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A cultivated Conservative friend of mine once exhibited great distress because in a gay moment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist. I need scarcely say that the remark lacked something of biographical precision; it was meant to.
Burke was certainly not an atheist in his conscious cosmic theory, though he had not a special and flaming faith in God, like Robespierre. Nevertheless, the remark had reference to a truth which it is here relevant to repeat.
I mean that in the quarrel over the French Revolution, Burke did stand for the atheistic attitude and mode of argument, as Robespierre stood for the theistic.
The Revolution appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all local custom or convenience. If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man.
Here Burke made his brilliant diversion; he didn't attack the Robespierre doctrine with the mediaeval doctrine of jus divinum—which, like the Robespierre doctrine, was theistic, he attacked it with the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short, the argument of evolution.
He suggested that humanity was everywhere molded by or fitted to its environment and institutions; in fact, that each people practically got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the tyrant it ought to have.
"I know nothing of the rights of men," he said, "but I know something of the rights of Englishmen." There you have the essential atheist.
His argument is that we have got some protection by natural accident and growth; and why should we profess to think beyond it, for all the world as if we were the images of God!
We are born under a House of Lords, as birds under a house of leaves; we live under a monarchy as [negroes] live under a tropic sun; it is not their fault if they are slaves, and it is not ours if we are snobs.
Thus, long before Darwin struck his great blow at democracy, the essential of the Darwinian argument had been already urged against the Fr. Revolution. Man, said Burke in effect, must adapt himself to everything, like an animal; he must not try to alter everything, like an angel.
The last weak cry of the pious, pretty, half-artificial optimism & deism of the eighteenth century came in the voice of Sterne, saying, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb." And Burke, the iron evolutionist, essentially answered, "No; God tempers the shorn lamb to the wind."
It is the lamb that has to adapt himself. That is, he either dies or becomes a particular kind of lamb who likes standing in a draught.
