dignity of man. Pride, which looks within, making man seek his own
approbation, as distinguished from vanity, which looks without, and
shapes its conduct according to the opinions of others, was not only
permitted in stoicism, it was its leading moral agent. The sense of
virtue, as I have elsewhere observed, occupies in this system much the
same place as the sense of sin in Christianity. Sin, in the conception
of the ancients, was simply disease, and they deemed it the part of a
wise man to correct it, but not to dwell upon its circumstances. In the
many disquisitions which Epictetus and others have left us concerning
the proper frame of mind in which man should approach death, repentance
for past sin has absolutely no place, nor do the ancients appear to have
ever realised the purifying and spiritualising influence it exercises
upon the character. And while the reality of moral disease was fully
recognised, while an ideal of lofty and indeed unattainable excellence
was continually proposed, no one doubted the essential excellence of
human nature, and very few doubted the possibility of man acquiring by
his own will a high degree of virtue.
The doctrine of suicide was the culminating point of Roman stoicism. The
proud, self-reliant, unbending character of the philosopher, could only
be sustained when he felt that he had a sure refuge against the extreme
forms of suffering or of despair. Although virtue is not a mere creature
of interest, no great system has ever yet flourished which did not
present an ideal of happiness as well as an ideal of duty. Stoicism
taught men to hope little, but to fear nothing. It did not array death
in brilliant colours, as the path to positive felicity, but it
endeavoured to divest it, as the end of suffering, of every terror. Life
lost much of its bitterness when men had found a refuge from the storms
of fate, a speedy deliverance from dotage and pain. Death ceased to be
terrible when it was regarded rather as a remedy than as a sentence.
Life and death in the stoical system were attuned to the same key. The
deification of human virtue, the total absence of all sense of sin, the
proud stubborn will that deemed humiliation the worst of stains,
appeared alike in each. The type of its own kind was perfect. All the
virtues and all the majesty that accompany human pride, when developed
to the highest point, and directed to the noblest ends, were here
displayed. All those which accompany humility and self-abasement were
absent.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 74: From Chapter II, Vol. I, of "History of European Morals,"
1869. The author's foot-notes have been omitted.]
THE ENTHUSIASM OF HUMANITY[75]
JOHN ROBERT SEELEY
The first method of training this passion which Christ employed was the
direct one of making it a point of duty to feel it. To love one's
neighbour as oneself was, he said, the first and greatest _law_. And in
the Sermon on the Mount he requires the passion to be felt in such
strength as to include those whom we have most reason to hate--our
enemies and those who maliciously injure us--and delivers an imperative
precept, "Love your enemies."
It has been shown that to do this is not, as might at first appear, in
the nature of things impossible, but the further question suggests
itself, Can it be done to order? Has the verb to love really an
imperative mood? Certainly, to say that we can love at pleasure, and by
a mere effort of will summon up a passion which does not arise of
itself, is to take up a paradoxical and novel position. Yet if this
position be really untenable, how is it possible to obey Christ's
commands?
The difficulty seems to admit of only one solution. We are not commanded
to create by an effort of will a feeling of love in ourselves which
otherwise would have had no existence; the feeling must arise naturally
or it cannot arise at all. But a number of causes which are removable
may interfere to prevent the feeling from arising or to stifle it as it
arises, and we are commanded to remove these hindrances. It is natural
to man to love his kind, and Christ commands us only to give nature
play. He does not expect us to procure for ourselves hearts of some new
supernatural texture, but merely the heart of flesh for the heart of
stone.
What, then, are the causes of this paralysis of the heart? The
experience of human life furnishes us readily with the answer. It
constantly happens that one whose affections were originally not less
lively than those of most men is thrown into the society of persons
destitute of sympathy or tenderness. In this society each person is
either totally indifferent to his neighbour or secretly endeavouring to
injure or overreach him. The new-comer is at first open-hearted and
cordial; he presumes every one he meets to be a friend, and is disposed
to serve and expects to be served by all alike. But his advances are met
by some with cautious reserve, by others with icy coldness, by others
with hypocritical warmth followed by treacherous injury, by others with
open hostility. The heart which naturally grew warm at the mere sight of
a human being, under the operation of this new experience slowly becomes
paralysed. There seats itself gradually in the man's mind a presumption
concerning every new face that it is the face of an enemy, and a habit
of gathering himself into an attitude of self-defence whenever he deals
with a fellow-creature. If when this new disposition has grown confirmed
and habitual, he be introduced into a society of an opposite kind and
meet with people as friendly and kind as he himself was originally, he
will not at first be able to believe in their sincerity, and the old
kindly affections from long disuse will be slow to rouse themselves
within him. Now to such a person the imperative mood of the verb to love
may fairly be used. He may properly be told to make an effort, to shake
off the distrust that oppresses him,--not to suffer unproved suspicions,
causeless jealousies, to stifle by the mere force of prejudice and
mistaken opinion the warmth of feeling natural to him.
