An article on the subject which frankly aimed at providing facts for modern folk would have at least mentioned the death sentence for heresy, which is obstinately kept in force in Catholic Canon Law today. Not a word about it, though on this subject of penalizing religious opinions, it is the question most frequently asked today.

The article “Hospitals” gives us a choice specimen of the art of X-ing. It consists of two parts, history and modern practice. To the historical section, which it is of considerable interest to the Catholic propagandist to misrepresent, X does not append his mark, but he puts it to the section on modern practice, of which he knows nothing. Was this due to an editorial or typographical error? Listen. The old article properly gave a summary account of the ample provision for the sick in many pre-Christian civilizations, especially the Roman, and added:

“In Christian days no establishments were founded for the relief of the sick till the time of Constantine.”

He might have added that even then they were few and were merely intended to keep the Christian sick away from the Pagan temples of Aesculapius, which were the chief Roman hospitals. All this is cut out and replaced by the totally misleading or totally false statement:

“But although hospitals cannot be claimed as a direct result of Christianity, no doubt it tended to instill humanist views, and as civilization grew, men and women of many races came to realize that the treatment of disease in buildings set apart exclusively for the care of the sick were in fact a necessity in urban districts.”

We have several good and by no means anti-Christian histories of hospitals today. They show a fine record in India under the Buddhist King Asoka and a creditable record for the Greek-Roman world in pagan days. They show also that the Christian record, not only in the period of confusion after the fall of the Roman Empire, but from 450 to the 18th century, is miserable; and thus in an encyclopedia that advertises that it is rewritten in order to ensure confidence that the reader is getting what is generally agreed upon by the experts in each department, writers are permitted to take the reader even farther away from the truth than—in articles of this kind—they were earlier in the century. A score of articles like this, which are supposed to prove by historical facts the nature of the Christian social inspiration and social record, are cheap and untruthful religious propaganda.

Even in the short notice of Hypatia the clerical surgeon has used his knife. Short as it was, we shall be told that it had to be curtailed (though the editor spares eight pages for Icelandic literature), but the omissions are significant. The earlier article rightly said that she was a “mathematician and philosopher,” and contemporaries speak of her works on mathematics, not philosophy. Yet even the word “mathematician,” which does not take up much space and does give us a better idea of the solid character of Hypatia, is cut out. The earlier writer says that she was “barbarously murdered by the Nitrian monks and the fanatical Christian mob,” that the Caesareum to which her body was dragged was “then a Christian church,” and that the remains of the aged scholar (as she was) were burned piecemeal. All the phrases I have italicized are carefully cut out, as is also the whole of the following passage:

“Most prominent among the actual perpetrators of the crime was Peter the Reader (a cleric), but there seems little reason to doubt the complicity of Cyril (the archbishop).”

So the “correction of dates” and “curtailing some articles to admit new matter” just happen to take a form which greatly reduces the guilt of the Christian Church in the foulest crime of the age; for the greatest lady in the whole Greek world at the time was stripped in the street and her flesh cut from her bones with broken pottery by monks and people directly inflamed against her by the archbishop. This is the sort of thing for which the University of Chicago now stands sponsor.

In the note on “Idealism,” which is colorless, I notice that the improvers of the old Britannica have recommended a work by “G. Moyce”; a point which must rather annoy the professors, since Josiah Royce is one of the most distinguished philosophers America has yet produced. More important is the great saving of space in reducing the size of the article “Illegitimacy.” In face of the drivel that Catholic apologists talk about the influence of their church on sexual conduct, we have been accustomed to point out, amongst other things, that bastards are far more common in countries where the Roman and Greek churches are, or were until recent years, more powerful. In the old Britannica the article gave a wealth of statistics, particularly about Ireland, to help the student on this point. Out they have all gone—to find more space, of course, for cricket and football. “Illiteracy” is just as little seriously informing for the inquirer who wants to know whether it is true that the church is the Great Educator.

The article on “Immortality” was much too pious in the old edition of the Encyclopædia to need any “improvement.” It stands, like a hundred other articles, as a monument of what respectable folk thought in Victorian days. It was out of date even in 1911. Since then the belief in immortality is almost dead in philosophy, and the teaching of psychology today emphatically excludes it. Even theologians doubt it, or at least widely admit that attempts to prove it are futile. Of this state of modern thought the article gives no more idea than it does of Existentialism.

Similarly, the article “Infallibility” in the old edition was written by a Catholic and needed no “correction of dates.” But it was better not to let the reader know that it was written by a Catholic, so away go his initials. The article “Infanticide” would be considered by many more important than archery and croquet and other genteel sports of our grandmothers, because it is one of the familiar claims of the apologist that while the ancient Romans were appallingly callous on the subject, the new religion brought the world a new sense of the importance of even a newborn babe’s life. The old edition was certainly defective in its account of practice in ancient Rome, but even the little it said has been cut out. An inquirer into the subject will not get one single ray of light on Roman practice from the new article; and it is candidly signed X.

POPES AND INQUISITORS

Then we come to the long string of Popes who adopted the name “Innocent” when they donned the white robes of “the Vicar of Christ.” We know little about some of them, but others are so well known, and there is so little dispute about their character, that the name is a
mockery. All that the Catholic editor could do in such cases was to make a few of those neat little cuts with his scissors that at least make the record seem grayish instead of black. For instance, under “Innocent III” the old article spoke about the “horrible massacre” of the Albigensians which he ordered. The word “horrible” has been cut out; it was, no doubt, too strong an expression for the fact that only a few hundred thousand men, women, and children were savagely massacred because they would not bow to Rome. No one doubts the religious sincerity and strict personal conduct of Innocent III, but this article does not give the reader the least inkling of the perfidy, dishonesty, and
cruelty into which his fanaticism led him.

It is different with Innocent VIII, an elderly roue (a man devoted to a life of sensual pleasure) who got the papacy in the fight of the factions and immensely promoted the debauchery of Rome and the Vatican. The old article said, moderately enough:

“His youth, spent at the Neapolitan court, was far from blameless, and it is far from certain that he was married to the mother of his numerous family.”

As he was credited by public opinion with only 16 children the censor must have thought this excessive, so cut out the whole passage. Naturally he cut out also the later passage:

His curia was notoriously corrupt, and he himself openly practised nepotism in favoring his children, concerning whom the epitaph is quoted: “He guiltily begot six sons and as many daughters, so that Rome has the right to call him Father.” Thus he gave to his undeserving son Franceschetto several towns near Rome and married him to the daughter of Larenzo de Medici (the greatest prince of Italy).

All this is cut out of the new edition of the encyclopedia, which was to appeal to all by its accuracy. There is not the least doubt in history that the Pope had children, that his son Franceschetto was one of the vilest and most dissipated young men of Rome, and that Innocent was aware that the Papal Court was sinking deeper and deeper into corruption. The notice of the Pope in this edition is a calculated deception of the reader.

