{190}
AN ancient Greek poet, of grave thoughts and weighty words,
describing the character and functions of one of the great primeval
divinities of his country, says that she is
πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μορφὴ μία,
One shape of many names,
an expression which might have been varied with equal truth, as
One Power of many shapes,
and indicating that the motley polymorphous harlequinade, as it
appears to us, of a polytheistic Pantheism, is at bottom reducible to
a few fundamental forms; and if this be true of such a shifting
kaleidoscopic exhibition as popular mythology, it holds good much more
of popular morals. All moral philosophies are fundamentally the same,
and cannot indeed be otherwise, being only the variously emphasized
expression of the one self-existent and self-organizing Reason--the
βασιλικὸς Νοῦς of Plato--which makes either a physical or a moral
world possible. We shall not expect therefore to find absolutely new
principles in the laws which regulate human conduct any more than in
the laws of those primary vitalizing forces--Light and Heat--which
{191} shape and regulate all organism, immutably and infallibly, by
the inherent necessity of the great Being of sleepless underived
energy of whom they are the manifestation. We shall, on the contrary,
believe with an assured faith, that the principles of morals, and the
primary forces of the physical universe, are as immutable and
self-congruent in the essential nature of things, as the laws of
measure and of magnitude traced out by the mathematician; with this
advantage in favour of what has been sometimes ignorantly talked of as
contingent truth, that whereas the certainty of mathematical
propositions depends on the fact that they are founded on
self-limiting definitions of mere thoughts, with which no disturbing
condition, not even the fiat of Omnipotence, can interfere, the
certainty of physical and of moral laws flows from this, that they are
facts, subject to no man’s definition, and necessarily existing as
normal manifestations of the great primary fact, which we call GOD.
The variations therefore which undoubtedly are observed in human
morals--variations peculiarly notable in the infancy and in the
decline both of individuals and of races,--are not contradictions, but
only partial, feeble, and inadequate expressions of immutable
morality. The ebb of the tide, looked at from a local and narrow point
of view, is a contradiction to the flow; but both flow and ebb are
parts of the grand harmonious motion of the sleepless waters of
ancient Ocean. Morals vary under varying conditions of society, as
plants vary under more or less favourable conditions of growth, or
landscapes under more or less happy incidences of solar light; but
these variations, so far from contradicting each other, could not even
exist without {192} a fundamental identity; as the element of likeness
in the different members of a large family could not exist without a
common parentage. And where there may not be a striking unity of
expression, traceable through all the varieties of popular morality,
there is always at least, as Mr. Lecky has well pointed out, a unity
of tendency;[192.1] even as a plant, when it first spreads out the
green lobes of its radical leaves, may present a very different
appearance from the distinctive leafage of its perfect growth; but the
type nothing the less is one, and the necessary law of the whole
congruous growth lay in the unity of the germ. There is nothing
accidental in nature; so neither in morals. All things are necessary;
all things are self-consistent; all things are harmonious; all things
upon a whole view of the whole are complete. The distinctive character
therefore of such an ethical system as Christianity is to be sought
not in the fundamental invariable absolute types of right and wrong,
which are the same everywhere, but mainly in the following two
things--_First_, In its method of operation and in the steam power,
the strong convictions and fervid passions by which the moral
machinery is set in motion; or, to adopt another simile, in the
fountainheads from which the necessary water-courses of a systematic
social irrigation are supplied. _Secondly_, In the particular virtues
which its method of operation and its moral steam, in conjunction with
the nature of the materials acted on, brings on the stage with a
certain preference. For though a moral system may, or rather must,
include theoretically all {193} the virtues, and is justly blamed if
it exclude one, even the smallest, yet from the narrowness of finite
natures, and the laws of habit, it seems practically impossible that
as soon as any moral system becomes a traditional law for great masses
of men, there should not be manifested a strong tendency to put
certain virtues into the foreground, while others are left to find
their places without favour, or even with a certain amount of
discouragement. All soils are not equally favourable to all plants;
and the most healthy climates, where human beings of the greatest
amount of robustness and grace are produced, have never been free from
peculiar diseases, springing from a source indissolubly intertwined
with the conditions of their remarkable salubrity. Another influence
also materially tends to give even the most large and comprehensive
system of Ethics a certain apparent narrowness and one-sidedness in
practice. A world-regenerating system of Ethics, such as Christianity,
is not a thing, like a treatise on Logic, written in a book and laid
on the shelf, and allowed quietly to work its way with whosoever may
choose to take it up. It is an active, aggressive, invasive power; it
is a strong medicine to knock down a strong disease; it is a charge of
cavalry dashing onwards, like a storm, to break the solid squares of
an opposing infantry, bristling with many spears. Such a movement is
necessarily one-sided; all movement is one-sided; speculation only is
catholic. We must not therefore expect Christianity, of all moral
forces the most impetuous and the most imperious, to be free from this
fault. It had to swoop down, so to speak, on violent wings from the
spiritual side of our nature upon the sensualism of {194} the Greeks,
otherwise it could not succeed; and its most distinctive features will
be found to spring mainly from this necessary attitude of imperious
hostility. There is no time to temper blows in the moment of battle. A
great victory is never gained by moderate blows; though, when gained,
a wise general will always know how to use it with moderation.
I will now proceed to attempt a sketch of Christian Ethics from the
two points of view here indicated.
FIRST, Let us inquire what is the steam-power, the lever, the motive
force of Christian Ethics. And here at once the most distinctive part
of the Christian moral system meets us in the face; it is presented to
us prominently, essentially, radically as a religion. It is not merely
connected with religion, not only, like the moral philosophy of Dr.
