MORALITY AS A RELIGION
That minimising or denial of moral evil with which we dealt in the
preceding pages, is common to, and follows as the corollary from, all
systems in which the personality and transcendence of God are either
explicitly denied or virtually ignored. Monism, that is to
say,--whether of the idealistic or the materialistic variety, whether
pantheist or atheist in complexion--finds its ethical counterpart in
Determinism.
There are, however, in our pathetically restless age a number--probably
a growing number--of serious men and women who attack the problem from
the opposite end. Weary of speculation, and leaning on the whole to
the side of negation rather than affirmation in matters of theology,
they say that one thing at any rate is left, a certainty of which no
one can deprive them, an ideal sufficient to inspire mankind--the
supreme worthiness of the good life. While the creeds of the Churches
divide their respective adherents from each other, here, they tell us,
is a basis upon which all can unite, and which therefore {172} should
assuredly prove adequate and attractive; nay, since religion is valued
for the kind of life it produces--since the tree is judged neither by
its name, nor age, nor foliage, but simply and solely by its
fruit--shall we not say that morality itself is the true and only
religion, that residuum of valid and vital truth which remains when all
the errors of supernaturalism have been purged and filtered away?
Certainly there are those in our own day who, while definitely
rejecting the sanctions and authority of religion in its commonly
accepted meaning, are fully convinced that to live an unselfish life is
a duty incumbent on man, and who honestly endeavour to practise what
they believe. That being so, is not faith shown to be practically
superfluous, and the autonomy and sufficiency of ethics a demonstrated
fact?
Such, in short, is the contention of the Ethical Movement, so ably and
often eloquently represented by leaders like Felix Adler, W. M. Salter,
Washington Sullivan, Stanton Coit, and others; all these teachers with
one accord deprecate and dismiss theological doctrines as at best not
proven, at worst a hindrance, and commend instead morality as the
all-embracing, all-sufficing and all-saving religion. To quote Mr.
Salter, who certainly speaks with authority for his side:--
A religion that will teach us how to live, that will hold up clear and
high the laws of life and win us to obedience {173} to them--this is
the religion the world needs, and it is the only true religion; all
others, all that seek to make something else sacred, that make men put
their trust in "God" or Christ or the Virgin or the Bible or the Church
or its sacraments and rites, are a diverting of man from the real
issue; they are the blind leading of the blind; they are a delusion and
a snare.[1]
Mr. Salter is, indeed, willing to show "charity" for the belief "that
the authority of the right is in some way connected with God"; but it
is the charity that may be extended to an exploded superstition on
account of certain beneficent associations that cling to it. "If by
the term 'God,'" he says,[2] "was meant simply the reason and nature of
things, it might perhaps be freely used; but the word means something
else to most persons"--and therefore the honest ethicist will not
employ it. For this sensible and candid course we cannot but feel
thankful; Mr. Salter at any rate knows well enough that there is all
the difference between "the reason and nature of things"--between a
mere "totality of being"--and a personal God.
We cannot disguise from ourselves that the present juncture is in many
respects singularly favourable to the ethical movement; to not a few
who have lost their earlier faith and feel the need of something to
take its place, Ethicism will seem to meet that want, and they will
accordingly give a wistful, grateful {174} hearing to what Mr. Salter
and his colleagues have to preach. Probably, indeed, it will be people
of a higher than the average intellectual and moral calibre who will
seek to fill the void left by Agnosticism by embracing "morality as a
religion"; and more particularly is this likely to happen when this
cult has for its apostles, men of high character and gracious
personality. It is for that very reason that we are bound to examine
this plea carefully, and to ask ourselves whether it is really
possible, as we are assured, "by purely natural and human means to help
men to love, know, and do the right." [3] The issue is no less than a
momentous one; for if religion, as generally understood, is a mere
graceful superfluity when it is not "a delusion and a snare," very vast
changes are bound to follow the recognition of such a fact. Dr. Coit
may be a little premature in making his voluminous arrangements for the
adaptation of the Established Church and the Book of Common Prayer to
the uses of ethical religion; but if ethicists can convince us of the
validity of their claims, then we must look forward to the fruitful
service of man taking the place of the fruitless service of God.
