that it has nothing at all in common with intellectual admiration, and
that its only spring of movement is pity. “Visiting the fatherless
and widows in their affliction,” though in our present imperfect
state the most characteristic, is not absolutely the most essential,
feature in its exercise. If it were so, indeed, the Christian would
never be comfortable except in the midst of misery; as a nurse can ply
her vocation only at the bed of the sick or the wounded. But in fact
his infinite tenderness for the lost sinner is produced and heightened
by his experience of joy from communion with saints; and the
contemplation and imitation of the image of moral perfection in the
person of the great Captain of his salvation sustains him in his
unwearied and often apparently hopeless endeavours to gather in
recruits to serve under that so glorious captainship. We shall
therefore justly say that without a Platonic love, that is, a fine
spiritual passion for the character and person of Christ, the
performance of the thousand and one works of social charity and mercy
for which the Christian is so famous would be impossible. But we may
say further, that the picture of Charity given in that wonderful
chapter of St. Paul is very far from confining the sphere of Christian
human-heartedness to that field of healing and of comforting in which
so many charitable institutions in all Christian countries are the
watch-towers. His picture evidently exhibits the ideal of a human
being, not merely in the habit of lifting the fallen, healing the
sick, and ministering, as the good Samaritan did, to those who may
have fallen into the hand of robbers--these are extraordinary {226}
occurrences, which will excite even the most sluggish to extraordinary
demonstrations of human sympathy,--but the apostle of the Gentiles
will have it that in our daily intercourse with our fellow-men we
learn to live their lives sympathetically as intimately and as
completely as we live our own; that we study on all occasions to
identify ourselves with their position and feelings and interests, and
then only pass a judgment on their conduct. “_Charity suffereth long,
and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not
puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is
not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but
rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things,
hopeth all things, endureth all things_.” What a problem is here,
what a lesson of humanity, of catholicity, and of something far more
human than that mere toleration, which the nations of Christendom have
taken now nearly two thousand years to learn, since the first
preaching of the gospel, and are scarcely learning even now! How much
of our daily judgments, spoken and printed, seems leavened in any
degree by the genuine humanity and manifest justice of this divine
ideal? “Speaking the truth in love” is the acknowledged law of
Christian intercourse; speaking lies in hatred were often a more
appropriate text for certain large sections of British practice. We
ought to pass judgment against our brother on our knees, fearful to
offend; we do it rather, not seldom with pride and insolence and
impertinence, mounted on the triumphal car of our own conceit, riding
rough-shod over the real or imagined faults of our brother. So far
does the ideal of Christian love, in the preaching of the {227}
Christian apostle, transcend its reality in the lives of men who, if
not Christians, at least breathe a Christian atmosphere, and ought to
have received some benefit from the inhalation!
FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES is one of the special fruits of Christian
charity, which has never been denied its due meed of acknowledgment,
though not unaccompanied sometimes with the sarcastic observation that
the pious zeal of Christian men has generally been more apt to flame
into hatred than their love to blossom into forgiveness. No man has
yet been able to say of Christians generally, as one may often have
remarked justly of Quaker ladies, that they have too much milk in
their blood; nor do British and French and German wars seem to have
abated very much in intensity for the want of a Christian text
saying--_Thou shalt love thy friends and hate thine enemies!_ Perhaps,
also, some scholar may be able to string together from the pages of
rare old Plutarch a longer chain of pretty specimens of lofty
forgiveness of enemies than can readily be picked from modern
Christian biographies. In the life of Pericles, by that mellow old
Bœotian, I remember to have read that on one occasion this great
statesman had to endure for a whole day in the agora a succession of
impertinent and irritating attacks from one of those waspish little
creatures who love to infest the presence of goodness; and he endured
it with such untroubled composure that, without taking the slightest
notice of his assailant, he executed quietly some incidental matters
of business, whose urgency demanded immediate attention. In the
evening the orator returned to his house, still pursued by the gibes
and scurrilities of his spiteful {228} little adversary. But the great
man remained unmoved; and as he entered his own gate, quietly said to
the janitor--_Take a lamp and show that gentleman back to his home!_ A
similar but more serious instance of large-minded forgiveness of
enemies is recorded by the same author in his life of Dion, the noble
Syracusan who about the middle of the fourth century before Christ
made a brilliant dash upon Sicily, similar to that which in the middle
of the last century Prince Charles Edward Stuart made upon Great
Britain, with this difference, that while the one succeeded gloriously
in his well-calculated enterprise, the other with his mock-sublime
rashness ludicrously failed. This Dion, after having planted himself
on the seat of power abandoned by the worthless usurper, found the
cause of constitutional order, of which he was the champion, suddenly
endangered by the intrigues of an ambitious demagogue called
Heracleides; but his plots were timeously discovered, and political
wisdom sealed to call upon the representative of public order to
prevent the recurrence of such dangerous dissensions by the death of
the conspirator. But the generosity of the disciple of Plato prevailed
over the severity that would have guided a common politician. Dion
forgave the offender; only, however, as it soon appeared, that the fox
chased out of the hole might begin to burrow in another. In this case
the Syracusan Platonist behaved like a modern Quaker--nobly as
concerned the sentiment of the man, foolishly considering his position
as a statesman; but while no sensible man might improve of such
conduct in a ruler, every man feels that the heathen here performed an
act of which, so far as motive is concerned, {229} the most
accomplished Christian might be proud. Let the Greeks and Romans
therefore have their praise in this matter; let “seekers after
God” in heathen times be put forward prominently as ensamples to
those who in Christian times rejoice to think that they have found
Him;[229.1] nor let sympathy be refused to noble deeds because
performed from somewhat different motives. The great heathen forgave
his enemies because he was too high-minded to allow himself to be
discomposed by petty assailants, and because a great indignation seems
wasted upon a paltry offence; the true Christian forgives his enemies
because he loves them too fervidly to have any room for hatred, and
because his sidling pity overwhelms his wrath. There is no sin in the
magnanimous pride of the heathen; there is more humanity in the quick
sympathy of the Christian. Anyhow, Christianity may claim this
peculiar merit, that it has set up that type of conduct as a general
law for every man, which among the ancients was admired as the
exceptive virtue of the few; and Voltaire certainly revealed one
source of his uncompromising hostility to the Christian faith, and
showed himself as far below the ideal of heathen as of Christian
magnanimity, when he acted so that one of his most illustrious
disciples could say of him that “he never forgives, and never thinks
any enemy beneath his notice.”[229.2]
One of the most interesting of the contrasts generally drawn between
Christian and heathen ethics, is that which concerns the very
difficult virtue of SELF-ESTIMATE. “Let every man,” says St.
