WHAT is most to be envied in really religious people of the earlier type
is their intellectual and moral peace. They had obtained certain
convictions, a certain conception of the Universe, by which they could
live. Their horizon may have been encompassed with darkness; experience
sometimes contradicted their faith, but they trusted—nay, they knew—that
the opposition was not real and that the truths were not to be shaken.
Their conduct was marked by a corresponding unity. They determined once
for all that there were rules which had to be obeyed, and when any
particular case arose it was not judged according to the caprice of the
moment, but by statute.
We, on the other hand, can only doubt. So far as those subjects are
concerned on which we are most anxious to be informed, we are sure of
nothing. What we have to do is to accept the facts and wait. We must
take care not to deny beauty and love because we are forced also to admit
ugliness and hatred. Let us yield ourselves up utterly to the
magnificence and tenderness of the sunrise, though the East End of London
lies over the horizon. That very same Power, and it is no other, which
blasts a country with the cholera or drives the best of us to madness has
put the smile in a child’s face and is the parent of Love. It is
curious, too, that the curse seems in no way to qualify the blessing.
The sweetness and majesty of Nature are so exquisite, so pure, that when
they are before us we cannot imagine they could be better if they
proceeded from an omnipotently merciful Being and no pestilence had ever
been known. We must not worry ourselves with attempts at reconciliation.
We must be satisfied with a hint here and there, with a ray of sunshine
at our feet, and we must do what we can to make the best of what we
possess. Hints and sunshine will not be wanting, and science, which was
once considered to be the enemy of religion, is dissolving by its later
discoveries the old gross materialism, the source of so much despair.
The conduct of life is more important than speculation, but the lives of
most of us are regulated by no principle whatever. We read our Bible,
Thomas à Kempis, and Bunyan, and we are persuaded that our salvation lies
in the perpetual struggle of the higher against the lower self, the
spirit against the flesh, and that the success of the flesh is damnation.
We take down Horace and Rabelais and we admit that the body also has its
claims. We have no power to dominate both sets of books, and
consequently they supersede one another alternately. Perhaps life is too
large for any code we can as yet frame, and the dissolution of all codes,
the fluid, unstable condition of which we complain, may be a necessary
antecedent of new and more lasting combinations. One thing is certain,
that there is not a single code now in existence which is not false; that
the graduation of the vices and virtues is wrong, and that in the future
it will be altered. We must not hand ourselves over to a despotism with
no Divine right, even if there be a risk of anarchy. In the
determination of our own action, and in our criticism of other people, we
must use the whole of ourselves and not mere fragments. If we do this we
need not fear. We may suppose we are in danger because the stone tables
of the Decalogue have gone to dust, but it is more dangerous to attempt
to control men by fictions. Better no chart whatever than one which
shows no actually existing perils, but warns us against Scylla,
Charybdis, and the Cyclops. If we are perfectly honest with ourselves we
shall not find it difficult to settle whether we ought to do this or that
particular thing, and we may be content. The new legislation will come
naturally at the appointed time, and it is not impossible to live while
it is on the way.