monogamy, it may be perfectly true that we have not yet reached that
level of morality which makes that condition universally practicable.
That wisest of teachers, Jesus of Nazara, expressly recognised this
distinction when he told the Jews of his own day that their lack of
ethical enthusiasm, "their hardness of heart," as he accurately
expressed it, the emptiness of their souls of everything save narrow
nationalism and religious formalism--an emptiness by no means peculiar
to them--was the sole reason which justified a departure from Nature's
great ideal. "In the beginning it was not so," he declared, but "Moses
gave ye permission to write out a bill of divorce". That one exception
may be necessary still, but, let it be understood, it is not the ideal,
and every one knows it, faithful and faithless alike, they whose honour
is intact and they whose souls are smirched. It is an instinct in the
human heart--no one can deny it--that love is for evermore.
Shakespeare is right, "Marriage is a world-without-end bargain," for
love is felt to be eternal. The old Roman digest interprets nature
with philosophic accuracy when it describes marriage as "_Conjunctio
maris et feminae et consortium omnis vitae, divini et humani juris
communicatio_". "The union of man and woman and the companionship of
all life, the sharing of right, human and divine." That is the
majestic conception of matrimony as it took shape in the brain of those
Roman masters of jurisprudence to whom we owe the law which is the
nerve of civilisation. They learnt it from that ethical religion which
we, too, reverently follow, from that morality which they found _in
things, in themselves_, in Nature's plain teaching that the union of
man and his wife was a sacramental fact and therefore indelible.
Are we asked for further evidence of this position? We see it as a law
of our rational being, which refuses to believe that Nature makes no
other provision for us than she does for the animals; that their
instinctive and impulsive association should be the norm of man's
intercourse with woman. Nay, we see Nature herself as she advances to
the higher stages of animal existence anticipating, in a sense, that
ideal which was only to be fully realised in man. The lion, the king
of beasts, as he is called, tends towards that ideal, and the elephant
is believed to be even more strictly monogamous. The loves of birds,
of doves and pigeons, are too well known to need more than a passing
mention, and the grief they experience on the death of their partner
not unfrequently ends in a broken heart. But how much better is man
than many animals, and what is merely instinctive in them shall not he
consciously obey as his acknowledged law of life?
We may see the truth also in Nature's ordinance, that man's offspring
must be educated in order to reach maturity; that training of a serious
character is indispensably necessary to the development of the powers
latent in them. But how is such training possible, except through the
unceasing watchfulness of the parents'? People here and there darken
counsel with the suggestion that the State should assume such
responsibilities. Was there ever such a suggestion? As a matter of
mere finance, we are told by the Vice-President of the Council, that
the assumption of the quite partial responsibility for the education of
the children now taught in the elementary schools of the denominational
bodies of the country, would mean an addition of some millions yearly
to the rates. The education rate is high enough in all conscience, but
where the "hill-top" theory would land us one can scarcely conjecture.
So urgent is this consideration of the claim which offspring has upon
parent, so imperative the need that children should be fittingly
instructed so as to be worthy citizens of a great community, that we
find writers like Karl Pearson, in his _Ethic of Free Thought_,[1]
consistently excepting from the operation of the free-love gospel those
unions which have resulted in the procreation of children. Mr. Pearson
being of the school of those who deride marriage as "the tomb of love,"
"the source of the stupidity and ugliness of the human race," his
admissions as to the necessity of maintaining some element of
permanence in the contract, if only for the sake of children, is well
worthy of our attention. It shows how grounded in nature is that
conception of the marriage tie which the Roman digest has put before us.
We may see the truth, once again, in the acknowledged instability of
the passional element in human nature--particularly in man. It is
nothing short of amazing to see this very instability urged as a reason
why the marriage tie should be still further weakened, as though man
should deliberately subject himself to the vagaries of sense, instead
of the guidance of reason. We hear much to-day about the "return to
nature," and, soundly interpreted, that gospel sounds like a breath of
pure mountain air after the stifling atmosphere of modern convention
and unreality. Would to heaven, I say from my heart, that we were more
natural, that a greater frankness and directness marked our intercourse
with one another, that the shams and pretences of so much of our social
life were made away with, that our lives were more open and free! The
grand old Stoic maxim had it thus: _Live in accordance with nature_.