Paul, {230} “strive not to think of himself beyond what he ought to
think, but soberly, according as God has divided to every man the
measure of faith.” And accordingly we find that in the lives of
eminent Christians, as well as in formal treatises on Christian
ethics, humility has always had a prominent place assigned to it in
the roll of the virtues. But here again we must beware of running into
a vulgar extreme, by imagining that the Greeks and Romans knew nothing
of this virtue, and that they systematically fostered pride and
self-importance. It is no doubt true, as every schoolboy knows, that
the word ταπεινός, which in classical Greek signifies _mean_
and _paltry_, in New Testament Greek is used to designate that sort of
person who thinks of himself modestly, or, as St. Paul in the verse
quoted says, “soberly;” but the mere change in the shade of colour
belonging to certain words when passing from Attic into Alexandrian
Greek, proves nothing in such a case; and if the matter is to be
settled by words, the phrase σωφρονεῖν used by St. Paul, taking the
place of the ταπεινοφροσύνη of other passages, is the very word by
which the Greek moralists constantly express that golden mean between
a high and a low estimate of self, which Aristotle their spokesman
lauds as the habitual tone of the perfectly virtuous man. So far
indeed was the Hellenic mind from recognising no sin in pride, that it
looked upon self-exaltation and ramping self-assertion in every form
as not only a great sin, but the mother of all sins. This sin they
designated by the significant term ὕβρις--a word which etymologically
signifies _beyond the mark_, and which, if it had not already existed,
might well have been coined by {231} Aristotle, had he been given,
like Bentham, to the pedantry of making a language for himself.
“Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines
Quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum.”
Pride, indeed, is not only the sin by which Lucifer falls in Christian
angelography, but it peoples Tartarus also in heathen legends; and the
boastful Salmoneus, whose insane ambition aspires to mimic the thunder
of Jove, is always the first to be blasted by the bolt. Wherein then
shall we say lies the difference--for a difference there certainly
is--between the humility of the Christian and the σωφροσύνη
of the Greek? The common root of the virtue in both is plain; it is
the contrast between mortal and immortal, which belongs equally to
Polytheism and to Monotheism; pride was not made for man; let him
worship one God or many gods, he is a poor weak creature at the best,
and only the more called upon to practise a sober-minded humility
because his winged schemes so often end in creeping deeds. The
luxuriant pride of our young leafage grows up so frequently into a
shrivelled blossom and a hollow fruit. Yet there is a difference. In
Monotheism there is an impassable gulf betwixt God and man which
exists not in Polytheism. There are steps which lead up with not a few
gradations from Pericles to Zeus; the son of a Theban Semele may be
raised into a god, and the son of a god, like Hercules, may indulge
grandly in many of the stout carnalities of a mortal man. Here
therefore lies the primary ground of the more profound humility of the
Christian. But there is another, which in practice has proved even
more potent,--the intense {232} feeling of the Christian already noted
with regard to the exceeding sinfulness of sin. Every Christian looks
upon sin habitually as a healthy man looks upon the plague; in some
popular catechisms it is even laid down that “every sin, even the
smallest, deserves God’s wrath and curse both in this world and in
that which is to come;” nay, more: certain theologians, deemed by
some peculiarly orthodox, have taught that the whole world lies under
a curse on account of the guilt of the great progenitor of the human
race, in violating a special divine command, a guilt incurred some six
thousand years ago, and transmitted in due course of generation to his
hapless progeny. These dogmas, of course, are only strong caricatures
of the great fact that every deed, whether good or evil, by the
eternal constitution of things, necessarily transmits its influence
from the earliest to the latest times; families and races therefore
may lie for generations under a curse; the Greek tragedy acknowledges
this in the strongest terms; but, as in the other cases that we have
been considering, Christianity here not only intensifies a moral
sentiment familiar to the heathen world, but it extends immensely the
surface over which it is diffused. Æschylus and Sophocles could
represent a heavy curse hanging for ages over the royal houses of
Pelops and Labdacus as the consequence of monstrous sins committed by
the founders of their families; but Christianity makes no selection in
this matter, and flings the blackness of a moral blight in the most
unqualified phrase over the whole race of Adam. So far as we are
sinners we are all under a curse, all children of wrath; and no man is
supposed to be so virtuous as that he cannot {233} honestly join in
the humble response of the Litany, _Lord have mercy on us, miserable
offenders!_ These words repeated constantly in the weekly or daily
service of a whole Church should alone be sufficient to prove how much
more the virtue of humility is stamped, so to speak, into the
Christian soul, than it was into the Hellenic. One cannot imagine
either Socrates or Pericles using any such strong language. And I must
confess, when coming out into the fresh air from the long Morning
Service of the Anglican Church, I have often wondered how far the
humble prostration of soul expressed in the refrain of the Litany had
been cordially repeated by the great majority of the worshippers. The
English, as is well known, are a peculiarly proud and often somewhat
insolent people; and for myself, I honestly confess that I have always
experienced in reference to my own feelings not a little exaggeration
in the expressions of soul-prostration employed whether in the spoken
Presbyterian or in the printed Episcopalian formularies. I do not see
why Christian worshippers should so constantly avoid the language of a
reasonable virtuous self-satisfaction used by King David in not a few
places, and by Nehemiah. But however this be, and allowing that many
Christians habitually employ phrases in their church service which are
plainly at variance with the whole tone and temper of their lives, it
is after all true that Christianity, if it errs here, errs on the safe
side, and errs only as the medical men do, by using a very drastic
drug to combat a very violent disease. For it is only too obvious that
self-importance in various forms, not rarely under the decent mask of
modesty and diffidence, {234} is the dominant vice of the human
character. Young men are apt to glory in their strength, young women
in their beauty, fathers are proud of their offspring, scholars of
their learning, metaphysicians of their subtleties, and poets of the
iridescent and evanescent bubbles of a luxurious fancy and an unpruned
imagination. Men of science too are apt to be proud of their
knowledge,--whether a knowledge of what is high or what is low matters
not; it is the knowledge which puffs them up, not the thing known,
which indeed, if well weighed, were oftener the motive to humiliation
than to exaltation. We are therefore much in need of getting as much
humility from the gospel as it is naturally calculated to inspire; and
it may be observed that the public pulse is always ready to beat in
unison with the sacred text whenever a man of great original genius
stands forward, signally marked with the peculiarly Christian type of
humility. Such a man was Michael Faraday, the subtle investigator of
those secret laws which regulate the molecular action of particles of
matter among themselves.
