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A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 06
SECTION II
There are, then, it seems, persons to be found who hesitate at nothing, who falsify a passage of Scripture as intrepidly as if they were quoting its very words, and who hope to deceive mankind by their falsehoods, knowing them perfectly to be such. If such daring impostors are to be found now, we cannot help supposing, that before the invention of printing, which affords such facility, and almost certainty of detection, there existed a hundred times as many.
One of the most impudent falsifiers who have lately appeared, is the author of an infamous libel entitled "The Anti-Philosophic Dictionary," which truly deserves its title. But my readers will say, "Do not be so irritated; what is it to you that a contemptible book has been published?" Gentlemen, it is to the subject of Jephthah, to the subject of human victims, of the blood of men sacrificed to God, that I am now desirous of drawing your attention!
The author, whoever he may be, translates the thirty-ninth verse of the first chapter of the history of Jephthah as follows: "She returned to the house of her father, who fulfilled the consecration which he had promised by his vow, and his daughter remained in the state of virginity."
Yes, falsifier of the Bible, I am irritated at it, I acknowledge; but you have lied to the holy spirit; which you ought to know is a sin which is never pardoned.
The passage in the Vulgate is as follows:
"Et reversa est ad patrem suum, et fecit ei sicut voverat quæ ignorabat virum. Exinde mos increbruit in Israel et consuetudo servata est, ut post anni circulum conveniant in unum filiæ Israel, et plangant filiam Jephte Galaaditæ, diebus quatuor."
"And she returned to her father and he did to her as he had vowed, to her who had never known man; and hence came the usage, and the custom is still observed, that the daughters of Israel assemble every year to lament the daughter of Jephthah for four days."
You will just have the goodness, Mr. Anti-philosopher, to tell us, whether four days of lamentation every year have been devoted to weeping the fate of a young woman because she was consecrated?
Whether any nuns (religieuses) were ever solemnly appointed among a people who considered virginity an opprobrium?
And also, what is the natural meaning of the phrase, he did to her as he had vowed – "Fecit ei sicut voverat?"
What had Jephthah vowed? What had he promised by an oath to perform? To kill his daughter; to offer her up as a burnt offering – and he did kill her.
Read Calmet's dissertation on the rashness of Jephthah's vow and its fulfilment; read the law which he cites, that terrible law of Leviticus, in the twenty-seventh chapter, which commands that all which shall be devoted to the Lord shall not be ransomed, but shall die the death: "Non redimetur, sed morte morletur."
Observe the multitude of examples by which this most astonishing truth is attested. Look at the Amalekites and Canaanites; look at the king of Arvad and all his family subjected to the law of devotion; look at the priest Samuel slaying King Agag with his own hands, and cutting him into pieces as a butcher cuts up an ox in his slaughter-house. After considering all this, go and corrupt, falsify, or deny holy Scripture, in order to maintain your paradox; and insult those who revere the Scripture, however astonishing and confounding they may find it. Give the lie direct to the historian Josephus, who transcribes the narrative in question, and positively asserts that Jephthah immolated his daughter. Pile revilings upon falsehoods, and calumny upon ignorance; sages will smile at your impotence; and sages, thank God, are at present neither few nor weak. Oh, that you could but see the sovereign contempt with which they look down upon the Rouths, when they corrupt the holy Scripture, and when they boast of having disputed with the president Montesquieu in his last hour, and convinced him that he ought to think exactly like the Jesuits!
JESUITS; OR PRIDE
The Jesuits have been so much a subject of discourse and discussion that, after having engaged the attention of Europe for a period of two hundred years, they at last begin to weary and disgust it, whether they write themselves, or whether any one else writes for or against that singular society; in which it must be confessed there have been found, and are to be found still, individuals of very extraordinary merit.
They have been reproached, in the six thousand volumes that have been written against them, with their lax morality, which has not, however, been more lax than that of the Capuchins; and with their doctrine relating to the safety of the person of kings; a doctrine which after all is not to be compared with the horn-handled knife of James Clement; nor with the prepared host, the sprinkled wafer, which so well answered the purpose of Ange de Montepulciano, another Jacobin, and which poisoned the emperor Henry VII.