Yes, but with what nature? No thinker, from Socrates to Kant, from
Buddha to Hegel, ever had a doubt but that man's nature was twofold,
and that the law of reason must be supreme in him. Let an animal live
for sense; it is its nature; but for man another law is ordained, which
bids him think last of enjoyment, and to partake only of that in
obedience to the law of the mind. The modern evangel of the apotheosis
of the unstable we understand to convey the teaching, "Live in
accordance with sense, or the feeling of the moment". Be like the
_dame du monde_ whom Mrs. Ward has so accurately drawn in _Madame de
Netteville_, who did not hold herself responsible to our petty codes,
and judged that feeling was guidance enough for her. That may be all
very well for Madame de Netteville, but how does such teaching look in
the light of Kant's solemn injunction: "Act so that thy conduct may
become a law unto all men"? Could any one seriously propose to erect
feeling into a supreme criterion whereby to judge of the conduct of
life?
And, to show that the line of argument here adopted is no mere false
asceticism surviving from an undisciplined and pre-scientific age, as
the solemn verbiage of so much second-rate talking expresses it to-day,
we may quote some words of David Hume, Huxley's "prince of agnostics,"
from the _Essay on Polygamy and Divorce_. The least emotional of
philosophers--a hard-headed Scotsman--he makes short work of the
sentimentality which is invoked now-a-days against the natural law of
marriage:--
"We need not be afraid of drawing the marriage knot . . . the closest
possible. The unity between the persons, where it is solid and
sincere, will rather gain by it; and where it is wavering and uncertain
that is the best method for fixing it. How many frivolous quarrels and
disgusts are there, which people of common prudence endeavour to
forget, when they lie under the necessity of passing their lives
together; but which would soon be inflamed into the most deadly hatred,
were they pursued to the utmost under the prospect of an easy
separation! We must consider that nothing is more dangerous than to
unite two persons so closely in all their interests and concerns, as
man and wife, without rendering the union entire and total. The least
possibility of a separate interest must be the source of endless
quarrels and suspicions. The wife, not secure of her establishment,
will still be driving some separate end or project; and the husband's
selfishness, being accompanied by no power, may be still more
dangerous." Thus our conception of marriage as a nature sacrament, a
permanent contract in Nature's original intention, is abundantly
confirmed by the sceptical philosopher of the eighteenth century.
Whatever man may make of the contract, there stands the fact that that
Nature meant it to be enduring which whispered into the lover's heart
that "love should be for evermore".
It is a far cry from the abstractions of philosophy to the realisms of
French fiction, but we could not better conclude this portion of our
subject than by citing one single sentence from Balzac, in the judgment
of many the first romancer of this century, and one of the greatest
masters of the social sciences. "Nothing," he declares, "more
conclusively proves the necessity of indissoluble marriage than the
instability of passion."
But here our difficulties begin. Though it may be abundantly clear
that Nature's ideal is Hume's and Balzac's, is it not a fact that this
"high has proved too high, this heroic for earth too hard"? Is it not
true that there are murmurs and mutterings of revolt both amongst men
and women against a burden too grievous to be borne? Does not the
fiction of the day represent a tendency to allow an increased laxity in
the interpretation of the matrimonial contract? And where there is
smoke there is fire. What novelists write other people are thinking.
Has the time come to reconsider our position with regard to marriage
and the permanent obligations hitherto associated with it?
We answer decisively, No. It is not the institution which is at fault,
but the individuals who embrace it. We spoke of marriage as Nature's
great sacrament, and so it is. And as with "the Lord's Supper" the
unworthy participant is said to "eat and drink only condemnation to
himself," so is it with they who draw near to Nature's banquet and
attempt, unprepared, to partake of the deepest joys of life. Their
profanity smites them with a curse. We hold up our hands in no
Pharisaic spirit of holy horror, but we ask the men and women of this
generation and of those classes from which these mutterings and
threatenings of revolt mainly emanate--we ask them, whether marriage,
as they understand the term, can be other than a bloodless martyrdom?