Now the first remark we have to make is that as a matter of fact and of
history a high morality has never made its appearance apart {175} from
religion. Such as they are, our moral code and moral standards at
their best are the product of the Christian faith; the ethical movement
has neither evolved a morality of its own, nor has it anything better
to put in the place of that which we owe to Christianity. Such
suggestions of alleged defects in the ethics of the Gospel as are
brought forward by Mr. Salter--_e.g._, that Jesus lacked "a scientific
sense of cause and effect"; that He failed to inculcate "intellectual
scrupulousness and honesty"; that we cannot go to Him for "political
conceptions" and "industrial ethics," and so forth--strike one as
palpably trivial, irrelevant, and made to order;[4] and leaving these
not very imposing criticisms on one side, it is simply a fact that the
highest laws of life were declared by Jesus Christ, and have never been
superseded. And since ethicists have nothing better to propose in the
domain of conduct than what we find in the Gospel--since the "higher
law," as formulated by Mr. Salter, reduces itself to altruism versus
living for self--there is nothing harsh in saying that the ethical
movement proposes merely to take over Christian morality minus its
Christian setting. If a simile may be allowed, we should say that this
new firm has no goods of its own manufacture; it intends to trade with
the stock, and hopes to take over the goodwill, of the old. {176}
Whether that is a feasible _modus operandi_ is another question, at
which we shall glance presently; for the moment we would simply insist
upon the fact that hitherto at any rate the ultimate sanction of
morality has always been the _religious_ sanction. The Churches, in
basing morality on religion, can at any rate point to some actual
achievements in the past; on the other hand those who maintain that
morality is independent of religious belief, and that human conduct
will actually rise to a higher level when this truth is recognised,
must pardon us if we tell them that they are merely issuing promissory
notes which may or may not be honoured when they fall due. A certain
extremely important thing has been done--we will not say perfectly, but
nevertheless done--in a certain way and by certain means for a very
long time; anyone who assures us that he will accomplish the same
important thing for us without the means which we have hitherto deemed
indispensable, can hardly be surprised if we reply that while we do not
doubt his entire good faith, we cannot possibly content ourselves with
his bare promises in so vital a matter.
But when we say this, we shall at once be met with the rejoinder that
it is manifestly unfair to argue as if Ethicism were all promise and no
performance. Are there not plenty of kindly, conscientious,
well-conducted agnostics who might serve as models to some of {177}
their Church-going neighbours? And have we not already referred to
some of the ethical teachers themselves as men of high character and
gracious personality? All this may be very readily admitted; but all
this has not an atom of bearing upon the matter in hand. The question
really is not whether certain avowed agnostics are not as good men as
certain professing Christians; but whether the moral excellences of the
good agnostic are the _product_, the fruit, of agnosticism, in the same
sense in which the virtues of the Christian are the _product_ of
Christianity. The answer to that question must be unhesitatingly in
the negative. There is no disputing the historical fact that the force
which has been most potent in building up our Western civilisation is
none other than Christianity; the ethics which have shaped and guided
right conduct through all these centuries are Christian ethics. Think
as we will about dogma, few will feel competent to contest Lecky's
verdict, when the historian of Rationalism and of European Morals
declares that Christianity "has been the main source of moral
development in Europe"; we know what this religion has done, because
its actual record is open to inspection. To quote Lecky again,
"Christianity has produced more heroic actions and formed more upright
men than any other creed." Now Agnosticism has not created its own
moral system; agnostic morality at its {178} highest has so far grown
in Christian soil, and to say that the flower will continue to grow in
quite a different soil is to make a very bold and very hazardous
prophecy. In the West we have never had anything like an agnostic
civilisation, which would allow us to test the effects of non-belief
upon conduct on a large scale; in the East, it is true, Japan offers us
something like an agnostic civilisation, but those who are best
acquainted with that nation are least inclined to exalt her
performances in the domain of ethics. Japanese commercial morality is
notoriously low; while Japan's dealings with Korea have called forth
the unmeasured denunciations of European eyewitnesses. The material
advances and military exploits of this virtually agnostic nation must
not blind us to other and less admirable features; it would, indeed,
seem that this highly-gifted race, while frantically eager to "gain the
whole world," has not yet discovered its own soul, and the familiar
question, "What shall it profit?" inevitably suggests itself.
