speculation, under a new heaven and a new earth, disembarrassed of
a load of selfish cares and troubles.... Hence it followed that
the conceptions of a God with any human attributes whatever, of
a principle or practice of design, of an administration of the
affairs of the world by the principles of human morals, must be mere
visions, necessary and useful in their day, but not philosophically
or permanently true.... The reality that philosophy founded upon
science is the one thing needful, the source and the vital principle
of all morality and all peace to individuals and good-will among men,
had become the crown of my experience and the joy of my life.... My
comrade (Mr. Atkinson) and I were both pioneers of truth. We both care
for our kind, and we could not see them suffering as we had suffered
without imparting to them our consolation and our joy. Having found,
as my friend said, a spring in the desert, should we see the multitude
wandering in desolation, and not show them our refreshment?... _Then_
(in younger days) I believed in a Protector, who ordered my work and
would sustain me under it; and, however I may now despise that sort
of support, I had it then, and have none of that sort now. I have all
that I want, ... and I would not exchange my present views, imperfect
and doubtful as they are,--I had better say I would not exchange my
freedom from old superstition,--if I were to be burned at the stake
next month, for all the peace and quiet of Orthodoxy. Nor would I
for my exemption give up the blessing of the power of appeal to
thoughtful minds.... When I experienced the still new joy of feeling
myself to be a portion of the universe, resting on the security of
its everlasting laws, certain that its Cause was wholly out of the
sphere of human attributes, and that the special destiny of my race is
infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of “divine
moral government,” how could it matter to me that the adherents of a
decaying mythology were still clinging to their Man-God?... Under this
close experience (of illness), I find death in prospect the simplest
thing in the world,--a thing not to be feared or regretted or to get
excited about in any way. I attribute this very much to the nature of
my views of death.... Now, the release is an inexpressible comfort. I
see that the dying naturally and regularly, unless disturbed, desire
and sink into death as into sleep.... I feel no solicitude about a
parting which will bring no pain.... Under the eternal laws of the
universe I came into being, and under them I have lived a life so full
that its fulness is equivalent to length: thus there is much in my
life that I am glad to have enjoyed, and much that generates a mood
of contentment at its close. Besides that, I never dream of wishing
that anything were otherwise than as it is; and I am frankly satisfied
to have done with life. I have had a noble share of it, and I desire
no more. I neither wish to live longer here nor to find life again
elsewhere. It seems to me simply absurd to expect it.[9]
It is no part of the purpose of this article to discuss the _truth_
of the doctrine that there is no God, and that death terminates human
consciousness. Nor yet do I question whether a high sense of loyalty
to what is understood to be truth may not make it appear to any one
holding such doctrines that he is under the obligation to publish them
frankly to the world. Many a man who is an Atheist as regards God holds
(what many believers in Him lack) a noble faith in Truth _as_ Truth,
a firm conviction that nothing can be better than Truth, and that, as
Carlyle said, “To nothing but error can any truth be dangerous.” It is
not, then, the holding of such views as those above quoted, nor yet
their frank publication and defence, wherewith we are now concerned;
but with the _tone of exultation_ with which they are announced, the
disregard and contempt which are manifested for the dearest hopes, the
purest aspirations, of the great mass of mankind.
Magnanimity has two phases. We may be magnanimous on our own
account,--brave, calm, and self-reliant in the face of things which
appall feebler souls. Of this sort of personal magnanimity, this
remarkable woman has given a very fine example. Here are the words she
wrote twenty years after the foregoing pages, in her last letter to her
friend:
I cannot think of any future as at all probable except the
annihilation from which some people recoil with so much horror....
For my part, I have no objection to such an extinction. I well
remember the passion wherewith W. E. Forster said to me, “I had
rather be damned than annihilated.”... I have no wish for any further
experience, nor have I any fear of it.[10]...