“Yet living face to face with these great laws,
Great truths, great mysteries, all who saw him near,
Knew him how childlike, simple, free from flaws
Of temper, full of love that casts out fear.
Untired in charity, of cheer serene,
Careless or gold or breath of praise to earn;
Childhood or manhood’s ear content to win,
And still as glad to teach as meek to learn.”[234.1]
Here we have the general type of a chaste and {235} beautiful
Christian humility in the shape of a living man. To this no one
objects. It is the dogmas and the doctrinal paradoxes of the
professional theologians that are so apt to fret us; to which,
accordingly, here as in other cases, in judging of Christian ethics,
we shall be wise in not attributing too much importance.
But it were a very great mistake to imagine that in reference to the
estimate of personal worth Christianity exercises only a repressing,
and as some may picture it, a depressing, influence. On the contrary,
there is no religion that has done so much in creating and fostering the
feeling of personal worth and dignity. How is this? Plainly because,
while the Christian doctrine prostrates every man in a humble equality
before God, that very equality makes every man conscious of an equal
personality as compared with any other man. All men are sinners; if
that be a difficult doctrine to swallow there is one closely connected
with it, which is more comfortable: all men are brethren; and if
brethren, equal--a wise father has no favouritism. This is another
consequence of that monotheistic fatherhood of which we have already
spoken; it not only abolished nationalities, it created personalities.
In the preaching of the gospel each individual is appealed to as a
person with separate responsibilities; he has sinned individually, he
repents individually, he is redeemed individually. In this affair of
Christian salvation there is nothing done by proxy. Priests are not
known in the Church. The people only are the priesthood;[235.1] each
individual in the congregation has the value and the dignity of a
{236} priest. From this equality of personal dignity before God two
remarkable phenomena have flowed, both specially characteristic of
modern society--the abolition of slavery and the rivalry of religious
sects. Slavery, of course, must appear an intolerable anomaly to a man
who believes that all men are brethren and all sons of God; to call a
man brother and to sell him as a chattel is a lie too gross to be
tolerated even by a world accustomed to cheat itself with the
authority of all sorts of mere names. And as to the rivalry of
multifarious sects and churches, which some people bewail as the one
great gangrene of Christendom, it is really somewhat shallow not to
see that in the moral as in the physical world diversity of form only
proves the richness and the variety of the vital manifestation. The
external unity after which some religious persons sigh existed
naturally under heathenism, where the individual conscience was merged
in the State; exists now also in Popish countries, where the same
conscience is merged in the Priesthood; but in the Christianity of the
early Church, founded as it was on a direct appeal to the conscience
of the individual sinner, such a purely external and mechanical idea
could find no place. The right to exist at all as a Church established
the right to dissent from other Churches, by asserting its own
convictions when such assertion seemed necessary. This assertion,
indeed, might often be made foolishly, forwardly--then it was a sin,
the sin of schism; but the right to dissent was inherent, it was part
of the indefeasible birthright of spiritual liberty wherewith Christ
had made his people free. In this sense, to talk of humility were to
establish slavery; while, on the other hand, to send {237} out
branching suckers, which anon take independent root, is merely to
prove the rich vitality of the stem. Christianity has thus become the
great mother of moral individualism; and the many sects, which are so
apt to annoy us with their petty jealousies, are, when more closely
viewed, merely a true index to the intensity of our spiritual life.
On the relation of Christian Ethics to civil AUTHORITY, on the one
hand, and to the sacred right of LIBERTY on the other, much has been
written, but most frequently by partisans too interested to be capable
of an impartial judgment. The wisdom of the original preachers of the
Gospel was in nothing more manifest than in the care with which they
avoided mixing themselves up in any way with the social and political
questions of the hour; while at the same time they did not omit to
enunciate principles and to exhibit conduct opposed equally to the
servility which despotism demands and the licence in which democracy
delights. It would be easy to marshal forth an array of texts by which
the doctors of divine right on the one hand, and the preachers of the
sacred right of insurrection on the other, have endeavoured to enlist
the Saviour of mankind as a recruit in the internecine wars which they
have waged. But however Churchman and Puritan might expound and
denounce, the serene face of the Son of Mary looked always strange
through the smoke and sulphur of such struggles; his name was invoked
on both sides with most vehement protestation; but it was difficult
all the while for the impartial spectator to perceive that he was part
of the battle; he seemed always to belong to both sides, or to
neither. But sensible men of all parties {238} have at length become
convinced that to attempt to stamp the name of Christ as the special
patron of our little partisan cliques and warfares is as absurd as to
expect that the sun should come down from heaven and confine his
illumination to our private parlours. As for purely secular parties,
it is quite certain that both the extremes which divide the political
world are equally remote from the spirit of moderation and toleration
which is the very atmosphere that Christian charity breathes. Absolute
despotism, or the unlimited authority of one man over his fellows, is
a condition of things which, as Aristotle remarks, could only be
natural and legitimate in cases where the one absolute ruler happened
to be both the strongest and the best man in the community; but to
acknowledge as absolute rulers those who have no authority for their
rule but their own imperious will, and are always more likely to be
the worst than the best members of the society to which they belong,
is manifestly as directly opposed to the sense of righteousness in the
Christian code of morals as to the dictate of reason in the Greek. On
the other hand, the right of the mere numerical majority to rule,
which is the characteristic principle of pure democracy, never can be
admitted by a religion which teaches that the majority are bad, and
that we ought not to follow a multitude to do evil. The equality which
belongs to all Christians is not so much an equal right to rule as an
equal duty to obey; an equal right only to participate in those
privileges and obligations which belong to an independent human being,
not a mere chattel, as a member of a moral society called the Church,
and of a legal society called the State. The Christian {239} rejoices
indeed in his liberty; but it is not in the liberty to do what he
pleases, much less in the liberty of a majority to outbawl and to
overbear a minority by the mere power of numbers. He is free from the
pollution of sin, from the slavery of the senses, from the forms of a
cumbrous ritualism, and the exactions of a lordly priesthood; but he
is not free, and never dreams of being free, from the homage which
vice ought always to pay to virtue, from the natural subordination
that ignorance owes to intelligence, and from the sacred authority of
law. Here Christ and Socrates agree. “_Render unto Cæsar the things
that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s_.”