Paley, willing to stamp its precepts with a religious sanction, and to
found moral obligation upon the will of the Supreme Being; much less,
like the philosophy of Socrates, ready to fraternize with religion,
and eager to prove with Heraclitus, the profoundest of the
pre-Socratic thinkers, that all human rules of conduct are derived
ultimately from the necessity of the divine nature.[194.1] It is more
than all this; it is a religion; by its mere epiphany it forms a
church; in its starting-point, its career, and its consummation it is
“a kingdom of Heaven upon earth.” In its method of presentation,
though not certainly in its contents, it is as different from its
great ally Platonism {195} as Platonism is from its great enemy, the
Homeric theology; for Platonism, however nearly allied to
Christianity, is a philosophy and not a religion; a philosophy which
did not even propose to overthrow the Polytheistic faith, whose
poet-theologer it had so rudely assaulted. The moral philosophy of the
Greeks, indeed, generally was either a simple wisdom of life in the
form of precepts loosely strung together, as in the early Gnomic
poets, or it was a wisdom of life deduced from principles of reason,
as in all the Socratic and post-Socratic teaching. But the Ethics of
the Gospel came down upon men like a flash from Heaven; suddenly,
violently, fervidly and explosively, not with a curious apparatus of
slowly penetrating arguments. There is no talk about reasons here at
all; the λόγος of St. John came afterwards and meant a very
different thing. “_Repent ye, and be baptized, for the kingdom of
Heaven is at hand!_” is the form of the Evangelical appeal, in which
no argument is attempted or indeed required. Your conscience tells you
that you are rebels against God; as rebels you can only live under a
curse; the whole sense-besotted Greek and Roman world is evidently
lying under a curse; repent and be converted; return to God and be
saved; to man there can be no safety anywhere except in God, who is
the source of all good, and in Christ, who gave himself a living
sacrifice that we might be redeemed from all evil. This is the whole
style of the greatest moral Evangel the world has ever heard;
absolutely and simply an act of religion; all immorality is departure
from God, all morality return to God. In the Christian Ethics God is
not a secondary figure; he is not brought in merely for a sanction: he
is the central sun of the {196} whole system, from whose bright
fountain of perennial excellence all the little twinkling lamps of our
minor moralities are lighted up. The individual virtues of a Christian
man are merely the flower and the fruit of a living plant, of which
the root is theology and the sap piety; nay more, the piety
accompanies the flower and the fruit, and imparts to them a fragrance
and a flavour, which gives them more than half their charm. A rose
without smell would still be a rose; but what a world of difference to
the sense and to the sentiment would the absence of that fine
invisible essence imply! Christian virtue, in fact, can no more exist
without piety than Socratic virtue can exist without logic. Socrates
was, no doubt, a remarkably pious man; but, while the piety of
Socrates was a strong shoot from his reason, the virtue of a Christian
is the fair issue of his piety.
The distinct proof of what we have here stated will be found
everywhere in the New Testament, but in the Acts of the Apostles
specially rather than in the Gospels. For the ideal of Christian
character we refer naturally to the Sermon on the Mount and to the
character of our Lord as exhibited in the evangelic narrative; but for
the manner in which Christianity was presented to men, for the method
of operation by which in so short a time it so wonderfully overcame
the stern ritualism of the Jew and the fair sensualism of the Greek,
we must look to the actual facts of the great early conversions as
they are presented to us in the apostolic memoirs of Luke. Let us see
therefore, in the first place, what we can learn from the early
chapters of that most interesting narrative. Now, the starting-point
here plainly is the effusion of the Holy Ghost, an influence which,
{197} whether we take it on this first occasion as miraculous,
according to the traditional understanding of the Church, or as
something extraordinary but in the course of nature, is a phenomenon
altogether different in kind from the action of arguments upon the
ratiocinative faculty of the mind, and had indeed been preceded not by
inductions or deductions, or analytic dissections, or any scholastic
exercitations at all, but by meetings for social prayer (i.
14)--prayer which is the great feeder of the moral nature of man when
reverting to the original source of all moral life in the form of
religion. It was therefore not in the philosophic way of debate and
discussion, but in the religious way of inspiration that the
regenerative afflatus of the first Christian Ethics came upon the
Jewish and Hellenic world; and it worked, let us say, by a fervid
moral contagion, not by the suasion of cool argument. And there can be
no doubt, that if even in the intellectual world a wise ancient might
justly say, _Nemo vir magnus sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit_,
much more in the world of moral and political action it is by the
infection of noble passions that men are moved to any grand issues,
not by the cogency of strong arguments. Melanchthon was as good a
reasoner as Martin Luther, perhaps a better, but he had not the
volcanic fire of his fellow; and it was an eruption of this fire only
that could prevail to shake the stout pillars of the Popedom. And it
was by an influence manifestly quite akin to the impetuous energetic
eloquence of the great Saxon reformer, that by the first sermon of the
Apostle Peter, as we read, great masses of men were suddenly pricked
in their hearts, conscience-stung as we phrase it, and in one day
three thousand {198} human beings, previously indifferent or hostile,
were added to the new moral community afterwards called the Christian
Church. Precisely similar in modern times has been the action of the
so-called religious revivals, which, from the days of the Methodists
downwards, have done so much in this country to rouse from a state of
moral lethargy the most neglected and the most abandoned portions of
the community. Of Martin Boos, the celebrated Bavarian evangelist, we
are told that his “sermon was as if he poured forth flame;”[198.1]
and not less striking were the moral effects of the eloquent
Whitefield when he drew the tears in white gutters down the grimy
cheeks of the congregated Bristol colliers, and, what is even more
significant of his power, in Savannah elicited from the prudential
pockets of sage Benjamin Franklin, sitting before the preacher with a
stiff determination not to contribute, first a handful of coppers,
then three or four silver dollars, and then five golden
pistoles![198.2] Preachings of this kind have been the subject of
scoffing with light-witted persons in all ages; but they stand firm as
grave attestations of the fact that the Christian method of
conversion, not by logical arguments, but by moral contagion and the
effusion of the Holy Ghost, has, with the masses of mankind, always
proved itself the most effective. Socrates did much more perhaps as a
reformer of sinners than any preacher in the guise of a philosopher
ever did; but he could not have done what Whitefield did with the
colliers. The arguments of Socrates convinced the few; but the fervour
of Peter, the loftiness of his religious position, and {199} the felt
firmness of his historical foundation converted the many.