It is not versatile grace which has been their ruin, nor the fraudulent bankruptcy of the reverend Father Lavalette, prefect of the apostolic missions. A whole order has not been expelled from France and Spain and the two Sicilies, because that order contained a single bankrupt. Nor was it affected by the odious deviations of the Jesuit Guyot-Desfontaines, or the Jesuit Fréron, or the reverend father Marsy, so injurious, in the latter instance, to the youthful and high-born victim. The public refused to attend these Greek and Latin imitations of Anacreon and Horace.
What is it then that was their ruin? —pride, What, it may be asked by some, were the Jesuits prouder than any other monks? Yes; and so much so that they procured a lettre de cachet against an ecclesiastic for calling them monks. One member of the society, called Croust, more brutal than the rest, a brother of the confessor of the second dauphiness, was absolutely, in my presence, going to beat the son of M. de Guyot, afterwards king's advocate (prêteur-royal) at Strasburg, merely for saying he would go to see him in his convent.
It is perfectly incredible with what contempt they considered every university where they had not been educated, every book which they had not written, every ecclesiastic who was not "a man of quality." Of this I have myself, times without number, been a witness. They express themselves in the following language, in their libel entitled "It is Time to Speak Out": "Should we condescend even to speak to a magistrate who says the Jesuits are proud and ought to be humbled?" They were so proud that they would not suffer any one to blame their pride!
Whence did this hateful pride originate? From Father Guinard's having been hanged? which is literally true.
It must be remarked that after the execution of that Jesuit under Henry IV., and after the banishment of the society from the kingdom, they were recalled only on the indispensable condition that one Jesuit should always reside at court, who should be responsible for all the rest. Coton was the person who thus became a hostage at the court of Henry IV.; and that excellent monarch, who was not without his little stratagems of policy, thought to conciliate the pope by making a hostage of his confessor.
From that moment every brother of the order seemed to feel as if he had been raised to be king's confessor. This place of first spiritual physician became a department of the administration under Louis XIII., and moreso still under Louis XIV. The brother Vadblé, valet de chambre of Father La Chaise, granted his protection to the bishops of France; and Father Letellier ruled with a sceptre of iron those who were very well disposed to be so ruled. It was impossible that the greater part of the Jesuits should not be puffed up by the consequence and power to which these two members of their society had been raised, and that they should not become as insolent as the lackeys of M. Louvois. There have been among them, certainly, men of knowledge, eloquence, and genius; these possessed some modesty, but those who had only mediocrity of talent or acquirement were tainted with that pride which generally attaches to mediocrity and to the pedantry of a college.
From the time of Father Garasse almost all their polemical works have been pervaded with an indecent and scornful arrogance which has roused the indignation of all Europe. This arrogance frequently sank into the most pitiful meanness; so that they discovered the extraordinary secret of being objects at once of envy and contempt. Observe, for example, how they expressed themselves of the celebrated Pasquier, advocate-general of the chamber of accounts:
"Pasquier is a mere porter, a Parisian varlet, a second-rate showman and jester, a journeyman retailer of ballads and old stories, a contemptible hireling, only fit to be a lackey's valet, a scrub, a disgusting ragamuffin, strongly suspected of heresy, and either heretical or much worse, a libidinous and filthy satyr, a master-fool by nature, in sharp, in flat, and throughout the whole gamut, a three-shod fool, a fool double-dyed, a fool in grain, a fool in every sort of folly."
They afterwards polished their style; but pride, by becoming less gross, only became the more revolting.
Everything is pardoned except pride; and this accounts for the fact that all the parliaments in the kingdom, the members of which had the greater part of them been disciples of the Jesuits, seized the first opportunity of effecting their annihilation; and the whole land rejoiced in their downfall.