It is almost as bad with the notice of Pope Innocent X; and the deception here is the more wicked because Innocent X ruled after what Catholic apologists call the Counter-Reformation, which is supposed to have purified the papacy and the church. The notice in the 14th edition at least gave a hint of his character by saying:

Throughout his pontificate he was completely dominated by his sister-in-law Donna Olimpia Maidalchini (a woman of masculine spirit). There is no reason to credit the scandalous reports of an illicit attachment. Nevertheless the influence of Donna Olimpia was baneful, and she made herself thoroughly detested by her inordinate ambition and rapacity.

This was a mild and inadequate expression of the notorious historical fact that for 10 years this vile woman openly sold—clerics, even bishops, queuing at the door of her palace—every ecclesiastical office in the gift of the papacy; and it suppresses entirely the scandal of the Pope’s “nephews.” The license granted her was so enormous that folk had every reason to assume that she had been Innocent’s mistress. Yet in the new edition of the encyclopedia the main part, which I have enclosed in brackets, of the moderate passage I quoted from the older edition is cut out. An incorrect date, no doubt. Each such notice of a Pope to the middle of the 17th century is thus doctored, to protect the modern Catholic myth of a Counter-Reformation.

We come a few pages later to “Inquisition,” and here you will expect that X has surpassed himself. Not a bit of it. He has changed little—because the article even in the old edition was written by a French Catholic, Alphandéry. X has just touched it up a little and put his mark at the end of it. It is as scandalous a piece of deception of the public, since it is not stated and cannot now easily be verified that Alphandéry was a Catholic, as for the Encyclopedia Americana to have got Japanese propagandists to write the long section in it on Japan. It opens with a show of flooring at once the critics of the Inquisition. They are supposed to say it began in the 12th century, whereas it goes back to the early church, even to Paul. This is throwing dust in the eyes of the reader. “Inquisition” does not mean persecution or prosecution for heresy but “searching out” heresy, and it was the Popes of the early 13th century who created the elaborately organized detective as well as penal force which we specifically call Inquisition.

It next scores by remarking that the early Fathers did not favor punitive measures. How on earth could they have dreamed of them under Roman law and when they were an illicit sect themselves? It says that there was little persecution for heresy from the 6th to the 12th century, the Dark Age; which amuses us when we recall that 99 and a fraction percent of the population of Europe were illiterate and so densely ignorant that folk could not tell one doctrine from another and just attended Sunday services in Latin. Then we get the germs of the cowardly and debased modern Catholic apology: that the Church was always reluctant to persecute, but the zeal of the peoples and princes of Europe forced its hand. Of course, both writers make much of the famous persecution decree of Frederick II—the great heretic who appealed to the other kings to abolish the papacy—but are careful not to mention the savage action of the papacy which dictated it or the fact that Frederick never applied the law. Torture the gentle church particularly disliked and only borrowed it from secular law, in which the church had enforced it for centuries for clerical offenses like blasphemy. They both say: “We must accept the conclusion of H. C. Lea and Vacandard that comparatively few people suffered at the stake in the medieval Inquisition.” That is a total perversion of Lea’s words—he refers to the first half of the Middle Ages when there was no Inquisition—and they grossly mislead the reader by coupling Vacandard’s name with his. Canon Vacandard was one of the most reckless of the French apologists.

But I cannot go phrase by phrase through this Catholic rubbish. In spite of all its sophistry and suppressions it leaves the Inquisition the most scandalous quasi-judicial procedure that ever disgraced civilization, yet it is not the full truth. It is true that it does not tell the lie that American apologists now do—that the Roman Inquisition never executed men—and it does not even mention, much less challenge, the definite figure of 341,042 victims of the Spanish Inquisition which Llorente, secretary of the Inquisition, canon of the church, and Knight of the Caroline Order, compiled from its archives. Its sophistry gets it so muddled in regard to this important question of the Inquisition that it first says the people regarded heresy as “a national scourge” and the Inquisition as “a powerful and indispensable agent of public protection,” and then tells how the greed of the Inquisition “rapidly paralyzed commerce and industry.” It does not tell how while Spain was still Catholic the fierce anger of the people destroyed the Inquisition.

This book would become another encyclopedia if I were to analyze in this way all the articles, especially on religious matters, that are in this new edition of the Britannica foisted on the reader as the common teaching of our historians, philosophers, or sociologists, nor can I stop at every little specimen of the zeal of the group or phalanx of writers who mask themselves with an X. Even the article “Ionia” has suffered from their clumsy treatment. In a fine page in the last edition Dr. Hogarth summed up:

“Ionia has laid the world under its debt not only by giving birth to a long series of distinguished men of letters and science but by originating the schools of art which prepared the way for the brilliant artistic development of Athens in the 5th century.”

This and the best evidence for it are cut out, but X does not put his crooked mark here. He appends it to the next section, which is on the geology of the Ionian Isles! In my own historical works I have laid great stress on the significance of Ionia and I have found my readers puzzled. They will not get much help from this mutilated article.

The historical section of the article “Italy”—a country which is described as 97.12 percent Catholic even now that Communists and Socialists dominate it—ought to have been revised, not in a Catholic sense, for it was far too lenient to the papacy, but to harmonize with the modern teaching of history. Instead of this being done, X is allowed to add a gushing section on the beautiful accord of the Pope and Mussolini, the “unexampled scenes of enthusiasm” in Rome when the infamous compact was signed, and the joy of “300,000,000 Catholics” throughout the world. This in the face of the notorious fact that the Fascists themselves bitterly attacked Mussolini for signing the Treaty and all that has happened since. The Chicago professors might ask Professor Salvemini what he thinks of it. The total impression given to any reader who ploughs through the history of Italy in this article from the time of Charlemagne onward is, as far as the relations of the Italians with the Popes are concerned, false; but I doubt if anybody ever does read these historical articles in encyclopedias from beginning to end.

THE JESUITS AND OTHER ROGUES

The article “Society of Jesus”—even the title has been altered from “Jesuits,” a word which does not smell so sweet—ought to have been a happy hunting ground for this Catholic corrector of false dates, but from the older editions of the Britannica it had already in the 11th edition been rewritten by a Jesuit. There are, however, or used to be, Jesuits and Jesuits, and the Father Taunton who initials the article assured me that in private he went far, but one did not look for that in his professional work. His article, endorsed and relieved of any leaning to candor, is still just one of those religious tracts that the encyclopedia offers the reader instead of seriously informing and neutral articles on controverted points. It is a travesty of the real history of the Society, a touching fairy-tale, mostly based upon what the Jesuit professes to be. Taunton, however, did let himself go to this extent:

“Two startling and undisputed facts meet the student who pursues the history of the Society. The first is the universal suspicion and hostility it has incurred—not merely from the Protestants whose avowed foe it has been, nor yet from the enemies of all clericalism and dogma, but from every Catholic state and nation in the world. Its chief enemies have been those of the household of the Roman Catholic faith.”