And this brings us to the second important point in the original
attitude of Christianity, and the manner in which it moved the moral
world. This point is the historical foundation on which the moral
appeal stood; and this historical foundation was the miraculous life,
death, and resurrection of the Founder of the ethical religion. It
concerns us not to inquire here, whether Christ was a real person, or,
as certain Germans with their ingenious whimsicality will have it, a
mere myth; as little need we ask whether the miracles were really
suspensions of the laws of nature, or were mere acts of remarkable
power somewhat exaggerated by the wondering narrators; much less can
it be necessary for the present argument to weigh the evidence for the
great crowning miracle of the resurrection. Concerning these matters,
every man must either judge for himself or take the authority of
nearly two thousand years of effective Christian teaching as a
sufficient guarantee. But what we have to do with here is simply this:
that these facts were believed, that the Apostles stood upon these
facts, and that the ethical efficiency of Christianity was rooted in
these facts. Take the facts away, or the assured belief in the facts,
and the existence of such an ethico-religious society as the Christian
Church becomes, under the circumstances, impossible. Consider what an
effect the personality of Socrates had in establishing what we with no
great license of language may call the Socratic Church in Athens. The
various schools of philosophy, first in Athens and then in Rome, were
sects of that Church. Had Socrates not lived and died {200} with
visible power and effect before men, the existence of these schools,
fathered by this great teacher, would have been impossible. A person
is the necessary nucleus round which all social organisms form
themselves. But the personality of Socrates was a much less important
element in the formation of the Socratic schools than that of Christ
was in the formation of the Christian Church. Socrates was only a
teacher--one who, like other teachers, might in time create disciples
as wise, perhaps wiser than, himself; Christ was a redeemer, whose
function as such could be performed by no vicar, and transmitted to no
successor: the one was a help and a guide, the other a foundation of
faith and a fountain of life. Socrates taught his disciples to become
independent of him, and rely on their own perfected reason; from
Christ His disciples always derive nourishment, as the branches from
the vine. And if the relation of Christ to His disciples, conceived
only as a living Saviour walking on the earth, was so much closer than
that of Socrates to his disciples, how much more intimate does the
relation become, when He who lived and died to redeem humanity from
sin rose from the dead as a living guarantee that all who walked in
His ways, should follow up their redemption from sin by a speedy
victory over that yet stronger enemy. Death![200.1] From the moment
that the resurrection stood amongst the disciples as an accepted fact,
the Founder of the religion was not merely a wonder-working man, a
prophet and the greatest of all the prophets, but He was an altogether
exceptional and miraculous Person, either {201} God in some mysterious
way combined into an incorporate unity with man, or at least a Person
that, compared with the common type and expression of humanity, might
pass for God. The influence which the belief in the actual existence
of such a human, and yet in so many regards superhuman, character as
the Founder of their faith, must have exercised on the early preachers
of the gospel, cannot easily be over-estimated. Plato and Plotinus
often talk of the raptures with which the human soul would be thrilled
if not only, as now, the shadows and types of the Beautiful, but the
very absolute Beautiful itself, the αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν, stood
revealed to mortal sight. But granting for the moment that the
manifestation of such a vague abstraction is possible, it is quite
certain that, when manifested, it could not possibly act upon men with
anything like the power of a human Christ actually risen from the
dead. Man, with all his range of imagination, is at bottom as much
concrete as any creature, and as little capable of being moved by mere
abstractions. Jesus Christ, and Him crucified; Christ risen from the
dead; believe in Him--this was the short summation of that preaching
of the gospel which regenerated the then world, lying as it did in all
sorts of wickedness. See how emphatically the resurrection is alluded
to as the main anchor in all the early preachings of the Apostles
(Acts ii. 32; iii. 15; iv. 2; v. 30, etc.) And as to St. Paul, he
declares again and again that if Christ be not risen, the faith of
Christians is vain, and those to whom the world was indebted for its
moral regeneration were justly to be accounted amongst the most
miserable of men; a method of speaking which plainly implies that, in
the Apostle’s {202} estimation, the firm fact of a risen Saviour was
the only real assurance that Christians had of a life beyond the
grave. So true is the utterance of a distinguished modern divine that
“the resurrection was the central point of the apostolic teaching,
nay more, the central point of history, primarily of religious
history, of which it is the soul. The resurrection is the one central
link between the seen and the unseen.”[202.1] Let this, therefore,
stand firm as the main principle of any just exposition of the
machinery by which the ethics of the gospel achieved the conquest of
the world. The Church--“the peculiar people zealous for good
works,” of whom St. Peter speaks--was formed out of the world not by
the clear cogency of logical arguments, but by the vivid belief in
miraculous facts.