These words have in them a calmness, simplicity, and courage which
demand our honor, written as they were by an aged woman (as she herself
describes them a few lines further) “under the clear knowledge of
death being so near at hand.” The old vulgar theory, so frequently
harped upon in the last generation, that the right place to judge
a man’s religious views is his death-bed, and that, while orthodox
believers alone can die bravely, sceptics must needs expire in anguish
and alarm, with “a certain fearful looking-for of judgment,” has
been thoroughly exploded by the now numberless instances of perfect
courage exhibited by dying men and women who had long before abandoned
the hopes of a happy futurity which revealed or natural religion has
to offer. Harriet Martineau’s serene self-resignation into eternal
nothingness ought, if any further evidence were wanting, to suffice
to set the matter finally at rest; and it may be cited very properly
by disbelievers in immortality, as exhibiting what they deem to be
the fitting and dignified tone of a philosophical mind drawing near
to the horizon beneath which it will presently disappear forever. No
one can help respecting courage, under whatever form or circumstances
it is manifested; and, if a man think that he is on the verge of
annihilation, it is truly dignified and praiseworthy to approach it
with unflinching eye and unblenched cheek. This is _so far as the
individual is concerned_. But is there not another and larger side of
the question, which the very noblest man _ought_ to feel as awful and
heart-rending,--nay, must feel to be so, in proportion to his nobleness
and his power to extend his view beyond his own petty personality?
True magnanimity, it seems to me, must look far outside of a man’s
own lot, of his past share of life’s feast, and his readiness now
to rise from it satisfied, and must take a wide survey of the lives
(so far as they can be known or guessed) of all other men,--of the
poverty-stricken, the savage, the ignorant, the diseased, the enslaved,
the sin-degraded,--and attain the conclusion that for _these_ also, as
well as for himself, life on earth has been sufficient good, and none
other need be asked or desired before he can complacently speak of the
_joy_ of abandoning faith in God and immortality. “I have had a noble
share of life, and I desire no more,” is an expression of personal
sentiment which may or may not be right and fitting on the assumed
hypothesis. But to join to such expression of individual contentment no
word of regret for the closing in of all hope to the suffering millions
of our race who have _not_ had “noble” shares of life, and who do, with
yearning hunger, desire more than has ever fallen to their lot,--this
is, as it seems to me, the reverse of magnanimity. This is littleness
and selfishness almost as bad as that of the bigots whom these Atheists
abhor, who rejoice to expect heaven for themselves, while leaving
thousands of their brethren to perdition. It might be pardonable in
one brought up to believe in hell, and who hurriedly leaped to the
doctrine of annihilation from that intolerable yoke, and cried, “Let
us all perish together rather than that hideous doom overtake a single
creature!” Such a choice would be generous and worthy. But when a woman
who probably never, at any period of her life, believed in the eternal
perdition of a soul, proclaims herself enraptured at the joy of finding
out that there is neither a God to protect the weak, nor, finally, any
holiness or happiness beyond the grave,--then, I repeat, this is _not_
magnanimity, but gigantic selfishness.
Let us think a little what it would signify to mankind to give up God
and heaven,--that is, the _belief_ in God and heaven; for--God be
praised!--it rests with no philosophic school to put out the sun or
prevent the morning from breaking, but only to _blind our eyes to them_.
Dr. James Martineau once made in a sermon the startling remark that,
“if it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but
little excitement in the streets of Berlin or Paris.” The observation
was doubtless true; for, of _direct_ thought of God, the streets
of great cities are probably the emptiest of any places wherein
mortals may be found. But there is an enormous share of human ideas
and feelings not directly or consciously turned toward God, yet
nevertheless colored by the belief that such a Being exists. Perhaps it
would be more proper to say that in Christendom every idea and every
feeling have imperceptibly been built up on the theory that there is a
God. We see everything _with Him for a background_. Inanimate nature
and the lower animals, human history and society, poetry, literature,
science, and art,--every one of them has its religious aspect, which
can only be excluded by a mental _tour de force_. Take inanimate
nature, for example,--the region where it seems easiest to sever
the links of habitual thought, and which the doctrine of Evolution
(according to some of its teachers) has already withdrawn from the
domain of a Creative Power. We all love this nature; and our hearts
are moved to their depths by sympathy with it when we gaze round of
a summer morning upon the woods and hills and waters, or, later in
the year, upon the “happy autumn fields” of ripened corn, or, on a
winter’s night, up into the solemn host of stars. But is it merely the
glittering “patines of bright gold,” or fields of yellow wheat, or the
block of wood and rock which form the forest or the mountain, which
awaken in us such mysterious emotion? Are we not dimly worshipping the
soul of nature through earth and sky,--the spirit wherewith our spirits
are in ineffable harmony, and of which all the loveliness we behold is
but the shadow?