For this original article gives abundant evidence. The clause I outline disappears in the sacred cause of abridgment and Father Taunton’s too candid words become:

“The most remarkable fact in the Society’s history is the suspicion and hostility it has incurred within the household of the Roman Catholic faith.”

Much of this, he explains, is due to the superior virtues of the Jesuits and the dishonesty of their critics. He even ventures to include the austere and most virtuous Pascal in a group of critics who are described as “not scrupulous in their quotations.” He cuts out the serious criticism of Jesuit education (in the old article) in order to protect the fiction, which modern Jesuits have spread, that they were great educators.

But the most deliberate perversion of the truth is seen in the account of what happened in the 18th century. It is a commonplace of history how the Catholic kings of France, Spain, and Portugal, stung by revelations of the greed, hypocrisy, and intrigues of the Jesuits, suppressed the Society in their dominions and appealed to the Pope to suppress it altogether, which he did in 1773. We might allow that in the new edition it was necessary to abridge the account of the crimes of the Jesuits on which the monarchs and the Popes acted, but these clerical champions of accuracy in the new edition of the encyclopedia have gone far beyond this. Taunton had said:

“The apologists of the Society allege that no motive influenced the Pope save the love of peace at any price and that he did not believe in the culpability of the Jesuits. The categorical charges made in the document (the Pope’s bull) rebut this plea.”

Taunton gave enough of the Pope’s words—I give a fuller account in my large Candid History of the Jesuits (which is, of course, not mentioned in the bibliography)—to prove this. It is all cut out, and the reader is just given the modern thumping lie of the Jesuits that the Pope expressed no opinion on the charges against them. And lest any reader or critic should be able to say that that is just the opinion of a Catholic writer, Taunton’s initials have been suppressed and in this case X has not given the mark of the crook. I should like to ask the professors of the University of Chicago what they think of that.

The articles “Jesus” and “Jews” I do not propose to desecrate by analysis. They are orthodox and venerable with age. They tell the reader what all theologians but a few rebels thought half a century or more ago. Whether it is for that sort of thing that you consult a modern encyclopedia… Well, please yourself. It is the same with the notice of Joan of Arc. In the old encyclopedia my friend Professor Shotwell, of Columbia, had a fair article on Joan. It was not quite up to date, but it was mildly critical. Now that Joan is turned into a saint, as part of the political deal of the Vatican and the French government, and in spite of the dire need to abridge the old edition, Shotwell’s sober one-and-a-half-page notice is replaced by a three-and-a-half-page sermon by a French Catholic. Not a word about modern military opinion of her—whether she had any ability at all or was just a superstitious tonic in a jaded military world—and not a word about the new research of Miss Murray and others into the real nature of witchcraft and their conclusion that Joan was probably a member of the witch cult.

Then come the “John” Popes and prodigious feats of juggling. They had to be brought down to the customary level of grossly untruthful treatment of saints, martyrs, popes, and other sacred things in this “modern” work of reference. Of the character of most of the Johns we know nothing, but three or four of them were so notoriously vicious and otherwise devoid of interest that their portraits had to be touched up considerably. John X was decidedly one of them. Even the old article, admitting discreetly that he “attracted the attention” of a leading lady of the Roman nobility, allowed that “she got him elected Pope” in direct opposition to a decree of council (which X cuts out). But old and new editions introduce John XI as “son of Marozia and reputed son of Pope Sergius III.” This is covering up the most infamous period of the depravity of the papacy (or any other religious authority in the world) not with a veil but with painted boards. The period was what the Father of Catholic History, Cardinal Baronius, following the few clerical writers of the period, calls “The Rule of the Whores”; and I am not here giving a vulgar rendering of the Latin. The period stinks amazingly even in Cardinal Baronius. The two chief whores who ruled the papacy for 30 or 40 years were Theodora and her daughter Marozia (as fierce and lustful a cat as you will meet even in the history of the Middle Ages). Two Popes at least were lovers of these women and one was—not reputed to be but certainly was—the bastard of Marozia and Pope Sergius and was put on the papal throne by Marozia’s orders.

Another son of Marozia’s ruled Rome and the papacy for 20 years after the period that is strictly called “The Rule of the Whores” and he put his own son, John XII, on the papal throne. There may have been a few Popes as licentious as this young man was—I would not be quite sure of it—but certainly not one worse. He, says the contemporary Bishop Liutprand, turned the papal palace into “a brothel” and an inn. He seduced his father’s mistress and his own sisters and raped pilgrims, he castrated the single cardinal who criticized him… There was nothing he did not do during the 10 years of his pontificate, yet the feeble reference to his scandalous private life in the 11th edition is cut out in the fourteenth, leaving him one of the Holy Fathers.

It is useless to go into every detail and is enough to say that in the case of the next scandalous John (XXIII) the work of the reviser is as foul as ever. He lived and ruled at the height of the Italian Renaissance (1410–15), and he was a monster of crime in comparison with the notorious Alexander VI. Neither the writer in the 11th edition (a French Catholic) nor the one in the 14th (anonymous) tells the undisputed fact that he was notorious for vice and corruption before he became Pope. In fact neither hints at irregularities before he was condemned by the Council of Constance. The older writer then candidly acknowledged that the Council (300 prelates) endorsed 54 charges against him and that three cardinals he paid to undertake his defense refused to do so. “Enough charges,” he said, “of immorality, tyranny, ambition, and simony were found proved to justify the severest judgment.” As a matter of fact the indictment, which may be read in any Latin History of the Councils, was a complete inventory of crimes and sins. One sentence includes “murder, sacrilege, adultery, rape, spoliation, and theft.” And this precious “rectifier” of errors in the new edition cuts out the whole of this. He just states that the Pope was suspended but the sentence was irregular in canon law!

Passing on our way to the Leos we note a point here and there that need not detain us. “Jubilee year” is described as an institution of piety and not a word said about the greed and corruption of the Pope who established it and why. Julius II has had the character sketch in the old edition, though written by a Catholic, touched up and trimmed until the reader, who may have read something in regular history about the Pope’s children, his heavy drinking and swearing, and his unscrupulousness, will be surprised to find how great and virtuous a Pope he was. The greatest nobles of Rome at the time assure us that he was a sodomite. “Juvenile Offenders” is a title that ought to meet many searching and varied queries in our time. It completely fails. Not a word about religion. Not a single statistic. Then we come to the article “Knighthood and Chivalry,” to which we were referred in the short note “Chivalry.”

