Book the Sixth
God, Satan and Homo Tewler

Chapter 1
“Tewler” To “Sapiens”

THAT completes all that is essential in the life of Edward Albert Tewler, his Deeds and Significant Sayings. But before this specimen human being can be put definitively into its place, in space, in time, among the stars, and Finis written to this book, a few possibly exasperating comments have still to be made on the nature of the universe and the wisdom of the ages. The reader was warned of this in the penultimate paragraph of the Introduction (q.v.).

Certain types of Homo Tewler, functioning under the designations of philosophers, theologians, teachers and the like, are still regarded with an excessive awe and far too readily accepted at their own valuation by the great majority of our race. They are like business, firms, competing among themselves for a monopoly, but agreed in selling God, Truth and Righteousness into the Tewler soul precisely as the proprietary medicine sellers sold their bottlefuls into Mrs Richard Tewler’s body. Not too confidently. Most of them betray a doubt of their own reality by dressing up in strange apologetic garments, gowns, hoods, robes, the oddest tiaras, mitres, petticoats and the like, shaving their heads, growing vast unclean beards, as who should say, “I am peculiar. I am not a man but a divine medium.”

I ask you; a medium for what?

For philosophy? But can there be more than one single philosophy for sane humanity? And can that philosophy be so outside the limits of the human understanding that it is necessary to dress up like a Gold Coast witch-doctor to expound that high hokey-pokey? Since poor rambling Homo sub-sapiens began to put facts together and ask questions about them, he has been accumulating a vast disorder of answers, right, wrong and oblique. Mostly they are oblique. His so-called “thinkers” were overtaken either by death or a conviction of indisputable Tightness, before they had thought anything out. The history of human thought is essentially a history of human error, of a midden that has never been thoroughly cleaned. Accumulation is the word for it. Never in all recorded time down to this last syllable, has that mass been submitted to an honest, sustained, digestive process. Its unassimilated chunks become “classics.” The student of philosophy doing “Greats” or whatever pompous name is given to this stale resurrection pie, is introduced to a jumble of incompatible ideas, a mixture of bits from different jig-saw puzzles; incoherence as wisdom. Our story of Edward Albert has shown reason why we still wait for a comprehensive clean-up. The little beast by the million blocks the way. But that clean-up has to come, if the transition to sapiens is ever to be attained.

And as with philosophy, so with religion. Religion is the binding system of ideas and practices which holds a community together. Obviously then, a healthy community can have only one religion, and now that distance has been abolished and mankind has become an interdependent world — wide community, there can be only one religion in the world. There can be no “religious toleration” in a sane world community. Your community needs to be bound by a common understanding, and you cannot allow organisations of priestly kidnappers to attack the social solidarity because they have a Church to sell.

The religion a world community needs is a very simple one. It cannot hold together without a dogmatic assertion of the supreme duty of outspoken truth, of the common ownership of the earth and the equal rights of man. So long, as people accept these fundamental dogmas, for dogmas they are, albeit vitally necessary dogmas, there is nothing to prevent folks elaborating whatever novel or antiquarian ceremonies or mythologies they have a mind for, or discussing in adult freedom any seditious ideas that occur to them. In a reasonably educated world, there would be no justification for suppressing the private sessions of the Jewish Khans or a Hell Fire Club or adult baptism, or Hitler’s astrologer or a celebration of the mass or a spiritualistic séance. So long as those who indulged in these oddities did not organise a propaganda of them and sell them to impair the general mental balance of the human community. But to tamper with the trustful minds of the young or the informative organisation of the world, is quite a different matter.

So we come to the problem of world teaching. This is certainly the most formidable problem ahead of us. For that old slattern, our Mother Nature, who has let one thing lead to another until we are now in a single world community, has neglected to give us any individual or collective drive for an education that will reconcile us to that conscious adaptation our situation demands. She has failed to mitigate our obstinate indisposition to learn. Homo Tewler may yet perish miserably en masse because of his fear of a plunge into reality. He holds on to his sinking ship; he looks at the dark waters and runs back to lock himself in his mental cabin with the sedatives the clerical salesman has persuaded him to trust. Yet time and again men of exceptional penetration have attempted to launch a recognition of universal brotherhood, of a new generosity and a cooperative life upon the world, as the only possible salvation for our species. It is not a new realisation. Now, indeed, it is finally urgent, but it has been plainly necessary to men of clear vision for scores of centuries. Nineteen centuries ago, Jesus of Nazareth, last, most indignant and most revolutionary of the Hebrew prophets, beating the money-changers and cursing the barren fig tree, was, so far as we can disinter his doctrine from subsequent accretions, preaching the gospel of human solidarity as his “Kingdom of Heaven”, and the socialist movement, before Marx undermined it, was an equally disinterested drive towards a sane salvation of our Tewler world.