If that individual who gave her name to a novel two or three seasons
ago, if the young woman known as _Dodo_ be a type--and it was noted by
the critics of the time that such was the character of the fashionable
young _mondaine_ of the day, greedy for nothing but excitement and
sensuous existence, incapable of serious thought, rebellious against, I
will not say the restraints, but even the _convenances_ of civilised
life, with no pretension to anything remotely resembling character or
moral earnestness, a wild, gay, frittering, helpless creature, whom it
were blasphemy to think of in the same day with noble womanhood as we
all have known it--if _that_, I say, is the type of the young
_mondaine_ of the hour, then I have no doubt they will give the
novelists and playwrights plenty of employment in describing their
self-imposed torments, the insufferable bondage to which they are
subjected. But does any one propose to alter the moral law for them?
If mothers in modern Babylon are ready to labour day and night in
attempting to catch as husbands for their daughters men in whom one and
one only qualification is asked, namely, that of wealth, then their
perdition be upon their own heads and on those of the luckless pair who
are literally speaking "crucified on a cross of gold". If girls
continue to be brought up with the preposterous notion that marriage is
the one profession open to them, and that therefore they are by no
means to risk the loss of an "engagement," no matter who the employer
may be, and that the wealthier he is the more suitable he is to be
adjudged, then let us abandon all attempts at reaching our ideal. But
let us at the same time prepare for the overthrow of the home and the
family; for the destruction of "pure religion breathing household
laws," and of the stately, dignified, domestic life, which has been the
glory of every land where Nature's true ideal has been worthily upheld.
If boys are brought up at school, or taught by the social atmosphere
they breathe on first entering into early manhood, to conceive of
marriage as in no wise nobler or loftier in essence than any of those
_mariages après la nature_, those ephemeral associations, terminable at
will; that the only difference between them is, that the one is legal
and permanent, the other voluntary and dissoluble, then so long will
the scandals of divorce and the revolt against marriage continue to be
heard. What one complains of is the utter lack of reverence in the
view which is taken of this most solemn of all acts. There is no
idealism in the contract. The thoughtless youth who has grown up in
what one may call the "wild oats" theory is, we suggest, utterly
incapable of appreciating the absolutely inestimable blessings which
wedded love might have brought him. How can he? He has "wasted his
substance, living riotously," and the most precious of all the
treasures he has squandered is that of his idealism. _His wife can
scarcely be to him what she might have been had he come to her as he
expected her to come to him_. "The golden gates are closed," "a glory
has passed from the earth". This is pain enough to make hearts weep,
but it is the operation of that inflexible law of Compensation, that
not all the tears of sorrow, not all the absolutions and sacrificial
atonements of Churches, can undo that past, can make that young man to
be as in the days of his youth, before the experimental "knowledge of
good and evil" touched him.
Our remedy is, therefore, not to destroy the institution of Nature, but
to reform the candidates who undertake to embrace it. An ethical
religion would reprobate the sacrilegious bargains in which bodies are
exchanged for gold, and refuse to accord them the honorific title of
marriage, which is first and foremost a union of souls. Time and again
have we seen that the springs of all things are in the invisible world,
from the breath of a flower to the energy that pulsates in the great
bosom of the ocean, or governs the movements of the uttermost star. It
is so here. Not the transference of bodies, of titles, of wealth or
station, are the sacrament. They are merely the accessories, the
outward form, the symbol of something higher and Diviner far, of the
invisible love, which is everywhere, yet manifests itself in especial
manner in these two souls, speaking even in their very countenances of
an emotion supreme and irresistible. An ethical religion, wholly based
upon and identified with morality, would refuse to sanction any
marriage but that we have described, a union based upon a supreme
affection between two who had worthily prepared themselves for its
consummation, and believed in the permanence of their tie.
With regard to the modern maiden--the _Dodos_ and their kindred
swains--it would be infinitely preferable that they did not degrade the
sanctity of a natural sacrament by profanely prostituting it to their
temporal and social convenience. Far better that they betook
themselves to "the marriage after the truth of nature" than to the
great human institution of which Milton sang:--
Hail, wedded love, mysterious law,
True source of human offspring!
They do but defile it by their patronage, and having manifestly spoiled
themselves by their reckless lives for the entertainment of any emotion
deeper than mere sensuousness, they are bound at length to bring a
noble institution into contempt, and drag it down in their own fall.