So deeply was the spirit of pride rooted in them that it manifested itself with the most indecent rage, even while they were held down to the earth by the hand of justice, and their final sentence yet remained to be pronounced. We need only read the celebrated memorial already mentioned, entitled "It is Time to Speak Out," printed at Avignon in 1763, under the assumed name of Anvers. It begins with an ironical petition to the persons holding the court of parliament. It addresses them with as much superiority and contempt as could be shown in reprimanding a proctor's clerk. The illustrious M. de Montclar, procureur-général, the oracle of the Parliament of Provence, is continually treated as "M. Ripert," and rebuked with as much consequence and authority as a mutinous and ignorant scholar by a professor in his chair. They pushed their audacity so far as to say that M. de Montclar "blasphemed" in giving an account of the institution of the Jesuits.
In their memorial, entitled "All Shall be Told," they insult still more daringly the Parliament of Metz, and always in the style of arrogance and dictation derived from the schools.
They have retained this pride even in the very ashes to which France and Spain have now reduced them. From the bottom of those ashes the serpent, scotched as it has been, has again raised its hostile head. We have seen a contemptible creature, of the name of Nonnotte, set himself up for a critic on his masters; and, although possessing merely talent enough for preaching to a mob in the church-yard, discoursing with all the ease of impudence about things of which he has not the slightest notion. Another insolent member of the society, called Patouillet, dared, in the bishop's mandates, to insult respectable citizens and officers of the king's household, whose very lackeys would not have permitted him to speak to them.
One of the things on which they most prided themselves, was introducing themselves into the houses of the great in their last illness, as ambassadors of God, to open to them the gates of heaven, without their previously passing through purgatory. Under Louis XIV. it was considered as having a bad aspect, it was unfashionable and discreditable, to die without having passed through the hands of a Jesuit; and the wretch, immediately after the fatal scene had closed, would go and boast to his devotees that he had just been converting a duke and peer, who, without his protection, would have been inevitably damned.
The dying man might say: "By what right, you college excrement, do you intrude yourself on me in my dying moments? Was I ever seen to go to your cells when any of you had the fistula or gangrene, and were about to return your gross and unwieldy bodies to the earth? Has God granted your soul any rights over mine? Do I require a preceptor at the age of seventy? Do you carry the keys of Paradise at your girdle? You dare to call yourself an ambassador of God; show me your patent and if you have none, let me die in peace. No Benedictine, Chartreux, or Premonstrant, comes to disturb my dying moments; they have no wish to erect a trophy to their pride upon the bed of our last agony; they remain peacefully in their cells; do you rest quietly in yours; there can be nothing in common between you and me."
A comic circumstance occurred on a truly mournful occasion, when an English Jesuit, of the name of Routh, eagerly strove to possess himself of the last hour of the great Montesquieu. "He came," he said, "to bring back that virtuous soul to religion;" as if Montesquieu had not known what religion was better than a Routh; as if it had been the will of God that Montesquieu should think like a Routh! He was driven out of the chamber, and went all over Paris, exclaiming, "I have converted that celebrated man; I prevailed upon him to throw his 'Persian Letters' and his 'Spirit of Laws' into the fire." Care was taken to print the narrative of the conversion of President Montesquieu by the reverend father Routh in the libel entitled "The Anti-Philosophic Dictionary."
Another subject of pride and ambition with the Jesuits was making missions to various cities, just as if they had been among Indians or Japanese. They would oblige the whole magistracy to attend them in the streets; a cross was borne before them, planted in the principal public places; they dispossessed the resident clergy; they became complete masters of the city. A Jesuit of the name of Aubert performed one of these missions to Colmar, and compelled the advocate-general of the sovereign council to burn at his feet his copy of "Bayle," which had cost him no less than fifty crowns. For my own part, I acknowledge that I would rather have burned brother Aubert himself. Judge how the pride of this Aubert must have swelled with this sacrifice as he boasted of it to his comrades at night, and as he exultingly wrote the account of it to his general.
O monks, monks! be modest, as I have already advised you; be moderate, if you wish to avoid the calamities impending over you.
JEWS
SECTION I
You order me to draw you a faithful picture of the spirit of the Jews, and of their history, and – without entering into the ineffable ways of Providence, which are not our ways – you seek in the manners of this people the source of the events which that Providence prepared.