But not only has Agnosticism so far not grown its own morality; there
is yet another consideration which leads us to listen with a certain
measure of scepticism to the assurances of those who say that right
conduct will survive though religion be surrendered. It has perhaps
not been generally observed that just as the virtuous agnostic is
generally the child of Christian parents, so by a seeming irony he is
{179} often found to be the father of Christian children: there is
hardly a genuine case on record where "free-thought," Agnosticism,
Rationalism, has descended from parents to children to the third or
fourth generation without a break, and the practical non-existence of
such cases proves something of real and great importance. It has been
said that pure-bred Londoners die out in three generations at most,
unless new blood from the country is brought in to replenish their
failing vital power. If unbelief shows the same incapacity to
propagate itself by natural descent--if the descendants of unbelievers
show a marked tendency to "revert to type," _i.e._, to religion--such a
fact suggests only one adequate explanation, _viz._, the instinct of
self-preservation, a return to the soil which made the growth of the
flower possible. The virtues of the agnostic may be not unfairly
compared to cut flowers, which may continue to shed their perfume for
awhile, but are bound to fade before long. Our agnostic ethicists,
being themselves the products of a Christian civilisation, may commend,
approve and practise--they may _wear_ the Christian virtues; that those
virtues will bear transplanting into an agnostic soil and flourish in
an agnostic climate is a highly dubious proposition. We can only say
that available experience seems to be against it. The Christian
morality implies the Christian religion which has created it; as for
the {180} high-minded, altruistic individual agnostic, he must simply
be pronounced a credit to Christianity.
We say "the high-minded _individual_ agnostic," because candour compels
us to go on to state that generally speaking those who have thrown
religion to the winds hardly strike one as standing on a particularly
high ethical level. One can only go by facts; and the facts are that
the frequenters of the betting-ring, the dram-shop, the light-minded,
pleasure-seeking throng that flutters from amusement to amusement
without any interest in life's serious duties--these are hardly drawn
from the Church-going strata of society. Religion says "no" to this
whole mode of life; and unbelief is most frequently, and in its most
typical forms, found where the restraints of religion have proved too
irksome to be tolerated. Before arguing in the abstract that morality
is independent of religion, and will be advanced by its abandonment, it
would perhaps be better to observe the average, concrete case of the
man who has cut himself adrift from religious beliefs and influences;
then it will be time to decide whether we should like to see the
experiment tried on a national scale. It is easy to theorise _in
vacuo_; in practice we are well aware that without the sanctions and
the guardianship of religion morality tends to sink to the level where
the accepted motto is the hedonist's "Let us eat and drink and be
merry, for to-morrow we die."
{181}
But at this point another objection will be raised; "surely," it is
said, "we do not seriously maintain that men are kind to their
families, honest in their every-day transactions, truthful in speech,
and so forth, merely because they believe that to do so is to act in
accordance with Divine injunction, and that if this belief were
suddenly destroyed we should be reduced to moral chaos." But this
argument, so frequently met with in this connection, misapprehends the
real issue. We do not dispute that the elements of moral conduct begin
to be inculcated wherever there is any social life at all. Where there
is any living together, complete selfishness is impossible; there must
come into being a rough law of give-and-take, a recognition of mutual
rights to be respected, a certain loyalty from the individual towards
the tribe, which in turn befriends and defends each of its members.
