week is the very reverse of inspiring. Of course, we are aware that
Dean Farrar has as effectually explained away the Orientalisms of the
Christian heaven as the Paganisms of the orthodox hell; we are ready to
believe that the Apocalypse--which is held now not to be a Christian
book at all, but a Jewish composition, edited and amended by a
Christian hand--sets forth only figures and types of the great supernal
blessedness. This we know, but our difficulty is not with the form but
with the content, that is, with that which these hyperboles symbolise.
It is fairly inconceivable to us that a matter which, according to the
Churches, merely concerns the body, soon to be resolved into its
component gases, should exercise so miraculous a transformation on the
soul, or the real man. _He_ did not die; his body did, and yet they
would have us believe that that mere physical occurrence, that
catastrophe of flesh and blood, means the subsequent and eternal
stagnation of all psychical life; that men either go forthwith into
scenes with which ninety out of a hundred would be wholly unfamiliar,
or are thrust headlong into a subterraneous locality called Sheol, or
the grave in Hebrew, the English equivalent of which is hell, the only
difference being that, whereas the good can grow no better, the wicked
can and do grow worse.
Doubtless, I shall be reminded that these teachings do not occur
explicitly in the Thirty-nine Articles, any Church Confession, or a
Papal Decree. That may very well be so, as regards them all, but there
can be no doubt that the main assertion is accepted as dogmatically
true by all Christian Churches--namely, that a wonderful and searching
change does occur at the moment of death, whereby "the time of
probation," as it is called, comes to an end, and all possibility of
further "merit before God," or, as we should say, of ethical
advancement, relentlessly cut off. To quote a letter of Cardinal
Newman's, written in 1872 to the Rev. W. Probyn-Nevins, and published
subsequently by him--in the _Nineteenth Century_ of May, 1893--"The
great truth is that death ends our probation, and _settles our state
for ever_, that there is no passing over the great gulf". Amidst much
that is uncertain, for instance, as to whether real devils are in hell,
a real fire, and whether it be bright or dark, whether the appalling
torments are ever mitigated, say on certain feasts of the Christian
Church, such as Christmas Day and Easter, or whether eventually the
pains ultimately die completely away and thus usher in that "happiness
in hell" in which Mr. Mivart is, or was, so deeply interested five
years ago--amidst all these highly debatable points, Newman pronounces
one thing certain, that "death ends our probation," that "there is no
passing over the great gulf".
Now, whence did he learn this strange teaching? How is he dogmatically
certain of that one thing, while all the rest is in a haze? From stray
texts, such as, "Whether the tree falleth to the north or the south, in
whatsoever place it shall fall, there shall it lie"; or, from the
parable of wise and foolish virgins, some of whom happened to be
asleep, and awoke at the critical hour to find that during the long
night-watch for the bridegroom their store of oil had become exhausted?
Surely tropes and parables are a highly insecure foundation whereon to
build such a momentous teaching. Certainly, it is gravely questionable
whether any direct statement in the Hebrew or Christian writings can be
adduced to support the common notion that bodily dissolution is a
spiritual reagent, and _ipso facto_ seals the destiny of a spiritual
essence. Vast numbers of even Anglicans repudiate the notion in the
name of theology and religion. We repudiate it in the name of reason,
which was put into us for no other purpose, we know well, than to judge
not only the statements Churches put forth, but the sacred documents on
which they build them. We repudiate the notion in the name of that
reason which shows us that the Infinite Mind, whose light and life we
share, was millions of years preparing this earth for man's habitation,
aeons of time so fashioning the course of things that a body might be
prepared in which that mind which we call soul might energise; aeons of
time so ordering the course of events that man should emerge one day
from the savagedom and animalism of the past to enter upon the path of
a progress which we believe to be endless. I say the reason which
demonstrates this to us with a certitude which not the most intolerant
bigotry dares to question to-day, tells us also that it is wholly
preposterous that all that is left to man wherein to work out his own
individual moral progress is the brief span of threescore years and
ten, that after these days "few and evil," the chapter is closed, the
book sealed for ever, and the status of man inexorably and unalterably
determined.
I frankly avow I would as soon believe the Buddhist _Jataka_ as such a
wholly irrational account of the ways of God with man. Just think of
the palaeolithic man, who had no glimmering of moral discernment; think
of the cave-men whose skulls we possess in scores, that bear eloquent
testimony to their deplorable degradation--think of such creatures
dying, and their mental and moral status stereotyped for ever. "Death
ends our probation!" A precious revelation this! Where and what are
these men now? When Newman visited Greece in the thirties what
impressed him, or rather oppressed him, as he stood above the glorious
bay of Salamis, over which once rode the hundreds and thousands of
galleys and triremes which transported the unnumbered hosts of Xerxes
to Greece, was the awful thought that all those million men, including
the proud monarch who reviewed them from the spot on which he then
stood, were "_still alive_". Alive! And where were they, and what
were they doing? I cannot conceive anything more appallingly
depressing, nay, maddening, than to believe that all that heavenly
orchestration is going on while Xerxes is possibly in an Apocalyptic
hell, and his hosts either bearing him company or wandering aimlessly
about in the same stupid, stolid, unmoral, unspiritual condition in
which they were the moment they were engulfed in those blue waters.