But we shall have a closer illustration if we suppose the cold-hearted
society itself to be addressed by a preacher who wishes to bring them
to a better mind. He too may fairly use the imperative mood of the verb
to love. For he may say, "Your mutual coldness does not spring from an
original want of the power of sympathy. If it did, admonitions would
indeed be useless. But it springs from a habit of thought which you have
formed, a maxim which has been received among you, that all men are
devoted to self-interest, that kindness is but feebleness and invites
injury. If you will at once and by a common act throw off this false
opinion of human nature, and adopt a new plan of life for yourselves and
new expectations of each other, you will find the old affections natural
to all of you, weakened indeed and chilled, but existing and capable of
being revived by an effort."
Such a preacher might go further and say, "If but a small minority are
convinced by my words, yet let that minority for itself abandon the
selfish theory, let it renounce the safety which that theory affords in
dealing with selfish men, let it treat the enemy as if he were indeed
the friend he ought to be, let it dare to forego retaliation and even
self-defence. By this means it will shame many into kindness; by
despising self-interest for itself it will sometimes make it seem
despicable to others; by sincerity and persistency it will gradually
convert the majority to a higher law of intercourse."
The world has been always more or less like this cold-hearted society;
the natural kindness and fellow-feeling of men have always been more or
less repressed by low-minded maxims and cynicism. But in the time of
Christ, and in the last decrepitude of ethnic morality, the selfishness
of human intercourse was much greater than the present age can easily
understand. That system of morality, even in the times when it was
powerful and in many respects beneficial, had made it almost as much a
duty to hate foreigners as to love fellow-citizens. Plato congratulates
the, Athenians on having shown in their relations to Persia, beyond all
the other Greeks, "a pure and heartfelt hatred of the foreign
nature."[76] Instead of opposing, it had sanctioned and consecrated the
savage instinct which leads us to hate whatever is strange or
unintelligible, to distrust those who live on the further side of a
river, to suppose that those whom we hear talking together in a foreign
tongue must be plotting some mischief against ourselves. The lapse of
time and the fusion of races doubtless diminished this antipathy
considerably, but at the utmost it could but be transformed into an icy
indifference, for no cause was in operation to convert it into kindness.
On the other hand, the closeness of the bond which united
fellow-citizens was considerably relaxed. Common interests and common
dangers had drawn it close; these in the wide security of the Roman
Empire had no longer a place. It had depended upon an imagined
blood-relationship; fellow-citizens could now no longer feel themselves
to be united by the tie of blood. Every town was full of resident aliens
and emancipated slaves, persons between whom and the citizens nature had
established no connection, and whose presence in the city had originally
been barely tolerated from motives of expediency. The selfishness of
modern times exists in defiance of morality, in ancient times it was
approved, sheltered, and even in part enjoined by morality. We are
therefore to consider the ancient world as a society of men in whom
natural humanity existed but had been, as it were, crusted or frosted
over. Inveterate feuds and narrow-minded local jealousies, arising out
of an isolated position or differences of language and institutions, had
created endless divisions between man and man. And as the special
virtues of antiquity, patriotism and all that it implies, had been in a
manner caused and fostered by these very divisions, they were not
regarded as evils but rather cherished as essential to morality.
Selfishness, therefore, was not a mere abuse or corruption arising out
of the infirmity of human nature, but a theory and almost a part of
moral philosophy. Humanity was cramped by a mistaken prejudice, by a
perverse presumption of the intellect. In a case like this it was
necessary and proper to prescribe humanity by direct authoritative
precept. Such a precept would have been powerless to create the feeling,
nor would it have done much to protect it from being overpowered by the
opposite passion, but the opposite passion of selfishness was at this
period justified by authority and claimed to be on the side of reason
and law. Precept is fairly matched against precept, and what the law of
love and the golden rule did for mankind was to place for the first time
the love of man as man distinctly in the list of virtues, to dissipate
the exclusive prejudices of ethnic morality, and to give selfishness the
character of sin.
When a theory of selfishness is rife in a whole community, it is a bold
and hazardous step for a part of the community to abandon it. For in the
society of selfish people selfishness is simply self-defence; to
renounce it is to evacuate one's entrenched position, to surrender at
discretion to the enemy. If society is to disarm, it should do so by
common consent. Christ, however, though he confidently expected
ultimately to gather all mankind into his society, did not expect to do
so soon. Accordingly he commands his followers not to wait for this
consummation but, in spite of the hazardous nature of the step, to
disarm at once. They are sent forth "as sheep in the midst of wolves."
