produced, but in fact produced—by a belief in revelation. They are
fearful of future punishment, because some being in the air has
threatened it. They have not the true belief in the Divine holiness which
arises from a love of holiness; they have not the true conception of God
which was suggested by conscience, and is kept alive by the activity
of conscience; but they have a vague persuasion that a great Personage
has asserted this, and why they should believe that Personage they do
not ask or know. While revelation remains connected in the mind with
the spirituality on which it is based, it is as consistent with true
morality as religion of any other sort; but if disconnected from that
spirituality, if it has become an isolated terrific tenet, like any other
superstition, it is inconsistent.
The original difficulty with which we started, and the true answer to
that difficulty, may be summed up thus: The objection is, that the
extrinsic motive to goodness (which religion reveals) must absorb the
intrinsic motives to goodness (which morality reveals). The answer is,
that the second revelation is contingent upon the first; that those only
have a substantial ground for believing the extrinsic motive who retain a
lively confidence in the intrinsic. Perhaps some may think this principle
too plain; perhaps others may think it too unimportant to justify so long
an exposition and such a strenuous inculcation. But if we dwell upon it
and trace it to its attendant results and consequences, we shall find
that it will account for more of the world than almost any other single
principle—at any rate, will explain much which puzzles us, and much which
is important to us.
First, this principle will explain to us the use and the necessity of
what we may call the _screen_ of the physical world. Every one who
has religious ideas must have been puzzled by what we may call the
irrelevancy of creation to his religion. We find ourselves lodged in
a vast theatre, in which a ceaseless action, a perpetual shifting
of scenes, an unresting life, is going forward; and that life seems
physical, unmoral, having no relation to what our souls tell us to be
great and good, to what religion says is the design of all things.
Especially when we see any new objects, or scenes, or countries, we
feel this. Look at a great tropical plant, with large leaves stretching
everywhere, and great stalks branching out on all sides; with a big
beetle on a leaf, and a humming-bird on a branch, and an ugly lizard
just below. What has such an object to do with _us_—with anything we
can conceive, or hope, or imagine? What _could_ it be created for,
if creation has a moral end and object? Or go into a gravel-pit, or
stone-quarry; you see there a vast accumulation of dull matter, yellow or
grey, and you ask, involuntarily and of necessity, why is all this waste
and irrelevant production, as it would seem, of material? Can anything
seem more stupid than a big stone _as_ a big stone, than gravel for
gravel’s sake? What is the use of such cumbrous, inexpressive objects
in a world where there are minds to be filled, and imaginations to be
aroused, and souls to be saved? A clever sceptic once said on reading
Paley that _he_ thought the universe was a furniture warehouse for
unknown beings; he assented to the indications of design visible in many
places, but what the end of most objects was, why _such_ things were,
what was the ultimate object contemplated by the whole, he could not
understand. He thought ‘divines are right in saying that much of the
universe has an expression, but surely sceptics are right in saying that
as much or more has no expression.’ Some of the world seems designed to
show a little of God; but much more seems also designed to hide Him and
keep Him off. The reply is, that if morality is to be disinterested,
some such irrelevant universe is essential. Life, moral life, the life
of tempted beings capable of virtue and liable to vice, of necessity
involves a theatre of some sort; it could not be carried on in a vast
vacuum; _some_ means of communication between mind and mind, _some_
external motive to question inward impulses, _some_ outward events as
the result of past action and the stimulus to new action, seem essential
to the life of a voluntary moral being, to a being tempted as a man is,
living as a man lives. The only admissible question is the nature of that
theatre. Is it to be in all its parts and objects expressive of God’s
character and communicative of man’s fate? or is it, as many say, in most
parts to express nothing and tell nothing? The reply is, that _if_ the
universe were to be incessantly expressive and incessantly communicative,
morality would be impossible; we should live under the unceasing pressure
of a supernatural interference, which would give us selfish motives for
doing everything, which would menace us with supernatural punishment if
we left anything undone. We should be living in a _chastising_ machine,
of which the secret would be patent and the penalties apparent. We are
startled to find a universe we did not expect. But if we lived in the
universe we did expect, the life which we lead, and were meant to lead,
would be impossible. We should expect a punitive world sanctioning moral
laws, and the perpetual punishment of those laws would be so glaringly
apparent that true virtue would become impossible. An ‘unfeeling nature,’
an unmoral universe, a sun that shines and a rain which falls equally on
the evil and on the good, are essential to morality in a being free like
man, and created as man was. A miscellaneous world is a suitable theatre
for a single-minded life, and, so far as we can see, the only one.