Quite a number of rudimentary virtues are thus developed by the force
of public opinion, which cannot tolerate flagrantly anti-social acts
from one member of the community towards the rest; murder, violence,
theft, false witness--these and the like offences are suppressed with a
strong hand, without the need of a special supernatural revelation to
decree "Thou shalt not." To be brief, there is no doubt that this
social pressure is powerful enough to insist upon behaviour which will
regulate most of the ordinary relationships of life in a fairly {182}
satisfactory manner--_i.e._, relationships between equals or members of
the same community. The latter is a highly important qualification;
where purely natural sanctions obtain, equal rights might be enjoyed by
all _bona fide_ members of the tribe, but the same rights would not
necessarily extend to an alien. And even within the community governed
by such sanctions the weaker, and especially the weakest, did not rank
as equals; among the most highly civilised nations of antiquity, the
Greeks and Romans, infanticide and exposure flourished--indeed, as
Lecky points out,[5] by the ideal legislations of Plato and Aristotle,
and by the actual legislations of Lycurgus and Solon, infanticide was
positively enjoined. Nothing can be more significant than to find in
the _Self-Tormentor_ of Terence the very character who expresses the
noble sentiment, "I am a man, and deem nothing that is human alien from
me," giving instructions that if the child that is to be born to him
should be a girl, it is to be put to death. The public opinion of an
enlightened and cultured paganism countenanced such deeds without
reproach; it was Christianity, or rather He who said, "Suffer the
little children to come unto Me," that put a stop to these barbarities.
The point which we wish to establish is this: that while "evolutional
ethics" and natural {183} sanctions will carry us a certain way, they
will certainly not carry us all the way; indeed, the moment we come to
the higher reaches of character, these sanctions are seen to be quite
inadequate. Why, _e.g._, should the conviction be born in man, and
become a governing conviction, that he must under no circumstances
commit a certain act, though to do so would be easy and advantageous,
and detection not to be feared? Why should the moral consciousness of
the higher races accept the principle which places self-sacrifice above
self-seeking? There is only one explanation for this paradoxical
phenomenon: it is that, as men rise in the moral scale, there dawns on
them the sense of a law that is not of this world, an _Ought-to-be_,
which speaks with a strange authority, and will not be denied; and when
this authority is properly interpreted, it reveals a Righteous and
Sovereign Will to which we owe unconditional obedience.
And here we may quote in support some significant words of Mr.
Salter's--words whose full significance, we venture to think, that able
and distinguished writer hardly realised when he penned them: "_The
whole meaning of ethics is in the sense of an invisible authority; to
bow to custom, to public opinion or to law, is moral idolatry._" [6]
"Whatever else I may doubt about, I cannot doubt the law of duty--that
there is a right and a wrong; that the {184} right obliges me, that I
ought to do it. . . . The law is over all, though it were never
obeyed. . . . Ethics is nothing but the response which man and man
make to the higher order of things. . . . Ecstasy is the grace heaven
sets upon the moment in which the soul weds itself to the perfect
good." [7] Let us see what is implied in these truly remarkable
statements. The real sanctions of moral conduct are not the sanctions
of expediency or force, but are derived from a higher law, an invisible
authority; the finest morality is man's free response to a higher
order. But, we ask, what is this higher order, this note of command,
but the expression of a higher Will? And how can there be a higher
Will without a Higher Personality, a God who impresses His law upon us
and makes us aspire after the ideal good? Mr. Salter explicitly denies
that the moral virtues come "from below, from prudence, from the sense
of decency, from longsighted selfishness; they who think so," he
declares, in a fine burst, "never breathed the climate of morality."
[8] But if not from below, they must come from above; and this "above"
really must be something more than an atmospheric conception. Will Mr.