I have made considerable research on this topic in medieval history and have pointed out repeatedly that the belief that there was an Age of Chivalry (about 1100 to 1400) is one of the crudest and emptiest of all the historical myths with which Catholic writers adorn their Middle Ages. No expert on the period fails to say the opposite. But in the case of this article I gather that the learned writer of it in the 11th edition, Dr. Coulton, who died in 1947, would not tolerate any monkey tricks with his work. He was not a master of the literature of the subject but he does say:

“Such historical evidence as we possess, when carefully scrutinized, is enough to dispel the illusion that there was any period of the Middle Ages in which the unselfish championship of God and the Ladies was anything but a rare exception.”

Dr. Coulton has paid too narrow an attention to the fairy-tale itself. On the broad question of the character of the princes, lords, knights, and ladies of the period, particularly in regard to sex, cruelty, dishonesty, and injustice, we have mounds of evidence, and it consistently shows that this was one of the least chivalrous and most immoral periods in history.

In the long list of the Leo Popes I need notice only the important article on Leo X, the man who opposed Luther. Here, however, X had not much to do. The article in the 11th edition was by Carlton Hayes, the Catholic professor at Columbia. It falsely said that modern research has given us a “fairer and more honest opinion of Leo X.” He was “dignified”: the Pope who enjoyed nothing more than grossly indecent comedies, largely written by his favorite cardinal, in the sacred palace and banquets at which gluttony was a joke and the most vulgar adventurers were richly rewarded. He “fasted”—at the doctor’s orders, for his body was gross. With a show of liberality it admits that he was “worldly,” “devoid of moral earnestness or deep religious feeling,” “treacherous and deceptive” (which is explained away as the common policy of princes at the time). No, X did not find many “dates” to correct in this Catholic sophistication, but the man who wants truth in his encyclopedia will not. Not the least idea is given of the monstrous corruption of the papal court under Leo: not a hint that it was so commonly believed in Rome that he was a sodomite that both his friends and authorized biographer Bishop Giovio and the great contemporary historian Guicciardini notice it and, contrary to the statement of the Catholic historian Pastor, seem to believe it.

The article “Libraries” is the next on which X employs his subtle art. I have explained, I think, that X is not one encyclopedic Catholic writer who does all this marvellous work. The explanation given of the X in the first volume of the 14th edition is that it is “the initial used for anonymous writers”; just as the lady whose sins are not to be disclosed in the court is called by the police Mlle. X. In all earlier encyclopedias anonymous writers, who do the great body of the hackwork of the encyclopedia, did not need any monogram. But, of course, this was a special arrangement with the Catholic body. It assumes that committees of Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic were appointed to scrutinize all articles bearing upon Catholic myths and to cut out and modify, no matter on what authority it rested, any statement that the Catholic clergy do not like. Whether any other sort of anonymous critics were allowed to do similar work and wear the mask I do not know. I have not noticed an X anywhere except where truth has been slain or mutilated by a Catholic sword.

You may wonder why an innocent article on libraries should excite the suspicions of the Catholic Knights Errant, but the history of libraries, like the history of literature or education generally, is even more dangerous from the Catholic viewpoint than an amorous story or picture. It tells how the Greeks and Romans had splendid libraries (and literature and schools); how during the Christian Middle Ages libraries (and schools and books of interest) were few and paltry to the 12th century; how in the meantime the Arabs and Persians again had magnificent libraries (and schools and literature) and in the course of two or three centuries succeeded in stimulating sluggish Christian countries to have a few decent libraries. This is real history and of deep sociological significance. But it is the kind of history Catholics hate as they hate science. So the historical part of the article is mercilessly but selectively cut.

A point, for instance, on which an inquirer is still apt to consult an encyclopedia is as to the fate of the greatest library of the ancient world, that of Alexandria. Said the article in the 1911 edition:

“In 389 or 391 an edict of Theodosius ordered the destruction of the Serapeum, and the books were pillaged by the Christians.”

This is cut out, and we have to be content with a vague admission that the stupid story that “the library survived to be destroyed by the Arabs can hardly be supported.” The older writer said that the transfer of imperial powers from Rome to Constantinople was “a serious blow to literature.” This truth also is cut out. He said that “during the Middle Ages knowledge was no longer pursued for its own value, but became subsidiary to religious and theological teaching.” Monstrous. Out it goes.

Loisy, the great French scholar, had a couple of pages in the 11th edition. He was then still a Catholic. He is cut to a paragraph in the 14th edition. The fame of his scholarship had grown but he had openly quit the church. When you see 20 pages devoted to logic, in which few folk take any interest today, you wonder whether the need of abridgement was really so drastic, but the pruning shears (and the signature X) appear again in the article “Lollards,” who were deadly enemies of the church. It is the same with the Lombards. Instead of the short account of their great importance in the restoration of civilization in Europe being expanded, as modern interest requires, it is cut down, as the interest of the papacy demands.

“Lourdes” would seem to give X a great opportunity, but the old article had only a few lines on the shrine of Lourdes. They are neatly strengthened. The older writer generously noted that it was “believed in the Roman Catholic world” that the Virgin revealed herself here. This becomes stronger. Lourdes has become famous since the visions of Bernadette Soubirous and their authentication by a commission of inquiry appointed by the Bishop of Tarbes. As if no serious person doubted them. But you are referred to Catholic literature for details of the epic story of the growth and the miracles: a tissue of fabrications.

The article “Martyrs” was in the old edition an edifying Christian sermonette, and it remains. Here, in a modern and candid encyclopedia, we should have had a useful account of the mass of historical work that has been done on the martyrs, even by Catholic scholars like the Jesuit Delehaye and Professor Ehrhard, in the last 50 years. More ancient martyrs have been martyred with the axe of historical truth than the early Christians manufactured in 200 years.

In the article “Materialism” you know what to expect. In this and most other encyclopedias Romanists write on Catholic matters, Methodists on Methodist matters, and so on, but, of course, on such subjects as Agnosticism, Atheism, Materialism, Naturalism, etc., we must entrust the work to ignorant and bigoted critics. So we still read how “naive materialism” is due to “the natural difficulty which persons who have had no philosophical training experience in observing and appreciating the importance of the immaterial facts of consciousness.” Some reverend gentleman has been drawing upon his sermons for copy. Not a single word about the evidence provided by Professor Leuba and others that, on their own profession, more than 70 percent of the scientific men of America are “naive materialists.” With a fatuousness that makes us groan the clerical reviser adds to the short article:

“Largely through the influence of Bergson, Alexander, and Lloyd Morgan contemporary science is turning away from materialism and reaching toward the recognition of other than mechanical factors in the phenomena, even the physical phenomena, of Nature.”

