Island - Aldous Huxley [58]
“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