“_Let every soul be subject to the higher powers_.” If laws are
bad or impolitic, the guilt of their viciousness lies at the door of
those who made them, or who gave themselves no concern to have them
altered. But so long as they are laws let them be obeyed. The first
duty of the Christian is obedience to all existing laws, respect for
all established authorities, and a reverence generally for those
gradations of dignity and excellence into which the fair proportions
of the social architecture have been piled. Generally speaking he is
not an eager politician; the inspiration of large human love which
possesses his breast tenders him incapable of entering warmly into
those party struggles in Church and State with which large human love
has seldom much to do. He can neither despise the lowly majority of
his fellow-men to please the oligarch, nor trample upon the
intelligent minority to please the democrat. He has no great appetite
for power; he does not covet office; he will not intrigue for place;
he will not grasp the sceptre of civic rule with a forward hand, {240}
but wield it when it naturally falls to him with firmness as respects
others, and with a holy jealousy as respects himself; and he will
rejoice with trembling then chiefly when the victorious car of his
party friends is riding over the prostrate army of his foes. Ambition
is with him the love of usefulness, not the love of power; he
comprehends the spirit which dictated the answer of a pious English
clergyman when he refused the cure of a parish which was offered him,
for the singular reason that “the emoluments were too large and the
duty was too small;”[240.1] and he fears the dangers which may flow
from the abuse of authority more than he desires the pleasures which
are connected with its use.
Let us now, in the last place, inquire how the Christian law of right
conduct has approved itself in the history of society since the first
institution of the Church. And we seem certainly justified in starting
here with the expectation that, moved by such a fervid steam-power,
strengthened with such lofty sanctions, and displaying a scheme of
virtues at once so manly and so gentle--virtues not preached merely in
sermons or discussed in ethical treatises, but set forth in the living
epistles of two such opposite and yet both eminently Christian types
of character as St. Paul and St. John--so accoutred surely, and clad
with the perfect panoply that belongs to a great moral warfare (Eph.
vi. 13), Christianity could not but go forth conquering and to
conquer, especially when the living faith in extraordinary, and
miraculous demonstrations everywhere accompanied its march; and if it
has in any considerable degree failed to fulfil its bright promise in
regenerating the {241} face of the moral worlds this, in those who
accepted the religion, must have proceeded mainly from one of three
causes: either because the ideal was too high for them, as we are
accustomed to observe that certain nations are not socially far
advanced enough for free constitutions, and thrive best under
despotism; or from, the neglect of a regulative force which might
check the natural tendency to excess, extravagance and one-sidedness,
to which all human movements are liable; or again, from the
disturbance of the proper healthy action of the regenerative virtue of
the doctrine by the admixture of certain foreign, incompatible, and
corrupting elements. Of the first cause of failure nothing need be
said; it is with high morality as with high art, it is and it always
must be above the average reach of the great mass of men; and it may
be that in morals, as in art, some nations have tacitly agreed to let
the high standard drop, and content themselves with attaining a
manifestly inferior but more generally attainable ideal. But however
such compromises and refuges of despair may be the necessary wisdom of
politicians and of lawyers, who have to deal practically with the
selfish element in the masses of mankind, in the theory of morals, as
of art, they can certainly find no place. The Church and the Academy
must always set up the highest ideal; if they fail to do so it is only
because the inspiration which created them was originally feeble, or
has waxed faint; and if the members of the Church or the scholars of
the Academy fail to realize in their lives and in their works the
perfect pattern which has been set before them, it is the defect of
the learner, not the fault of the teacher. No one thinks of elevating
the character of art by lowering {242} the standard. And so if
Christianity is too good for mankind it must just remain too good,
till in the slow process of the ages men shall become more worthy of
it. But the two other causes of failure require to be looked into more
seriously. To the danger of excess Christian morality is peculiarly
liable, just because its steam-power is so very strong and its action
so efficacious. I read but the other day in a newspaper of a girl,
studious, as girls are apt to be, of personal beauty, who, having
picked up somewhere a fact well known to horse-dealers, that arsenic
has a specific beneficial action on the skin, set to work of her own
motion to mingle her daily potations with an infusion of the potent
metal, and did this so assiduously that in a very short time, instead
of improving her complexion, she had well-nigh removed herself for
ever from the society of the living. Now this is exactly what has
happened with Christian Ethics. Men have taken too much of a certain
virtue, say Reverence--which is the virtue most closely bound up with
religion--and have changed it into stupidity. That which was meant to
elevate human beings out of their finite littleness has been used to
depress them below the level of their meanest selves. And not only
have Christians by the excessive culture of favourite virtues turned
them into caricature, but they have assumed that because they have
learned to be Christians they should forget to be men. There are
certain human instincts, either purely physical, or closely connected
with our animal existence, so strong that the first preachers of the
evangelic ethics seem to have thought they might be safely left to
take care of themselves; but these same instincts certain
high-pressure Christians {243} who came afterwards, with more zeal
than sense, thought it their duty studiously to repress, or even
violently to extirpate. The result has been that we have seen
Christianity set at work systematically to maim that humanity which it
was intended to heal. As to the third cause of failure, the admixture
with foreign elements, it is of the same nature as the water which
dilutes the milk and the sand which debases the sugar in the
adulterated traffic of low traders. That such adulteration should
exist to a large extent in Christianity was unavoidable, so soon as
the profession of a religion so high above the measure of vulgar
ethics became respectable. When everybody was born and baptized and
bribed into Christianity, the morality which each Christian of this
external type professed must have been something as cheap as the blood
from which he was procreated, the water with which he was washed, and
the work by which he gained his livelihood.
The first, and in its epiphany one of the earliest and most
wide-spread excesses of Christian morality, was ASCETICISM. The
temptation to this lies very near, in the practice of the Christian
life, and is suggested in the strongest manner by its very language.
If sin is the flesh, and some of its most shameless and rampant
exhibitions are characteristically designated the lusts of the flesh,
it would seem that the simplest way to get the mastery of such lusts
is to keep the body under, as St. Paul has it,--to frown upon cakes
and ale, and perhaps even to extirpate certain passions, as you would
pull up dock by the long tape root, to make more room for the grass.
