The most thoughtful of those who have lost faith in the Living God and
in fellowship with Him hereafter, look on this life with a pessimistic
eye. Without trust in the Unseen and Eternal, life is worthless, an
idle dream. With its harassing cares, with its petty vexations, with
its turbulence and strife, its sorrows, its breaking up of old
associations, its quenching the light of our {55} eyes, 'O dreary were
this earth, if earth were all!' On the stage of the world, 'the play
is the Tragedy Man, the hero the conqueror worm!'
We cannot but extend the deepest sympathy, the warmest admiration to
those who, bereft of belief and of hope, yet cling tenaciously to moral
goodness.[5] 'What is to become of us,' asks the pensive Amiel, 'when
everything leaves us, health, joy, affections, the freshness of
sensation, memory, capacity for work, when the sun seems to us to have
lost its warmth, and life is stripped of all its charms? ... There is
but one answer, keep close to Duty. Be what you ought to be; the rest
is God's affair.... And supposing there were no good and holy God,
nothing but universal being, the law of the all, an ideal without
hypostasis or reality, duty would still be the key of the enigma, the
pole star of a wandering {56} humanity.'[6] Who does not see that it
is the lingering faith in God which gives strength to this conviction
and that, were the faith obliterated, the natural conclusion would be
for the cultured, 'Vanity of vanities: all is vanity'; and for the
multitudes, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' 'I remember
how at Cambridge,' says Mr. F. W. H. Myers of George Eliot, 'I walked
with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity on an evening of rainy
May: and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text
the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet
calls of men--the words _God, Immortality, Duty_--pronounced with
terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the _first_, how
unbelievable the _second_, and yet how peremptory and absolute the
_third_. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty
of impersonal and uncompromising Law. I {57} listened and night fell:
her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a sibyl's in the
gloom, and it was as though she withdrew from my grasp one by one the
two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with
inevitable fates. And when we stood at length and parted, amid that
columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the last twilight of
starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on
vacant seats and empty halls, on a sanctuary with no presence to hallow
it, and heaven left lonely of a God.'[7]
Withdraw belief in a God above and in a life beyond, the only reason
for obedience to Duty and Morality will be either our own pleasure, the
doing what is most agreeable to ourselves; or sympathy, the bearing of
others' burdens, in the hope that when we have passed away there may be
some on earth who will reap the harvest which we have {58} sown; or
public opinion, the views which are prevalent in a particular time in a
particular region; and these reasons are hardly likely to produce a
morality which will be other than that of self-indulgence, of despair,
or of conventionality.[8]
'We can get on very well without a religion,' said Sir James Fitzjames
Stephen, 'for though the view of life which Science is opening to us
gives us nothing to worship, it gives us an infinite number of things
to enjoy. The world seems to me a very good world, if it would only
last. It is full of pleasant people and curious things, and I think
that most men find no difficulty in turning their minds away from its
transient character.' If it would only last! But it does not last:
those dearer to us than ourselves are snatched away. Could anything be
more selfish, more despicably base than to go about saying, All that is
of no {59} consequence, so long as I meet with pleasant people and have
an infinite number of things to enjoy? It is true that an infinite
number of my fellow-creatures may not be enjoying an infinite number of
things, may have trouble in recalling almost anything worthy of the
name of enjoyment, but why should I be depressed by that? I find no
difficulty in turning away my mind from the misfortunes of others. 'We
can get on very well without religion.' No doubt without it some of us
can have agreeable society and a variety of pleasures more or less
refined; but this does not prove that religion is no loss. On the same
principle, we can get on very comfortably without honesty, without
sobriety, without purity, without generosity. We can get on very
comfortably indeed without anything except without a heart which is
intent on self-gratification, and which excludes all thought of the
wants and woes of the world. 'Let us eat and drink, for {60} to-morrow
we die,' is the irresistible, though rather inconsistent, conclusion of
that sublime austerity which so indignantly repudiates the merest hint
of reward or hope within the veil, and which so sensitively shrinks
from the mercenariness of the Religion of the Cross.
'The wages of sin is death:
if the wages of Virtue be dust,
Would she have heart to endure for the life
of the worm and the fly!'[9]
What are the facts? What is the growing tendency where men think
themselves strong enough to do without religious beliefs, when they
have been proclaiming that the suppression of Religion will be the
exaltation of a purer Morality? There are plenty of indications that
the laws of Morality are found to be as irksome as the dictates of
Religion. The first step is to cry out for a higher Morality, to
censure the Morality of {61} the New Testament as imperfect and
inadequate, as selfish and visionary. The next step is to question the
restraints of Morality, to clamour for liberty in regard to matters on
which the general voice of mankind has from the beginning given no
uncertain verdict. The last step is to declare that Morality is
variable and conventional, a mere arbitrary arrangement, which can be
dispensed with by the emancipated soul. The literature which assumes
that Religion is obsolete does not, as a rule, suffer itself to be much
hampered by the fetters of Morality. The non-Religion of the Future is
what, we are confidently told, increasing knowledge of the laws of
Sociology will of necessity bring about. Should that day ever dawn, or
rather let us say, should that night ever envelop us, it will mean the
diffusion of non-Morality such as the world has never known.[10]
[1] Appendix.
[2] Appendix VI.
[3] _Nineteenth Century_, June 1884.
[4] Appendix VII.
[5] Appendix VIII.
[6] _Journal Intime_, ii.
[7] _Modern Essays_.
[8] Appendix IX.
[9] Tennyson, _Wages_.
[10] Appendix X.
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