Who Can Refute a Sneer?

Clever people have realised that it is easier to get people on your side by mockery than by persuasion.

1785

King George III 1760-1820

Detail from ‘Christ Carrying the Cross’ attributed to Hieronymus Bosch (?1450-1516).

By Hieronymus Bosch (?1450-1516), Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.

A detail from ‘Christ Carrying the Cross’, attributed to Hieronymus Bosch (?1450-1516), or a follower of his. The evangelists tell us that Jesus was subjected to sneering mockery by the crowds even as he carried his own cross to the place of execution. Paley had at one time expected better from the eighteenth century ‘Enlightenment’, but he had come to realise that Europe’s clever men had studied human nature closely enough to realise that people will stubbornly resist all manner of criticism or argument when taken seriously, but fall meekly into line as soon as they are ridiculed.

Introduction

William Paley complained that critics of Christianity no longer troubled themselves with civilised debate. Instead, they scattered sniggering remarks throughout popular and academic literature, in the hope of laughing the public into atheism; for their knowledge of human nature had taught them that scorn is far more persuasive than argument.

by William Paley 1743-1805

INFIDELITY is served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination: in a fable, a tale, a novel, a poem; in interspersed and broken hints, remote and oblique surmises; in books of travels, of philosophy, of natural history; in a word, in any form rather than the right one, that of a professed and regular disquisition.

And because the coarse buffoonery and broad laugh of the old and rude adversaries of the Christian faith would offend the taste, perhaps rather than the virtue, of this cultivated age, a graver irony, a more skillful and delicate banter is substituted in their place.

An eloquent historian,* besides his more direct, and therefore fairer, attacks upon the credibility of Evangelic story, has contrived to weave into his narration one continued sneer upon the cause of Christianity, and upon the writings and characters of its ancient patrons. The knowledge which this author possesses of the frame and conduct of the human mind must have led him to observe, that such attacks do their execution without inquiry. Who can refute a sneer?

by William Paley 1743-1805

* Paley does not name this historian. A few years earlier, in 1776, Edward Gibbon had published the first volume of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which he attributed that event largely to the enervating effect of Christianity.

Précis

It was not reasoned criticism of Christianity that distressed the Revd William Paley, who took it in good part. It was the trend among historians, scientists and even writers of popular literature to denigrate Christianity with little digs, nudging and winking the undecided into sharing their prejudices, and leaving serious-minded opponents nothing they could reply to.

Questions for Critics

1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?

2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?

3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?

Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.

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