this subject, and saying: “Do you ask why should you love your
neighbor? _Because you cannot help it!_” Now, as I listened to that
genuine philanthropist’s utterance, my heart smote me, and I said to
myself: “But I _could_ help it, and only too easily! It comes to him
spontaneously, I have no doubt, to love his neighbors; but I have been
trying to do it for many years, and have very imperfectly succeeded.
Instead of _beginning_ with love, and going on to duty toward them
as the result of love, I have had to begin with duty, and, only with
many a self-reproach for hardness of spirit, learned at last to feel
love--for some of them!”
I do not think my experience is exceptional. I think the people who
can and do love spontaneously that terribly large section of our
race who are commonplace, narrow-minded, and small of heart, are the
exceptions, and that, if we are to have no benevolence except from
born philanthropists like the good man I have named, we shall see very
little in future of the Enthusiasm of Humanity.
No! It takes, for most of us, all the help to loving our brother
which comes from believing that we have a common Father and a common
home,--all the help which comes to the heart in answer to the prayer
that God would melt its stoniness, and make it blossom into tenderness
and sympathy,--to enable us to attain the love which is not the
_spring_ of social duty, but its _climax_,--the “fulfilling of the law.”
I honestly think that the process of making Atheists, _trained as
such_, into philanthropists, will be but rarely achieved. And I venture
to propound the question to those who point to admirable living
examples of Atheistic or Comtist philanthropy,--How many of these have
passed through the earlier stage of morality _as believers in God_,
and with all the aid which prayer and faith and hope could give them?
That they _remain_ actively benevolent, having advanced so far, is (as
I have shown above) readily to be anticipated. But will their children
stand where they stand now? We are yet obeying the great impetus of
religion, and running along the rails laid down by our forefathers.
Shall we continue in the same course when that impetus has stopped, and
we have left the rails altogether? I fear me not.
In brief, I think the outlook of Atheism, as a _moral educator_, as
black as need be. Viewed with the utmost candor, and admitting all the
excellence of many of its disciples, I think Atheism must deduct from
morality the priceless training to reverence afforded by religion;
the illuminating consciousness of an unseen Searcher of hearts; the
invigorating confidence in an Almighty Helper; the vivifying influence
of divine love; and, finally, the immeasurable, inestimable benefits
derivable from that practice of prayer which is God’s own education of
the soul.
But, whatever may be its results as a system of moral training,
Atheism, in its ultimate aspect, must be, to every religious man and
woman who is driven to adopt it in later life, the setting of the
sun which has warmed and brightened existence. We may _live_ in the
twilight; but that which gave to prosperity its joy, to grief its
comfort, to duty its delight, to love its sweetness, to solitude its
charm, to all life its meaning and purpose, and to death its perfect
consolation and support, is lost forever. There are no words to tell
what that loss must be,--worst of all to those who are least conscious
of it, and who have therefore lost with their faith in God those
spiritual faculties in the exercise of which man has his higher being,
and of which the pains are better worth than all the pleasures of earth.
Atheism involves a far _worse_ loss to humanity than the exclusion of
the belief in a Life after Death; but we can form no fair estimate of
the deduction which our complacent Agnostics are prepared to make from
the sum of human virtue and happiness, if we do not thoroughly realize
what it is they are talking of when they tell us so cheerfully to
abandon the hope of Immortality, as well as the belief in God, and that
they are quite satisfied to do both.
As far as each individual is personally concerned, such Hope is of
course a very variable sentiment. There are those who say (as Miss
Martineau mentions Mr. W. E. Forster saying to her), “I would rather
be damned than annihilated.” And there are others who say, as she does
herself, “I have had a very noble share of life, and I do not ask
any more.” With the latter feeling _per se_, no one has a right to
quarrel. To many, no doubt, especially persons of feeble bodily health
or overstrained conscientiousness, the notion of final repose is more
grateful than that of an immortality of activity. They feel in our day,
as it would seem almost everybody did in more trying times, that it was
the “rest which remaineth for the people of God,” beyond the storms
of the world,--the “everlasting beds of rest” on which the weary may
lie,--rather than our more modern notion of a Heaven of Progress, to
which they aspire. There are Buddhists of the West as of the East, to
whom, by some natural or acquired habit of mind, existence itself seems
a burden; and they extend the _taedium vitae_ which they feel here by
anticipation to any future state to which they could be transferred.