Injuries they are to expect, but they are neither to shun nor to
retaliate them. Harmless they are to be as _doves_. The discipline of
suffering will wean them more and more from self, and make the channels
of humanity freer within them; and sometimes their patience may shame
the spoiler; he may grow weary of rapacity which meets with no
resistance, and be induced to envy those who can forego without
reluctance that which he devotes every thought to acquire.
But we shall soon be convinced that Christ could not design by a mere
edict, however authoritative, to give this passion of humanity strength
enough to make it a living and infallible principle of morality in
every man, when we consider, first, what an ardent enthusiasm he
demanded from his followers, and secondly, how frail and tender a germ
this passion naturally is in human nature. Widely diffused indeed it is,
and seldom entirely eradicated; but for the most part, at least in the
ancient world, it was crushed under a weight of predominant passions and
interests; it had seldom power enough to dictate any action, but made
itself felt in faint misgivings and relentings, which sometimes
restrained men from extremes of cruelty. Like Enceladus under Aetna, it
lay fettered at the bottom of human nature, now and then making the mass
above it quake by an uneasy change of posture. To make this outraged and
enslaved passion predominant, to give it, instead of a veto rarely used,
the whole power of government, to train it from a dim misgiving into a
clear and strong passion, required much more than a precept. The precept
had its use; it could make men feel it right to be humane and desire to
be so, but it could never inspire them with an enthusiasm of humanity.
From what source was this inspiration to be derived?
Humanity, we have already observed, is neither a love for the whole
human race, nor a love for each individual of it, but a love for the
race, or for the ideal of man, in each individual. In other and less
pedantic words, he who is truly humane considers every human being as
such interesting and important, and without waiting to criticise each
individual specimen, pays in advance to all alike the tribute of good
wishes and sympathy. Now this favourable presumption with regard to
human beings is not a causeless prepossession, it is no idle
superstition of the mind, nor is it a natural instinct. It is a feeling
founded on the actual observation and discovery of interesting and noble
qualities in particular human beings, and it is strong or weak in
proportion as the person who has the feeling has known many or few noble
and amiable human beings. There are men who have, been so unfortunate as
to live in the perpetual society of the mean and the base; they have
never, except in a few faint glimpses, seen anything glorious or good in
human nature. With these the feeling of humanity has a perpetual
struggle for existence, their minds tend by a fatal gravitation to the
belief that the happiness or misery of such a paltry race is wholly
unimportant; they may arrive finally at a fixed condition, in which it
may be said of them without qualification, that "man delights not them,
nor woman neither." In this final stage they are men who, beyond the
routine of life, should not be trusted, being "fit for treasons,
stratagems, and spoils." On the other hand, there are those whose lot it
has been from earliest childhood to see the fair side of humanity, who
have been surrounded with clear and candid countenances, in the changes
of which might be traced the working of passions strong and simple, the
impress of a firm and tender nature, wearing when it looked abroad the
glow of sympathy, and when it looked within the bloom of modesty. They
have seen, and not once or twice, a man forget himself; they have
witnessed devotion, unselfish sorrow, unaffected delicacy, spontaneous
charity, ingenuous self-reproach; and it may be that on seeing a human
being surrender for another's good not something but his uttermost all,
they have dimly suspected in human nature a glory connecting it with the
divine. In these the passion of humanity is warm and ready to become on
occasion a burning flame; their whole minds are elevated, because they
are possessed with the dignity of that nature they share, and of the
society in the midst of which they move.
But it is not absolutely necessary to humanity that a man shall have
seen _many_ men whom he can respect. The most lost cynic will get a new
heart by learning thoroughly to believe in the virtue of _one_ man. Our
estimate of human nature is in proportion to the best specimen of it we
have witnessed. This then it is which is wanted to raise the feeling of
humanity into an enthusiasm; when the precept of love has been given, an
image must be set before the eyes of those who are called upon to obey
it, an ideal or type of man which may be noble and amiable enough to
raise the whole race and make the meanest member of it sacred with
reflected glory.
Did not Christ do this? Did the command to love go forth to those who
had never seen a human being they could revere? Could his followers turn
upon him and say, How can we love a creature so degraded, full of vile
wants and contemptible passions, whose little life is most harmlessly
spent when it is an empty round of eating and sleeping; a creature
destined for the grave and for oblivion when his allotted term of
fretfulness and folly has expired? Of this race Christ himself was a
member, and to this day is it not the best answer to all blasphemers of
the species, the best consolation when our sense of its degradation is
keenest, that a human brain was behind his forehead and a human heart
beating in his breast, and that within the whole creation of God nothing
more elevated or more attractive has yet been found than he? And if it
be answered that there was in his nature something exceptional and
peculiar, that humanity must not be measured by the stature of Christ,
let us remember that it was precisely thus that he wished it to be
measured, delighting to call himself the Son of Man, delighting to call
the meanest of mankind his brothers. If some human beings are abject and
contemptible, if it be incredible to us that they can have any high
dignity or destiny, do we regard them from so great a height as Christ?