There is-much to be learnt about the psychology of the animal we are, from the fate of these two initiatives. They were caught and crippled and destroyed by the sub-conscious malice of their first generation of disciples. Paul took possession of Jesus and smothered him in doctrinal Christianity, and in a little while that noble beginning had sunken to the wangling of the “Fathers.” It was not the Galilean who triumphed over the pagan stoicism of Julian. It was Paul who conquered. It was the fundamental Tewlerism of mankind that asserted itself against a precocious stirring of Homo sapiens. In the same way Marx imposed an orthodoxy upon the socialist impulse, and infected it with his own conceit, jealousy and arrogance.

Corruptio optima, pessima. To-day the most evil thing in the whole world is the Roman Catholic Church, whose shameless symbol is Jesus the Son of Man, drooping, crucified and done for. Wherever the Catholic priest prevails, among the decadent pious French generals of the surrender, in Croatia, in Japan, in Spain, in that spite-slum, Eire, in Italy, in South America, in Australia, there you find malicious mischief afoot against the enlightenment of mankind. People have called Catholicism a cancer of the human mind. But it is no such neoplasm; it is congenital; it is the organised front of that base heritage of the Tewlers, from which we are seeking Escape. It had no revelation; to claim a revelation is priestly impudence; it is the most natural religion possible, mean and muddle-witted, human to the dregs, pretending to be divine.

The Communist Party is the identical twin of Catholicism. It is its little left brother, psychologically the same. Inevitably the two work together for the same general frustration of human hope. They gratify the same resentful craving of the inferiority complex that we have traced throughout the life of our particular specimen. They arc; the same sort of animal as he. Never shall life be better than my life! they insist.

In view of these two great betrayals, we may reasonably doubt the possibility of a world-wide common education that will raise and keep Homo Tewler above himself. Whatever a few far-seeing people may attempt, it will surely be undermined and defeated by those who will come in and be brought into the great work. “You can’t expect humanity to pull itself up by its own shoe-straps,” tee-hees Mr Chamble Pewter triumphantly. “Forgive my sense of humour.”

But obstinate rebels exist who will not accept that. They argue, for instance, that already there has been at least one drive in this Tewler world, the onset of what it is customary nowadays to call Science with a capital S, which has so far evaded priestcraft or any sort of authoritarian suffocation. This Science has revolutionised the material conditions of human life, and it behoves us to examine how it sprang up and what exactly it is. No miracle begot it. It had no Founder. It began in a natural Adlerian revolt against the overbearing religious dogmatisms of the Middle Ages. Against their exasperating self-confidence, the recalcitrants, unable to take it meekly any longer, and casting about for some means of self-assertion, discovered to their delight certain incompatibilities between the teaching and facts, and summoned a new arbitrator, experimental verification, to justify their revolt. It is absurd to ennoble the driving force of that new movement. We cannot afford to sentimentalise Science; Roger Bacon, so far as our knowledge of him goes, never said, “I love truth,” or “What noble thing can I do for my fellow — men?” or in a state of pious helpfulness, “Let me discover something for the greater glory of God.” He did nothing of the sort; and anyhow the essential thing about him was something quite different; he lost his temper. He endured the philosophical assurance about him as long as he could, and then flung himself at a weak point, abusively and violently, and made the most of it. There was really no essential difference between the motives of Roger Bacon when he put out his tongue at the medieval Aristotle and young Master Edward Albert Tewler when he put out his tongue at the serene self — satisfaction of the lion in the Zoo.

Galileo again, was no visitant from a higher sphere; he was as human as any of us. But the complacent finality of the Church about everything in heaven and earth was too much for him. He published his forbidden book to make those who were set in authority 6ver him realise just what damned fools they were. He could not keep quiet. They argued with him, they made him recant and keep a civil tongue in his bead, but they knew and he knew that they knew. “All the same, it moves,” he jeered at their dignified efforts to nail the earth down again, the earth that Copernicus and he had dislodged and sent spinning off round the sun for ever.