But the miraculous personality of the teacher, however essential to
the proclamation and reception of the teaching, was not the teaching
itself. There were doctrines of an essentially theological character,
and strong emotions that only religion could excite, which operated
along with the unique personality of the Founder in laying a firm
foundation for the ethics of the gospel. The most important of these
doctrines was the doctrine of the unity of the Godhead. This is a
matter with which in Christian countries we are now so familiar that
not a few find it difficult to realize how prominent an element it was
in the Christian creed, and how powerful must have been its action in
the creation of a new school of morals in the midst of the heathen
world. By the Fathers of the Church, however, in the first and second
centuries, the ethical virtue of this element {203} was never
overlooked; they knew only too well, from their own personal
experience most of them, and all of them by what they saw written in
the habits and maxims of a corrupt society, how easily Polytheism had
lent itself to draw a beautiful veil over what was ugly, and to stamp
the most debasing vices with consecration. Philosophers, like
Xenophanes and Plato, in whose breasts these things had long ago
roused a rebellious indignation, might well despair of converting to a
pure morality a people who, though they might be sober on all the
other days of the year, would think it necessary, as an act of piety,
to appear publicly intoxicated on the feast of Dionysus. The salt of
goodness, it is quite true, which kept the body of Polytheism so long
from rotting, has often been overlooked, principally by the
exaggeration of Christian writers, seldom remarkable for candour; and
the early Fathers of the Church, engaged, as they were, in actual
warfare with the many-headed foe, may well be excused if their zeal
was not always accompanied by that fairness to which even error is
entitled. But with the most honest purpose to do justice to the moral
element of Polytheism, as we may find it exhibited most favourably
perhaps in the living pictures of the Homeric poems, it cannot be
denied that the obvious deduction from the Polytheistic creed was, in
all cases to palliate, in some cases even to justify, vice; and that
this deduction was often made we may gather from the familiar fact
that the most illogical people even now suddenly become very acute
reasoners, the moment it is necessary to defend their prejudices, or
to protest against the amendment of their faults. In a system of
faith, where every {204} instinct had its god, and every passion its
patron-saint, it required either a rare training, or a remarkably
healthy habit of mind to keep the low and the high in their just seats
of subordination and supremacy. No doubt the more imperative moral
virtues to a well-constituted Heathen mind were conceived as
represented by Jove, who was the real moral governor of the world; and
the supremacy of Zeus in Olympus was a sufficient assertion of the
superiority which belongs to the moral law in the little republic of
the soul: but as the son of Kronos in the Greek heaven was only a
limited monarch, and often, as the Iliad plainly indicates, obliged to
wink at the contravention of his own commands by the unruly
aristocracy of the skies, so Polytheism could never invest the τὸ
ἡγεμονικόν--the regulating principle of the soul--with the
absolute sovereignty which to its nature rightfully belongs.
Christianity, as an essentially monotheistic faith, applied a perfect
remedy to this evil. The highest part of man’s nature was now the
only sacred part. The flesh, so far from being glorified and
worshipped, was denounced, degraded, and desecrated as a synonym for
all corruption. The deification of mere sensuous pleasures, which with
Polytheists had passed for orthodox, was now impossible; the moral law
became supreme; and surely the sanction which this law requires can
never be conceived in more imperative terms than as the distinctly
enunciated command of the all-powerful, all-wise, and all-beneficent
Father of the human family. No sanction, deduced from a mere reasoning
process, can ever approach this in broad practical efficiency. It is
the impersonated, incarnated, and enthroned Reason, to which all {205}
reasonable creatures owe an instinctive and a necessary obedience.
But there is another corollary to a monotheistic creed, which, in
estimating the influence of Christian faith on Christian Ethics, is by
no means to be overlooked. If there is only one God, the father of the
whole human race, then there is only one family; all men are brethren;
nationality ceases; philanthropy, or love of men in the widest sense
of the word, becomes natural; mere patriotism has now only a relative
value; Leonidas is no longer the model hero; the Jew is no longer of
the one chosen people; and the Greek, full of wisdom, and full of
conceit, must condescend to call the ignorant barbarian his brother.
This breaking down of the middle wall of partition between Jew and
Gentile, between every nation and its neighbour, removed two of the
greatest obstructions which have ever stood in the way of a generous
morality, in the shape of what Lord Bacon would have called idols of
the place and of the race; these idols could be worshipped no longer;
and no shibboleth of separation could be mumbled to consecrate the
unreasonable prejudices which every nation is so apt to entertain
against its neighbour. No doubt towards the propagation of these
catholic and cosmopolitan principles, ancient philosophy also, and
specially Stoicism, contributed its share;[205.1] the consolidation of
the Roman empire and the policy of the Roman emperors worked in the
same direction; {206} but the monotheistic creed of the Christian
Church, proclaimed with such dignity and moral courage by St. Paul in
his discourse on the Hill of Mars, supplied the only effective
leverage. Compared with what the preaching of St. Paul did for the
grand idea, of humanity and fraternity, all that modern science,
modern political theories, modern commerce, and modern philosophies
have achieved or may yet achieve, can only be counted as a very small
supplement.
The immortality of the soul, the second coming of Christ, and the
final judgment of the world, form together a group of doctrines, the
relation of which to moral practice is too deeply felt to require much
discussion in this place. Perhaps, however, everybody does not
sufficiently consider how peculiarly Christian these doctrines are,
and how the belief in them, and the moral issues of such belief, must
necessarily stand and fall with the faith in some such historical
religion as has hitherto formed the framework of the Churches of
Christendom. For however these doctrines might be dimly conceived and
vaguely believed by the people who wrote D. M. upon their tombstones,
and however solemnly imagined and grandly depicted they were in the
eloquent discourses of the great philosopher of Idealism, there are
few mistakes greater than to accept these dim conceptions and grand
imaginings as a proof that the doctrine of the immortality of the
soul, as a point of Polytheistic faith, performed the same function in
moulding the morality of the ancient Greeks and Romans that it does at
the present day among modern Christian peoples. A single
quotation--one of the most trite--from Homer {207} will suffice to
show how utterly unfounded such an idea is. In the Cimmerian visit to
the unseen world, the wandering king of Ithaca is made to encounter
the hot thane of Thessaly, pacing with a stately fierceness through
the Elysian fields, like a king among the shades. On being
complimented to this effect by his visitor, the son of Peleus
replies--
“Name me not death with praiseful words, noble Ulysses; I
Would sooner be a bonded serf, the labourer’s tool to ply
To a small cottar on the heath with wealth exceeding small,
Than be the Lord of all the Shades in Pluto’s gloomy hall.”