Salter help us to determine its nature more clearly? He says, "The
Mighty Power, hid from our gaze by the thin screen of nature and of
nature's laws . . . is {185} with our struggles after a perfect right"
[9]; _but if this Mighty Power_, which is not so much expressed as
hidden by nature's laws--which therefore transcends nature--_is in the
highest sense moral, how can it be less than personal_? It is this
Power which, according to our author, gives us the vision of the ideal,
this Power which sets the mark of its approval upon our surrender to
its behests, this Power which manifests its character in doing justice
upon individuals and nations alike, weeding out the selfish, the
wanton, the luxurious, and preserving the pure and upright; may we not
ask what reason there is for withholding from that Power the one
adequate name of God?[10]
Let us pursue and emphasise this thought a little further. Already we
have seen that--_teste_ Mr. Salter--the highest ethics require our
belief in a mighty, transcendent and benevolent Power; that admission
means nothing less than the surrender of naturalism {186} in morals--it
is an acknowledgment that ultimately a true ethic involves and
presupposes a metaphysic. Indeed, when Mr. Salter speaks of ethical
religion, the same implication is there. Religion signifies a living
and personal relationship between the worshipper and the object of his
worship: we can stand in such a relationship to a living, personal God,
in harmony with whose will alone we are able to find our true
happiness; we cannot stand in such a relationship to an impersonal
power or a universal order. Mr. Salter speaks of man "bending hushed
and subdued, as he thinks of those mighty laws on which the health and
safety of the race depends," and calls that a religion; we submit that
so far as such an emotion is religious, it means that behind those
mighty laws there stands a mighty Lawgiver, whom we worship and seek to
obey because He is good. We can keep a law, we can conform to it so as
to escape hurt, but we cannot worship it except when we conceive of it
as the manifestation of a good Will; neither can we derive moral
stimulus from an abstract ideal. It is when the ideal speaks in us and
to us as the behest of the Living God--above all, when it stands before
us incarnated, made actual in the Son of God--that it becomes dynamic,
drawing and uplifting and transforming men into the Divine likeness.
We are not greatly helped by such a statement as that the bare idea of
morality, {187} quite apart from faith in God, "may be the supreme
passion to a man"; we have to deal with things as they are, and in
actual life we well know that the most commonplace presentation of the
Gospel has been more of a force in the making of character and as an
inspiration to righteousness than the most refined philosophical
Ethicism.
And now let us show, from yet another point of view, as we think may be
done quite simply and cogently, that it is impossible rationally to get
away from the theistic position if we are in earnest about morality,
viewed as the pursuit of the ideal. In order to engage in such a
pursuit, we must in the first place be free agents, able to choose
between conflicting motives and to follow the right. If our actions
are necessitated, then to speak of our "pursuing" this or that course,
choosing and rejecting, is of course a mere contradiction in terms.
But if the universe, including ourselves, is simply the resultant
outcome of the interaction of unconscious mechanical forces, freewill
is an absolute illusion, and Determinism the only true theory; and
again, if Determinism is true, we cannot choose, we cannot strive--in a
word, we cannot help being what we are. Hence, if morality in any
intelligible sense is to exist at all, we must be free; and only a
personal and transcendent God could have conferred on us the faculty of
freewill.
{188}
We pass on to one or two final considerations. One of our ethicists,
who genially informs us that "theology is discredited . . . and the
world is indifferent to what the Church either thinks or says," writes
as follows: "The Ethical Movement believes that the good life has an
imperative claim upon us because of its supreme worth for humanity."
[11] As against this statement we have no hesitation in affirming that
only religion, in the accepted sense of the term, can give us the
absolute conviction of the absolute supremacy of moral claims--the
assurance that it were better to suffer, to hunger, to be despised and
rejected of men, to die on a cross, than to violate one of these.
Grant that the good life is of supreme worth for humanity; yet
supposing a man is sorely tempted to obtain some immense advantage or
to gratify some consuming passion, at the cost of injuring someone
else--suppose he can do so with safety and success--why should he
prefer humanity's interests to his own? Why, indeed? We make bold to
say that no one in the throes of conflict between duty and desire, at
the moment of moral crisis, has ever been influenced by the worth of
his action for humanity. The ultimate sanction of right conduct must
be drawn from a Source beyond humanity, which enjoins the right at all
costs--from Him who is humanity's Maker and Ruler.
{189}
And the same fact is borne witness to by the experience which waits
upon wilful wrong-doing, by the sense of sin. Such an emotion can
never be inspired by an impersonal order with which we have come into
conflict, but only by a personal Will against which we are conscious of
having offended. The man who disregards the law of gravitation and
falls from a ladder, experiences one kind of painful sensation; but the
man who disregards the law of righteousness and falls into sin,
experiences quite a different kind of painful sensation--the sensation,
not of self-pity, but of self-accusation and remorse, because it is
God's holiness against which he has transgressed; and that feeling
finds utterance age after age in the agonised cry, "Against Thee, Thee
only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight."