Let some Agnostic disenchanter come to us at such an hour and tell us
that, though it takes a man of genius to depict worthily on canvas
a corner of this wide field of loveliness, yet that the whole great
original had no Painter, no Designer; that the mountains had no
Architect, the well-balanced stars no supreme Geometer, but that it
all came about as we behold it through the action of forces, unguided
by any mind, undirected by any Will,--and what revulsion shall we not
experience? Shall we not feel like a man enamoured of a beautiful woman
whom he has believed to be good and wise and tender, but, when he comes
at last to look close into her face, he finds her to be a soulless
idiot, from whose stony and meaningless gaze he turns shuddering away?
Science, again, is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of
truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God.[11] In every
department of human thought, in short, something--and that something
the most beautiful in it--must be lost, some sacred spell must be
broken, if we are to think of it as divested from the deeper sense
which religion has (all unconsciously to ourselves) given to it,--the
thread of purpose running through; the understood promise of justice;
the sympathy of an unseen, all-beholding Spectator.
In the same way, all human relationships will be stripped of the
majestic mantle under which they have been sheltered. The idea of the
common Fatherhood of God, which Paganism in its best days had begun
to teach, and which Christ’s lessons have made the familiar thought
of every European child, has put a meaning into the phrase of human
brotherhood, which it is much to be doubted if the warmest “Enthusiasts
of Humanity” would, without such preliminary training, have been able
to give to it. The idea (poorly as it has been hitherto recognized)
that the most degraded of mankind, those from whom we naturally turn in
disgust, have yet the same Creator and the same Judge as ourselves,
has, beyond question, an indirect influence of no small force over
all our sentiments concerning them. The same reflection has even at
last begun to exercise a perceptible influence over our conduct to the
brutes. Christians and Theists of every shade may be found impressed
with the sense that religion demands the humane treatment of all
sentient creatures; and this, whether they take the view of Cardinal
Manning, that, “if I owe no moral duties to the lower animals, I owe
all the moral duties that are conceivable to the Creator of those
animals,--humanity, mercy, and care for them,” or take the simple
Theist stand-point, that, as we love Him, so we naturally look with
sympathy and tenderness on everything He has made. Of course, this
motive of humanity to brutes disappears with the belief in God; and,
accordingly, we find, with quite logical fitness, that, while the
opposition to brute torture is maintained by men of every varied shade
of religion, the majority of the chief vivisectors of Europe are
professed Materialists. Vivisection is the logical outcome of Atheism
as regards the brutes; and M. Paul Bert and Carl Vogt are only the most
candid examples of men who have carried it out.
But it is in the region of the personal virtues--purity, truth,
temperance, contentment--that the loss of the belief in God will be
most disastrous. I am far from maintaining that, putting religion
wholly out of sight, there are not motives of a purely ethical kind
left which _ought_ to make men practise the highest inward virtue. But
I think it needs only a slight knowledge of human nature to perceive
that the shutting up of the window of the soul, through which an awful
and most holy Spectator has hitherto been believed to gaze into all its
secrets, must leave a great deal in darkness which has been till now
illumined with a sin-exposing light. It takes much for a man to say,
like the author of _In Memoriam_,--
“The _dead_ shall look me through and through.”
The idea of any eye perceiving all that is going on in the recesses of
the mind,--the double motives, the unfaithfulnesses, the vanities, the
memories of old shameful errors,--this is hard enough. But the belief
that such introspection is always taking place, and by the Holiest
of all beings, is undoubtedly a sort of purification such as no mere
solitary process of self-examination can resemble. Even a warm human
friendship in youth brings with it always a burst of self-knowledge. We
see ourselves quite freshly in our friend’s view of us. But a thousand
times greater inevitably is the self-revelation which comes with the
realized presence of God in the soul, the flood of sunshine which
discloses all the motes which fill the atmosphere of our thoughts. Now,
though it is only spiritually-minded men who know this experience in
its full intensity, yet every man who believes in God has gleams of it
at intervals through life which are never afterward quite forgotten.
But, more (and this is a point which concerns the whole Theistic moral
argument most importantly), the supreme experience of spiritual men is
_filtered down_ through all grades of minds by books and intercourse.
The lofty standard of purity which has been revealed to them is
partially exhibited by their words and example, and forms a kind of
high-water mark for lesser souls. It is an immense gain, even to very
poor sinners, that there should be a few rich saints; and every man who
has attained a lofty conception of holiness helps to make all the world
around him conscious of its unholiness. He is a mirror in a dark place:
the ray of light which has fallen on him dispels somewhat of the gloom
around.