A people who could think and speak thus of the state of souls after
departure from the body, could not derive much practical advantage
from belief in immortality. That belief indeed was held so loosely by
the mass of the Greek people that it may rather be described as a dim
imagination than as a definite conviction. People were rather
unwilling to believe that their beloved human friends had vanished
into the realm of nothingness, than convinced that they had gone to
where on any account it would be at all desirable to go. To a few
select heroes no doubt, men like Menelaus, of divine extraction, and
divine affinity, a really enviable abode after death in the cloudless
and stormless islands of the blest was by popular tradition assigned;
a few perpetrators also of enormous crimes, red-hand murderers, open
blasphemers, and traitors who sold their country for gold were
consigned for ever to the ensanguined scourge of the Furies in those
flaring regions which the genius of Virgil and Dante has so vividly
portrayed; but if the belief in these exceptional cases inspired some
to acts of unwonted heroism and {208} deterred others from deeds of
abhorred foulness, the very good and the very bad in the world are too
few in number to admit of the idea that the motives which either stir
them to acts of exceptive virtue or deter them from acts of abnormal
crime should have any influence in determining the conduct of the
great masses. And as for the philosophers, it was Socrates only and
Plato who in their teaching gave any special emphasis to the doctrine
of the immortality of the soul; and no man who has read the most
familiar accounts of the defence which the former delivered to the
jury at his trial, or of his last moments as reported by Plato in the
_Phædo_, can have carried off the impression that the great father of
moral philosophy taught that doctrine with any dogmatic decision or
certainty. We must say therefore, with Dr. Paley, who, though
incapable of sounding great depths, had a very clear head, and was a
very sensible man, that it was the gospel, and the gospel alone, which
“brought life and immortality to light,” and with it introduced
whatever real power in elevating or strengthening the moral nature of
man such a doctrine, when held as a habitual conviction, must exercise
over the masses of men. What Socrates contemplated calmly as a
probable contingency, St Paul and the early Christians gloried in as a
grand culmination and a triumphant result. And the effective influence
of this firm faith on society has been to give an infinitely greater
dignity to human life, to increase infinitely the moral worth of the
individual, and to add a support of wonderful efficacy to those states
and stages of toilsome existence which stand so much in need of such
hopeful consolation. That it has always acted, and {209} must always
act, as a strong aid to virtuous conduct can scarcely be denied,
though they of course are poor philosophers and ignoble men who think
that virtue could not possibly exist in the world without the belief
in immortality. There are many motives that force the masses of men to
be virtuous, according to the respectable righteousness of the Scribes
and Pharisees, altogether independent of any prospect of rewards and
punishments in a future state; and as for men of a more than commonly
delicate moral sensibility--persons to whom a life in baseness and
foulness would under any conditions be intolerable--it is not to be
imagined that they would be more virtuous from the prospect of an
eternity of bliss, than they are from the fear of a short season of
shame. These men will always live nobly, for the same reason that
whatever they do they must do well. If they play cricket, they will
play a good game; if they ride, they will ride well; and if they boat,
they will boat well; and, for the same reason, if they live, they will
live well--not because they expect a reward, but because they have no
pleasure in living badly. To them vice is always rottenness,
putrescence, and loathsomeness; and no man will consciously condemn
himself to these who knows what soundness means.
There is one marked peculiarity about Christian Ethics, growing
directly out of a religious root, and closely connected with certain
theological doctrines, which, though indicated in some of the previous
paragraphs, demands special mention here. We mean what Dr. Chalmers
called its aggressive attitude. The idea of Duty is not necessarily
aggressive; a man may perform his duty quietly, as the spheres {210}
move in their orbits, without daring, or even desiring, to meddle with
the movements of other members of the great social machine. Even
Christian Churches in quiet and flat times, as the last century for
instance, have been known to content themselves with the unobtrusive
performance of a certain round of familiar pieties, undisturbed by any
desire to make moral inroads into the domain of remote or even
adjacent heathenism. But this is certainly not the normal or
flourishing state of any Christian Church; not the natural state
indeed of any sect or society, whether religious or philosophical,
professing to possess a healing medicine for the cure of diseased
souls. We accordingly found in the first discourse that Socrates was
in his attitude, however pleasant and playful on the surface, at
bottom very earnestly aggressive; it was this aggressiveness, in fact,
that raised up against him the hostility of those spiteful little
individuals to whom more than to popular ill-will he owed his
martyr-death. He asserted, as we have seen, a divine mission, and
acted as a missionary, though always in the manner of a reasoner
rather than as a preacher. But the aggressive element in early
Christianity was much stronger than in Socrates; as any one may see at
a glance by comparing the biographical career of St. Paul with that of
the Athenian philosopher. And the causes of this were more than one.
In the first place, the whole Hebrew nature was more fervid, more
impassioned, more prophetic than the Hellenic; and again, the
autocratic character which belongs to all monotheism, imparted to the
moral message of the missionaries an urgency and a lofty intolerance,
which in an atmosphere compounded of polytheism in its lower {211}
sphere and of logic in its upper sphere was impossible. A divine
command superadded to fervid human sympathies necessarily creates a
mission in the person who is the subject of them; but the divine
command is much more stringent from an autocratic Jehovah than from a
limited monarch like Jove, and the fervour of human sympathy is more
intense in proportion as the offence of the rebels against the
sovereign authority is looked upon as more heinous. We are brought
back therefore again to the great doctrine of the Divine Unity, if we
would make it fully evident to ourselves why St. Paul was so much more
aggressive than Socrates: Socrates was only partly a missionary, and
the messenger of a god whose authority was limited by an inferior but
acknowledged authority in other gods; St. Paul was a missionary of the
one true God, to whose authority there could be no limit, and to whose
command there could be no contradiction. From this principle of divine
autocracy there necessarily grew up the conception of sin, not as
folly merely and imperfection, but as contumacy, rebellion, and
treason; and the conviction of the exceeding sinfulness of sin and the
exceeding misery of the sinner became the strongest spur to the
missionary activity of the Christian preachers, and gave a true moral
sublimity to an aggressive attitude, which in a mere reasoner had
appeared impertinent. Nothing indeed is more remarkable than the
contrast between the strong colours in which sin is painted by the
writers of the New Testament and its more venial aspect in the mild
regard of the philosopher. Aristotle can surrender a whole generation
of young men to the dominion of πάθος and think nothing more
about it. {212} They are as incapable of moral ideas, these young
sensualists, as swine are of cleanliness; let them wallow in the mire
for a season; we shall speak to them, when they have outgrown their
animalism. But the converted Pharisee who wrote his burning epistles
to the young Christian churches in magnificent Rome and luxurious
Ephesus used very different language. Sin with him is a very serious
offence, on account of which the curse of God lies on the whole world.