The encyclopedia might just as well say that under the influence of Gandhi, the Grand Lama, and the Mufti of Jerusalem, military men are now turning away from thoughts of war.

X comes on the scene again in the article on the Medici. Any truthful account of this famous Florentine family must show us the greatest paradox—if you care to call it paradox—of the Middle Ages; a wonderful art, superficial refinement, and pursuit of culture covering an abyss of corruption. The older writer was honest enough to tell a little of the background, and X generally cuts it out. The great Lorenzo is disinfected, and he strikes out such passages as this, referring to Cosmo III:

“Cosmo’s hypocritical zeal for religion compelled his subjects to multiply services and processions that greatly infringed upon their working hours. He wasted enormous sums in pensioning converts—even those from other countries—and in giving rich endowments to sanctuaries.”

Lorenzo’s 20 lines of vices are “abridged” into two, and so on.

“Medicine” ought, like “Libraries,” “Hospitals,” and a score of other articles, to show in its historical part the appalling blank in the civilized record. It did this to some extent in the earlier edition, so the account of Greek-Roman and Arab-Persian progress is abridged so that the blank from 500 to 1500 is not so painful to the eye.

“Mithraism” might seem an innocent and remote subject, but the modern inquirer will want to know whether or not it is true that it made more progress than Christianity in the Roman world and whether it had a superior morality. The fine article by Professor Grant Showerman in the 11th edition fairly answered these questions. He said that by the middle of the 3rd century “it looked like becoming the universal religion” (which is cut out). He said that it appealed to the Romans by its strongly democratic note and its high ethic. Here his account is cut to pieces, and we now learn that it made progress by boasting of an esoteric wisdom and compromising with paganism. The substance of Showerman’s article is kept, but his initials are deleted. Perhaps he demanded that. Of course, nothing is said about the material borrowings of Christianity from Mithraism or how Christianity destroyed its rival by violence.

It appears that X (or one of him) is also an expert on Mohammed. He has reduced an authoritative 12-page article to three pages, and perhaps some will think that he has shorn the prophet’s glory. Moses, on the other hand, passes into the new edition as “one of the greatest figures in history.” You may have heard that even theologians and liberal Jews are wondering how much historical knowledge we have of such a person. “Beyond question,” says this more accurate new edition, “Moses must be regarded as the founder alike of Israel’s nationality and of Israel’s religion.” These X’s are great at settling disputed points.

The article “Monasticism” is a grand opportunity for telling a large amount of picturesque truth. But, alas, even the editor of the 11th edition had the quaint idea that it ought to be written by a monk. The result is that X did not find a word to alter. We have the old article in all its fragrance—and mendacity. It tells us as much about the new history of the monastic bodies in Europe as a history of Hitlerism by a Fascist would tell of events in Europe. Whether or not an encyclopedia is a book in which you expect the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth… There are probably simple folk who do.

“Mozart” does not sound of theological interest, but since his Requiem or “mass for the dead” is said to be “one of the finest of religious compositions” and is a prime favorite in the Catholic ritual, it is important to the church that the public should not learn that he was an apostate and an anti-clerical Freemason who, in the familiar phraseology of the cleric, died and was buried like a dog. The article in the old edition did not tell the whole truth about this, but its misleading of the public was not strong enough for the reviser, so it is made a little more misleading. It is well known in what circumstances Mozart began to compose his Requiem. A stranger approached him and offered to pay him to write it, and, as Mozart was ailing, the story runs that he nervously saw in the offer a warning of his death. If he did so at any time he must have soon learned that (as it proved) it was a rich amateur (Count Walsegg) who was really hiring his genius, but the “reviser” of the article has actually changed the text from “Mozart worked at it unremittingly, hoping to make it his greatest work” to “Mozart put his greatest music into it and became more and more convinced that he was writing it for his own death.” After this you would expect a lovely death in the arms of his holy mother the church, but the clerical reviser cuts out in the new edition what the expert writer of the article said. It was:

“His funeral was a disgrace to the court, the public, society itself… his body was buried in a pauper’s grave.”

But the initials of the writer, Eric D. T. Tovey, are kept at the foot of his mutilated article. This story of a mysterious visitor who gave Mozart the idea that he was being supernaturally warned of his approaching death has recently inspired an eloquent article in the pious Reader’s Digest. Naturally readers who turn for verification of it to the great encyclopedia will be fully encouraged. The fact is, as the “corrector” probably knew well, Mozart refused to send for a priest when he became dangerously ill, and when his wife secretly sent for one the man refused to attend so notorious a heretic. It might be instructive to the inquirer into religious inspiration in art to know that one of the most beautiful pieces of church music was composed by a man who emphatically rejected Christianity, but it would be inconsistent with so much that is said in the Britannica, so the fact is suppressed.

Nietzsche you would almost expect to find banished altogether from so pious an encyclopedia, but we have here one of the little mysteries of its compilation. In spite of the grim need for abridgment, the one-column article in the 11th edition has been replaced by a two-page appreciation of the great skeptic by his devout follower, Dr. A. Levy. One might quarrel with it here and there, but let us not be meticulous.

HOW HISTORY IS RE-WRITTEN

There must have been a good deal of maneuvering in the subterranean vaults in which the new edition of the Britannica was being forged when the time came for doing an article on the papacy. In the 11th edition the lengthy treatment of the subject was entrusted to a number of well-known Catholic writers who were understood to be what were then called “liberal Catholics.” The first section, covering the early centuries and the Dark Age (to 1100), was written by Mgr. Duchesne and the next by Professor Luchaire, both said in private clerical circles (to which I once belonged) to be modernists. Duchesne was an arch-trimmer, and he writes the first 1,000 years of the history of the papacy in such fashion that X finds nothing to correct. I do not know to what extent there are folk who fancy that by reading such an article they learn the historical truth, but the fact is that this long article on the papacy is a travesty of history and a sheer Catholic tract; and any subeditor ought to have known what to expect. It is utterly impossible for any Catholic writer to tell facts, much less the whole of the facts, on such subjects. How could he, for instance, tell that few historians outside the church admit that there is any serious evidence that Peter was ever in Rome? Duchesne placidly observes that it is “now but little disputed,” because a few American historians who play up to Rome take an indulgent view of the so-called evidence. I have proved from the most solid Christian document of the time that the Roman Christians of the 1st century did not believe it.

So the narrative continues on the usual and most untruthful Catholic lines. All the other churches looked up to the Roman and did not question the universal authority of its bishop; which is the direct opposite of the truth, for I have shown in detail that every assertion of Roman authority over the other churches to the 6th century (when the other churches had either disappeared or formed the separate Greek Church) was indignantly, often contumeliously, spurned. There is, of course, not the slightest hint of the demoralization of the church from about 150 onward. It is a body of virtuous folk braving its persecutors. And its immense enrichment after the conversion of Constantine is explained audaciously by saying that the pagan emperors had deprived the church of its wealth and Constantine just restored it. Naturally there is not a word about the dozen persecuting decrees, even with a death-sentence, which the bishops got from the Christian emperors and so crushed every religious rival.