Nor was this altogether an unreasonable procedure. It might be very
admissible, in certain cases, to {244} become a eunuch for the kingdom
of heaven’s sake; “for the present need” he who abstained from
marriage might save himself from much incumbrance and from some
misery. The error lay in setting up that as a general ideal which was
valuable only as a device for special occasions, and possible only in
a rational way to persons of a peculiar temperament. Our Saviour
showed himself publicly at marriage-feasts as well as retired into the
mountains; he was found eating and drinking, and even changing water
into wine. St. Paul also never denied that a glass of wine was a good
thing; but Christians afterwards very soon began to act as if the
stern Baptist of the wilderness, and not the social Jesus of the
waysides, had been the pattern set up for their imitation. This
degeneration, no doubt, was the fruit of the anti-sensuous impulse
which it had been necessary to give them; and they saw daily in the
streets of Rome and of Corinth unseemly spectacles enow, of which the
lesson seemed to be: it is better to abstain than to be poisoned. Add
to this that Plato and his Alexandrian successors had thrown the whole
force of their ethics of reason on the spiritual side, and spoken of
the body often in terms of greater contempt than the Christian
apostles had ever done of the flesh. Of Plotinus, his biographer
Porphyry tells that “he lived like a man who was ashamed of being in
the body at all;” and Clemens of Alexandria, one of the most
intelligent of the Fathers, though not going to the extreme of these
Platonic devotees, speaks of a good dinner in a style calculated to
lead by a violent plunge on the other side into an artificial appetite
for dry pease and hard crusts. “We must not,” he says, “have any
care of external things, but be {245} anxious rather to purify the eye
of the soul and to chasten the flesh. Other animals live that they may
eat; man eats that he may live; for neither is eating his business nor
pleasure his good. Therefore those are strongly to be condemned who
seek after Sicilian lampreys, Mæandrian eels, Pelorian mussels,
oysters from Abydos, sprats from Lipara, Attic flounders, Mantinean
turnips, Ascræan beetroot, thrushes from Daphne, and Chalcedonian
raisins.”[245.1] Of course the sensible old Father meant this partly
as a protest against the monstrous gastronomic luxury of the Romans,
of which we read in Suetonius and other Latin writers of that age; but
it seems no less true that he was carried away in these matters by an
ideal of extravagant anti-sensualism, which had then strongly taken
possession of the Christian Church, and was indeed a rank native
growth of the East, specially of Syria and Egypt, as Church history
largely testifies. Nay, even in modern times, and in Western Europe,
where the cold climate partly excuses, partly necessitates, high
feeding, we find young persons, in the first start of a religious
life, not unfrequently led into a course of ascetic practice, as
prejudicial to their bodies as the excessive bookwork of the colleges
is to the mind. Young Whitefield, we are told, suffered not a little
from exercises of this kind; and the prolonged formal fastings
prescribed as God-pleasing by recent Ritualistic clergymen in this
country, have on more than one occasion enfeebled for a whole lifetime
the bodily functions of their virgin devotees. This is sad enough; but
it is not the worst. Such absurdities make Christianity ridiculous,
and force revolted nature into the {246} school of a benign Bentham or
an easy Hume, where one may at all events be moral and reasonable.
When we read in the biography of some modern Anglo-Catholic saint that
he feared nothing so much as the soft seduction of a slice of buttered
toast, and the golden deliciousness of a glass of Madeira, we begin to
sigh for Aristotle; it were better to have no religion at all as an
inspiring soul of morality, than a religion which lends importance to
such puerilities. But if these things have been done by certain
pseudo-Christians, and are paraded even now, there was one belief,
very common in the early ages of the Church, which tended not a little
to intensify the tendencies which lead to them. At all times it is
possible for the expectation of a future life to encroach on the
enjoyment of the present; and the growth of the asceticism of the
first centuries was beyond doubt powerfully aided by the overwhelming
influence of a newly promulgated and greedily accepted immortality,
and yet more perhaps, by the belief in the speedy second coming of
Christ. The renunciation of the world, and the more characteristic
worldly enjoyments, becomes of course much more easy when the
machinery of the world is shortly expected to stop. And thus the
weakness of human nature concurred with a number of accidental causes
to make the ascetic caricature of Christian ethics one of the most
wide-spread diseases, and an altogether astounding phenomenon in the
moral history of man. The ascetic oddities of Diogenes and a few Greek
cynics were nothing to it. The multitude of strange, and ridiculous,
and even disgusting forms which it assumed, will be found amply
detailed in the second volume of Mr. Lecky’s excellent _History_
{247} _of European Morals_, and need not be enlarged on here.
One of the strangest fancies that was ever begotten by the translation
of sense into nonsense is the idea of the Society of Friends, that
Christianity forbids war, and that self-defence is a sin.
Unquestionably Christianity forbids the spirit of hatred and the
desire of revenge; for the religion of Christ is a religion of
motives, of purity of heart, and of humanity of purpose, and could not
but forbid every spring of action that had in it the least tincture of
selfishness; but hostility between diverse interests is a fact which
Christianity could not deny, and common sense would not attempt to
explain away. What Christianity denounced was the spirit from which
wars generally arise--“_From whence come wars and fightings among
you? Come they not even from your lusts that war in your members?_”
And so far as this is the case, if these lusts were regulated by
Christian principle--that is, if love and sympathy took the place of
selfishness and jealousy, the wars that spring from their feverish
ferment and fury would not take place. But this is a quite different
thing from the natural right of self-defence; there are wars where the
aggression is all on one side, and where to yield to the assault would
be to offer a bribe to brigandage; there are wars also of pure
stupidity, where both parties don’t know what they are about, and
where it is not a pure heart but a disciplined intellect that is
necessary to prevent the fray. But whatever be the cause, wherever
there is a fermenting bed of conflicting interests of divergent
opinions and of antagonist passions, even amongst good men wars are
unavoidable; unless, indeed, such a court of impartial {248} arbiters
could be appointed, as it has hitherto proved beyond the reach of
human wit to realize; and what Christian Ethics in this case requires
is, that, contests of right being unavoidable, after every attempt at
peaceful adjustment has failed, men should go to war with a certain
mutual self-respect, and with a generous chivalry such as the knights
of the middle ages systematically fostered, carrying on hostilities
like men, and not like tigers. In this sense it has been proved
perfectly possible to love our enemies without betraying our rights,
and will become more and more practicable in the degree that
international recognition becomes more common, and a large Christian
philanthropy more diffused. But the idea that Christian love should
become so intense as absolutely to annihilate the instinct of
self-preservation, and to train every creature to love every other
creature a great deal better than itself, is pure maundering, and will
then only be tolerated among men when a decadent humanity shall have
entirely divorced piety from reason, and Buddhism instead of
Christianity shall have become the religion of the most advanced
pioneers of civilisation.