Sinners, whether old or young, are by nature the children of wrath;
and by the act and fact of the transgression of divine law, so utterly
cast down and degraded from the proper human dignity, that they
require to be born again, and baptized with a fire-baptism before they
can be purified from their foulness and restored to the original
rights and privileges which belonged to them, as to all men, in right
of their divine fatherhood. Hence the strongly accentuated opposition
between flesh and spirit (Romans vii. viii.; 1 Pet. iv. 3, 4) which no
doubt Aristotle, as we have seen above, also mentions; but in the
Stagirite it is only an incidental recognition; in the New Testament
it is a pervading and overwhelming power, a force which possesses the
atmosphere, a moral storm, which, swooping violently down from the
dark-throned seat of the Supreme Regent, tears the cloak of
self-righteousness from the shivering sinner, and exposes him in all
his bareness. Plato also and Plotinus use very Christian language when
they tell us that to be partakers of true moral beauty the soul
requires a κάθαρσις or purification from its natural or
acquired foulness, and that the necessity of this purification was
symbolically indicated in the {213} mysteries.[213.1] Very true; but
here again Plato wrote calmly for the few, Paul preached fervidly for
the many. And this word _purification_, as connected with the
Christian idea of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and the necessity
of an ingrafting of a higher moral life by the operation of the Divine
Spirit, leads me necessarily to specialize the doctrine of the
Atonement as performing a peculiar function in the ethical attitude
and moral efficiency of the gospel. The doctrine of the Atonement
arises as the necessary consequence of the Christian conception of sin
as a polluting, perverting, rebellious, and treasonable principle. An
error is reasoned away, but filth must be washed away; guilt must be
atoned; the offender must pray for forgiveness; and the free grace of
the Sovereign must restore the traitor to the place and the protection
which belong to him as a loyal subject. Put into a strictly articulate
form, this doctrine of atonement, not less than its correlative the
exceeding sinfulness of sin, especially when pushed to its extreme of
logical consistency by the so-called federal theologians, is apt to
give, and has always given, more or less just cause of offence to
speculative minds; but in that broad practical aspect in which it was
originally presented to the world, before men began to turn a fervid
faith into a curious theology, there can be no doubt that it operated
most beneficially in intensifying that hatred of sin which is the
mother of all {214} holiness, and in enabling many a guilt-laden soul
to start on the career of a regenerate life with a comfortable
lightness and an unfettered speed, which from no other source could
have flowed so readily.
The plan of this discourse leads us in the next place to consider the
individual virtues to which, by their radical connexion with religion
and a theological creed, Christian Ethics have shown a preference. But
before attempting this it is obvious to remark how, by the atmosphere
of piety in which they grow, and the theological soil in which they
are rooted, the Christian virtues, as a whole and individually, are
elevated to a much higher platform than belongs to any system of mere
moral philosophy; and from this point of view we can understand how
the divines of the school called Evangelical have been led to look
down with such contempt as they generally do on every form of
Christian preaching in which a round of mere moral duties is held up
as in itself capable of performing the functions of a truly Christian
life. The Evangelicals, narrow and bigoted as they too often are,
especially in points of artificial and traditional orthodoxy, which
they are unable to separate from the essence of the gospel, were quite
right in this matter. It is not the mere duties performed, but the
motives from which, and the inspiration by which, they are performed,
that make the moral life of a truly Christian man so excellent. It is
not merely that he is morally correct in all his intercourse with his
fellow-men; not merely that he is richly furnished perhaps with all
those born amiabilities which an acute Scotch speculator has
designated as but the painted masks of virtue;[214.1] {215} the world
may shower its plaudits on such cheap forms of native goodness as
loudly as it pleases; Christian morality, by virtue of its lofty
religious inspiration, aims at something more; the mere righteousness
of the Scribes and Pharisees it looks upon as an attainment utterly
unworthy of a high moral ambition, as a vulgar something, the
contentment with which would indicate an entire absence of that pure
moral ideal, with the acknowledgment of which a religious morality--a
system of ethics founded on the worship of the one true God--must
necessarily start. Whatever morality the world may possess, as
absolutely indispensable for the common movements of the social
machine, Christianity, of course, accepts, but makes no account of in
its characteristic appeals. It is rather the low maxims, the false
authorities, and the spurious virtues, mixed up with the vulgar
morality of the many, that it most mercilessly exposes and protests
against. “_Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed in
the renewing of your minds_.” “_But you are an elect people, a
royal priesthood, a holy nation_.” Such is the lofty tone which it
assumes, and from the days of St. Paul to Xavier and Howard has
justified the assumption amply by its deeds. It aspires not merely to
be moral; it would be the poetry of morality in a world where prose is
the common currency. It intends to hold up to the whole human family a
divine ideal of social heroism, which may some day be universally
admired but which never can be universally enacted.
Let us now look at the beautiful portraiture of the Christian man in
the detail of his most characteristic virtues.