This fairy-tale, which it is disgusting to find in a serious encyclopedia, is sustained throughout the entire 30-page article, but I have not space here to go much into detail. There was no Dark Age for the church, though the “barbarian invasions,” the usual scapegoat, are admitted to have caused some irregularities. There is not the least recognition of the need to explain why the worst degradation of the papacy, from 890 to 1050, began four centuries after the invasions and deepened for 100 years. The attainment of the Temporal Power is explained without a word about the Donation of Constantine, which Catholic historians admit to have been a forgery, and the development of the monstrous pretensions of the Popes to power is explained by an argument as ingenious as it is false. Innocent III was “compelled”—I have shown from his own letters that he deliberately and fraudulently engineered it—to sanction, though he tried to check, the persecution of the Albigensians. Then the corruption of Europe by the Renaissance “infected” the good church to some extent, but there is no proof, for instance, of the fearful charges against John XXIII. No, they were merely examined and endorsed by a Council of 29 cardinals, 33 archbishops, 150 bishops, 134 abbots, and 100 doctors of law and divinity. The second two-century period of deep papal degradation is passed over with the admission that there was one pope, Alexander VI, of abandoned morals.

X then takes up the story and you may bet that it does not lose in piety. This is how he writes history. At the French Revolution “the Pope fought against the Terror when the worship of reason was proclaimed.” There, of course, never was a “worship of reason” in France, and the Feast of Reason and Liberty in Notre Dame was not official, and it was after the official proclamation of the Worship of the Supreme Being that the Terror followed. So on to 1929. This is, as I said, a blatant Catholic tract from beginning to end, and it closes with the usual list of Popes all of whom to the year 530—including such rogues as Victor, Callistus, and Damasus—are described as “Saints.” Some of them are fictitious, the majority of quite unknown character, and half the remainder poor specimens.

Catholics might well boast of their service to their church in getting permission to correct a few dates and other trifling errors in the earlier Britannica. Their converts, if educated at all, are generally of the type who would look for truth in an encyclopedia. Perhaps one ought not to complain if the editor of an encyclopedia invites a Christian Scientist to tell the aims and belief of Christian Science, a Moslem to tell the tenets of Islam, and so on, but to allow Catholic propagandists not merely to explain what the church’s doctrines are but to write 30 pages of historical mendacity and misrepresentation because… Well, you may guess for yourself what the agreement between the compacting parties was. Where the Chicago professors come in I don’t know.

Presently we come to the article “Pasteur,” and of course that famous scientist must be claimed as a Catholic, though I have proved a score of times that he quit the church early in his career, publicly avowed his agnostic creed, and died without any recognition of the church. There was a fine article on him in the earlier edition by Sir Henry Roscoe, which concluded:

“Rich in years and honors, but simple-minded and as affectionate as a child, this great benefactor to his species passed quietly away.”

In the new edition this becomes:

“Rich in years and in honors, this simple and devout Catholic, this great human benefactor…”

And there is no X to warn the reader that an anointed hand has altered the article. That happens in hundreds of cases.

Psychical research was still considered by many in the first decade of this century to be at least not a waste of time, so three pages were devoted to it in the 11th edition. In the third decade of the century few took any serious notice of its futilities, yet, in spite of the tremendous need for abridgment, the three-page article is replaced by a five-page article by an enthusiast for the nonsense. The article “Psychology” is, of course, entirely useless to any inquirer who wants to know, as most thoughtful folk do want to know, what the modern science makes of the old idea of mind. You gather that the mind is still as solidly established as the Pope. With great boldness (it seems to think) the new article alters the definition of psychology from the science of the mind to “the study of the mind or of mental phenomena.” At the time (1929) there was hardly a manual published in America that did not define it as “the science of behavior” and reject the reality of mind. But the new article does not give you the least idea of the revolution. Two reactionary professors just grind out five pages of the old academic verbiage. It is like a barrel-organ in Broadway.

“Preaching” is a short article which few folk will ever consult, but there is here a point of high social interest. When good people read about the way in which the church kept men in the ways of virtue during the Middle Ages—one of the most vicious of historical periods—they imagine devout priests preaching the gospel to them every Sunday. It is all a myth, of course. The faithful just spent half an hour to an hour in church on Sunday morning while the priest raced through the liturgy of the mass, in Latin, which quite commonly he did not understand himself. The friars of the later Middle Ages created quite a sensation when they began to preach sermons. But does our E. B. tell the reader this? Look up the orthodox short article.

“Rationalism” is a companion article to “Agnosticism,” “Naturalism,” and a score of other articles. It is just a moldy piece of academic verbiage. It tells you how once there were bold thinkers like Hume and Kant who thought that truth was to be learned by the use of reason, not intuition, but of the mental attitude which 99 men out of 100 call Rationalism today, of its great growth in the 19th century and the reasons for this, it does not say a word.

The Reformation is still a subject of high popular interest in countries where the population is divided into Catholics and Protestants, and we may regret that the fine 20-page article by Professor Coulton in the 11th edition is reduced to nine pages in the 14th. We do not forget the imperious need for abridgment, though when we notice that 36 pages are spared for Pottery and Porcelain, that Psychical Research gets more room than ever, and so on, we are a little puzzled. And, as usual, the abridgment happens to cut out bits that Catholics do not like. In both editions the article has the initials of Professor Coulton, a learned liberal Protestant expert on the Middle Ages who wrote with discretion and reserve; that is to say, he said far less about the share of the appalling general corruption of the Church in causing the Reformation and far more about political conditions than a quite candid historian would today. However, as Coulton was still alive and active in 1929 I imagine that he saved his article from the Catholic chopping block.

The article “Relics” also is written by so lenient a Protestant writer that it is little altered. The reader will not get from it the faintest idea of the appalling fraud in the manufacture of relics in the early and the medieval church, the gross traffic in bogus articles, and the exploitation of the people.

On the important subject of the Renaissance one may congratulate the editors on having carried into the 14th edition the splendid article by J. A. Symonds. They could hardly venture to do otherwise, for Symonds is incomparably the highest authority and best writer on the subject in the English language. But the cloven hoof appears here and there. We get the ridiculous contention of certain second-rate American professors that it is misleading to speak of “the Renaissance,” meaning that Christian Europe had been asleep until the 13th century. There had been a “Carolingian Renaissance” in the 9th century, an “Ottonian Renaissance” in the 10th, and so on. Unfortunately it was precisely after these “rebirths” that Europe, especially Italy, sank to the lowest depth. To call these claims “new historical research” is bunk. They are symptoms of the demoralizing growth of Catholic influence in America. What is really new is the research into the causes of the rebirth of Europe after about 1050, which has shown the great debt of the Christian world to the Arabs and Jews. Preserved Smith seems here to do the X-ing and he not only is too pious to tell the truth about the influence of the Albigensians and the wicked Spanish Arabs, but he appends to Symonds’ fine article a rather incoherent page comparing the Renaissance and the Reformation as “emancipations.”