The same sort of reasoning partly elucidates, even if it does not
explain, the brevity of our apparent life. If visible life were eternal,
future punishments must be visible. We should meet in our streets with
old, old men enduring the consequences of offences which happened before
we were born. We should not see, perhaps, old age as we now see it;
decrepitude would be unknown to us. If there was immortal life on earth,
there would probably also be immortal youth; at any rate, immortal
activity. The perpetuity of existence would not be divided from the
perpetuity of what makes life desirable, of what makes effective life
possible. But if children saw their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers,
and their fathers’ ancestors, in an unending chain, suffering penalties
for certain acts, and obtaining rewards for certain deeds, how is it
possible that they could act otherwise than according to those visible
and evident examples? The consecutive tradition of self-interest would
be so strong among a perpetual race of immortal men that disinterested
virtue would be not so much impracticable as unthought-of and unknown.
The exact line of real self-benefit would be chalked out so plainly, so
conspicuously, so glaringly, that no other action would be conceivable,
or possible. The evidence of _all_ consequences would be like the
evidences of legal consequences now, only infinitely more effective
and infinitely more perceptible. In human law, the _detection_ of the
offence by man is a pre-requisite of all punishment by man. An offence
not proved to the ‘satisfaction of the court’ escapes the judgment of the
court. But in a visible immortal life, this pre-requisite would not be
needful. _If_ there be a future punishment, and _if_ man lived for all
futurity upon earth, that future punishment would be on earth, and it
would be inflicted by God. Undetected crime, that general bad character
without specific proved offence, which now mocks all law and laughs
at visible punishment, would then, under our very eyes, receive that
punishment. Job’s friends kindly argued with him, ‘You are suffering,
therefore you are guilty.’ And the argument was bad, because they only
saw an exceptional accident in the life of a good man, not his entire
life through a subsequent eternity; but if that eternal life had been
passed in continuous residence on this globe, if notorious bad fortune
had pursued him through eternity in the nineteenth generation, his
descendants might well have said, ‘Oh, Job, there is something wrong in
you, for you never come out right.’ A great historian has observed,—
‘That honesty is the best policy, is a maxim which we firmly
believe to be generally correct, even with respect to the
temporal interest of individuals; but with respect to
societies, the rule is subject to still fewer exceptions, and
that for this reason, that the life of societies is larger than
that of individuals. It is possible to mention men who have
owed great worldly prosperity to breaches of private faith; but
we doubt whether it be possible to mention a state which has,
on the whole, been a gainer by a breach of public faith.’
If the visible life of individuals were yet longer than the life of
societies, the rule would be subject to still fewer exceptions; if that
visible life were eternal, the rule would be subject to no exceptions;
the staring evidence of conspicuous results would purge temptation out of
the world.
The physical world now rewards what we may call the physical virtues,
and punishes what we may call the physical vices. There is a certain
state of the body which is a condition of physical well-being, and (as
life is constituted) very much of all well-being. If by gross excess
any man should impair that condition, physical law will punish him. The
body is our schoolmaster to bring us to the soul; it enforces on us the
preparatory merits, it scourges out of us the preparatory defects. The
law of human government is similar; it enforces on us that adherence
to obvious virtue, and that avoidance of obvious vice, which are the
essential preliminaries of real virtue. There is no true virtue or vice,
so long as physical law and human law are what they are in any such
matters. The dread of the penalties is too powerful not to extinguish
(speaking generally, and peculiar cases excepted) all other motives. But
these teachers strengthen the mental instruments of real virtue. They
strengthen our will; they hurt our vanity; they confirm our manhood.
Physical law and human law train and build up, if the expression may
be permitted, that good pagan, that sound-bodied, moderate, careful
creature, out of which a good Christian may, if he will and by God’s
help, in the end be constructed. If visible life were eternal instead
of temporary, the same intense discipline which so usefully creates
the preparatory prerequisites would likewise efface the possibility of
disinterested virtue.
Again, the great scene of human life may be explained, or at least
illustrated, in like manner: _we are souls in the disguise of animals_.
We lead a life in great part neither good nor evil, neither wicked nor
excellent. The larger number of men seem to an outside observer to
walk through life in a torpid sort of sleep. They are decent in their
morals, respectable in their manners, stupid in their conversation.
The incentives of their life are outward; its penalties are outward
too. The life of such people seems to some men always—to many men at
times—inexplicable. But if such beings were not permitted in the world,
perhaps a higher life might be impossible for any beings. They act
like a living screen, just as we say matter acts like a dead screen.
