The Stark Munro Letters III - Home, 15th October, 1881

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The Stark Munro Letters by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Chapter 3 Home, 15th October, 1881 Without any figure of speech, I feel quite ashamed when I think of you, Bertie. I send you one or two enormously long letters, burdened as far as I can remember them, with all sorts of useless detail. Then, in spite of your kindly answers and your sympathy, which I have done so little to deserve, I drop you completely for more than six months.

By this stray pen I swear that it shall not happen again, and this letter may serve to bridge the gap and to bring you up to date in my poor affairs, in which, of all outer mankind, you alone take an interest. To commence with what is of most moment, you may rest assured that what you said in your last letter about religion has had my most earnest attention. I am sorry that I have not got it by me to refer to. I lent it to Charlie. But I think I have the contents in my head. It is notorious, as you say, that an unbeliever may be as bigoted as any of the orthodox, and that a man may be very dogmatic in his opposition to dogma.

Such men are the real enemies of free thought. If anything could persuade me to turn traitor to my reason, it would, for example, be the blasphemous and foolish pictures displayed in some of the agnostic journals.

But every movement has its crowd of camp followers who struggle and scatter. We are like a comet, bright at the head, but tailing away into mere gasp behind. However every man may speak for himself, and I do not feel that your charge comes home to me. I am only bigoted against bigotry, and that I hold to be as legitimate as violence to the violent.

When one considers what effect the perversion of the religious instinct has had during the history of the world, the bitter wars, Christian and Mohammedan, Catholic and Protestant, the persecutions, the torturings, the domestic hatreds, the petty spites, with all creeds equally blood guilty, one cannot but be amazed that the concurrent voice of mankind has not placed bigotry at the very head of the deadly sins. It is surely a truism to say that neither smallpox nor the plague have brought the same misery upon mankind. I cannot be bigoted, my dear boy, when I say from the bottom of my heart that I respect every good Catholic and every good Protestant, and that I recognize that each of these forms of faith has been a powerful instrument in the hands of that inscrutable providence which rules all things. Just as in the course of history one finds that the most far-reaching and admirable effects may proceed from a crime, so in religion, although a creed can be founded upon an entirely inadequate conception of the Creator and his ways, it may nonetheless be the very best practical thing for the people and age which have adopted it. But if it is right for those to whom it is intellectually satisfying to adopt it, it is equally so for those to whom it is not, to protest against it, until by this process the whole mass of mankind gets gradually leavened and pushed a little further upon their slow, upward journey.

Catholicism is the more thorough. Protestantism is the more reasonable. Protestantism adapts itself to modern civilisation. Catholicism expects civilisation to adapt itself to it. Folk climb from one big branch to the other big branch, and think they have made a prodigious change, when the main trunk is rotten beneath them, and both must in their present forms be involved sooner or later in a common ruin.

The movement of human thought, though slow, is still in the direction of truth, and the various religions which man sheds as he advances, each admirable in its day, will serve, like boys dripped down from a sailing vessel, to give the rate and direction of his progress.

But how do I know what is true, you ask? I don't. But I know particularly well what isn't. And surely that is something to have gained. It isn't true that the great central mind that planned all things is capable of jealousy, or of revenge, or of cruelty, or of injustice. These are human attributes, and the book which ascribes them to the Infinite must be human also. It isn't true that the laws of nature have been capriciously disturbed, that snakes have talked, that women have been turned to salt, that rods have brought water out of rocks. You must in honesty confess that if these things were presented to us when we were adults for the first time, we should smile at them. It isn't true that the fountain of all common sense should punish a race for a venial offence committed by a person long since dead, and then should add to the cross injustice by heaping the whole retribution upon a single innocent scapegoat. Can you not see all the want of justice and logic to say nothing of the want of mercy involved in such a conception? Can you not see it, Bertie? How can you blind yourself to it? Take your eyes away from the details for a moment and look at this root idea of the predominant faith. Is the general conception of it consistent with infinite wisdom and mercy? If not, what becomes of the dogmas, the sacraments, the whole scheme which is founded upon this hand-bank? Courage, my friend! At the right moment all will be laid aside, as the man whose strength increases lays down the crutch which has been a good friend to him in his weakness. But his changes won't be over then. His hobble will become a walk, and his walk a run. There is no finality, can be none, since the question concerns the infinite. All this which appears to advance to you today will seem reactionary and conservative a thousand years hence.