And first, as the starting-point here, we must {216} observe that the
Christian is pre-eminently equipped with that self-denial and
self-control, and what we generally call strength of character, which
are the necessary postulates of all moral excellence. A man who will
take the world easily will never take it grandly; χαλεπὰ τὰ
καλά· _omnia præclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt:_ all
excellent things are difficult; the Christian recognises the
difficulty, but delights in it as the stout old Roman did in the foes
which added fuel to his victories, or as the strong modern engineer
does in mountains, that he may show the triumph of his art in boring
through them or winding round them. Modern sensualists and preachers
of the low doctrine that pleasure is the only good have delighted to
fling discredit on this grand Christian virtue of self-denial, as if
anything great ever was performed without it. The man of genius denies
himself in a thousand ways that he may work out a perfect body for the
imaginary ideals which possess him; the great soldier denies himself
through leagues of hardship that he may repel the rude invader and
preserve the honour of his country unstained; and the man of virtue
must deny himself also, if virtue is a thing which a creature of high
enterprise and lofty purpose may reasonably have to do with. To lie in
the lap of pleasure may be the highest enjoyment of which a feeble
character is capable; the alternation betwixt sensuous languor and
sensuous excitement may be the only grateful change of which a
predominantly sensuous nature can be made to partake; but a strong man
must have something difficult to do; and the strong Christian man has
to “work out his salvation with fear and trembling;” to mortify
the body, lest being overindulged {217} it should learn to be the
master instead of the servant of the soul; and “laying aside every
weighty and the sin which more easily besets him,” learn to “run
with patience the race which is set before him.” What race? The race
of realizing as much goodness as possible in his own personal life
lend in the life of that society of which he is a part, by the twofold
process of nursing virtues and weeding out vices: an ideal which never
can be reached by those who commence life, after the Epicurean
fashion, with a low calculation of pleasures and pains, but by those
only who we inspired by the vision of what Plato preached as divine
ideas, and Paul as divine commands. The recognition of a divine ideal
in some shape or other is the first step to the prosecution of a
divine life; and this alone can supply the inspiration which makes
difficulty easy, educes pleasure from pain, and converts the most
severe acts of self-denial into the materials of an elevating warfare,
and the occasion of a glorious triumph.
Very closely connected with the stern self-denial and the manly
strength of character so conspicuous in the first Christians was their
moral courage. It requires very little knowledge of the world and
experience of life to be made aware, in the case of those who are
capable of being made aware of these things, that the general habitude
of the world is not moral courage, but moral cowardice. The majority
of men, like the majority of dogs I presume, are not physical cowards;
the dog is naturally a fighting animal, and so is man. But that the
majority of men are moral cowards is certain. No consideration is so
powerful with schoolboys as that of being laughed at for any
singularity in dress or appearance; the slavery of {218} fashion among
grown-up persons is founded partly on the same dread; and the fear of
standing in a minority restrains many a man in public life from giving
voice to a salutary truth, and planting a gag on the barking mouth of
popular error. I have myself been present at meetings of corporate
bodies, where I gave my suffrage, confident that I was right in acting
consistently on a plain principle of common honesty; and after the
vote was taken I was told confidentially by some of those who had
voted against my views, that they had a strong conviction I was in the
right, only they could not venture to vote with me in the face of such
an overwhelming majority! This is the moral courage of the world.
‘Have any of the Scribes and Pharisees believed in him? If so, we
will speak out; if not, we keep silence.’ This tendency to follow
authority is in many persons, no doubt, the necessary consequence of
their own ignorance; ignorance is always afraid, and it knows by a
sure instinct that its only safety lies in being led by superior
knowledge. This no one can blame. But when a man acts against his own
conviction in giving his vote as a member of a corporate body, or in a
political assembly, to shield himself from the indignation or to gain
the favour of an unreasonable multitude,--when, as in pure democracy,
the question of right and wrong never comes before a man at all, but
the one rule of political life simply is to submit to what such and
such a local majority may choose to dictate,--this is sheer cowardice
and simple slavery, from which a man of honourable and independent
mind, not tainted with the baseness of democratic life, must shrink
with abhorrence. And so in fact we do find that in democratic
countries, where all {219} things are controlled by political cliques,
who dictate the local policy, to which the puppet called a Member of
Parliament, or a Deputy, is expected to swear, men of independent
spirit, manly courage, and large intelligence are found systematically
to shrink from the arena. How different from this demoralizing miasma
is the atmosphere which we breathe in the New Testament! There a
single manly individual stands forward, and in the name of God
solemnly calls upon men to renounce the dearly-cherished errors, and
to trample under foot the warmly-worshipped idols of a whole people.
“_If it be lawful in the sight of God to hearken unto men rather
than unto God, judge ye!_” This is what Peter said, speaking the
truth boldly, in the face of roaring multitudes, frowning dignitaries,
and lines of bristling lances. A religion in which such rare manhood
was as common as cowardice is common in general society, if it was not
crushed in the bud, as Protestantism was in Bohemia, could not but
grow up to a mighty tree in the end. The stoical death of the
gladiators in the Colosseum was wont to draw admiration, and sometimes
even to extort pity, from the spectators; but their death was
compulsory, and the stoicism of their last moments only a theatrical
grace to fall decently before an applauding multitude. The Christian,
on the other hand, whether as a fearless preacher or as an unflinching
martyr, made a voluntary protest, and chose a self-imposed torture. If
he was not a fool or a madman, he was a hero; and the heroism he
displayed was of such a high order, that being repeated only for a
generation or two, it caused the combined force of popular prejudice
and traditional authority in the heathen world to blush itself into a
{220} not unwilling subjection. So much of lofty courage and of
genuine manhood did subtle Greece and powerful Rome learn from the
moral missionaries of poor and despised Palestine!