Thus, if the belief in God be lost to humanity, we shall lose not only
the direct, the incalculable effects on individual souls of the belief
in a divine Searcher of Hearts, but also the indirect and universal
uplifting influence on society of the presence of men who have
experienced such effects, and formed their moral standard accordingly.
Is it too much to augur that the result will be a depreciation of the
common ideal standard, and a consequently still further depression of
the practical level of personal virtue?
What is left, when religion is gone, to give to the personal virtues
of purity (of _thought_ as well as of act), of truth, temperance, and
contentment, the high status they ought to hold? These virtues, in the
history of the moral development of mankind, are always the last to
be recognized. In the earlier ages of morality, nobody asks for more
than negative merits,--_not_ to murder or rob or deal treacherously.
Then comes the great step, when the rabbinical precept, “Thou shalt
_not_ do to another what thou wouldest not he should do to thee,” is
exchanged for the positive Christian law, _Do_ to another what thou
wouldest he should do to thee. But only very slowly, above and beyond
all social duties, the principle, “Be perfect, as thy Father in heaven
is perfect,” has dawned on mankind as the aim of life; and how little
it is yet the practical rule of conduct there is no need to tell. Let
us but let slip our faith in the perfect Father in heaven, and will it
not sink again by degrees into oblivion? We shall hear a great deal,
doubtless (for a time, at all events), of the duty of “laboring for
the cause of humanity,” and be encouraged by promises of “posthumous
activity.” But where are the motives for personal and secret virtue
to come from,--that inward virtue without which even warm social
benevolence soon becomes tainted? It _must_, it would seem, fall more
and more into the background. There is, theoretically, no more reason
for placing it forward: there is no more any “end of creation” in
contemplation, to which the virtue of each soul, to be wrought out by
its own struggles, must contribute its quotum. _The intrinsic moral
character of each soul_ will no longer be deemed the concern of any
being except the man himself, but only what _each is able to achieve
in the way of contributing to the welfare of other people_. While the
lesson of the higher ethics has been, “It is more important to _be_
good than to _do_ good,” that of the new ethics must inevitably be,
“It is very important what you _do_: it is of the smallest possible
consequence what you _are_ except in so far as your neighbors may know
it and be affected thereby.”
In another way, also, I think morality would be affected enormously,
though still indirectly, by the downfall of religion. Many of my
readers will recall a very able article on Atheism in the _National
Review_ for January, 1856, by Mr. R. H. Hutton, in which it was
maintained that “Atheism has no language by which it can express
the infinite nature of moral distinctions.... It is not, as has
been falsely said, that right and wrong take their distinction from
measures of duration, but that faith in infinite personal life, and in
communion with or separate from infinite good, is the only articulate
utterance which our conscience can find for its sense of the absolutely
boundless significance it sees in every moral choice.” Take away this
_expression_ of the infinite nature of moral distinctions, and the
_sense_ of it will very rapidly dwindle away.
And, after all, can it be said in the same sense, under an Atheistic
as under a Theistic creed, that moral distinctions _are_ “infinitely”
significant? Is there any “infinite” left for us to talk about, when we
have abolished God and immortality? Some few thousands of years ago,
on the Atheistic hypothesis, when man was just emerging from apehood,
there was no Being anywhere who distinguished right from wrong;[12] and
some few thousand years to come, when the final glacial period sets
in, there will be nobody left to know anything about it. There is no
Being now in whom righteousness is impersonated, nor any world to come
wherein the injustices of this will be rectified. From the eternal and
immutable law of the universe, the ἄγραπτα κᾀσφαλῆ θεῶν νόμιμα, which
Sophocles held it to be, the moral law has sunk to a mere “Rule of
Thumb,” whereby certain ephemeral creatures on our small planet find
it most beneficial, on the whole, to regulate their behavior. Is it
in the nature of things to pay to such a rule the sort of obedience
and reverence we have paid to the divine law? And if, with the very
highest sanctions which can be conceived, that law has but too often
failed to secure our obedience against the temptations of selfishness
and passion, does anybody expect that, when it is divested of all those
sanctions, it will prevail even so far as it has done hitherto?
These are some of the indirect ways in which mankind must lose beauty
and truth and goodness, as it loses faith in God and immortality. But
the direct losses inevitably to follow are, if possible, graver still.