With such persons as these, as I have just said, we have no claim
to contend, even though we may think, with Tennyson, that, if they
knew themselves better, they would recognize that, even in uttermost
lassitude,
“’Tis _life_ of which our veins are scant;
O Life, not Death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller, _that_ we want.”
The dreams of men as to what they desire beyond the grave are
infinitely varied, from Nirvana to Valhalla; and nothing is to be said,
so far as he himself is concerned, respecting a man who wishes it to be
written on his tombstone that he
“From Nature’s temperate feast rose satisfied,
Thanked Heaven that he had lived and that he died,”
except this,--that his choice of eternal sleep betrays the fact _that
there is no one in this world or the next whom he loves well enough
to wish to be awakened to meet him again_. Of course, a man may have
abundance of kindly and dutiful sentiments for his relatives and
friends, and yet (thinking they will do well enough without him) be
satisfied to quit them for ever. But I cannot believe that any one
who has ever lost the object of the higher and more absorbing human
affection, or who leaves behind him in dying one united to him by such
transcendent love, can fail passionately to desire immortality. He may
_resign_ himself through philosophy or religion (if his religion take
the strange and rare form of belief in God and disbelief in a life to
come) to see his beloved one no more. But not to _desire_ to meet,
at any cost of unwelcome ages of life, the being we profess to love
supremely, seems to be a contradiction in terms. Were there to loom
before us worlds to climb, and centuries of labor, we would surely
thankfully go through them all to reach the hour when we shall say,
“Soul of my soul, I shall meet thee again!
And with God be the rest.”
But because a loveless man may, without blame, be content to let death
drop a final curtain on his consciousness, it is quite another matter
for him to be equally placidly resigned to the extinction of the hopes
of others, who have had no such feast of life as he, or who yearn for
the renewal of affection hereafter. As I have elsewhere attempted to
show, in a little parable, such resignation _on behalf of other people_
is very much like that of Dives,[13] who, having fared sumptuously,
should be contented to let Lazarus starve.
Nor is it only the _comfort_ of expecting to see our beloved ones again
which we shall lose with the hope of a future life. I am persuaded
that a great deal of the higher part of love itself will fade out of
human existence altogether, if that hope be generally abandoned. Every
one knows how friendship and marriage are hallowed by the thought of
their perpetuity even in this world, and how a union is debased if
it be, consciously to those who make it, temporary and transitory.
Hitherto, we have loved one another _as immortal beings_, as creatures
whose affections belonged to the exalted order of eternal things. When
that ennobling and sanctifying element evaporates, when Love, like
everything else, is reduced to a question of days and months and years,
will it not undergo somewhat of the degradation which now belongs to
the brief contracts of passion? Even those who might still be able to
feel all the holiness of love would, when they learned it was destined
to end in the agony of eternal separation, check themselves from
indulging a sentiment leading up inevitably to such a termination, just
as a man would turn from a path ending in a precipice.
Thus, I believe, the affections must irretrievably suffer from the
loss of the hope of immortality. So must, in a measure, the intellect
and the imagination, driven from the wider expanse back on that poor
fleshly life which is to be the end-all of man, and which must be
destined to assume an importance it has never possessed since our
race emerged from its brute and barbarian origin. Nor would our moral
life fail to suffer also very grievously, though in another way from
that which has been alleged. I think we can scarcely now estimate the
_minifying_ consequences of closing all outlook beyond this world,
and shutting up morality within the narrow sphere of mortal life. As I
have said in my _Hopes of the Human Race_, it is not possible we should
continue to attach to virtue and vice the same profound significance,
when we believe their scope to reach no further than our brief span,
and justice to be a dream of our puny race never to be realized
throughout the eternal ages. In theory, right and wrong must come to
be regarded as of comparatively trivial importance; and, practically,
the virtue destined shortly to be extinguished forever must seem to
the tempted soul scarcely deserving of an effort. Life, after we have
passed its meridian, must become in our eyes more and more like an
autumn garden, wherein it would be vain to plant seeds of good which
can never bloom before the frosts of death, and useless to eradicate
weeds which must be killed erelong without our labor. Needless to add
that of that dismal spot it may soon be said,--
“Between the time of the wind and the snow,
All loathsome things began to grow”;
and, when the winter comes at last, none will regret the white shroud
it throws over corruption and decay.