But the most general excess which runs, so to speak, in the blood of
Christian ethics, arises from the overflow of zeal without knowledge,
at one time boiling over in floods of the most savage intolerance, at
another ossified into the rigid features of the most unrelenting
bigotry. This is an evil which springs naturally from the connexion of
morality with religion; and it is an evil of so enormous a magnitude
that it seems in some sort to supply an excuse for those inadequate
ethical systems of recent growth which take no cognisance of the
reverential and devout {249} instincts of human nature, and, after the
model of Aristotle, would build up an architecture of Ethics without
piety. And if religious zeal generally is prone to run into
intolerance, it is specially so in the case of monotheism. For
monotheism is naturally intolerant; it will bear no assessor on the
supreme throne; if true, it is exclusively true. And this is indeed no
more than what it is entitled to; but it should be intolerant only of
polytheism as a system, not uncharitable to polytheists as men;
whereas it has become almost a proverb that the zeal of Christian
theologians stands divorced not only from charity, but from truth; of
all disputants men of the clerical profession are the most unfair, so
much so, that among churchmen as a class candour is scarcely a
mentionable virtue. A candid evangelist is generally a black sheep to
his brethren; assuredly he will not be found prominent in Church
debates, or forward as a leader of Church parties. But neither must we
bear too hard upon the clergy in this matter. It is human nature, in
fact, more than clerical inoculation that is to blame; and we shall
find if we look round with an impartial eye, that humanitarian
democrats, anti-church Radicals, scientific crotchet-mongers,
mathematical formulists, and conceited young poets, are equally
intolerant in their own way; only religion, like love, by the very
intensity of its excellence, raises the natural intolerance of human
nature to its highest power; it is so pleasant to stamp the name of
God upon our passions and ride triumphantly over the world in the
character of armed apostles of the most sacred truth. Hence religious
wars, which, as all the world knows, have generally proved the most
bitter and sanguinary; hence conquests, robberies, {250} and
oppressions in the name of the God of Christians; which for systematic
cruelty, treachery, and all manner of baseness, have not been
surpassed in the annals of Spartan helotage or Venetian espionage;
hence assumptions of infallibility which make reason blush, and
consecrations of absurdity which petrify common sense. And when this
flaming zeal, in more quiet times, has settled down, it does not
therefore always cease to exist, but stiffens into bigotry, and,
united with that self-importance which is so natural to man, produces
an exclusiveness and a Pharisaism of which all Christian Churches, in
seeming rivalry of the Jews, whom they revile, have presented a very
sharp and well-marked adumbration. If the religious Hindu will not eat
from a Christian’s platter, the religious Episcopalian will not dine
in the same room or stand on the same platform with the religious
Dissenter. The hissing fervour which originally forbade the approach
of two adverse churches has now been changed into a dead wall or
partition, which keeps those who ought to know, and love, and
co-operate with one another, habitually as far apart as Greeks and
Turks; so that it has become the most difficult of all social
operations to unite two Christian churches, separated perhaps by some
notion more political than religious, in the prosecution of some
common object which they both confess to be supremely desirable.
That which makes the ebullition and overflow of religious zeal so
fatal in its effects, is not merely the excess of the zeal itself,
which like all excess is bad, but the tendency of all religions to
subordinate the moral element which they contain to the religious: to
make religion a separate business instead of an ethical instrument; to
hang it as an amulet round {251} the neck, not to breathe it as an
atmosphere of social health, to nurse it as a sacred fire in the
heart, and to feel it as a power which purifies every passion,
ennobles every motive, and braces the nerve to the robustness of all
manly achievement. If there is one characteristic of Christianity more
prominent than another, it is certainly this, that it is essentially
an ethical religion; other religions favour certain virtues, or give a
certain sanction to all virtues, but Christianity is morality; the
moral regeneration is the religion. There are religions which profess
to possess a power by which its priests can bring down rain, banish
the pestilence, make the devil speak truth, and charm a murderer into
heaven. Christianity knows nothing of these tricks. Its ministers
supply no passports by which knaves and sluggards, when they escape
from the body, may pass the celestial police without question. The
Christian religion is not a special training which pious persons are
to go through in order to prepare themselves for a future world; it
calls upon every man with a loud voice to do the work of God in this
world, here where alone work is possible for us; and not until our
assigned task has been bravely done here, can there be any question of
what promotion may await us there. Had the gospel been intended
according to the vulgar prejudice now under consideration, as a
religion having an existence apart from the details of everyday
morality, John the Baptist certainly would never have been sent as its
precursor, nor the Sermon on the Mount been given forth as its
manifesto. Neither again does the famous doctrine of St. Paul, that
men are saved by faith not by works, in any wise contradict the
essentially ethical character {252} of the faith which he preached.
The works which in the Epistle to the Romans he so unconditionally
denounces, are works either of self-conceit or of sacerdotal
imposition, by which persons uninspired by a lofty moral ideal seek to
recommend themselves to God. From such a germ no moral good can
possibly grow; for as in the realm of speculation the oppressive sense
of ignorance is the commencement of true knowledge, so in the
practical world, the honest confession of sin is the commencement of
sanctification. But how little Christian faith can have any
significance apart from works, the same Apostle shows largely in the
11th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the only part of the New
Testament by the way in which a formal definition of faith is given,
and a chapter at the same time from whose copious historical
illustrations, it is plain to any child that faith is merely a
religious synonym for what we in secular language call moral heroism,
a heroism peculiarly marked as Christian only by the distinct
recognition on the part of the actor that the moral law which he obeys
is the accredited will of the Moral Governor whom he serves. Clear as
this is, however, there has always been manifested in the Christian
church a tendency to separate faith from works, a tendency which, like
other aberrations, has sometimes had the hardihood to stilt itself up
into the dignity of a dogma, and in this attitude has been known in
these latter times under the name of Antinomianism. Of a leaning
towards this monstrous doctrine, the Calvinistic churches have been
specially accused; and there can be no doubt, that in Scotland and
other countries where a Calvinistic creed is professed, notions of
this kind will always {253} find an open soil in souls of a certain
nature, notions too that will often be practically acted upon even
where they are not theoretically professed; but it is historically
certain, that of all Christian teachers the great Genevan reformer
himself was the least chargeable with any absurdity of this kind. On
the contrary, he found himself involved in a serious war with the city
to which he ministered, just because he insisted that his religion
should be practical, and his faith if it meant anything, should mean
good works; and he carried his point too in the end in spite of those
who stoutly protested that the stern limitations of gospel law marked
out by the preacher, should have nothing practically to do with the
broad licence that might be convenient for the libertine and the
publican. And indeed, it would be the greatest reform that could be
made in the Christian church at the present moment, if our popular
preachers were to give us fewer sermons, and when they did preach,
take care, like St. Paul in his Epistles, to have some distinct
practical point to speak to. For the difficulty of Christian as of all
ethics, lies not in the general rules, but in the special application
of the rules; and vague condemnations of sin however severe, and
commendations of holiness however fervid, will have little effect if
people are not to be made to understand distinctly what those phrases
so awfully sounded forth on Sunday are meant to signify on Monday. The
dignity of the pulpit, I suspect, like the dignity of history, has
often made it dull; certain it is, that whether from a false sense of
dignity, or from a religious zeal without ethical depth, or from
ignorance of those affairs to which ethical maxims must be applied, or