It is certain that the Jewish nation is the most singular that the world has ever seen; and although, in a political view, the most contemptible of all, yet in the eyes of a philosopher, it is, on various accounts, worthy consideration.
The Guebers, the Banians, and the Jews, are the only nations which exist dispersed, having no alliance with any people, are perpetuated among foreign nations, and continue apart from the rest of the world.
The Guebers were once infinitely more considerable than the Jews, for they are castes of the Persians, who had the Jews under their dominion; but they are now scattered over but one part of the East.
The Banians, who are descended from the ancient people among whom Pythagoras acquired his philosophy, exist only in India and Persia; but the Jews are dispersed over the whole face of the earth and if they were assembled, would compose a nation much more numerous than it ever was in the short time that they were masters of Palestine. Almost every people who have written the history of their origin, have chosen to set it off by prodigies; with them all has been miracle; their oracles have predicted nothing but conquest; and such of them as have really become conquerors have had no difficulty in believing these ancient oracles which were verified by the event. The Jews are distinguished among the nations by this – that their oracles are the only true ones, of which we are not permitted to doubt. These oracles, which they understand only in the literal sense, have a hundred times foretold to them that they should be masters of the world; yet they have never possessed anything more than a small corner of land, and that only for a small number of years, and they have not now so much as a village of their own. They must, then, believe, and they do believe, that their predictions will one day be fulfilled, and that they shall have the empire of the earth.
Among the Mussulmans and the Christians they are the lowest of all nations, but they think themselves the highest. This pride in their abasement is justified by an unanswerable reason – viz., that they are in reality the fathers of both Christians and Mussulmans. The Christian and the Mussulman religion acknowledge the Jewish as their parent; and, by a singular contradiction, they at once hold this parent in reverence and in abhorrence.
It were foreign to our present purpose to repeat that continued succession of prodigies which astonishes the imagination and exercises the faith. We have here to do only with events purely historical, wholly apart from the divine concurrence and the miracles which God, for so long a time, vouchsafed to work in this people's favor.
First, we find in Egypt a family of seventy persons producing, at the end of two hundred and fifteen years, a nation counting six hundred thousand fighting men; which makes, with the women, the children and the old men, upward of two millions of souls. There is no example upon earth of so prodigious an increase of population; this people, having come out of Egypt, stayed forty years in the deserts of Stony Arabia, and in that frightful country the people much diminished.
What remained of this nation advanced a little northward in those deserts. It appears that they had the same principles which the tribes of Stony and Desert Arabia have since had, of butchering without mercy the inhabitants of little towns over whom they had the advantage, and reserving only the young women. The interests of population have ever been the principal object of both. We find that when the Arabs had conquered Spain, they imposed tributes of marriageable girls; and at this day the Arabs of the desert make no treaty without stipulating for some girls and a few presents.
The Jews arrived in a sandy, mountainous country, where there were a few towns, inhabited by a little people called the Midianites. In one Midianite camp, alone, they took six hundred and seventy-five thousand sheep, seventy-two thousand oxen, sixty-one thousand asses, and thirty-two thousand virgins. All the men, all the wives, and all the male children, were massacred; the girls and the booty were divided between the people and the sacrificers.
They then took, in the same country, the town of Jericho; but having devoted the inhabitants of that place to the anathema, they massacred them all, including the virgins, pardoning none but Rahab, a courtesan, who had aided them in surprising the town.
The learned have agitated the question whether the Jews, like so many other nations, really sacrificed men to the Divinity. This is a dispute on words; those, whom the people consecrated to the anathema were not put to death on an altar, with religious rites; but they were not the less immolated, without its being permitted to pardon any one of them. Leviticus (xxvii., 29) expressly forbids the redeeming of those who shall have been devoted. Its words are, "They shall surely be put to death." By virtue of this law it was that Jephthah devoted and killed his daughter, that Saul would have killed his son, and that the prophet Samuel cut in pieces King Agag, Saul's prisoner. It is quite certain that God is the master of the lives of men, and that it is not for us to examine His laws. We ought to limit ourselves to believing these things, and reverencing in silence the designs of God, who permitted them.