But it is when we come to think of humanity _as a whole_ that the
prospect of final extinction appears so unutterably deplorable, so
lame and impotent a conclusion for all the struggles, the martyrdoms,
and the prayers of a hundred generations who have gone to the grave in
hope and faith, _and perished there_. We English men and women have
been wont to think proudly of the vast geographical extension of our
country’s dominion, the grandeur of the Empire on which the sun never
sets; and the remark has often been made that there is not a petty
corporation or board in the kingdom whose proceedings are not, in a
degree, dignified by the sense of England’s greatness. The politicians
who have expressed a readiness to give up our Colonies have been
taunted, and justly, with lack of the nobler patriotism which regards
not only financial and administrative details, but the larger interests
and glory of what we have delighted to call our Imperial Race. But
what would be the loss to the _prestige_ of England of the severance
of Australia and Canada and India, compared to the loss to mankind of
that glorious empery of Immortality in which it has prided itself since
the beginning of history? Everything we have achieved and thought--our
literature, art, laws, kingdoms, churches--has all been wrought and
built up in this faith, which has given value to the soul of the
humblest child, and added grandeur to the most splendid deeds of the
hero and the martyr. With that hope disappears not only the consolation
of all bereaved hearts, but the very crown upon the head of humanity.
* * * * *
It is no argument for the truth of any opinion that the disclosure
of its falsehood may have disastrous consequences. Nothing that has
been advanced in this paper proves, or has been offered as proof, that
there is a God or a life to come. The foundations for those beliefs
belong to a different order of considerations. But I think thus much
may be presumed to have resulted from our inquiry; namely, that their
value to the virtue and the happiness of mankind is so incalculably
vast that the work of demolishing them ought to be carried on, by men
professing to love their kind, in a very different spirit from that
which is generally exhibited by Agnostics. Even if their position be
true, and if they be morally bound to make known to the world that such
is the case, and to put an end to the baseless dream which has deluded
our race for so many thousand years,--even granting this, I think it
remains clear that their task is one to be undertaken only under the
sternest sense of duty, and with immeasurable mournfulness and regret.
I think that, instead of rejoicing over the discovery of “a spring in
the desert,” it behooves them to weep tears, bitter as ever fell from
human eyes, over the grave wherein they bury the Divine Love and the
Immortal Hope of our miserable race.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Moral Philosophy_, B. I., chap. vii.
[2] _Deontology_, p. 191.
[3] Miss Martineau says: “I saw with the pain of disgust how much
lower a thing it is to lead even the loftiest life from a regard to
the will or mind of any other being than from a natural working out of
our own powers” (_Autobiography_, Vol. II.). I must humbly confess I
have not come yet to see anything of the kind. Provided that the Being
to whose will we have regard is Supreme Goodness itself, it seems to
me infinitely _higher_ to strive to assimilate our will to His than to
“work out our own powers.”
[4] _Alone to the Alone_, p. 110, third edition.
[5] _E.g._, the following passage, which deserves to be reprinted a
hundred times, _Nineteenth Century_, July, 1877, p. 832: “We entirely
agree with the theologians that our age is beset with a grievous
danger of materialism. There is a school of teachers abroad, and they
have found an echo here, who dream that victorious vivisection will
ultimately win them anatomical solutions of man’s moral and spiritual
mysteries. Such unholy nightmares, it is true, are not likely to
beguile many minds in a country like this, where social and moral
problems are still in their natural ascendant. But there is a subtler
kind of materialism, of which the dangers are real. It does not,
indeed, put forth the bestial sophism that the apex of philosophy is
to be won by improved microscopes and new batteries. But then it has
nothing to say about the spiritual life of men. It fills the air with
pæans to science, but it always means physical, not moral science. It
shirks the question of questions,--To what human end is this knowledge?
