The Invention of a New Religion | Page 9

ideas can be traced back to Fenelon
and other seventeenth-century thinkers, weary of the pomp and
periwigs around them. Rousseau himself did but fulfil the aspiration of
a whole society for something simpler, juster, more true to nature, more
logical. He gave exactly what was needed at that moment of history--
what appeared self-evident; wherefore no one so much as thought of
asking for detailed proofs. His deism, his statements concerning the
"state of nature" and the "social contract," etc., were at once recognised
by the people of his day as eternal verities. What need for discussion or
investigation?
The case of Judaea is obscure; but it would seem that something
analogous must have happened there, when the continuity of national
life had been snapped by the exile. A revolutionised and most unhappy
present involved a changed attitude towards the past. Oral tradition and
the scraps of written records that had survived the shipwreck of the
kingdom fell, as it were, naturally into another order. The kaleidoscope
having been turned, the pattern changed of itself. A few gifted
individuals voiced the enthusiasm of a whole community, when they
adopted literary methods which would now, in our comparatively stable
days, be branded as fraudulent. They simply could not help themselves.
The pressing need of constructing a national polity for the present on
the only basis then possible--Yahwe worship--FORCED them into
falsifying the past. The question was one of life and death for the

Jewish nationality.
* * *
Europeans there are in Japan--Europeanised Japanese likewise-- who
feel outraged by the action of the Japanese bureaucracy in the matter of
the new cult, with all the illiberal and obscurantist measures which it
entails. That is natural. We modern Westerners love individual liberty,
and the educated among us love to let the sunlight of criticism into
every nook and cranny of every subject. Freedom and scientific
accuracy are our gods. But Japanese officialdom acts quite naturally,
after its kind, in not allowing the light to be let in, because the roots of
the faith it has planted need darkness in which to grow and spread. No
religion can live which is subjected to critical scrutiny.
Thus also are explained the rigours of the Japanese bureaucracy against
the native liberals, who, in its eyes, appear, not simply as political
opponents, but as traitors to the chosen people--sacrilegious heretics
defying the authority of the One and Only True Church.
"But," you will say, "this indignation must be mere pretence. Not even
officials can be so stupid as to believe in things which they have
themselves invented." We venture to think that you are wrong here.
People can always believe that which it is greatly to their interest to
believe. Thousands of excellent persons in our own society cling to the
doctrine of a future life on no stronger evidence. It is enormously
important to the Japanese ruling class that the mental attitude sketched
above should become universal among their countrymen. Accordingly,
they achieve the apparently impossible. "We believe in it," said one of
them to us recently--"we believe in it, although we know that it is not
true." Tertullian said nearly the same thing, and no one has ever
doubted HIS sincerity.

End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of The Invention of a New Religion
by Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850-1935)

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