The course of the moral life, after it has been commenced in earnest,
probably passes through the same two great phases in almost every
man who lives long enough. At first, duty is a hard effort and _all_
effort. A strong hand seems to be laid on the man, urging him up a
toilsome road. Every evil tendency of his nature has to be separately
fought with and trampled down, every act of self-sacrifice for others
to be performed with exertion of his will. The man labors heroically
under his stern sense of duty, taking consolation in it _as_ duty, but
still looking rather to fulfil _his_ obligation than desirous that the
end of each task should be accomplished. If he die at this stage, it
is in some sense a release. He has discharged his duty as a soldier,
and is glad to lay down his arms. If he be a religious man, he hopes to
hear it said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant! enter thou
into the joy of thy Lord.”
But if a man live many years, striving in earnest, however failingly,
to do his duty, there comes by degrees a change in his condition. Old
temptations lie down; and, if no new ones arise to give him trouble,
the friction of the inner life diminishes so sensibly that he is apt to
be alarmed lest he be growing indifferent. As to his positive duties,
those which he has been fulfilling merely because he felt it laid upon
him to undertake them, by degrees they acquire interest for him for
their own sake. He is intensely anxious for the success of his labors,
and no longer measures his efforts by what may be considered his moral
obligations. He _wants_ such and such aged or suffering persons to
be relieved, such sinners to be reclaimed, such children trained to
virtue, such truths published, such wrongs redressed, such useful laws
or reforms or discoveries introduced. There is no need now for him to
spur himself by reflections that it is his duty to work for these ends:
the difficulty with him now lies to moderate his work with a view to
the preservation of health and strength. It would be cruelty to tell
him his task has been honorably fulfilled, though the object of it has
failed. He would cry, “Let me be accounted a faithless servant, but let
the work be accomplished by another, and I shall be content.” If he die
_now_, he takes very little comfort from thinking he has discharged his
duty. The work is not finished, and will miss his hand. He says, as
Theodore Parker said to me on his death-bed: “I am not afraid to die,
but I wish I might carry on my work. I have only half used the powers
God gave me.”
Now, in all this history of the moral life, it appears that no
ostensible difference need exist between the sentiments of an Atheist
and a Theist, _provided we can carry the Atheist safely to the second
stage of progress_. Once there, it is evident that no change in his
opinions about God or loss of hope of heaven will practically affect
his conduct. The habits of self-control whereby he has ruled his
passions will not be lost, the interest he has taken in unselfish
objects will not dwindle. He will go on to the end, laboring for the
good of his kind, and regret his own death mainly because it will
stop those labors. But how are ordinary men, of no specially elevated
moral fibre, to be carried up to that turning-point where Law is
superseded by love? I am far from thinking that men may not and do
not often begin their self-reformation when they are (so far as their
own consciousness goes) quite alienated from God or disbelieving his
existence. I know, on the contrary, that it is no uncommon experience
that this should be so. But, in the ordinary history of the soul, the
resolute effort to obey conscience after a very little time brings
with it a sense, first dim, then shining more to the perfect day,
that there _is_ (as Mr. Matthew Arnold says) “a Power not ourselves
which makes for righteousness”; or, in plainer revelation, that God
watches and helps the soul which strives to do right. Henceforth, the
mechanical moral effort is aided by the electric force of religion,
burning away the dross of sin in the fire of a divine Presence, and
making self-sacrifice sweet as an offering of love. But if this normal
process, whereby morality leads up to religion and becomes thereby
aided through all future effort, is to be rigidly prohibited by
reason, if we are to starve out the religious sentiment as a passion
not to be indulged by a rational being, then, I ask, how many are the
men and women who, after their first good resolutions, will persist in
the course of arduous moral effort long enough to reach that stage when
duty becomes comparatively easy? Where are the aids to come from to
keep them from self-indulgence? We have seen that the moral law itself
is to be represented to them as merely an hereditary set of the brain;
that they are not to dream there is any Holy Eye looking at them, any
strong Hand ready to aid their feeble steps, any Infinite Love drawing
them to itself, any Life beyond the grave where the imperfect virtue of
earth shall grow and blossom in eternal beauty. All these ideas are to
be resolutely dismissed. The habit of prayer (irreparable, immeasurable
loss) is to be discarded. Nothing is to be left save only the one
motive of the Enthusiasm of Humanity, which is to replace God and
conscience and heaven. Let me speak out concerning this much-boasted
modern sentiment.