"...I would
not exchange my freedom from old superstition, if I were to be burned
at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of orthodoxy, if
I must take the orthodoxy with the peace and quiet."
Letter
to Mr. Atkinson, February
1848
This
is taken from Annie Laurie Gaylor's Women
Without Superstition "No gods, No Masters"published by
the Freedon From Religion Foundation The
quotations here are from Harriet Matrtineau's Autobiography
written in 1855 and published posthumously in 1877.
ACCLAIMED BRITISH AUTHOR HARRIET MARTINEAU
pronounced herself "a free rover on the broad, bright
breezy common of the universe."
The sixth of eight children
of a silk manufacturer in Norwich, England, Harriet is called "the
first sociologist," mapping out sociological methodology before
the word was coined, according to twentieth-century sociologist Alice S.
Rossi. Harriet was a significant role model in the woman's movement: a
respected female author winning acclaim for her own thought, who supported
herself by her nonfiction, writing fifty books and more than sixteen
hundred articles, signed by her own name. She boasted of being "probably
the happiest single woman in England."
Since she had been raised
in a Unitarian family, Unitarians claimed her as one of theirs, provoking
her to write at the end of her life: ". . . I hope and believe my old
co-religionists understand and admit that I disclaim their theology in
toto, and that by no twisting of language or darkening of its meanings
can I be made out to have any thing whatever in common with them about
religious matters.... they must take my word for it that there is nothing
in common between their theology and my philosophy.
"My business in
life has been to think and learn, and to speak out with absolute freedom
what I have thought and learned. The freedom is itself a positive and
never-failing enjoyment to me, after the bondage of my early life."
At age thirty-two in 1834,
Harriet took a two-year visit to America, writing the two-volume Society
in America, a definitive work on the status of American women, whom
she found unhealthily obsessed with religion, as Frances Wright had. Her
work was as acclaimed as de Tocqueville's. Her warm reception turned nasty
after Harriet endorsed William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolitionists. She
spent the final three months of her tour mobbed, condemned, and fearing
for her life.
During a period of
invalidism, Harriet published a series of essays, including the story
"The Hour and the Man," a tribute to Toussaint L'Ouverture. She
turned down the first of three offers of a government pension. In 1846,
Harriet claimed a "scientific" mesmeric cure, making her
"transition from religious inconsistency and irrationality to
free-thinking strength and liberty" during this period. (I: 466)
In 1846, Harriet visited
Egypt, Palestine, and Arabia with friends, writing Eastern Life, Past
and Present (1848), examining the genealogy of Egyptian, He-brew,
Christian and Mohammedan faiths. Critics pounced on the "mocking
spirit of infidelity." Three years later, her freethought was made
clear when On the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, letters between
herself and H. G. Atkinson, was published.
In the controversial book,
she had written: "There is no theory of a God, of an author of
Nature, of an origin of the Universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my
faculties; which is not (to my feelings) so irrelevant as to make me
blush; so misleading as to make
me mourn. I can now hardly believe that it was I who once read Milton with
scarcely any recoil from the theology. ..."
Harriet pondered: "I
certainly had no idea how little faith Christians have in their own faith
till I saw how ill their courage and temper can stand any attack on
it."
She wanted to write a book
for "the Secularist order of parents ... who could obtain few
story-books for their children which were not stuffed with what was in
their eyes pernicious superstition." Not confident of her ability to
write fiction, Harriet wrote Household Education (1848), and was
pleased to learn that "there are a good many Christian parents who
can accept suggestion and aid from one who will not pronounce their
Shibboleth. .."
She translated and
condensed the six volumes of French atheist and philosopher Auguste Comte
into two, to his approval, a project completed in 1853. Told she
had fatal heart disease in 1855, Harriet wrote her autobiography,
but survived until 1876. When Harriet's diagnosis became known, she
received correspondence from believers: "One sends me a New Testament
(as if I had never seen one before) with the usual hopes of grace &c.,
though aware that the bible is no authority with me; and, having been
assured that I am `happy,' this correspondent has the modesty to intimate
that I ought not to be happy, ...
"The lesson taught
us by these kindly commentators on my present experience is that dogmatic
faith compels the best minds and hearts to narrowness and insolence."
Another correspondent took
the liberty of regretting that Harriet's espousal of causes was undermined
by her freethinking. Harriet exclaimed: "what signifies the
pursuit of any one reform, like those specified, anti-slavery and the
woman question, when the freedom which is the very soul of the
controversy, the very principle of the movement, is mourned over in any
other of its manifestations? The only effectual advocates of such reforms
as those are people who follow truth wherever it leads.... My own feeling
of concern arises from seeing how much moral injury and suffering is
created by the superstitions of the Christian mythology. . . ."
William Lloyd Garrison
wrote on July 4, 1876, that "the service she rendered to the
antislavery cause was inestimable." Florence Nightingale, on Sept.
29, 1876, wrote that Harriet Martineau "was born to be a
destroyer of slavery, in whatever form, in whatever place, all over the
world, wherever she saw or thought she saw it."
In women Without Superstition "No Gods, No Masters" Annie
Laurie Gaylor publishes several experts from Harriet Martineu's
autobiography Volumes I & II, written in 1855 and published
posthumously in 1977. Below is part of it and includes her eloquent
expression of her feelings as she was approaching death.