Are we likely to be more pained by their faults and deficiencies than he
was? Is our standard higher than his? And yet he associated by
preference with these meanest of the race; no contempt for them did he
ever express, no suspicion that they might be less dear than the best
and wisest to the common Father, no doubt that they were naturally
capable of rising to a moral elevation like his own. There is nothing of
which a man may be prouder than of this; it is the most hopeful and
redeeming fact in history; it is precisely what was wanting to raise the
love of man as man to enthusiasm. An eternal glory has been shed upon
the human race by the love Christ bore to it. And it was because the
Edict of Universal Love went forth to men whose hearts were in no
cynical mood but possessed with a spirit of devotion to a man, that
words which at any other time, however grandly they might sound, would
have been but words, penetrated so deeply, and along with the law of
love the power of Jove was given. Therefore also the first Christians
were enabled to dispense with philosophical phrases, and instead of
saying that they loved the ideal of man in man could simply say and feel
that they loved Christ in every man.
We have here the very kernel of the Christian moral scheme. We have
distinctly before us the end Christ proposed to himself, and the means
he considered adequate to the attainment of it. His object was, instead
of drawing up, after the example of previous legislators, a list of
actions prescribed, allowed, and prohibited, to give his disciples a
universal test by which they might discover what it was right and what
it was wrong to do. Now as the difficulty of discovering what is right
arises commonly from the prevalence of self-interest in our minds, and
as we commonly behave rightly to anyone for whom we feel affection or
sympathy, Christ considered that he who could feel sympathy for all
would behave rightly to all. But how to give to the meagre and narrow
hearts of men such enlargement? How to make them capable of a universal
sympathy? Christ believed it possible to bind men to their kind, but on
one condition--that they were first bound fast to himself. He stood
forth as the representative of men, he identified himself with the cause
and with the interests of all human beings, he was destined, as he began
before long obscurely to intimate, to lay down his life for them. Few of
us sympathise originally and directly with this devotion; few of us can
perceive in human nature itself any merit sufficient to evoke it. But it
is not so hard to love and venerate him who felt it. So vast a passion
of love, a devotion so comprehensive, elevated, deliberate and
profound, has not elsewhere been in any degree approached save by some
of his imitators. And as love provokes love, many have found it possible
to conceive for Christ an attachment the closeness of which no words can
describe, a veneration so possessing and absorbing the man within them,
that they have said, "I live no more, but Christ lives in me." Now such
a feeling carries with it of necessity the feeling of love for all human
beings. It matters no longer what quality men may exhibit; amiable or
unamiable, as the brothers of Christ, as belonging to his sacred and
consecrated kind, as the objects of his love in life and death, they
must be dear to all to whom he is dear. And those who would for a moment
know his heart and understand his life must begin by thinking of the
whole race of man, and of each member of the race, with awful reverence
and hope.
Love, wheresoever it appears, is in its measure a law-making power.
"Love is _dutiful_ in thought and deed." And as the lover of his country
is free from the temptation to treason, so is he who loves Christ secure
from the temptation to injure any human being, whether it be himself or
another. He is indeed much more than this. He is bound and he is eager
to benefit and bless to the utmost of his power all that bear his
Master's nature, and that not merely with the good gifts of the earth,
but with whatever cherishes and trains best the Christ within them. But
for the present we are concerned merely with the power of this passion
to lift the man out of sin. The injuries he committed lightly when he
regarded his fellow-creatures simply as animals who added to the
fierceness of the brute an ingenuity and forethought that made them
doubly noxious, become horrible sacrilege when he sees in them no longer
the animal but the Christ. And that other class of crimes which belongs
more especially to ages of civilisation, and arises out of a cynical
contempt for the species, is rendered equally impossible to the man who
hears with reverence the announcement, "The good deeds you did to the
least of these my brethren you did to me."
There are two objections which may suggest themselves at this point, the
one to intellectual, the other to practical men. The intellectual man
may say, "To discover what it is right to do in any given case is not
the province of any feeling or passion however sublime, but requires the
application of the same intellectual power which solves mathematical
problems. The common acts of life may no doubt be performed correctly by
unintellectual people, but this is because these constantly recurring
problems have been solved long ago by clever people, and the vulgar are
now in possession of the results. Whenever a new combination occurs it
is a matter for casuists; the best intentions will avail little; there
is doubtless a great difference between a good man and a bad one; the
one will do what is right when he knows it, and the other will not; but
in respect for the power of ascertaining what it is right to do,
supposing their knowledge of casuistry to be equal, they are on a par.
Goodness or the passion of humanity, or Christian love, may be a motive
inducing men to keep the law, but it has no right to be called the
law-making power. And what has Christianity added to our theoretic
knowledge of morality? It may have made men practically more moral, but
has it added anything to Aristotle's Ethics?"