You do not believe, we would say to them, in the eternity of soul and
love, and therefore the nature sacrament is not for you. But having
presented yourselves at its sacred table, and partaken of its rites, do
not, if only for motives of mere decency, betake yourselves to the
denunciation of that of which, indeed, you were never worthy.
Week by week, at the services of the ethical Church, we see numbers of
young men who doubtless aspire one day to share in the benediction
which a true marriage alone can bring them. Their presence is welcome
as a testimony to the virility and inspiration of the ethic creed which
is strong enough to prevail over other inducements which would take
them far afield. It shows that spirit overcomes the flesh, and that
the culture of the mind is not postponed to the relaxation and
enjoyment of the body.
What the ethical religion says to all such as they is this: Live so as
to be worthy of that which you one day hope to receive at Nature's
hands--a pure, good and true wife. Somewhere, in some corner of this
earth, unknown to you, unknown to her, she is being made ready for the
hour of your espousals. You will know her when you see her. Wait
until you do. Remember the requisite preparation of the body, and now
forget not the preparation of the mind.
Marriage is based on friendship, that true kinsman of love, which made
a poet call his friend "O thou half of my own soul!" [2] Your wife
must be your friend. True love, the love of which true marriages are
made, is friendship transfigured--the halo, the glory, of a supreme
emotion coming to crown that which is most enduring on this earth.
Just as we say that our religion is morality, is duty, only
etherealised by viewing it as the expressed mind and will of the Soul
of all souls, the World-intelligence, so do we think of marriage as
based on a union of souls by friendship, inspired by a deep mutual
respect, not for what the partners have, but for what they are, and
finally made glorious in the light of an unfading love. Live, we would
counsel you, so as to be worthy one day of the reverence of a woman's
pure and untried soul.
And our message to womanhood is not dissimilar. Live, we would say, so
that you be worthy of the respect, of the homage of all men. Your
nature is such that virtue in you has a double charm, wherefore you are
visibly marked out as the treasury wherein the ideal is enshrined and
handed down through all the generations of men.
A nation is, ethically speaking, worth just what its women are worth,
and we must therefore rejoice, and greatly rejoice, to know that the
contention which is being increasingly put forth by women, that the men
who demand their sisters' hands should themselves be arrayed in
suitable wedding garment, is convincing evidence of a strong ethical
enthusiasm which is beginning to pervade the sex, and a determination
to ennoble more and more that one great sacramental ordinance of
Nature, marriage.
All things transitory
But as symbols are sent;
Earth's insufficiency grows to event;
The indescribable,
Here it is done,
_The ever-womanly leadeth us_
_Upward and on._
--GOETHE.
[1] Pp. 431-443.
[2] "Dimidium animae meae" (Horace).
XII.
THE ETHICAL CHURCH AND POSITIVISM.
The appearance within the last hundred years of different philosophical
attempts to produce a synthesis which should combine at once a system
of thought for the guidance of the mind, and a source of enthusiasm for
the inspiration of the heart, is significant of many things, but
chiefly of two. In the first place it is evidence that the present has
outgrown the past; that the religion of medievalism is inadequate to
modern needs; that
Still the new transcends the old,
In signs and tokens manifold.
And, next, it would appear to indicate the serious disposition of the
new Age. If we find the thinkers of humanity uniformly tending towards
a given direction, we may be sure there is an undefined, perhaps
unconscious, though none the less real, desire on the part of the age
to be led thither. Thus, at the close of the last century, Immanuel
Kant, while undermining the ground on which the faith of old rested,
attempted that new presentation of religion, as essential and sovereign
morality, with which we are so familiar. And, within half a century of
the foundation of the new Church, we meet with another bold and
comprehensive effort to revivify religion, which had grown cold in the
heart of his country, by showing that its chief expression is to be
found in that "love of the brotherhood" whereby Jesus Christ declared
his own truest followers would ever be known. "We tire of thinking and
even of acting," this foremost of the thinkers of his age declared, but
"we never tire of loving". I need not say that these are the words of
Auguste Comte, one of the two men in this nineteenth century who had
learning enough to grasp the universal knowable, and genius enough to
express it in a clearly defined philosophic system. His fellow and
compeer, of course, is our own Herbert Spencer.
