Chapter 12 - Page 2

share the benefit of the law, and compel everybody to revere
their Shakespeare and hold him sacred. We can't have that:
there's enough of us already. If you go on widening and spreading
and inflating the privilege, it will presently come to be conceded
that each man's sacred things are the ONLY ones, and the rest of
the human race will have to be humbly reverent toward them or
suffer for it. That can surely happen, and when it happens, the
word Irreverence will be regarded as the most meaningless, and
foolish, and self-conceited, and insolent, and impudent and
dictatorial word in the language. And people will say, "Whose
business is it, what gods I worship and what things hold sacred?
Who has the right to dictate to my conscience, and where did he get
that right?"

We cannot afford to let that calamity come upon us. We must save
the word from this destruction. There is but one way to do it, and
that is, to stop the spread of the privilege, and strictly confine
it to its present limits: that is, to all the Christian sects, to
all the Hindu sects, and me. We do not need any more, the stock is
watered enough, just as it is.

It would be better if the privilege were limited to me alone. I
think so because I am the only sect that knows how to employ it
gently, kindly, charitably, dispassionately. The other sects lack
the quality of self-restraint. The Catholic Church says the most
irreverent things about matters which are sacred to the
Protestants, and the Protestant Church retorts in kind about the
confessional and other matters which Catholics hold sacred; then
both of these irreverencers turn upon Thomas Paine and charge HIM
with irreverence. This is all unfortunate, because it makes it
difficult for students equipped with only a low grade of mentality
to find out what Irreverence really IS.

It will surely be much better all around if the privilege of
regulating the irreverent and keeping them in order shall
eventually be withdrawn from all the sects but me. Then there will
be no more quarrelling, no more bandying of disrespectful epithets,
no more heart burnings.

There will then be nothing sacred involved in this Bacon-
Shakespeare controversy except what is sacred to me. That will
simplify the whole matter, and trouble will cease. There will be
irreverence no longer, because I will not allow it. The first time
those criminals charge me with irreverence for calling their
Stratford myth an Arthur-Orton-Mary-Baker-Thompson-Eddy-Louis-the-
Seventeenth-Veiled-Prophet-of-Khorassan will be the last. Taught
by the methods found effective in extinguishing earlier offenders
by the Inquisition, of holy memory, I shall know how to quiet