Why, Nero fiddling while Rome was burning is a pleasant memory compared
with it!
But we have not reached the end yet. "Deep calleth unto deep," and the
extreme deductions from the perverse notion that the act of dying is
the signal for the infliction of an everlasting mental and moral
sterility, finally convince us of the groundlessness of this feckless
theology. According to these deductions of which I speak, one grievous
offence against Divine or ecclesiastical law--such, for instance, as
grave scandal or the omission to attend at mass--is sufficient to
condemn a man to eternal reprobation. If it be supposed that death
cuts the offender off before he has the opportunity to make confession
of his fault or otherwise express his sorrow, we are soberly asked to
believe that the horrors of Tartarus are his eternal doom. Surely the
mediaeval authorities who formulated this precious teaching must have
been bereft of the most elementary notions of ethical law. One act, or
a dozen such acts, do not stamp the delinquent as habitually bad, still
less as one irredeemably wicked. Habits are only generated by a
constant repetition of corresponding acts, just as good habits are
formed with difficulty, and only after persevering and resolute
attention on the part of our wills. So, also, an evil disposition is
only the outcome of a deliberate surrender of our moral nature to
perverse inclinations.
Now, the hell dogma implies that the so-called "lost" are so
irredeemably depraved as to be incapable of as much as a good thought;
they are described in the graphic language of Aquinas and Suarez as
"obstinated in evil," "confirmed immutably in malice"; in fact,
absolutely diabolised. And all this for missing attendance at mass on
one of the Church's festivals! "_Paris vaut bien une messe_," said
Henri Quatre. It would be well worth attending a mass to escape such a
destiny! "There must be something rotten in the state of Denmark,"
where such horrors go stalking about unreproved. As though infinite
justice could be conceivably associated with such a transaction as the
branding of a man as an eternal criminal, blasting every moral
sentiment he ever possessed, arbitrarily reducing him to a condition
infinitely beneath the bestial--and all because he had broken a Church
law in neglecting to attend Divine service. Many of us incline to
believe that our own punishments, inflicted in the name of law, often
tend rather to degrade the prisoner than to improve him. At any rate,
not a man in the land but believes that no punishment should be
administered except with a view of amending what is amiss in the
culprit's character. But contrast this moral attitude of ours with the
method of procedure deliberately ascribed to Deity, and let us ask
ourselves whether the God of some men is not worse than their devil?
No such scruples, apparently, affect that supreme tribunal, but if
bodily death by accident overtake the erring man, then, forthwith, and
as if by magic, the spiritual in him is rendered fiendish, and
henceforth and for ever he is fit for nothing but that genial society
and those edifying occupations which are described in the cheerful
manuals known as, _A Glimpse of Hell_, and _Hell open to Christians_.
Those who witnessed the recent revival of _Hamlet_--a revival which it
would appear is destined to be historic--cannot have failed to notice
how the great master of song permits himself to express the perverse
conception that death is synonymous with everlasting moral stagnation.
Hamlet steals into his murderous uncle's apartment, sword in hand, but
discovering the criminal upon his knees, forbears to strike then, lest
somehow his devotions should save him from his doom. No, he will wait
until the miserable creature is off his guard, so that death may
overtake him at a moment when no prayer or cry for mercy is possible.
As though a momentary act could undo the mischief of years! As though
a man is in himself any different after years, of crime because he
utters a sudden cry for mercy! And, as though by killing him at an
opportune moment, Hamlet could damn his soul for ever! And it will be
noted, moreover, that the ghost emphasises the treachery of which he
has been the victim, in that he was sent into eternity "unhouseled,
unaneled," as though momentary acts can make up for years wasted and
misspent. As well might one scatter one's fortune in luxury and
riotous living, and resolve to win it all back in a moment, as misuse
these glorious powers of mind and will we bear within us, turn them to
evil, steep them in iniquity, and then think to suddenly turn and by a
single act bend them successfully to the arduous service of the good.