How shall man thereby order his life as a whole? Where is he to find
the object of the yearnings of his spirit?”
I am not concerned to defend the orthodox ideal of heaven against Mr.
Harrison’s strictures; but I cannot help entering a protest against his
sneer at the “eternity of the tabor” as “so gross, so sensual a creed.”
It seems to me it errs by an excessive and unreal spirituality. It was,
certainly, not a “gross” or “sensual” order of mind which deemed the
act of _adoration_ to be one wherein man could spend an eternity of
ecstasy.
[6] Pages 838, 839.
[7] _Autobiography_, Vol. II., p. 356.
[8] _Age of Science_, p. 49.
[9] _Autobiography_, pp. 333, 438.
[10] Harriet Martineau’s last letter to Mr. Atkinson, Ambleside, May
19, 1876, _Autobiography_, Vol. III., p. 453.
[11] I have heard of two very great living philosophers who thought
they had pretty nearly got rid of Final Causes, but who, in talking
together, found it hard to avoid assuming their existence. One of them,
in fact, in detailing his own observations and discoveries concerning
animals and plants, used so often terms implying that there was a
_purpose_ visible in natural arrangements that his friend stopped him,
and said, “Mr. ----, you are getting strangely _teleological_!”
[12] Or at least _our_ right from wrong; for, on Mr. Darwin’s showing,
there may, it seems, be a different right and wrong for creatures
differently constituted in other worlds, whose interests, being
different, will cause different “sets” of their brains toward the lines
of action useful to their tribes accordingly.
[13] The following letter appeared in the _Spectator_:--
SIR,--Indulging in the pernicious habit of reading in bed, I last
night perused with profound interest Mr. Greg’s letter in your current
number, your own remarks thereupon, and also Mr. Greg’s generous
defence of his old friend, Harriet Martineau, in the _Nineteenth
Century_. As my eyes closed on the last paragraph of this article, I
seemed to behold a vision, which I shall take leave to describe to you.
Dives had just eaten a particularly plentiful dinner, and was standing
at the door of a pretty cottage in Ambleside. Lazarus, looking up at
him, said pitifully, “I perish with hunger.” Thereupon, Dives observed,
with great serenity: “Lazarus, I have had an excellent dinner. There is
not a crumb left. But I am quite content, and you ought to be the same.”
Poor Lazarus, however, instead of seeming satisfied, wailed yet more
sadly: “But I hunger, Dives! I hunger for the bread of life! I hunger
for human love, of which I had only begun to taste, when it was
snatched away. I hunger for justice, of which such scant measure has
been dealt me, and to millions like me. I hunger for truth, I hunger
for beauty, I hunger for righteousness, I hunger for a love holy,
divine, and perfect, which alone can satisfy my soul. I hunger, Dives!
I hunger, and you tell me there is not a crumb left of the rich feast
of existence, and bid me be content. It is a cruel mockery.”
Then Dives answered yet more placidly: “I never dream of wishing
anything were otherwise than it is. I am frankly satisfied to have done
with life. I have had a noble share of it, and I desire no more. I
utterly disbelieve in a future life.”
At that moment, my respected friend Mr. Greg passed by, and heard what
Dives was saying; on which, to my great surprise, he made the following
observation: “This is, unquestionably, the harder--_may it not also be
the higher_?--form of pious resignation, the last achievement of the
ripened mind.”
As for Lazarus, on catching Mr. Greg’s remark, he turned himself
painfully on the ground, and groaned: “I never heard before of anybody
being ‘_piously resigned_’ to the woes and wants _of other people_. La
Rochefoucauld was right, I suppose, to say, ‘_Nous avons tous assez de
force pour supporter les maux d’autrui_’; but, for my part, I should
not precisely call Dives’ satisfaction in his ‘noble share’ of the
feast, while I am doomed to perish starving, by quite so fine a name
as ‘pious resignation.’ Pray, Mr. Greg, with your large humanity, take
_my_ case into consideration, before you credit Dives with anything
better than stupendous egotism.”
Startled by the vehemence of poor Lazarus, I awoke.
I am, Sir, etc.
HYGEIOLATRY.
