Will laughed.
"Yes," Dr. Robert agreed, "it does seem pretty comic. But it didn't then. Then it was serious-much more serious than the H-bomb is today. It was known for certain that ninety-nine point nine percent of the human race were condemned to everlasting brimstone. Why? Either because they'd never heard of Jesus; or, if they had, because they couldn't believe sufficiently strongly that Jesus had delivered them from the brimstone. And the proof that they didn't believe sufficiently strongly was the empirical, observable fact that their souls were not at peace. Perfect faith is defined as something that produces perfect peace of mind. But perfect peace of mind is something that practically nobody possesses. Therefore practically nobody possesses perfect faith. Therefore practically everybody is predestined to eternal punishment. Quod erat demonstrandum."
"One wonders," said Susila, "why they didn't all go mad."
"Fortunately most of them believed only with the tops of their heads. Up here." Dr. MacPhail tapped his bald spot. "With the tops of their heads they were convinced it was the Truth with the largest possible T. But their glands and their guts knew better- knew that it was all sheer bosh. For most of them, Truth was true only on Sundays, and then only in a strictly Pickwickian sense. James MacPhail knew all this and was determined that his children should not be mere Sabbath-day believers. They were to believe every word of the sacred nonsense even on Mondays, even on half-holiday afternoons; and they were to believe with their whole being, not merely up there, in the attic. Perfect faith and the perfect peace that goes with it were to be forced into them. How? By giving them hell now and threatening them with hell hereafter. And if, in their devilish perversity, they refused to have perfect faith, and be at peace, give them more hell and threaten hotter fires. And meanwhile tell them that good works are as filthy rags in the sight of God; but punish them ferociously for every misdemeanor. Tell them that by nature they're totally depraved, then beat them for being what they inescapably are."
Will Farnaby turned back to the album.
"Do you have a picture of this delightful ancestor of yours?"
"We had an oil painting," said Dr. MacPhail. "But the dampness was too much for the canvas, and then the fish insects got into it. He was a splendid specimen. Like a High Renaissance picture of Jeremiah. You know-majestic, with an inspired eye and the kind of prophetic beard that covers such a multitude of physiognomic sins. The only relic of him that remains is a pencil drawing of his house."
He turned back another page and there it was.
"Solid granite," he went on, "with bars on all the windows. And, inside that cozy little family Bastille, what systematic inhumanity! Systematic inhumanity in the name, needless to say, of Christ and for righteousness' sake. Dr. Andrew left an unfinished autobiography, so we know all about it."
"Didn't the children get any help from their mother?"
Dr. MacPhail shook his head.
"Janet MacPhail was a Cameron and as good a Calvinist as James himself. Maybe an even better Calvinist than he was. Being a woman, she had further to go, she had more instinctive decencies to overcome. But she did overcome them-heroically. Far from restraining her husband, she urged him on, she backed him up. There were homilies before breakfast and at the midday dinner; there was the catechism on Sundays and learning the Epistles by heart; and every evening, when the day's delinquencies had been added up and assessed, methodical whipping, with a whalebone riding switch on the bare buttocks, for all six children, girls as well as boys, in order of seniority."
"It always makes me feel slightly sick," said Susila. "Pure sadism."
"No, not pure," said Dr. MacPhail. "Applied sadism. Sadism with an ulterior motive, sadism in the service of an ideal, as the expression of a religious conviction. And that's a subject," he added, turning to Will, "that somebody ought to make a historical study of-the relation between theology and corporal punishment in childhood. I have a theory that, wherever little boys and girls are systematically flagellated, the victims grow up to think of God as 'Wholly Other'-isn't that the fashionable argot in your part of the world? Wherever, on the contrary, children are brought up without being subjected to physical violence, God is immanent. A people's theology reflects the state of its children's bottoms. Look at the Hebrews-enthusiastic child-beaters. And so were all good Christians in the Ages of Faith. Hence Jehovah, hence Original Sin and the infinitely offended Father of Roman and Protestant orthodoxy. Whereas among Buddhists and Hindus education has always been nonviolent. No laceration of little buttocks-therefore tat tvam asi, thou art That, mind from Mind is not divided. And look at the Quakers. They were heretical enough to believe in the Inner Light, and what happened? They gave up beating their children and were the first Christian denomination to protest against the institution of slavery."
"But child-beating," Will objected, "has quite gone out of fashion nowadays. And yet it's precisely at this moment that it has become modish to hold forth about the Wholly Other."
Dr. MacPhail waved the objection away. "It's just a case of reaction following action. By the second half of the nineteenth century freethinking humanitarianism had become so strong that even good Christians were influenced by it and stopped beating their children. There were no weals on the younger generation's posterior; consequently, it ceased to think of God as the Wholly Other and proceeded to invent New Thought, Unity, Christian Science-all the semi-Oriental heresies in which God is the Wholly Identical. The movement was well under way in William James's day, and it's been gathering momentum ever since. But thesis always invites antithesis and in due course the heresies begat Neo-Orthodoxy. Down with the Wholly Identical and back to the Wholly Other! Back to Augustine, back to Martin Luther-back, in a word, to the two most relentlessly flagellated bottoms in the whole history of Christian thought. Read the Confessions, read the Table Talk. Augustine was beaten by his schoolmaster and laughed at by his parents when he complained, Luther was systematically flogged not only by his teachers and his father, but even by his loving mother. The world has been paying for the scars on his buttocks ever since. Prussianism and the Third Reich-without Luther and his flagellation theology these monstrosities could never have come into existence. Or take the flagellation theology of Augustine, as carried to its logical conclusions by Calvin and swallowed whole by pious folk like James MacPhail and Janet Cameron. Major premise: God is Wholly Other. Minor premise: man is totally depraved. Conclusion: Do to your children's bottoms what was done to yours, what your Heavenly Father has been doing to the collective bottom of humanity ever since the Falclass="underline" whip, whip, whip!"
There was a silence. Will Farnaby looked again at the drawing of the granite person in the rope walk, and thought of all the grotesque and ugly phantasies promoted to the rank of supernatural facts, all the obscene cruelties inspired by those phantasies, all the pain inflicted and the miseries endured because of them. And when it wasn't Augustine with his "benignant asperity," it was Robespierre, it was Stalin; when it wasn't Luther exhorting the princes to kill the peasants, it was a genial Mao reducing them to slavery.
"Don't you sometimes despair?" he asked.
Dr. MacPhail shook his head. "We don't despair," he said, "because we know that things don't necessarily have to be as bad as in fact they've always been."
"We know that they can be a great deal better," Susila added.
"Know it because they already are a great deal better, here and now, on this absurd little island."