It is not desirable that the results of goodness should be distinctly
apparent; and if all human life were intensely and exclusively moral;
if all men were with all their strength pursuing good or pursuing evil,
the isolated consequences of that isolated principle must be apparent;
at least, could scarcely fail to be so. If one set of men were cooped up
in the exclusive pursuit of virtue, and were very ardent and warm about
it, and another set of men were eager in the pursuit of evil, and cared
for nothing but evil, the world would fall asunder into two dissimilar
halves. If goodness in the visible world had _any_, the least, tendency
to produce visible happiness, then incessant goodness would be very
happy. The accumulations of the slight tendency by perpetual renewal
would amount of necessity to a vast sum-total. Incessant badness would
produce awful misery. Those absorbed in vice would be warnings dangerous
to disinterestedness; those absorbed in virtue, attractions and examples
almost more dangerous. The mischief is prevented by those _unabsorbed_,
purposeless, divided characters which seem to puzzle us. They complicate
human life, and they do so the more effectually that they typify and
represent so much of what every man feels and must feel within himself.
In each man there is so much which is unmoral, so much which comes from
an unknown origin, and passes forward to an unknown destination, which is
of the earth, earthy; which has nothing to do with hell or heaven; which
occupies a middle place not recognised in any theology; which is hateful
both to the impetuous ‘friends of God’ and His most eager enemies. This
pervading and potent element involves life as it were in confusion and
hurry. We do not see distinctly whither we are going. Disinterestedness
is possible, for calculation is confused. Doubtless, even on earth virtue
of all kinds eventually must have, on a large average of cases, some
slight tendency to produce happiness. This earth is an extract from the
moral universe—partakes its nature. But that tendency is too slight to
be a considerable motive to high action; it would not be discovered but
for the inward principle which sets us to look for it; and even when
we find it, it is transient, and small, and dubious. It is lost in the
vast results of the unmoral universe, in the vague shows, the multiform
spectacle of human life.
Again, we may understand why the convictions of what duty is, and what
religion is, vary so much and so often among men. If all our convictions
on these points, on these infinitely important points, were identical
and alike, an accumulated public opinion would oppress us, would destroy
the freedom of our action and the purity of our virtue. If every one
said that certain penalties would be the consequence of certain actions,
we should believe that the consequences would be so and so, not because
we felt those actions to be intrinsically bad, but because we were told
that such would be the consequences. We should believe upon report, and
a vague impression would haunt us, not produced by our own conscience,
or our own sense of right and wrong, and would impair both our manhood
and our virtue. The extraordinary discrepancies of believed religion
and believed morality have weighed on many and will weigh on many; but
they have this use—they enable men to be disinterested. As there is no
sanctioned invincible firm custom, there are no customary penalties,
there is nothing men must shun; as the world has not made up its mind,
there is no executioner of the world ready to enforce that mind upon
every one.
Lastly, the same essential argument may be applied to a problem yet
more delicate and difficult, to one which it is difficult to treat in
Reviewer’s phraseology. Why is God so far from us? is the agonising
question which has depressed so many hearts, so long as we know there
were hearts, has puzzled so many intellects since intellects began to
puzzle themselves. But the moral part of God’s character could not be
shown to us with sensible conspicuous evidence; it could not be shown
to us as Fleet Street is shown to us, without impairing the first
pre-requisite of disinterestedness, and the primary condition of man’s
virtue. And if the moral aspect of God’s character must of necessity be
somewhat hidden from us, other aspects of it must be equally hidden.
An infinite Being may be viewed under innumerable aspects. God has
many qualities in His essence which the word ‘moral’ does not exhaust,
which it does not even hint at. Perhaps this essay has seemed to read
too sternly; as if the moral side of the Divine character, which is and
must be to imperfect beings in some sense a terrible side,—as if the
moral side of human life, which must be to mankind not always a pleasant
side,—had been forced into an exclusive prominence which of right did
not belong to it. But the _attractive_ aspects of God’s character must
not be made more apparent to such a being as man than His chastening and
severer aspects. We must not be invited to approach the Holy of holies
without being made aware, painfully aware, what Holiness is. We must know
our own unworthiness ere we are fit to approach or imagine an Infinite
Perfection. The most nauseous of false religions is that which affects a
fulsome fondness for a Being not to be thought of without awe, or spoken
of without reluctance.
On the whole, therefore, the necessary ignorance of man explains to us
much; it shows us that we could not be what we ought to be, if we lived
in the sort of universe we should expect. It shows us that a latent
Providence, a confused life, an odd material world, an existence broken
short in the midst and on a sudden, are not real difficulties, but real
helps; that they, or something like them, are essential conditions of a
moral life to a subordinate being. If we steadily remember that we only
know the ultimate fate, the extrinsic consequences of vice and virtue,
because we know of their inherent nature and intrinsic qualities, and
that any other evidence of the first would destroy the possibility of the
second, _then_ much which used to puzzle us may become clear to us.