Now, no one will be able to even dimly appreciate the significance of
the work of Immanuel Kant and Auguste Comte unless he realises that the
inspiration which moved them both was that which we call religion. As
the rivers flow into the sea, so the streams of knowledge converge at a
point which marks the limits of the finite, the boundaries of the
Infinite. There never was a system of thought yet which did not
culminate in the sublimity of religion. From the first system of all,
the immortal Aristotle's, down to Kant's, Comte's and Spencer's in our
own times, the issue is always the same: philosophy leads the way to
the Boundless; it lifts the veils of the Eternal. And therefore Kant
and Comte, each in his own way, while setting forth their exposition of
intellectual truth, endeavoured to provide a stimulus to move the heart
of man to put its plain teachings into execution.
Though at first sight there appears to be nothing but irreconcilable
opposition between the critical and positivist systems, there is,
nevertheless, a fundamental unity which Comte was quick enough to
detect, for he pronounced Kant "the most positive of all
metaphysicians". What led him to this conviction was the fact that the
German philosopher had, like himself, based his whole idealism on the
sure ground of morality which cannot be overthrown. As Spinoza was
called by Novalis "a God-intoxicated man," so Comte was described by
Mill as "morality-intoxicated," for in the purity and elevation of his
ethical conceptions he comes nearest of all to the austere standard set
up by Kant and Emerson.
Nor do the points of resemblance stop here. In the course of this
chapter it will become ever more evident that there is no
irreconcilable opposition between the ethical religion of Kant and the
Religion of Humanity of Comte, nay, that there appears to be a
well-grounded hope that the Church of the Future, which we salute from
afar, and towards the building of which we are each contributing our
share, will in the main embrace as its essential features the teaching
of these two great men. For that Church will aspire to guide men in
their private and in their public capacities, in their individual and
in their social life. The ethic of Kant, the categorical imperative of
duty, will be the inspiration of the individual; the _Politique
Positive_ of Comte will govern him in his social and political
relations, while in the supreme concern of worship, I venture to
foretell a widening of the Comtist ideal so as to admit of such
conceptions as underlie the philosophical belief of Mr. Spencer, that
the world and man are but "the fugitive product of a Power without
beginning or end," whose essence is ineffable. Thus the agnosticism of
to-day will contribute to the reverence of the future, while I firmly
believe that the religion of Humanity will come to be so interpreted as
not to wholly exclude belief in an Existence anterior to man and to all
things, from whom he and all he knows aboriginally sprang, unto whom he
and all things ultimately return. Nothing shall be lost of these words
of life which have fallen from Wisdom's lips; they are treasured now in
many hearts, and some day, near or distant, they will be one and all
incorporated in some diviner gospel than any which has yet been heard,
and preached in some church, vast enough, catholic enough, for the
inspiration of the race. _Reposita est haec spes in sinu meo_.
In the meantime, we must attempt something of a succinct statement of
the ethical, social and religious system with which the name of Auguste
Comte is associated.
It is clear that he was early impelled to a study of the principles on
which society rests by the disorganisation into which his country had
fallen, after the upheaval of the Revolution and the disasters of the
Napoleonic era which succeeded it. It may even be the truth that his
bold and subversive teaching in religious matters was due to a profound
conviction that the virtue of the old ideals had been completely
exhausted, and that if society was to be regenerated, it must be by a
radical reformation of the theoretic conceptions on which it had been
held to repose. Certainly there was a vast deal in the contemporary
history of France to confirm Comte in his belief that Catholicism had
spent its force. At a period of crisis in a nation's history, thinking
men naturally look about them for some strong influence, for some
commanding ideal which can serve as a rallying point in times of social
dispersion, and help to keep the severing elements of the body politic
together. But what had religion done for France in the hour of her
trial? So little, that the country had to wade through blood in order
to reach a measure of political emancipation which England had long
enjoyed. In fact, it was the corruption of religion in the person of
its official representatives, its intellectual degradation in the eyes
of the thinkers, which helped to provoke the catastrophe. What wonder,
then, that a mind so penetrating and alert as Comte's early arrived at
the conclusion that the _ancien régime_ in religion, no less than in
politics, must be abolished if progress was to be possible among men?