{254} from fear to offend those whose support is thought necessary,
the ministrations of the Christian pulpit lose not a little of their
efficiency from dealing more in the generalities of sin and holiness,
than in special vices and virtues, and from yielding to the easy
temptation of expatiating on scholastic subtleties or ecclesiastical
crotchets, instead of unravelling the perplexities of social practice,
or unmasking the disguises of individual character. Many things are
left to be handled lightly by the novel-writer, which with much more
effect might have been handled seriously in the pulpit; and in fact, I
have found not a few excellent sermons in novels, which I should have
sought for in vain in our pulpits; but the misfortune is, that people
read novels mainly to be amused, and will see the living portrait of
their own follies painted in the firmest lines, and with the most
glowing colours, without making the slightest attempt to amend their
faults. But of this enough. One thing is certain, that no amount of
faith, no amount of preaching, and no amount of prayer, can be taken
as a true measure of the genuine Christianity of any country, unless
the faith professed shall be found to be permeating every form of
social life, and elevating every trait of individual character. To any
one who wishes to see what real Christianity can do for a district in
the person of a truly evangelic and wise man, I recommend the perusal
of the life of the Rev. John Frederick Oberlin, who, in the latter
half of the last century, was, during the course of a long life,
pastor of the mountain district of the Ban de la Roche in Alsace. This
remarkable man was not content with the common ministerial routine of
preaching and praying; he saw that in the circumstances {255} in which
he was placed, nothing was to be done by mere talk; so with pick-axe
in hand he set himself to make roads; he became the forester of his
parishioners, and planted trees; their schoolmaster, and built them
schools; their architect, and reformed their cottages; their deacon,
and taught them trades; their professor, and lectured to them on
science; their physician, and taught them to live according to the
laws of health. Thus the faith which he professed turned a neglected
parish in a few years into a perfect museum of all good works, of
which a religion of the purest love was the soul; and the unobtrusive
Christian worker, who of this wilderness made a garden, was perhaps
the greatest man in France at a time when the thunders of Napoleon
were shaking the world from west to east, while his own fame had
scarcely travelled beyond the bleatings of the sheep of his own
parish. So little has the noisy applause of the world to do with some
of the highest forms of Christian virtue.[255.1]
It remains now only shortly to indicate how Christian ethics has
suffered from the admixture of adulterating elements. These are
notably three: INTELLECTUALISM, RITUALISM, and SECULARISM.
“There is a strange fascination,” says a living distinguished
theologian, “in reasoning about mysteries.”[255.2] Every religion
of course has its mysteries--for a man reverences that only which he
has reason to respect, {256} while he cannot fully comprehend it; but
the faculty of reverence when exercised on sacred mysteries should
rather deter men from presumptuous dogmatism than invite them to its
exhibition. But it has not always proved so in the Church. The
unsophisticated intellect of the laity might possibly have been
content without the vain attempt to define what is in its nature
undefinable. It is not the business of man to define God at all; our
finite work in reference to all forms of the Infinite is to
acknowledge, to worship, and to obey. But the meddling intellect of
professional theologians would not allow matters to rest here; they
proceeded to construct certain curious formulæ of doctrinal
orthodoxy, an intellectual belief in which was substituted for the
living ethical faith by which the heathen world had been regenerated.
Men were now taught to entertain the thoroughly unchristian idea that
the acceptance by the cognitive faculty of an array of nicely-worded
propositions concerning the Divine Nature and the plan of redemption
was somehow or other essential to their salvation; was certainly not
the least important element in Christian faith, and the non-acceptance
of which was held as justly excluding the recusant from the communion
of the saints. This was a sad mistake. The fiery denunciations which
St. Peter (2 Pet. ii. 1) and the other apostles uttered against those
who “privily bring in damnable heresies,” were launched not
against intellectual heterodoxies, but against the lusts of the flesh
and all sorts of sensualism; but now the hated name of heresy was
transferred to the imaginary sin of not being able to believe what a
conclave of foolish or presumptuous Churchmen chose to lay down, and
artificial creeds {257} were forged and fulminated, and flung with
stern anathemas and boastful defiance against every honest thinker who
could not be brought to believe that faith must show its efficacy
principally by its power of blinding reason and smothering common
sense. This gigantic dogmatism of the shallow understanding making an
alliance with the fervid religious zeal which has been already
mentioned, led consistently to a system of the most organized social
selfishness that the history of the world knows,--selfishness only the
more horrible that it was dignified by the most venerable names, and
consecrated by the most sacred ceremonial The office-bearers of the
originally free moral community called the Church now declared
themselves infallible, and lorded it insolently over the consciences
of those within the Church, and over both soul and body of those
without its pale. To think on any of the subjects most interesting to
a thinking man was now a sin; men who had the misfortune not to think
exactly according to the formulæ prescribed by the Church were
prosecuted as criminals, condemned as malefactors, burnt at the stake
as monsters, and refused the humanities of common burial. A compact
was made with the civil power that no situation of honour, emolument,
or trust should be given to any one who was not ready to swear to the
established orthodoxy; and thus, as human nature is constituted, not
only was thinking forbidden and absurdity enthroned, but a bribe was
held out to public hypocrisy; the conscience of young persons was
systematically debauched; and the love of truth and the independent
searching of the Christian Scriptures in many Christian churches
became utterly unknown. Such were the fruits of Intellectualism. {258}
But these portentous results were not produced by the impertinence of
the meddling intellect alone. Such a hideous domination over the
liberties of the individual conscience could not have been achieved by
one unassisted evil power. During the same period of Christian
corruption the other evil influences of RITUALISM and Secularism
were both equally active. Of these the first, though with a
distinctively religious feature, was in essential character
anti-Christian. Christianity is a religion of inward motives,
Ritualism a religion of outward forms. It was not enough that the hand
should shrink from offending; that the eye should cease from lustful
wandering; the fountains of evil desire had to be stopped in their
first wellings; the lawyer and the police might concern themselves
with the completed act and its consequences; with the evil thought,
which is the germ of all evil deeds, Christianity commenced and
finished its purifying action. Occupied with this radical
regeneration, the preachers of the Gospel never dreamt of prescribing
minute regulations about attitudes, gestures and postures, crosses,
crosiers, candlesticks and change of dresses, decorations with
banners, flags, festoons, gilded shrines, jewelled images, and other
appurtenances of flaunting ceremonial. These might be matters of
decency and taste very proper to be attended to; but to have made them
the subject of special prescription would have been to assign them an
importance which they did not deserve; nay, would have manifestly run
counter to the liberty of that religion which they taught, and
confounded it with the bondage of that Judaism--a bondage of meats and
drinks, new-moons and sabbaths, and other externalities--which neither
{259} they nor their fathers had been able to bear. And this leads us
to remark, that the oppressive puerilities of Ritualism in themselves,
perhaps more ridiculous than pernicious, were, in the case of the
Jews, and are indeed naturally everywhere, closely combined with
another evil no less foreign to the genius of Christianity, which we
may call SACERDOTALISM. The Jews and the Egyptians had a closely
banded hereditary priesthood culminating in a theocracy; the Greeks
and Romans had a sporadic priesthood of special sacred persons,
colleges and places; of these a ritual, often cumbrous, seldom
graceful, sometimes shameful, generally ridiculous, was the legitimate
exponent. Christianity with the performance abolished the performers;
prayers were declared to be the only incense, a holy life the only
offering, and a people zealous of good works the only priesthood. But
this was too good a doctrine for poor human nature to hold by, or at
least for the then stage of civilisation permanently to maintain.