But it may be said, What sort of evidence is this on which you base
the future moral life of man, and the present existence of a moral
Providence? Is it not impalpable? It is so, and necessarily so. If a
consecutive logical deduction, such as has often been sought between an
immutable morality and a true religion, could in fact be found, we should
be again met with our fundamental difficulty, though in a disguised and
secondary form. Morality might fall out of sight because religion was
obtruded upon us. Morality would be the axiom, religion the deduction;
and as a geometer does not keep Euclid’s axioms in his head when he is
employed upon conic sections, as a student of the differential calculus
may half forget the commencement of algebra,—so the great truths of
religion, if rigorously and mathematically deduced from the beginnings of
morality, might overshadow and destroy those ‘beggarly elements.’ No one
who has proved important doctrines by rigorous reasoning always retains
in his mind the primitive principles from which he set out. As the
concrete deductions advance, the primary abstractions recede. Happily,
the connection between morality and religion is of a very different kind.
Religion (in its moral part) is a secondary impression, produced and kept
alive by the first impression of morality. The intensity of the second
feeling depends on the continued intensity of the first feeling.
The highest part of human belief is based upon certain developable
instincts. Not the most important, but the most obvious of these,
is the instinct of beauty. Since the commencement of speculation,
ingenious thinkers, who delight in difficulties, have rejoiced to draw
out at length the difficulties of the subject. It is said, How can you
be certain that there is such an attribute as beauty, when no one is
sure what it is, or to what it should be applied? A barbarian thinks
one thing charming, the Greek another. Modern nations have a standard
different most materially from the ancient standard—founded upon it in
several important respects, no doubt, but differing from it in others as
important, and almost equally striking. Even within the limits of modern
nations this standard differs. The taste of the vulgar is one thing, the
taste of the refined and cultivated is altogether at variance with it.
The mass of mankind prefer a gaudy modern daub to a faded picture by
Sir Joshua, or to the cartoons of Raphael. What certainty, the sceptic
triumphantly asks, can there be in matters on which people differ so
much, on which it seems so impossible to argue; which seem to depend
on causes and relations simply personal; which are susceptible of no
positive test or ascertained criterion? You talk of impalpability, he
adds; here it is in perfection. But these recondite doubts impose on no
one. Not a single educated person would sleep less soundly if he were
told that his life depended on the correctness of his notion that the
cartoons of Raphael are more sublime and beautiful than a common daub. He
cannot prove it, and he cannot prove that Charles the First was beheaded;
but he is quite as certain of one as of the other. This is an instance of
an obvious, unmistakable instinct, which does produce effectual belief,
though sceptics explain to us that it should not.
The nature of this instinct differs altogether from that of those
intuitive and universal axioms which are borne in infallibly upon all the
human race, in every age and every place. It is not like the assertion
that ‘two straight lines cannot enclose a space,’ or the truth that two
and two make four. These are believed by every one, and no one can dream
of not believing them. But half of mankind would reject the idea that the
cartoons were in any sense admirable; they would prefer the overgrown
enormities of West, which are side by side with them. The characteristic
peculiarity of this instinct is, not that it is irresistible, but that
it is _developable_. The higher students of the subject, the more
cultivated, meditate upon it, acquire a new sense, which conveys truth to
them, though others are ignorant of it, and though they themselves cannot
impart it to those others. The appeal is not to the many, as with axioms
of Euclid, but to those few,—the exceptional few,—at whom the many scoff.
The case is similar with the yet higher instincts of morality and of
religion. It is idle to pretend that much of them can be found among
bloody savages, or simple and remote islanders, or a degraded populace.
It is still idler to fancy that because they cannot be discovered there
full-grown, and complete, and paramount, there is no evidence for them,
and no basis for relying upon them. They resemble the instinct of beauty
precisely. The evidence of the few—of the small, high-minded minority,
who are the exception of ages, and the salt of the earth—outweighs the
evidence of countless myriads who live as their fathers lived, think as
they thought, die as they died; who would have lived and died in the very
contrary impressions, if by chance they had inherited these instead of
the others. The criterion of true beauty is with those (and they are not
many) who have a sense of true beauty; the criterion of true morality
is with those who have a sense of true morality; the criterion of true
religion is with those who have a sense of true religion.
Nor can this defect of an absolute criterion throw the world into
confusion. We see it does not, and there was no reason to expect it
would. We all of us feel an analogous fluctuation and variation in
ourselves. We all of us feel that there are times in which first
principles seem borne in upon us by evidence as bright as noonday, and
that there are also times in which that evidence is much less, in which
it seems to fade away, in which we reckon up the number of persons who
differ from us, who reject our principles; times at which we ask, Who
are _we_, that we should be right and other men wrong? The unbelieving
moods of each mind are as certain as the unbelieving state of much of
the world. But no sound mind permits itself to be permanently disturbed,
though it may be transiently distracted, by these variations in its own
state. We have a _criterion_ faculty within us, which tells us which are
lower moods and which are higher. This faculty is a phase of conscience,
and if at its bidding we struggle _with_ the good moods, and _against_
the bad moods, we shall find that great beliefs remain, and that mean
beliefs pass away.