Let us now cast a glance on that most characteristic and most widely
bruited of all the Christian virtues, viz., LOVE; which under the
name of Charity (not Ἔρως, the old satellite of Venus, but
ἀγάπη), St. Paul in a famous chapter eulogizes as at once the
crown and the epitome of all virtues most peculiarly Christian. We
read also that “Love is the fulfilling of the law;” and a
watchword so deliberately chosen and so emphatically sounded must
always be pregnant with significance as to the moral character and
efficiency of the religion to which it belongs. Now the plain
significance which this blazon bears on the face of it is this, that
if Love be the blossom of all virtue, the root of all vice is the
opposite of Love, viz., Selfishness. And whosoever has looked into the
moral world with any faculty of generalizing, will not fail to have
observed that every form of vice is only a diverse manifestation of
that untempered, voracious, and altogether monstrous egotism, which,
in order to purchase for itself a slight advantage or a momentary
titillation, would not scruple to plunge a whole universe into
disorder and ruin; while, on the other hand, the virtuous man lives as
much by sympathy with the desires of others as by the gratification of
his own, and is ready at any moment to dash the bowl of blessedness
from his lips, if he must purchase it by the consignment to misery of
a singly human soul. And if we look at the lower organism of society,
we shall find, that as in the republic of science knowledge prospers
exactly in proportion as {221} the pure love of truth prevails, so in
communities of human beings, the measure of the amount of that
brotherly love which man feels to man, taken in its intensity and in
its diffusion, furnishes an exact test of the amount of moral
excellence and consequent happiness--as distinguished from mere
material prosperity--which is found in any place. The greatest
difficulties, indeed, which society has to encounter, spring
fundamentally from a deficiency of brotherly love,--from every grade
of carelessness, indifference, and coldness, down to niggardliness,
shabbiness, and the wretched mania of hoarding jealously what he who
hoards is afraid to use. Poor-laws, for instance, which are generally
looked upon as a necessary evil, exist only because those social
associations to which the administration of charity naturally belongs,
viz., in a Christian country the Christian churches, are not powerful
or zealous enough adequately to do their duty in relieving human
misery; that is to say, because Love, which is professedly the soul of
those associations, is either not intense enough where it exists, or
not sufficiently diffused, to provide the necessary aid; and thus
people are driven to supply the want of voluntary love in the
community by the exaction of compulsory rates, which may, indeed, save
a few individuals from starvation, but which certainly produce the
double evil of weakening the healthy habit of self-support through all
classes of the community, and of stopping the fountain-heads of that
natural flow of brotherly aid, which is a virtue only so long as it is
voluntary. Now to this selfishness, which may without exaggeration be
termed the endemic taint of all human associations, Christianity has
applied the antidote of Love, in the {222} triple form of love to
Christ, love to the brethren, and love to the human race;--love to
Christ as the incarnate type of unselfish benevolence and noble
self-sacrifice; love to the brethren as fellow-soldiers in the same
glorious human campaign; love to all men, as sheep of one common fold,
which the further they have strayed the more diligently they are to be
sought for. How much more intensely and extensively than in any other
association this Love has operated in the Christian churches, from the
days of Dorcas and her weeping widows down to Florence Nightingale and
her Crimean campaign, need not be told; nine-tenths of the most active
benevolence of the day in this country are Christian in their origin
and in their character; and even those persons the favourite
watchwords of whose social ethics are borrowed not from Christ but
from Epicurus, will be found to have added a strange grace to the
philosophy which they profess by a light borrowed from the religion
which they disown. And if we inquire what are the causes of this
superior prominence given to active benevolence in the Christian
scheme of ethics, we shall find, as in other instances, that the
peculiar character of the ethical fruit depends on the root of
religion by which the plant is nourished, and the theological soil in
which it was planted. For surely it requires very little thought to
perceive that the root of all that surpassing love of the human
brotherhood lies in the well-known opening words of the most catholic
of prayers--“_Our_ FATHER _which art in Heaven;_” the aspect
also of sin as a contumacy and a rebellion, and a guilt drawing down a
curse, necessarily led to a more aggressive philanthropy, with the
view {223} of achieving deliverance from that curse; but, above all,
the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and the terrible
consequences necessarily involved in the idea of an eternal banishment
from the sunshine of the Divine presence, has created an amount of
social benevolence and missionary zeal which under any less potent
stimulus would have been impossible. The miseries of the more
neglected and outcast part of humanity present an entirely different
aspect to the calm Epicurean and to the zealous Christian. To the
Christian the soul of the meanest savage and of the most degraded
criminal is still an immortal soul. As when a conflagration bursts out
in a high turret, where a little child is sleeping within the near
enswathment of the flames, some adventurous fireman boldly climbs the
ladder, and rushing through the suffocating smoke, snatches the little
innocent from the embrace of destruction; so the Christian apostle
flings himself into the eager host of idolatrous worshippers, and
rejoices with exceeding joy when he saves if it were but one poor soul
from the jaws of the destroying Siva to whom he was sold. But, as
men’s actions are the offspring of their convictions, the Epicurean
will find no spur strong enough to shake him out of his easy-chair at
such a spectacle of human degradation. Let the poor sinner be
worshipping Siva on the banks of the Ganges, or committing slow
suicide by what, in the language of the Celtic islands, is strangely
called the water of life,[223.1] your easy sensuous philosopher needs
not vex himself about the matter. _Poor idiot! poor sot! poor devil!
with his little feeble flame of smoky light which he calls life, let
him flicker on another moment, or let him be_ {224} _snuffed out, it
matters not; another bubble has burst on the surface of the waters,
and the mighty ocean of cosmic vitality flows on as full and as free
and as fathomless as before!_
In the estimation of Christian love one of the most interesting points
is its strongly pronounced contrast with what has been called Platonic
love. As for that which is commonly called love in novels and in life,
though capable of affording a very exquisite bliss in its little
season, it is a matter with which mere puberty and the bloom of
physical life has so much to do, that except in the way of regulation
(which is anything but an easy matter), it does not come under the
category of morals at all; only this general remark may be made with
regard to it, that in all well-conditioned human beings it springs
originally from a certain affinity of souls shining through the body,
as much as from the mere attractions of physical beauty; and in so far
as this is the case, the purely physical instinct is elevated into the
sphere of genuine Platonic love. Now, what is Platonic love? As
described by the great philosopher of Idealism in the _Phædrus_, its
root lies plainly in the rapturous admiration of excellence, and its
consummation in the metamorphosis of the admirer into the perfect
likeness of that which he admires; whereas Christian love, most
characteristically so called, has its root in an infinite depth of
divine tenderness, and for its fruit broad streams of human pity and
grand deeds of human kindness. Platonic love is more contemplative and
artistic; Christian love more practical and more fruitful; the one is
the luxury of an intellectual imagination, the other the appetite of a
moral enthusiasm.
{225}