Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 August 1885 — A Liberal Crank. [ARTICLE]

A Liberal Crank.

Another species of crank is the man who delights to call himself a liberal. There are liberals and liberals, and some of them are the most wholesouled, unpresutoing, generous noblemen in existence, but this kind very seldom introduce themselves by saying, “I am a liberal.” The liberal crank usually volunteers the information. You’d never iihagino there was anything liberal about him unless he told you. He is intrusive in his belief. No matter what company he may be in he airs his peculiar doctrines. One man may mention as an historical fact that the Jews lived in Judea, or Pontius Pilate was a Roman office-holder. Instantly Mr. Liberal breaks in and informs you that that is all bibld fiction, and that he is astonished that any man in these days of advanced thought—oh, how he loves that phrase—can read such a tissue of lies. Another may innocently intimate that he thinks Mr. Beecher and Mr. Spurgeon are very eloquent speakers, when to his surprise Mr. Liberal bristles up and says that he is happy to say that he has not been inside a church for so many years, and could not be hired to go, that all preachers are arrant humbugs and only after the money they can get out of it, and then he launches off into a fulsome eulogy of Mr. R. G. Ingersoll whpm he pays his dollar unwhimperingly to listen to, and never inquiries into what charity the modern apostle of liberalism turns his hardearned shekels. The liberal crank is the most illiberal of liberals. He is a canting iSater of cant, an idol-worshiping iconoclast. He dilates for hours on the bigotry and intolerance of sects, and exhibits the most intense intolerance for all who do not accept his peculiar broad-gauge theories. He claims the absolute right to condemn, malign and insult all denominations, but becomes righteously indignant if his own crowd are in the slightest manner impugned. He professes with loud flourish of trumpet to march Under the banner of “Universal Mental Liberty,” but if any poor church member claims the same privilege, and his idea of liberty does not happen to coincide with Mr. Liberal’s, he is stigmatized as a hypocrite, a priest-ridden fool, a time-serving, pandering deceiver. He professes to defy reason, but thinks that all men must reason through his quill or be wrong. He abhors superstitions of the day. He stigmatizes supernaturalism as folly, and is a faithful devotee at the shrine of modern spiritualism. His great hold however is science. Oh, what a luscious morsel is science as he glibly rolls it over his tongue. He rolls up the honored names of Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer and others with great gusto, and triumphs ntly t ells you they have disposed of the whole question, but on inquiry it will be found that his knowledge of anything pertaining To these men, except their names, is extremely meagre. He has glanced over some elementary science primer, and thinks he knows it all, and what he don’t know ain’t worth knowing. He boastfully tells you he is an agnostic, and then proceeds to show you that he knows everything. He likes to inform you that he believes so and so with Hseckel, but ask him to point out when Haeckel says it, and he is at a loss. He always saddles his puerile drivelings on some great name. His idea of liberty is not the freedom to worship God accordingto the conscience, but a prohibition of the worship of any kind whatever. The crusades this clique getup are not to disseminate truth, but in their own language to “demolish the whole religious fabric and crush out every seed of theology, priestcraft, and superstition.” Another watchword is humanity. Oh, how he deifies humanity. He quotes “the proper study of mankind is man.” He tells you that man is the noblest of all conceivable or possible evolutions, and then proceeds to prove that the human species are all a pack of idiotic fools and imbeciles or they would never be so credulous as the only humanity that is absolutely perfect is exemplified in his own person. He is a disgrace to the cause he represents, unstable as water, veered about by every wind of prejudice and passion, and the greatest obstacle in the path of true liberalism.— “Doak,” in Arkansaw Traveler.