Voluntary Self-Degradation.
A recent number of the New York Herald announces, as an item of news, that "the annual session of the Grand Lodge of the Benevolent Order of Elks was attended by two hundred and fifty delegates." Soon, we suppose, in addition to "benevolent" secret associations of "elks" and "beavers" and "tigers," we shall have equally "benevolent" societies of wild-cats, monkeys, muskrats, etc. From one point of view, it is supremely ridiculous for rational men to be taking the name of brute beasts, and making their habits, real or supposed, models for imitation. But from another point of view it is inexpressibly sad. Think of men made "in the likeness and image of God," endowed with all the high gifts of reason and will, formed, according to the divine intention, to exercise "dominion" over the entire animal creation, and "the whole earth," voluntarily placing themselves on an equality with beasts devoid of reason, placing themselves, indeed, below them, and making them leaders and patterns for them to follow. What is this custom, so widely prevalent in our times, of persons forming societies that call themselves elks and beavers, etc., etc., but a denial that divine revelation, and their own reason, and the history of the human race, furnish them with any proper exemplars, or models, for them to follow? Therefore they resort to the brute creation, and from them select patterns for imitation. "Benevolent! Order of Elks." So the members of this "Order" can find among all the men and women whose names are recorded in history not a single one sufficiently suggestive of "benevolence" to satisfy their high aspirations! They must go down to the brute creation, and select a wild elk as their idea of benevolence. Can unreasoning stupidity, and not only stupidity, but positive impiety, go further? From choosing animals as ideals of human virtues there is but one step, and that, too, a very short one, to setting up their images and worshiping them. Nor should we be at all surprised if this step has been taken in the "lodges" of some of these brute-admiring secret associations. They have their rituals and their badges and symbols, all significant in one way or another of the respect and honor in which they hold the particular brute which they have exalted to the position of a patron saint or tutelary deity. From that to positive, open idolatry and beast worship, is, as we have said, a very short step. In principle there is no difference between it and the "totem" worship of our American Indians or the fetich-worship of the negroes of Africa. The apostle Paul, in the first chapter of his epistle to the Romans, clearly explains this tendency of men to turn away from the truths of divine revelation and from the models for imitation which He proposes to them in the lives of those who faithfully serve him. St. Paul declares that God has clearly made manifest to men "that which is known of God, his eternal power and divinity." But because "they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense." "They changed the truth of God into a lie." "They became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened." "For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things." Our age vaunts itself upon its superior "enlightenment," but it is becoming a serious question whether much of this so-called enlightenment is not real moral darkness which swiftly smooths the way for intellectual darkness. There has been of late years a revival or resuscitation of paganism; not under its ancient forms, it is true, yet of its inherent characteristics, its immorality, its skepticism and forgetfulness of God, its moral corruption, nevertheless. Pagan ideas deeply and widely permeate the popular literature of the day, its newspapers, its novels, its weekly and monthly periodicals, its treatises on physical science, on medicine, on political economy, and on law. Is not this tendency of persons to associate together under the names of animals one sign, among many others, of the spread of paganism under modern forms?