It is very important for our purpose here to recall this essential resentful Tewlerism of the scientific initiative, because then we can realise that great truths can and do emerge and increase without the agency of great minds, exalted discoverers or the like, Through a quite ignoble recalcitrance. It was Tewler insubordinate against Tewler in authority. Scientific progress oozes out of the general substance of Tewlerism, and its outstanding personalities, so liable to deification, are a hindrance rather than a help.

But this does not explain why these new expansions of the human outlook were not presently seized upon and exploited and betrayed by some creed-maker like St Paul, followed up by the usually inevitable priesthood. For that we must account in some other way. It is not so very difficult to do that. Science began differently. It began less as a public teaching than as a hobby. And it did not invade more than a limited part of the field of modern life and thought, and that was a part of the field remote from the primordial scuffle for pride and power. It began completely out of politics, and it raised no objections to current religious and social life. The Royal Society, like the Academia dei Lincei, was a society of gentlemen amateurs who met unobtrusively and exchanged their sceptical observations, their entertaining Centuries of Inventions and so forth, and published their Philosophical Transactions more or less privately. In those days they did not use the word “Science.” It was Natural Philosophy and Natural History they talked about.

The Royal Society was a toy for Charles II, and it was only as the nineteenth century unfolded that mankind realised that this pet tiger cub was growing into a rather formidable monster. It stuck its claws through the gaiters of Bishop Wilberforce with great effect, when he launched a Tewleresque kick at it. It was that memorable encounter of “Soapy Sam” and Grandfather Huxley at the British Association meeting which made the “Conflict of Religion and Science” a fighting issue. Then it was that the great vested interest of Anglicanism, which, in spite of the resistances of nonconformity and dissent, had been selling the Hanoverian Church-and — State system to the variegated population of the British Empire very successfully, took alarm, and the competing nostrum — sellers of Roman Catholicism and the Bible-reading sects, made common cause with it. This young tiger was biting mouthfuls out of the Creator! A Creator was an integral asset in their common equipment; they could not have him eroded and damaged; they could not do without him.

It is plausible to liken Science to a young tiger in this way, but that comparison needs to be qualified. Science may claw or bite upon occasion, but essentially it is the product of a protean anonymous power, and if in certain circumstances it took on the appearance of a dangerous assailant, it eluded any definitive suppression by its extraordinary lack of centralised organisation. It had no head to strike off, no sanctum to burn. There were no consolidated funds to be seized. It arose from the world-wide natural recalcitrance of the human mind. It was here. It was there. Like a dawn. And wherever it spread, the critical spirit in man was stimulated and encouraged to further insubordination.

So the struggle against Science is not so much an attempt to uproot and end something tangible and uprootable, as a world-wide disposition on the part of the great vested interests that overshadow our lives and sell us God, government and war today, to prevent an undesired and unexpected illumination reaching die general mass of mankind.

In this they have succeeded to a disconcerting extent. You have been told how a sample young Englishman, fifty years after Darwin, could dispose of his relationship to Tarsius and the apes with an oafish guffaw, still believing that he and all things were made, as one might mould clay, by a personal God rather resembling Mr Myame but with a whiter and woollier beard, a little muddled in his identity with an extremely mawkish Saviour who was also his Son, a phosphorescent pigeon intervening. (“Mystery of the Holy Trinity,” comes an echo from Edward Albert. “‘Ands off sacred things! ‘Oly! ‘Oly! ‘Oly! People won’t tol’rate you saying things like that, and if God was anything like what he used to be, you’d be struck dead for it instanter”)

Which belated outbreak of Edward Albert’s is exactly why I write with ruthless precision here. The words I have used describe Christian doctrine unconventionally but exactly as it is presented by the Church and Christian art. If my phrases shock the reader, that only shows it is high time.he or she was shocked. The doctrine of the Trinity is, I repeat, atrocious nonsense. Yet all over the English-speaking world, children’s minds are still being paralysed by the injection of this same atrocious nonsense. You can hear the bland voices of the parsons in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Children’s Hour, telling the old Bible stories as truth, telling of real angels and real miracles, of resurrections and marvels of the utmost absurdity, lying deliberately to earn their livings.

“You talk like the Village Atheist,” protests Bishop Tewler, being as upper-class and socially subtle as he knows how. “All that, we understand quite as well as you do, is just a series of time-honoured stories, dear bewtiful old symbols.” The village atheist was often the salt of the village; and I am proud to rank with him. I had rather jest with him at the public ho............