This is stern teaching, but it is the truth; and a mercy would it be, a
mercy would it have been for us all in the days of our youth, if
instead of the too frequent insistence on the doctrine of the
forgiveness of sin, the doctrine of compensation and retribution, as
taught by Ralph Waldo Emerson, had been instilled into our hearts. "Ye
shall not go forth until ye have paid the last farthing," is the
teaching. Dare to break those solemn laws, to pervert these mysterious
powers we possess, Amen, Amen, we cannot escape retribution; we cannot
go forth until we pay the last farthing.
And this last thought prepares for the statement of our view of the
attitude a rational religion takes up in the solemn presence of death.
"Stoicism shall not be more exigent," said Emerson of the new Church.
We take no lax view of life and its responsibilities, but we refuse to
magnify death into the one thing worth living for or thinking about.
_Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat_. We do not set
about digging our graves, we do not carry our coffins about with us,
still less do we sleep in them--a gruesome practice which has attracted
some fanatical folk. To us, death is a fact, not an effect, an
incident as natural as birth, in no wise affecting the real, the
spiritual, man. We therefore utterly disavow all sympathy with the
groundless assumption that a magical change comes over the psychical
powers of a man at that supreme moment, whereby he can do no more good,
but may harden into a more hopeless reprobate. The notion that a
judgment of the soul takes place, as in the hall of Osiris, of Egyptian
mythology, at the instant of dissolution, whereby the destiny of the
individual is sealed for ever, we repudiate in terms. Man is judged,
not then, but at every moment of his life. "The moral laws vindicate
themselves" without the intervention of any external tribunal. And,
therefore, the eternal progress of the man in us is maintained
uninterruptedly across the gloomy chasm of death, under other
circumstances, no doubt, but still it is the same ceaseless approach
towards the Infinite Ideal, the same untiring journey along "the
everlasting way". All are in that "way," we may be sure, even those
whom we foolishly deem hopelessly reprobate. Something can be made of
those failures of men, for
After last returns the first, though a wide compass
round be fetched;
What began best can't end worst, nor what God once
blest prove accurst.
But such men, the Neros, Caligulas, the Wainwrights and Palmers of all
ages and nations, are but a fractional, an infinitesimal, element in
the great human family. _Sanabiles fecit nationes super terram_. "He
hath made earth's peoples to be healed;" they shall redeem _themselves_
one day. The moment of awakening comes sooner or later to all; there
is an unextinguished capacity for good under the sores and scars of the
most dissolute life, and we may believe that awakening comes when the
spirit enters new-born, as it were, into a world where the illusions of
the flesh, the deceptions of the sense, obtain no more.
There are no final, irredeemable failures. The Divine in man must
emerge one day; its glory pierce through the gloom of his sin and
shame, and transfigure him anew after the beautiful and pathetic image
of the holy Christ in the legend,[1] whose closing days on earth, they
say, were illumined by one supreme wonder--his face calm and blissful,
glowing radiant like the glory of a setting sun, his very raiment
turned white like the driven snow. A beauteous imagery! But there was
no external transfiguration. It was but a type of the radiant purity
within; a witness to the "beauty of holiness". It was an emblem of
what all may be in some far-off day, when the lowliest amongst us
learns to follow the Christs, the blessed company of all elect souls,
in the way which begins and ends in the eternal righteousness.
[1] In the same way the Buddha was "transfigured". See Doane's _Bible
Myths_.
X.
THE ETHICAL ASPECT OF WAR.
An idealism such as that which substantially identifies religion with
morality, is suitably occupied, as occasion offers, in the discussion
of those questions of public interest which have an immediate bearing
on the well-being of communities. In this respect it departs markedly
from the attitude taken up by those Churches, which afford little or no
guidance on such matters, probably because it is felt by priests and
prelates that their functions are rather of an ultra-mundane character,
and that their most important duty is to prepare humanity for the
enjoyment of another life after this unsatisfactory stage has passed.
Hence the sharp line of distinction they draw between the Church and
the world, the one the kingdom of saints, the other "lying" hopelessly
"in wickedness". Hence, again, their distinction of "holy days" and
secular days, Sunday being devoted to religious exercises, while the
remaining six days are presumably to be occupied in wholly secular
enterprise. The distinction affects our very attire. Religious rites
being of a totally different character from the duties we accomplish
during the week, there is nothing for it but to don "our blacks," to
quote the language of a current popular play, and enact subsequently
the ceremonial described as the church parade. It is the same feeling
which causes the average Englishman to lapse into a sort of funereal
solemnity at the very mention of the word religion, or of anything
allied to it. The divorce of religion from ordinary life could not be
more plainly indicated than by such phenomena as we have noticed.