It is also asked what right had strangers like the Jews to the land of Canaan? The answer is, that they had what God gave them.
No sooner had they taken Jericho and Lais than they had a civil war among themselves, in which the tribe of Benjamin was almost wholly exterminated – men, women, and children; leaving only six hundred males. The people, unwilling that one of the tribes should be annihilated, bethought themselves of sacking the whole city of the tribe of Manasseh, killing all the men, old and young, all the children, all the married women, all the widows, and taking six hundred virgins, whom they gave to the six hundred survivors of the tribe of Benjamin, to restore that tribe, in order that the number of their twelve tribes might still be complete.
Meanwhile, the Phœnicians, a powerful people settled in the coasts from time immemorial, being alarmed at the depredations and cruelties of these newcomers, frequently chastised them; the neighboring princes united against them; and they were seven times reduced to slavery, for more than two hundred years.
At last they made themselves a king, whom they elected by lot. This king could not be very mighty; for in the first battle which the Jews fought under him, against their masters, the Philistines, they had, in the whole army, but one sword and one lance, and not one weapon of steel. But David, their second king, made war with advantage. He took the city of Salem, afterwards so celebrated under the name of Jerusalem, and then the Jews began to make some figure on the borders of Syria. Their government and their religion took a more august form. Hitherto they had not the means of raising a temple, though every neighboring nation had one or more. Solomon built a superb one, and reigned over this people about forty years.
Not only were the days of Solomon the most flourishing days of the Jews, but all the kings upon earth could not exhibit a treasure approaching Solomon's. His father, David, whose predecessor had not even iron, left to Solomon twenty-five thousand six hundred and forty-eight millions of French livres in ready money. His fleets, which went to Ophir, brought him sixty-eight millions per annum in pure gold, without reckoning the silver and jewels. He had forty thousand stables, and the same number of coach-houses, twelve thousand stables for his cavalry, seven hundred wives, and three hundred concubines. Yet he had neither wood nor workmen for building his palace and the temple; he borrowed them of Hiram, king of Tyre, who also furnished gold; and Solomon gave Hiram twenty towns in payment. The commentators have acknowledged that these things need explanation, and have suspected some literal error in the copyist, who alone can have been mistaken.
On the death of Solomon, a division took place among the twelve tribes composing the nation. The kingdom was torn asunder, and separated into two small provinces, one of which was called Judah, the other Israel – nine tribes and a half composing the Israelitish province, and only two and a half that of Judah. Then there was between these two small peoples a hatred, the more implacable as they were kinsmen and neighbors, and as they had different religions; for at Sichem and at Samaria they worshipped "Baal" – giving to God a Sidonian name; while at Jerusalem they worshipped "Adonai." At Sichem were consecrated two calves; at Jerusalem, two cherubim – which were two winged animals with double heads, placed in the sanctuary. So, each faction having its kings, its gods, its worship, and its prophets, they made a bloody war upon each other.
"While this war was carried on, the kings of Assyria, who conquered the greater part of Asia, fell upon the Jews; as an eagle pounces upon two lizards while they are fighting. The nine and a half tribes of Samaria and Sichem were carried off and dispersed forever; nor has it been precisely known to what places they were led into slavery.
It is but twenty leagues from the town of Samaria to Jerusalem, and their territories joined each other; so that when one of these towns was enslaved by powerful conquerors, the other could not long hold out. Jerusalem was sacked several times; it was tributary to kings Hazael and Razin, enslaved under Tiglath-Pileser, three times taken by Nebuchodonosor, or Nebuchadnezzar, and at last destroyed. Zedekiah, who had been set up as king or governor by this conqueror, was led, with his whole people, into captivity in Babylonia; so that the only Jews left in Palestine were a few enslaved peasants, to sow the ground.
As for the little country of Samaria and Sichem, more fertile than that of Jerusalem, it was re-peopled by foreign colonies, sent there by Assyrian kings, who took the name of Samaritans.