People were only too glad to get theologians to think for them, and
ceremonies to dress up their devout feelings in an imposing though it
might be often a tasteless garb. These ceremonies, originally
indifferent, by the sacred character belonging to the men by whom they
were performed, soon became sacrosanct, and the performing priest
naturally attributed a special efficacy to those rites of which he was
the instrument. Whatever virtue they possessed was derived originally,
no doubt, like everything else, from God, but specially and
exclusively through him. He was the conducting rod, the chosen medium
of bringing down the spiritual electricity from heaven to earth. Thus
he became a wonder-worker more potent than the rainmakers {260} of
African superstition. He had but to open his mouth and wine became
blood, and bread flesh at the magic mutter of his lips. In a religion
thus made essentially sacerdotal, where thaumaturgic rites received
such prominence, it was impossible that the ethics of common life
should be able to maintain their original place in the idea of its
founder. Judaism, in fact, and Heathenism, had been smuggled back into
the Church; religion was one thing, moral character another; brigands
might rob and kill, and, at the same time, keep up a converse with
Heaven by the kissing of crosses, the telling of beads, and the
tramping of pilgrimages; the poles of right and wrong might be
positively inverted, while piety remained. But a still greater triumph
for the evil principle was in store. In the evangelic history of the
Temptation, it is narrated that the devil, after trying other methods
of seduction, carried our Lord up into an exceeding high mountain,
where there was a survey of all the kingdoms of the world and the
glory thereof, and pointing out these the tempter said,--“_All this
I will give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me_.” This
argument, as we know, did not succeed with our Lord; but it succeeded
only too well with those who came after Him. The marriage of worldly
power and glory, to an essentially spiritual and unworldly religion,
gave birth to that last and most potent adulteration which we have
called SECULARISM. There is no necessity, of course, that a modern
bishop should be a poor man, any more than an ancient patriarch;
Christian ethics do not forbid a man to have a fat purse any more than
a full stomach; but as a Christian may not live an epicure mainly for
the sake of his stomach, so neither {261} may he live for the sake of
his purse. And then there is a great difference between the effect of
worldly prosperity in individuals and in institutions. An individual
may be a man of exceptional virtue, and in the face of many
temptations may become more virtuous the more he is exposed; but
institutions are composed of the majority, and οἱ πολλοὶ
κακοί, the majority are not heroes. It was natural, therefore, to
expect, that as the Christian Church in its first epoch possessed a
principal element of purity in the poverty and the social
insignificance of its members, so one great occasion of its corruption
would emerge as soon as the profession of the once despised faith
became the high-road to wealth, the badge of social worth, and the
guarantee of political power, whether, “as at Constantinople, the
attempt was made to imperialize the Church, or, as at Rome, the Church
waxed into the dimensions of an empire.”[261.1] But it was not at
Rome or Constantinople only that the Church was thus secularized.
Wherever official position in a prosperous and popular church presents
an open career to persons desirous of making a respectable livelihood,
there must always be a class of people, more or less numerous, who are
ready to say in their hearts, though they may not dare everywhere to
say it openly,--“_Put me, I pray thee, into one of the priests’
offices, that I may eat a bit of bread_.” Only the means by which
this bit of bread may be obtained depends always to a great extent on
the character of the patrons; and the corruption of the church
office-bearers will always be greater where the appointment to
valuable benefices is a mere civil right, {262} belonging to private
individuals, than where it remains with its original depositaries, the
congregations of the Christian people. No doubt where popular election
exists in a church there will always be a danger of divisions, and a
sort of ecclesiastical demagogy or mean subserviency to the passions
and prejudices of the majority can scarcely be avoided; but this is a
less evil than open simony, and the usurpation of apostolic functions
by men who do not, like St. Paul, work with their own hands that they
may preach without fear, but preach that they may feed themselves, and
dress themselves, and amuse themselves, and bring up their sons to
play billiards, and their daughters to dance quadrilles with the
aristocracy of the land. This thorough secularisation of religion is
one of the most revolting spectacles that the moral history of the
world presents; and to its existence in any country, along with the
other two adulterations mentioned, must be attributed its full share
of guilt in creating that reaction in favour of a morality without
religion, and a State divorced from Church, which is one of the
favourite ideas of the democratic age in which we live. For while
Intellectualism and Ritualism expose an ethical religion to attack,
the one by planting faith in an attitude of hostility to reason, the
other, by making its worship puerile and ridiculous, the secular
corruption cuts deeper and proves suicidal to the very essence and
soul of Christianity. For by this infection a religion of the most
chivalrous love, the purest unselfishness, and the profoundest
humility, is worked up into a monstrous combination of selfishness,
pride, and hypocrisy, which tears up the very notion of public virtue
by {263} the roots; and so in point of fact it came to pass that, in
the lives of some of the most conspicuous of Christian pontiffs, there
was exhibited to the world a march of scarlet sins, unsurpassed by the
bestialities of Roman or the ferocities of Byzantine autocrats. In the
holiest courts of the most holy all was rankness, loathsomeness,
putrescence; only a theatric show of sanctitude was kept up scarcely
with decency, to deceive those who might be deceived by the good
fortune of not living too near the actors. And thus was realized the
most sorrowful example of the truth of the ancient adage--_corruptio
optimi pessima;_ THE CORRUPTION OF THE BEST THINGS IS THE WORST.