It is, of course, one of the main objects of our movement to show the
falsity of this distinction between the Church and the world, between
religion and morality. We submit that it is not the institution of the
founder of Christianity, but of his later followers. The Church of
Christ meant the assemblage of men _as men, as citizens_. The entry
thereto was not by the magical washing away of an imaginary birth-sin,
but through the natural and beautiful sacrament of human birth. The
world is the Church, and the Church is the world, and the "living
stones" out of which "the kingdom of heaven" is built here on earth are
precisely the stones out of which the civil commonwealth arises. There
is nothing secular, nothing profane, but from first to last the life of
every man, from the miraculous moment of his conception to the closing
of his eyes in bodily death, and beyond death, through the perfecting
of him by an ever-increasing approximation to the standard of all moral
perfection, everything is religious, sacred, divine. The Church is
nothing but an ethical society, co-extensive with the race, and it is
for the realisation of this ideal that the ethical movement is working,
to show men that religion is morality, is life.
This preamble, then, may serve as a justification for introducing here
such a subject as war. The Christian Churches, with one single
exception, that of the Quakers, vouchsafe no guidance whatsoever on the
moral aspects of this question. On the contrary, they rather suggest
that it is a highly moral proceeding, for their ministers pray to their
Deity for the success of their country's arms, and sing their _Te
Deums_ over the mangled corpses of the vanquished. An archbishop in
Spain offered to guarantee the harmlessness of every American bullet,
and unctuous prayers were reported in the newspapers of last spring as
emanating from Transatlantic pulpits. Indeed, it would be difficult,
if not impossible, to imagine what the supreme court of their heaven
must be, the perplexities of patron saints and angels, and ultimately
of their Deity himself, in face of the immoral mingling of bloodshed
and religion which went on during the recent Spanish-American war. But
the Churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, see none of the impiety
which is so revolting to moral men and women, who to their lasting
advantage have emancipated themselves from ecclesiastical guidance. On
the contrary, the public in America which looks for moral inspiration
to clergymen, is fed upon this sort of doggerel:--
Strike for the Anglo-Saxon!
Strike for the newer day!
O strike for heart and strike for brain,
And sweep the _beast_ away.
And let no feeble pity
Your sacred arms restrain;
This is God's mighty moment
To make an end of Spain!
It is our purpose to endeavour to make an end of the immoral
inspiration behind this profane piffle by speaking out our mind on the
subject of war as viewed from the standpoint of ethics.
By war we understand the appeal to _might_ to decide a question of
_right_ between two or more civilised peoples, and of war thus defined
I say that it is the great surviving infamy[1] of our unmoral past, the
persistence in us of animal instincts, of the ape and tiger which
should long since have died out. That man, in the childhood of the
world, should have decided questions of justice by an appeal to brute
force is only what we should expect. The laws of life, which are laws
of development, necessarily presuppose the imperfect before the
perfect, the animal as a preparation for the human. As Immanuel Kant
puts it in a sentence which flashes the light over the whole panorama
of existence, "the _cosmic_ evolution of Nature is continued in the
_historic_ development of humanity and completed in the _moral_
perfection of the individual". This is the synthesis of the greatest
of the masters of modern philosophy. The non-moral cosmos makes way
for a process of moral human development, which is consummated in the
perfection of each individual man. Here is the _Alpha_ and _Omega_ of
all existence.
Now, warfare, or the invocation of might to settle right, was as
natural an accompaniment of earlier conditions as theft or cannibalism.
But is it not obvious that with the disappearance of other unmoral
ideals of the past, we have a right to expect, and to demand, that the
last and crowning infamy of wholesale and systematised manslaughter,
called war, should cease also? The humanity which has got rid of
slavery in all civilised countries, which has now through England's
instrumentality succeeded in destroying its last strongholds on the
Upper Nile, will also ultimately get rid of war. The manhood of the
race, which in this country has long since put down the immorality of
duelling as a means of settling private differences, will indubitably
assert itself elsewhere to the final overthrow of warfare as a means of
deciding public disputes. The great reform is in the air. It is
everywhere except in the pulpits of Christendom and the "yellow
press"--the jingo journalism of the world. We all experienced the
growing sense of the unsuitability of war to our modern ideals during
the earlier months of this year while matters were reaching the acute
stage between Spain and the United States. The best Press in this
country reflected the common sentiment, that the whole proceeding is
savage, barbarous, inhuman, and therefore utterly unworthy of rational
men. I believe it is this growing horror of legalised carnage which
prevented the late President of the United States' ill-judged message
leading to any rupture between our two countries. It was felt that
Englishmen and Americans deliberately setting about the destruction of
each other's property and taking one another's lives would amount to a
scandal positively unthinkable--a fratricidal horror to be prevented at
all and any costs. I am not sure that the same opinion was so
universal on the other side, though undoubtedly it existed amongst the
best men of the country.