But the Catholics expand gloriously when we come next to the article “The Roman Catholic Church.” In the older edition the introductory part was by the old-fashioned historian Alison Phillips, and he is now replaced by a short—well, say fragment of a sermon—by no less a person than Cardinal Bourne (assuring us in effect that, as the Roman Church alone was founded by Christ, we need not pay any attention to other churches) and a technical account of the structure of the church by a theologian. But the 10 pages of history, now written by a priest, that follow are just the same undisguised propaganda with a sublime indifference to the facts as non-Catholic historians tell them. You have here, in fact, the clotted cream of Catholic controversial literature served up in an encyclopedia that promises you an objective statement of modern culture and scholarship. There are few statements of fact in it that have not been torn to shreds years ago.

You have the old story of the Christian body surviving 10 persecutions by the pagans. We thought that it had been agreed by this time that there were only two general persecutions in 250 years, but this new encyclopedia account says that there were 10, or practically that there was one long struggle. How even Catholic scholars have shown that only a hundred or two of the many thousands of martyrs claimed have survived scrutiny, how the bishops of the time describe the enormous body of the faithful abjuring the faith—Catholics claim 10,000,000 Christians in the time of Diocletian and can’t prove 100 martyrs—and so on, is, of course, not mentioned. The growth of the church’s power, spiritual and temporal, is described in the usual Catholic manner. Even in the Dark Age—a phrase that does not soil this article, of course—the Roman Church was “the most vigorous influence for civilization in Western Europe”—on its own theory it took six or seven centuries to civilize it—and if it seems to turn its spiritual power into political repeatedly, it was compelled to do this because the secular princes wanted to “control the souls of men.”

I should be inclined to call that the high-water mark of Catholic rhetoric. We are given to understand that during these centuries (500 to 1300), apart from a little disorder caused by the barbarian invaders, the church kept the world (and its clergy, monks, and nuns) virtuous—that is one of the tallest myths in history—but “the pagan Renaissance” and “the general decadence of morals” which this foresaw unhappily did penetrate the armor of the church’s virtue a little. “It seems even many of the Popes themselves were too affected by the general materialism.” A grave work of reference offers us that as a summary of the historical fact that, to say nothing of the barbarism of the Dark Age and the license of the 12th and 13th centuries, the papacy itself was so low in tone from 1300 to 1670 that the few popes who made a serious effort to reform the church—and that in regard to sex almost alone—reigned, collectively, only about 20 years out of the 350, and the general level of conduct in Europe was infamous. And it is equally false to say that the church purged itself by a Counter-Reformation which began before and independently of its Protestant critics. The Reformation began in 1517, and the Vatican and Rome were, as the contemporary Cardinal Sacchetti describes, appallingly corrupt to 1670. This is public instruction in history up to date, and now under the aegis of the University of Chicago.

One of the arch-sophists of the American regiment of propagandists, Mgr. Peter Guilday, is permitted to tell the situation of the church in the world today. It is enough to repeat what he says about America. He says that in 1920 there were 22,233,254 Catholics in America, so there were probably about 25,000,000 (the Catholic Directory claimed only 20,000,000) in 1928. The same church authorities give these enormously conflicting figures, yet notice how definite they are to the last unit. Naturally he does not explain that, unlike any other church, the Catholic Church includes in its figures even the millions who have quit it. On such positive inquiries as we have, it seems that there can hardly be much more than 15,000,000 real Catholics in America; but it would not do to let Washington know that.

After this I need not comment on the article “Rome,” meaning the city of Rome. The sketch of its history during the Dark Age and the later Middle Ages is on a line with what I have just described. Compared with the great work of Gregorovius, the world-authority on the city, this account is like a Theosophist’s sketch of the life of Mme. Blavatsky. “Russia” must have tempted the ghostly censors, but the editor of the encyclopedia got Duranty to do it, and we miss the clerical touch. “Skepticism” is another subject on which, you would think, a Catholic would like to write, but the article was already so innocuous and misleading that it was left in all the glory of its Victorian verbiage. The poor man who has to depend upon encyclopedias for his information will gather that Skepticism was, like Rationalism, a malady of the philosophical world in the last century, but that it has died out.

Under “Schools” there was in the 11th edition a fine 12-page history of schools in Europe from Greco-Roman days onward. After what we saw about the articles “Education” and “Libraries,” you will be prepared for a burnt offering. The whole essay, with its excellent account of the Roman system of free schools for all, and discreet insinuation of the blank illiteracy and schoollessness of the Dark Age, and some account of the Arab-Persian achievement, goes by the board. Certainly it was important to provide large new space for modern school systems, but an informed and honest pedagogist could have told the historic truth and introduced the results of recent research into the Spanish Arab schools in a page or so. But it would have been deadly to the claim that Christianity “gave the world schools” or that the Roman Church cared the toss of a cent about the education of the children of the workers until secular states started our modern systems.

In passing we note how neatly the encyclopedia does a little whitewashing of the church in the Dark Age in its article “Silvester II.” We do not question that he was “the most accomplished scholar of his age”—in Christendom, the writer ought to have added. He is not to be mentioned in the same breath as Avicenna (Ibn Sina), the great Persian scholar of the same age, and could not hold a candle to scores, if not hundreds, of other contemporary Persian and Arab writers. But what the article and Catholic writers generally carefully conceal is that he got his learning from the Arabs—his chief biographer proves that he actually studied in Cordova (and had a gay time there)—and that he was forced by the German Emperor upon the reluctant and half-barbarous Romans, and they probably poisoned him off in four years. He was a great collector of books (manuscripts), but, says this article ingenuously, “it is noteworthy that he never writes for a copy of one of the Christian Fathers.” Read his life by the expert and you will smile.

“Slavery” is an article upon which a critic would joyously pounce if he did not know anything about the Irish professor Ingram, who wrote the long and fairly good article in the 11th edition. Ingram was a Positivist and he let the church off lightly, as Positivists always do, and at the same time let the public down heavily. But even Ingram’s dissertation was a little too strong, so X was let loose upon it, and he adds his mark to Ingram’s initials as joint author. You know why the subject is important from the clerical angle. The myth that Christianity “broke the fetters of the slave” is so strongly established, though it has not an atom of foundation, that even the late H. G. Wells included it as a historical fact in the first edition—he promptly cut it out when I told him how wrong he was—of his “Outline of History.”

