restricts it to his own sects, thus making it clearly compulsory
upon us to revere HIS gods and HIS sacred things, and nobody’s
else. We can’t say a word, for he had our own dictionary at his
back, and its decision is final.
This law, reduced to its simplest terms, is this:
1. Whatever is sacred to the Christian must be held in reverence by
everybody else; 2. whatever is sacred to the Hindu must be held
in reverence by everybody else; 3. therefore, by consequence,
logically, and indisputably, whatever is sacred to ME must be
held in reverence by everybody else.
Now then, what aggravates me is that these troglodytes and
muscovites and bandoleers and buccaneers are ALSO trying to crowd
in and share the benefit of the law, and compel everybody to
revere their Shakespeare and hold him sacred. We can’t have
that: there’s enough of us already. If you go on widening and
spreading and inflating the privilege, it will presently come to
be conceded that each man’s sacred things are the ONLY ones, and
the rest of the human race will have to be humbly reverent toward
them or suffer for it. That can surely happen, and when it
happens, the word Irreverence will be regarded as the most
meaningless, and foolish, and self-conceited, and insolent, and
impudent, and dictatorial word in the language. And people will
say, “Whose business is it what gods I worship and what things
hold sacred? Who has the right to dictate to my conscience, and
where did he get that right?”
We cannot afford to let that calamity come upon us. We must
save the word from this destruction. There is but one way to do
it, and that is to stop the spread of the privilege and strictly
confine it to its present limits–that is, to all the Christian
sects, to all the Hindu sects, and me. We do not need any more,
the stock is watered enough, just as it is.
It would be better if the privilege were limited to me
alone. I think so because I am the only sect that knows how to
employ it gently, kindly, charitably, dispassionately. The other
sects lack the quality of self-restraint. The Catholic Church
says the most irreverent things about matters which are sacred to
the Protestants, and the Protestant Church retorts in kind about
the confessional and other matters which Catholics hold sacred;
then both of these irreverencers turn upon Thomas Paine and
charge HIM with irreverence. This is all unfortunate, because it
makes it difficult for students equipped with only a low grade of
mentality to find out what Irreverence really IS.
It will surely be much better all around if the privilege of
regulating the irreverent and keeping them in order shall
eventually be withdrawn from all the sects but me. Then there
will be no more quarreling, no more bandying of disrespectful
epithets, no more heartburnings.
There will then be nothing sacred involved in this Bacon-
Shakespeare controversy except what is sacred to me. That will
simplify the whole matter, and trouble will cease. There will be
irreverence no longer, because I will not allow it. The first
time those criminals charge me with irreverence for calling their
Stratford myth an Arthur-Orton-Mary-Baker-Thompson-Eddy-Louis-
the-Seventeenth-Veiled-Prophet-of-Khorassan will be the last.
Taught by the methods found effective in extinguishing earlier
offenders by the Inquisition, of holy memory, I shall know how to
quiet them.
XIII
Isn’t it odd, when you think of it, that you may list all
the celebrated Englishmen, Irishmen, and Scotchmen of modern
times, clear back to the first Tudors–a list containing five
hundred names, shall we say?–and you can go to the histories,
biographies, and cyclopedias and learn the particulars of the
lives of every one of them. Every one of them except one–the
most famous, the most renowned–by far the most illustrious of
them all–Shakespeare! You can get the details of the lives of
all the celebrated ecclesiastics in the list; all the celebrated
tragedians, comedians, singers, dancers, orators, judges,
lawyers, poets, dramatists, historians, biographers, editors,
inventors, reformers, statesmen, generals, admirals, discoverers,
prize-fighters, murderers, pirates, conspirators, horse-jockeys,
bunco-steerers, misers, swindlers, explorers, adventurers by land
and sea, bankers, financiers, astronomers, naturalists,