The advance of physical science and the simultaneous retreat of
religious faith threaten, among their numerous consequences, to
introduce a new principle into morals. We may call it Doctor’s
Doctrine,--not because it is by any means the exclusive property of
the medical profession, or that all doctors can be supposed to hold
it, but because it is more rife among them and tells more directly on
their work than in the case of other men. It is indeed excusable for a
physician to attribute to bodily health, wherewith this new principle
is concerned, more importance than a poet, a preacher, or a soldier, is
likely to concede to it; and to this natural tendency is added, pretty
frequently perhaps, a tolerably defined materialism, which not merely
connects but identifies genius, happiness, and virtue with physical
soundness, and stupidity, misery, and crime with diseased organization.
With such views, and deprived of that vista of an eternal future
which alone gives to human things their true perspective, it is not
wonderful that many should come to regard bodily health as the _summum
bonum_, and thence to deduce the principle to which I desire to call
attention as an innovation in ethics. Reduced as nearly as possible to
a formula, that principle is as follows:
_That any practice which, in the opinion of experts, conduces to bodily
health or tends to the cure of disease, becomes_, ipso facto, _morally
lawful and right._
I do not mean to imply that this principle has yet been clearly stated
by any of its adherents, or that they are even generally conscious that
they have adopted it. Possibly, many who have practically embodied
it in their conduct for years may repudiate it on seeing it defined
in words. Nevertheless, it may be traced as the substructure of
innumerable arguments on all manner of subjects of public and private
interest,--arguments which, if the principle were knocked from under
them, would instantly be seen to fall baseless to the ground. It is, in
short, the implied major term of a thousand syllogisms which we hear in
every debate and read in every magazine and newspaper.
Now, to measure the extent of the change which the adoption of this
Doctor’s Doctrine must introduce into ethics, it is only necessary to
cast a glance backward at the older view of the relation of duty to
health which has hitherto prevailed in the world, and been taught
pretty equally by moralists of every school, with the exception of
ascetics on one side, and pure hedonists on the other. That older
lesson--which we may for convenience call Divine’s Doctrine, since it
is the general teaching of every Protestant theologian and moralist,
may be summed up in the canon--
_Bodily health may not be lawfully sacrificed to our desire of pleasure
or fear of pain. It may and ought to be sacrificed to the health of our
souls, to the service of our fellowmen, or to fidelity to God._
In other words, it has been taught that the man who injures his health
by debauchery is guilty of a serious moral offence, and he who commits
suicide is guilty of a crime; but that, on the other hand, the man who
sacrifices his health in the performance of his duty as physician,
clergyman, or soldier, or in endeavoring to save a fellow-creature from
flood or fire, or who gives up life itself rather than forswear himself
or renounce his religious faith, or commit a base or unclean action,
is not only exonerated from any guilt, but is, in the highest degree,
virtuous.
On these lines, Christian civilization may be said to have been built
up. The natural selfishness of human nature has been counteracted by
the sense of duty; and if, now and then, needless and exaggerated
self-sacrifices without adequate reason have been made, and there was
room for brave Charles Kingsley to preach the claims of the natural
laws of life, a thousand times more often has the sense of duty enabled
men and women to perform alike the painful daily tasks whereby our
homes are made beautiful and sacred, and the occasional acts of heroism
wherewith human existence on earth is crowned and glorified.
It needs no words to prove to any one who reflects that two-thirds
of what we have been wont to reverence as homely virtue and all the
martyrdoms of history consist precisely in the voluntary sacrifice
of health, or of health and life together. To withhold from such
sacrifices the meed of moral admiration would be to reverse the
judgment of all the ages,--to prefer Sardanapalus and Heliogabalus to
Curtius and Regulus, and to treat as a deluded fanatic the apostle
who converted the Gentile world, but spent his years in perils by sea
and land amid prisons and scourgings. From the crucifixion of Christ
to the silent self-immolation of the poor consumptive girl who works
half-blinded through the winter’s night to support her aged mother, the
holiest and the sweetest things this earth has witnessed have been the
actions of those who counted not their lives dear to them, so long as
they could obey the law of truth, of righteousness, and of love.