Neither St. Paul nor any Christian Father nor any Pope or great Christian leader, and certainly no Church Council, condemned slavery until modern times when the wicked “world” was busy extinguishing it. Even the article in the “Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics” makes this clear. It still existed in Europe, though economic conditions had greatly restricted it, when, under the blessing of the Spanish Church, it expanded again into the horrible chapter of African slavery. The proper treatment of Ingram’s article would have been to let the reader understand this more clearly, to take into account the large amount of scholarly work which has in recent years greatly modified the old idea of slavery in Rome in the first three centuries of the present era, and to explain how economic causes changed slavery to serfdom and then, in most of Europe, emancipated the serfs. Instead of this, X has been permitted to do a little of his usual tampering with the truth.

“Solomon” has a page and a half of the old credulous glorification, in spite of all the progress of biblical science. If this and similar articles which were solemnly read by our grandmothers but are now confined to the seminaries of the more backward churches, such as the Catholic, had been cut down to so many explanatory short paragraphs, the editor might have found room for a couple of useful pages on Social Progress, though the subject deserves as much space as football or cricket, and at least a couple (instead of the scanty and outdated treatment of the subject under “Psychology”) of pages summarizing the results of the important new science of Social Psychology.

The historical section of the article “Spain” ought to have been almost entirely rewritten. It was written in the days when historians had not quite recovered from the Catholic legend that the Arabs had taken over the beautiful Christian country in the 8th century and held an eccentric rule over it until the valiant Spaniards overthrew them and made the country glorious and virtuous once more. For 100 years we have known the truth, and since this article was written, liberal Spanish professors—Ballesteros, Ribera, Cordera, etc.—working on the Arabic manuscripts which have been hidden in Catholic libraries for centuries so that the orthodox myth should not be exposed, have shown the real grandeur of the Arab (as opposed to the later Moorish) civilization. The churches of the Christian monarchs themselves and the remarkable sexual looseness of the Spanish clergy and people in all ages have been established, the appalling ruin of the country after 100 years of Castilian rule has become a platitude of history, and even the Cambridge History tells the awful story of the Bourbon dynasty in the 19th century and, in conjunction with the church, its savage war on liberalism. It is impossible to understand modern Spain unless you know these things. The encyclopedia does not tell them. It completely misleads the innocent reader and supplies as “authority” an untruthful religious propagandist.

The article on Spiritualism was entrusted to Sir Oliver Lodge, a man who had betrayed his childlike credulity and unfitness for such a task in his “Raymond” and other works. There are six pages on “Spirits” and they will doubtless have a use for experts in distillation (who ought to know all about it), but on the subject of “Spirit,” which is one of the most confused words in the modern vocabulary, there is not even a paragraph. Writers, preachers, and politicians talk every day about “spiritual realities,” and we may surely assume that a large number out of their tens of millions of readers and hearers would like to know precisely what they mean. From a wide experience I may say that most of them do not know themselves. One American professor gives us seven different definitions of the word Spirit. Yet editors who spare many pages for whelks or wall-papers give no assistance here. Naturally the British (High Tory) journalist, Garvin, who was the original editor of the 14th edition, knew no more about these things than Henry Ford or Herbert Hoover did. What the editor whose name appears on the latest printing of it, Walter Just, knows I can’t say, as his name is not in “Who’s Who in America.” But there must have been a regiment of sectional editors, and this is their idea of giving the general public clear ideas and authenticated facts to enable them to form sound opinions.

The article “Stoicism” is not much less misleading. There is so much extant literature of Stoicism—Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, etc.—that it was in modern times impossible to misrepresent it as the philosophy of Epicurus is misrepresented (the early Christians having conveniently burned the whole of his 300 books). So pious folk swung to the opposite extreme. It was a religion founded by an austere puritan named Zeno and was too high and impractical for the people. The article in the Britannica runs on these lines. The author puts out of all proportion the small and temporary religious wing of the movement and misrepresents the character of Zeno, who, his Greek biographer tells us, used to go with a youth or a young woman occasionally to show that he had no prejudices of that sort. He fails entirely to make clear that the central doctrine of the Stoics, the Brotherhood of Man, was a practical social maxim borrowed from the gay-living Lydians, and that it was a blend of this with the same central doctrine of Epicurus that worked as an inspiring social influence in the Greco-Roman world for five centuries; and that of the so-called Stoic emperors only Marcus Aurelius, who let down the Empire, was a Stoic.

MORE WHITEWASH FOR THE MIDDLE AGES

An article on Surgery is scarcely the place in which you would look for clerical trickery, and X has not ventured to couple his name with that of the distinguished expert who writes the article in the 11th edition. But his work has in the 14th edition been deprived of an essential value. I do not know many who consult such articles as anatomy, physiology, surgery, and medicine in an encyclopedia. They are too technical for the general public, while students have to seek their information in more serious works. But the historical introduction which the Britannica used to prefix to its essays on the more important branches of science and on such subjects as education, slavery, philanthropy, etc., were useful to a wide public. Reading the articles in the 14th edition, one would at first think that the editors had never heard that anybody disputed the claim that the churches created modern civilization.

The truth is, of course, that the historical introductions to articles on the various elements of our civilization in the old Britannica made a mockery of the clerical claims and painfully exposed the barbarism of the Dark Age and the scientific sterility of the later Middle Ages. In those days the clerical bodies had not the economic and business organization that they now have, and they had to be content that they were allowed to write the articles on religious subjects, that articles dealing with philosophy, psychology, and ethics were entrusted to men of the old spiritual school, and that the general historical sections were carried on from the less critical days of the last century. Now even the scientific parts must be revised. Those introductions which brought out too prominently the cultural blank of ages in which the church was supreme must be abbreviated by cutting out significant details, falsified, or abolished.

In this case the excellent four-page introduction on the historical development of surgery has disappeared. It had shown that, while there was appreciable progress in the science in Greece and Alexandria, this was lost in the general barbarism after Europe became Christian.

“For the 500 years following the work of Paulus of Aegina (the last distinguished Greek surgeon) there is nothing to record but the names of a few practitioners of the court and of imitators and compilers… The 14th and 15th centuries are almost without interest for surgical history.”

The writer admitted, however, that the Arabs and Persians had resumed the work of the Greeks, and, though they were occasionally hampered by the religious ban on dissection, they carried the science forward once more. In point of fact this article ought here to have been strengthened, for in some respects the Arabs advanced far beyond the Greeks. But all this is as distasteful to our modern clerical corporations as statues without fig-leaves, so the whole section has been cut out. We fully recognize that a great deal more space was needed for modern surgery, but there are hundreds of articles of far less importance to the modern mind that could have been relegated to the 19th-century trash-basket.

(To be continued.)