The two and a half tribes that were slaves in Babylonia and the neighboring towns for seventy years, had time to adopt the usages of their masters, and enriched their own tongue by mixing with it the Chaldæan; this is incontestable. The historian Josephus tells us that he wrote first in Chaldæan, which is the language of his country. It appears that the Jews acquired but little of the science of the Magi; they turned brokers, money-changers, and old-clothes men; by which they made themselves necessary, as they still do, and grew rich.
Their gains enabled them to obtain, under Cyrus, the liberty of rebuilding Jerusalem; but when they were to return into their own country, those who had grown rich at Babylon, would not quit so fine a country for the mountains of Cœlesyria, nor the fruitful banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris, for the torrent of Kedron. Only the meanest part of the nation returned with Zorobabel. The Jews of Babylon contributed only their alms to the rebuilding of the city and the temple; nor was the collection a large one; for Esdras relates that no more than seventy thousand crowns could be raised for the erection of this temple, which was to be that of all the earth.
The Jews still remained subject to the Persians; they were likewise subject to Alexander; and when that great man, the most excusable of all conquerors, had, in the early years of his victorious career, begun to raise Alexandria, and make it the centre of the commerce of the world, the Jews flocked there to exercise their trade of brokers; and there it was that their rabbis at length learned something of the sciences of the Greeks. The Greek tongue became absolutely necessary to all trading Jews.
After Alexander's death, this people continued subject in Jerusalem to the kings of Syria, and in Alexandria to the kings of Egypt; and when these kings were at war, this people always shared the fate of their subjects, and belonged to the conqueror.
From the time of their captivity at Babylon, the Jews never had particular governors taking the title of king. The pontiffs had the internal administration, and these pontiffs were appointed by their masters; they sometimes paid very high for this dignity, as the Greek patriarch at Constantinople pays for his at present.
Under Antiochus Epiphanes they revolted; the city was once more pillaged, and the walls demolished. After a succession of similar disasters, they at length obtained, for the first time, about a hundred and fifty years before the Christian era, permission to coin money, which permission was granted them by Antiochus Sidetes. They then had chiefs, who took the name of kings, and even wore a diadem. Antigonus was the first who was decorated with this ornament, which, without the power, confers but little honor.
At that time the Romans were beginning to become formidable to the kings of Syria, masters of the Jews; and the latter gained over the Roman senate by presents and acts of submission. It seemed that the wars in Asia Minor would, for a time at least, give some relief to this unfortunate people; but Jerusalem no sooner enjoyed some shadow of liberty than it was torn by civil wars, which rendered its condition under its phantoms of kings much more pitiable than it had ever been in so long and various a succession of bondages.
In their intestine troubles, they made the Romans their judges. Already most of the kingdoms of Asia Minor, Southern Africa, and three-fourths of Europe, acknowledged the Romans as their arbiters and masters.
Pompey came into Syria to judge the nation and to depose several petty tyrants. Being deceived by Aristobulus, who disputed the royalty of Jerusalem, he avenged himself upon him and his party. He took the city; had some of the seditious, either priests or Pharisees, crucified; and not long after, condemned Aristobulus, king of the Jews, to execution.
The Jews, ever unfortunate, ever enslaved, and ever revolting, again brought upon them the Roman arms. Crassus and Cassius punished them; and Metellus Scipio had a son of King Aristobulus, named Alexander, the author of all the troubles, crucified.
Under the great Cæsar, they were entirely subject and peaceable. Herod, famed among them and among us, for a long time was merely tetrarch, but obtained from Antony the crown of Judæa, for which he paid dearly; but Jerusalem would not recognize this new king, because he was descended from Esau, and not from Jacob, and was merely an Idumæan. The very circumstance of his being a foreigner caused him to be chosen by the Romans, the better to keep this people in check. The Romans protected the king of their nomination with an army; and Jerusalem was again taken by assault, sacked, and pillaged.
Herod, afterwards protected by Augustus, became one of the most powerful sovereigns among the petty kings of Arabia. He restored Jerusalem, repaired the fortifications that surrounded the temple, so dear to the Jews, and rebuilt the temple itself; but he could not finish it, for he wanted money and workmen. This proves that, after all, Herod was not rich; and the Jews, though fond of their temple, were still fonder of their money.
