WCP6656

[1] [p.52]

"9, St. Mark's Crescent, Regent's Park,¹

"September 23, 1865.

"DEAR ROLLESTON,²

"Your friend³ has very fairly stated my argument,⁴ yet does not seem to me to touch the point of it in his [2] [p.53] answer. For instance, he says, 'the principal doctrines of Christianity were held at the beginning as now.'⁵ True, but what was that beginning? and where did the doctrines and dogmas of Christianity spring up? It was in the very focus of all the highest and most ancient civilizations of the world — the Jewish, the Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Greek, and the Roman. These peoples had already gone through the long process of mental development which the savage has not even begun. The doctrines (of Christianity) grew among them, as they do not grow among savages, because they were adapted to the mental state in the one case, but are not in the other.

"What savage nations have (as he asserts) been raised out of their degradation by Christianity? The Abyssinians are a good case to show that Christianity alone does nothing. The circumstances have not been favourable to the growth of civilization in Abyssinia, and therefore, though they have had Christianity as long as we have (or longer), they are scarcely equal morally to many pagan and certainly inferior to some Mohammedan nations. This is a crucial instance.

"He says the Britons did not arrive at any 'great moral elevation' under the Romans. But will he point out any savages who have arrived at a 'great moral elevation' in the same time under Christianity? I know of none. No doubt there has been often a superficial improvement, as in some of the South Sea islands; but it is an open question how much of that is due to the purely moral influence of a higher and more civilized race.

"Of course, if you claim all virtue as Christian virtue, and impute all want of goodness to want of true Christianity, you may prove the value of any religion. The Mohammedan argues exactly the same (see Lady Duff Gordon's⁶ 'Letters from Egypt'⁷). Your friend would no doubt impute whatever scraps of goodness there may exist in myself to the Christianity in which I was educated; but I know and feel (though it would no doubt shock him to hear) that I acted from lower motives than I do now, and that I was really inferior morally as a Christian than I am now as, what he would call, an infidel.

[3] [p.54] "I look upon the doctrine of future rewards and punishments as a motive to action to be radically bad, and as bad for savages as for civilized men. I look upon it, above all, as a bad preparation for a future state. I believe that the only way to teach and to civilize, whether children or savages, is through the influence of love and sympathy; and the great thing to teach them is to have the most absolute respect for the rights of others, and to accustom them to receive pleasure from the happiness of others. After this education of habit, they should be taught the great laws of the universe and of the human mind, and the precepts of morality must be placed on their only sure foundation — the conviction that they alone can guide mankind to the truest and most widespread happiness.

"I cannot see that the teaching of all this can be furthered by the dogmas of any religion, and I do not believe that those dogmas really have any effect in advancing morality in one case out of a thousand.

"My article,⁸ by-the-bye, was considerably pruned, and I, of course, think spoilt by the editor.

"Yours very sincerely, | "Alfred R. Wallace."