"Release from
Superstition"
I had long perceived
the worse than uselessness of enforcing principles of justice and mercy by
an appeal to the example of God. I had long seen that the orthodox
fruitlessly attempt to get rid of the difficulty by presenting the
two-fold aspect of God,-the Father being the model of justice, and the Son
of love and mercy,-the inevitable result being that he who is especially
called God is regarded as an unmitigated tyrant and spontaneous torturer,
while the sweeter and nobler attributes are engrossed by the man
Jesus,-whose fate only deepens the opprobrium of the Divine cruelty: while
the heretics whose souls recoil from such a doctrine, and who strive to
explain away the recorded dogmas of tyranny and torture, in fact give up
the Christian revelation by rejecting its essential postulates.... I had
long given up, in moral disgust, the conception of life after death as a
matter of compensation for the ills of humanity, or a police and penal
source of "the divine government." I had perceived that the
doctrines of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body
were incompatible; and that, while the latter was clearly impossible, we
were wholly without evidence of the former. (I:468 - 469)
--------------------------
When I experience the still
new joy of feeling myself to be a portion of the universe, resting on the
security of its everlasting laws, certain that its Cause was wholly out of
the sphere of human attributes, and that the special destination of my
race is infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of
divine moral government,' how could it matter to me that the adherents of
a decaying mythology,-(the Christian following the heathen, as the heathen
followed the barbaric-fetish) were fiercely clinging to their Man-God,
their scheme of salvation, their reward and punishment, their arrogance,
their selfishness, their essential pay-system, as ordered by their
mythology? As the astronomer rejoices in new knowledge which compels him
to give up the dignity of our globe as the centre, the pride, and even the
final cause of the universe, so do those who have escaped from the
Christian mythology enjoy their release from the superstition which fails
to make happy, fails to make good, fails to make wise, and has become a
great an obstacle in the way of progress as the prior mythologies which it
took tha place of nearly two thousand years ago....To the emancipated, it
is a small matter that those who remain imprisoned are shocked a the
daring which goes forth into the sunshine and under the stars to study and
enjoy, without leave asked, or fear of penalty. (II:45-46)
--------------------------
I have now had three
months' experience of the fact of constant expectation of death; and
the result is as much regret as a rational person can admit at the absurd
waste of time, thought and energy that I have been guilty of in the course
of my life in dwelling on the subject of death. ...And now that I am
awaiting it at any hour, the whole thing seems so easy, at simple and
natural.... I attribute this very much, however, to the nature of my views
of death. The case must be otherwise with Christians, - even
independently of the selfish and perturbing emotions connected with an
expectation of rewards and punishments in the next world. They can
never be quite secure from the danger that their air-built castle shall
dissolve at the last moment, and that they may vividly perceive on what
imperfect evidence and delusive grounds their expectation of immortality
or resurrection reposes.... An unselfish and magnanimous person cannot be
solaced, in parting with mortal companions and human sufferers, by
personal rewards, glory, bliss, or anything of the sort. I used to
think and feel all this before I became emancipated from the superstition;
and I could only submit, and suppose it all right because it was ordained.
But now the release is an inexpressible comfort and the simplifying of the
whole matter has a most tranquillizing effect. I see that the
dying...naturally and regularly, unless disturbed, desire and sink
into death as into sleep ... We know, by all testimony, that persons
who are brought face to face with death ny an accident which seems
to leave no chance of escape, have no religious ideas or emotions
whatever... Under the eternal laws of the universe, I came into
being, and, under them, I have lived a life so full that its fullness is
equivalent to length....since I attained a truer point of view: and the
relief from old burdens, the uprising of new satisfactions, and the
opening of new clearness,-the fresh air of Nature, in short, after
imprisonment in the ghost- peopled cavern of superstition, - has been as
favourable to my moral nature as to intellectual progress and general
enjoyment....(II: 104-107)
--------------------------
... the time cannot be far off
when, throughout the civilised world, theology must go out before the
light of philosophy...... Precisely in proportion to Man's ignorance of
his own nature, as well as of other things, is the tendency of his
imagination to inform the outward world with his own consciousness. The
fetish worshipper attributes a consciousness like his own to every thing
about him; the imputation becomes more select and rare through every
rising grade of theology, till the Christian makes his reflex of himself
invisible and intangible, or, as he says, "spiritual.". .. About
this matter, of the extinction of theology by a true science of human
nature, I cannot but say that my expectation amounts to absolute
assurance; and that I believe that the worst of the conflict is over. I am
confident that a bright day is coming for future generations. Our race has
been as Adam created at nightfall. The solid earth has been but dark, or
dimly visible, while the eye was inevitably drawn to the mysterious
heavens above. There, the successive mythologies have arisen in the east,
each a constellation of truths, each glorious and fervently worshipped in
its course; but the last and noblest, the Christian, is now not only
sinking to the horizon, but paling in the dawn of a brighter time. The
dawn is un-mistakable; and the sun will not be long in coming up. The last
of the mythologies is about to vanish before the flood of a brighter
light.... (II:122-124)
Women
Without Superstition "No gods, No Masters"published by the Freedon
From Religion Foundation