This crablike progress of social evolution, in
which the individual advances by seeming to go
backward, continues to illude us in spite of all
the lessons of history. To the pious man the
newly made freethinker, suddenly renouncing
supernatural revelation, and den3ang all obliga-
tion to believe the Bible and obey the command-
ments as such, appears to be claiming the right
to rob and murder at large. But the freethinker
soon finds reasons for not doing what he does not
want to do; and these reasons seem to him to
be far more binding on our conscience than the
precepts of a book of which the infallibility can-
not be rationally proved. The pious man is at



lo The Quintessence of Ibsenism

last forced to admit — as he was in the case of
the late Charles Bradlaugh, for instance — that
the disciples of Voltaire and Tom Paine do not
pick pockets or cut throats oftener than your even
Christian : he actually is driven to doubt whether
Voltaire himself (poor Voltaire, who built a
church, and was the greatest philanthropist of his
dmel) really screamed and saw the devil on his
deathbed.
