moral force into the dry veins of materialistic communities is our aim.
We seek to come into touch with the ultimate power in things, the
ultimate peace in things, which yet, in any literal sense, we know well
that we cannot know. We seek to become morally certain--that is, certain
for moral purposes--of what is beyond the reach of demonstration. But
our moral optimism must include the darkest facts that pessimism can
point to, include them and transcend them.
To give to actual life the formal poise and finish of a work of art is
the tendency of those who see in learning and beauty the highest end of
human endeavour. It is a tendency the value of which as an element of
wisdom cannot be denied; but it cannot, on the other hand, be said that
it is “the religious teaching which is proper to our time.” The
watchword “culture” we may indeed adopt. But there is needed the
qualifying prefix “ethical” to give it a practical direction and a
higher than the merely æsthetic connotation.
We should teach our children nothing which they shall ever need to
unlearn; we should strive to transmit to them the best possessions, the
truest thought, the noblest sentiments of the age in which we live.
The moral ferment that has worked from the beginning in human nature is
active still. To-day it is manifest in the great social problems that
agitate our age, demanding a higher justice, if they are to be solved,
threatening social disruption if they are met in the hard spirit of
selfish greed, while promising a fairer future than the world has yet
seen if dealt with in wisdom and forbearance.
The frontier of the higher life is everywhere contiguous to the common
life, and we can cross the border at any moment. The higher life is as
real as the grosser things in which we put our trust. But our eyes must
be anointed so that we may see it.
The office of the religious teacher is to be a seer, and to make others
see, and thus to win them into the upward way.
They have not grasped the whole truth who see in the sympathetic side of
human nature, in the tender and amiable impulses of the heart, the
well-spring of our moral judgments. These gentle qualities--pity,
tenderness, sympathy--are the sweet, younger sisters of Virtue; but
Virtue herself is greater than they.
We should seek to free the moral life from the embarrassments and
entanglements in which it has been involved by the quibbles of the
schools and the mutual antagonisms of the sects; to introduce into it an
element of downrightness and practical earnestness; above all, to
secure to the modern world, in its struggle with manifold evil, the boon
of moral unity, despite intellectual diversity.
In order to improve ethics as a science it is necessary to fix attention
on the moral facts, to collect them, to bring them into view, especially
the more recondite facts.
Many of us stumble, not because we lack the desire to do what is right,
but because we fail to discern what the right is.
I believe in the supreme excellence of righteousness; I believe that the
law of righteousness will triumph in the universe over all evil; I
believe that in the attempt to fulfil the law of righteousness, however
imperfect it must remain, are to be found the inspiration, the
consolation, and the sanctification of human existence.
We live in order to finish an, as yet, unfinished universe, unfinished
so far as the human, that is, the highest part of it, is concerned. We
live in order to develop the superior qualities of man which are, as
yet, for the most part latent.
The test of genuine moral culture is to be found in the attention we pay
to the oft-neglected details of conduct; in the extent to which we have
formed the habit of asking, What is it right to do in those little
things which yet are not little?
The thought of the brevity of life is the prod that spurs us on to the
achievement of our task; it is like the blast of a bugle from the walls
of a fortress that warns us to make haste lest the gates be closed
against us.
We are to go out as teachers among the people, discarding the
limitations imposed by the theologies of the past, and holding up the
moral ideal, pure and simple, as the human ideal, as the ideal for all
men, embracing all men, binding on all men--the ideal of a perfect
society, of a society in which no men or class of men shall be mere
hewers of wood and drawers of water for others; in which no man or
woman, or class of men or class of women shall be used as tools for the
lusts of others, or for the ambitions of others, or for the greed of
others; in which every human life, the life of every man and woman and
child, shall be esteemed a sacred utterance of the Infinite.
THE END
WATTS AND CO., PRINTERS, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.