The truth is, those who claim to set up morality as a religion, while
declaring "the personal Deity of theology illusory," are engaged in an
impossible task; and it is because of the inherent hopelessness of
their enterprise that we must raise our voice in warning to any who may
be tempted to put faith in their fair promises. The ethicist's
intentions are admirable; but he sets about their realisation in a
manner which dooms him and them to failure. Let us have practice
without theory, he says, the superstructure without the foundation, the
fruit without the root, works without the {190} faith which produces
works: and such being the nature of his undertaking, he fares
accordingly, a spectacle of ineffectual goodness, wondering why the
world declines to listen to his so reasonable gospel. But the world
continues to cling to an ultra-rational Gospel because it is
instinctively aware that morality rests upon ultra-rational sanctions.
Ethicism may borrow from Christianity the doctrine of the brotherhood
of man, but it has no explanation to give of the basis supporting that
axiom--why we ought to regard each human being as having certain
indefeasible claims upon us, so that we may not treat him as a mere
means subserving our ends. That position can never be defended on
purely natural grounds; in the last analysis the brotherhood of man has
a right to be accepted as true only by those who believe in the
Fatherhood of God.
In conclusion, as all true morality pre-supposes religion, so it is
only religion which can supply the strongest incentive and
encouragement to the good life; for it is religion alone which has the
promise that the Good shall and must prevail, that the stars in their
courses are fighting on the side of right and truth, and that it shall
be well or ill with us according as we range ourselves on that side or
in opposition to it. Take away the idea of a God whose will is that
righteousness shall triumph, that life shall be lord of death, and
{191} love victorious over all, and we have no guarantee but that all
the efforts and sacrifices of martyr and reformer may be in vain, and
the hope of the world a delusion. It is only the believer who can
never despair, who knows that his work will endure and enrich the
world--that there will be no collapse or final disarray, that the world
is no blot nor blank, but means intensely and means good. It is that
faith which makes endeavour and surrender worth while; that faith--the
assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen--which
alone gives us a right to sing Felix Adler's noble hymn:--
And the work that we have builded,
Oft with bleeding hands and tears,
Oft in error, oft in anguish,
Will not perish with our years,
It will rise and shine transfigured
In the final reign of light;
It will pass into the splendours
Of the City of the Light.
For the assurance which breathes in these lines rests on a previous,
deeper assurance: it is that which the Christian expresses in the
words, "_If God be for us, who is against us?_"
[1] _Ethical Religion_, p. 48.
[2] _Ibid_, p. 39.
[3] See _A Few Points about Ethical Societies_, a tract issued by the
Union of Ethical Societies.
[4] _Ethical Religion_, pp. 81, 84, 86, 89; for a concise treatment of
this subject the reader may be referred to the present writer's _Jesus
or Christ_? chapter iv.
[5] _History of European Morals_, ii., p. 26.
[6] _Op. cit._, p. 38.
[7] _Ibid._ pp. 16-18.
[8] _Op. cit._, p. 17.
[9] _Ibid._, p. 57.
[10] "If for the word 'God' you read the 'universal life,'" writes the
Rev. R. J. Campbell, "you have at once gained the ear of every
high-minded thinking man to whom you appeal." (_The Christian
Commonwealth_, April 14th, 1909.) Are we, then, to understand that if
we want to appeal to high-minded thinking men, we must drop the term
"God" and substitute for it, as being less offensive to these higher
thinkers, some non-committal phrase like "universal life?" We say
quite frankly that we are not prepared to pay such a price for making
such a successful appeal; for the "universal life"--just because it is
universal and all-embracing--is no more "good" than "bad"--it has no
moral character, and hence can exercise no moral authority, nor
generate any moral enthusiasm.
[11] _What the Ethical Movement is_, by Harry Snell.
{192}