CONDUCT.
Of all aspects of religion none is so difficult to understand as the
relation of religion and conduct. It is ever varying. There seems to be
nothing fixed about it. What does conduct arise from? It takes its
origin in an instinct, and this instinct is so strong, so imperious, so
almost personal, that of all the instincts it alone has a name. It is
conscience.
By conscience our acts are directed.
There are scientific men who tell us that our consciences are the result
of experience, partly our own, but principally inherited. That if
conscience warns us against any course of action it is because that has
been experienced to result in misfortune. It is an unconscious memory of
past experiences. Conscience is instinctive, and not affected by
teaching to any great extent; and that conscience is the main guide of
life no one will deny.
But do the voices of conscience and of God, as stated in the sacred
books, agree?
When the savage sees a god in the precipice and is afraid of him, there
is no question of right or wrong. Not that the savage has no code of
morals. He has a very elaborate one. But it is usually distinct from his
religion. What virtue did Odin teach? None but courage in war. Yet the
Northmen had codes of conduct fitted to their stage of civilisation. The
Greeks had many gods. They had also codes of morals and an extensive
philosophy, but practically there was no connection. In fact, the gods
were examples not of morality but of immorality. It was the same with
the Latins and with all the Celts. Their religions were emotional
religions, their codes of conduct were apart, although even here you see
now and then an attempt to connect them. And when the Latin people took
Christianity and formed it, they put into their creeds no question of
conduct. You believed, and therefore you were a Christian. The results
of bad conduct would be annulled by confession, and the sinner would
receive absolution. To a Latin Christian a righteous unbeliever who had
never done anything but good would in the end be damned, whereas the
murderer who repented at the last would be saved. "There is more joy in
heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just
persons that need no repentance."
Is the inference that the Latin peoples were wickeder than others? I
doubt it. They initiated all European civilisation, and trade and
commerce, and law and justice. Probably the highest examples of conduct
the world has known have been Latins. They had and have the instinct of
conduct, they had and have consciences as good as other people, but only
they do not so much connect conduct and religion. You can be saved
without conduct.
The Jews, on the contrary, had no instinct of conduct apart from
religion. In the Ten Commandments conduct, if it have the second place,
has yet the larger share. Righteousness was the keynote of their belief,
and if the only righteousness they knew was little better than a noble
savagery, it was the best they could do. They included every form of
conduct in their religion--sanitary matters, caste observances, and
business rules. The Hindu goes even further in the same line. Everything
in life is included in his religion.
When in the Reformation the Teutonic people threw off the yoke of Rome,
a yoke which was not only religious but political and social, one of
their principal arguments against Roman Catholicism was the
abominations that had crept in. I think it would be difficult to assert
that the people who revolted were in morals generally any better than
those they seceded from. Good men in the Latin Church saw equally the
necessity for reformation. But bad morals did not seem to them so
destructive to faith as it did to the Teutons. There was this
difference, that whereas the Latin could and did conceive of religion
apart from conduct, the Teuton, like the Jew, could not do so. With the
Latin they were distinct emotions, with the Teuton they were connected.
One of the principal aspects of the Reformation is the restoration of
morality to religion, the abolition of indulgences, of confession and
absolution, the insistence on conduct in religious teachers.
The morality of Christ?
The remarkable fact is that it was not the morality of Christ at all.
The Reformation was never in any way a revival of the code of the Sermon
on the Mount or the imitation of Christ. To a certain extent it went
further away from Christ than the Latins. For instance, the Latin
priests imitate Christ in being unmarried, the Protestant pastors
married. When Calvin burnt Servetus he was not returning to the tenets
of the New Testament, and what thought had the Puritans or the French
Huguenots, the most masterful of men, of turning the other cheek?
Protestantism was a return of conduct to religion, but it was not
Christ's conduct. It was rather the Old Testament code softened by
civilised influence that was revived. It was a revolt against excessive
emotionalism, and was, in fact, a combination of two creeds tempered as
to conduct by the conduct of the day.
So it continues to-day. The Latin's idea of religious conduct is the
imitation of Christ, and when a Latin cultivates religious conduct that
is what he does. He becomes a priest or monk, poor, celibate,
self-denying and unworldly. But conduct to him is not the great part of
religion that it is to a Teuton. With us conduct is the greatest part;
the mystical and ceremonious part has decreased, in certain sects almost
disappeared. Confession disappeared, and with it absolution from
priests. Conduct is part of religion, and the code of conduct to be
followed is that which conscience bids, and the code of conscience is,
scientific men tell us, the result of experience, personal and
inherited. Practically, what conscience tells us to do is what suits the
circumstances of the day.
Therefore we may say that the religion of the Latins is mainly
emotional, that of the Teutons half emotional and half conduct; and then
we come to the Buddhist, which is nearly all conduct.
The Latin would say of an unbeliever, "He cannot be saved; faith is the
absolute necessity, and faith even at the last moment by itself is
sufficient." The Teuton would say, "I do not know. To be a good man,
even if an unbeliever, is very much; it may be that God will accept
him."
And the Buddhist? He has no doubt at all. Conduct is everything. Believe
what you like as long as you act well. To be a Buddhist is best because
there you have the way of life set clearly before you, and it is easy
for you to follow. But any man can be saved if he act aright. Conduct is
_everything_. In fact, Buddhism in its inception was in one aspect a
revolt against excessive emotionalism, that of the ascetics, and it
maintains that attitude to-day.
Or, to put it another way: Roman Catholicism is all emotion,
Protestantism is half emotion, Buddhism is the suppression of emotion.
These are the theories. And the facts? What effect does this difference
make on the lives of the peoples?
It may have some effect. There is sometimes action and reaction. These
different views of the relation of religion and conduct come from the
instincts of the people, and being held and taught they in turn affect
the people. But how much? Personally, I believe very little.
A man's daily conduct is regulated by quite other factors. If the effect
was great we should find Buddhists the least criminal of peoples, the
Teutons a medium, and the Latins without any idea of conduct at all. But
this is certainly not true. The Burman is greatly given to certain
crimes, the outcome of his stage of civilisation.
And I have great doubts whether the Protestants generally can show any
superiority over the Latins when the circumstances are considered. Are
the English Roman Catholics less honest than Protestants in the same
class? Are sceptics more criminal than religious people? The inclusion
of conduct in religion is astonishingly varied. Some peoples cannot be
born or come to maturity, or marry, or die without religion; others do
not allow religion to have any part in these matters. But the fact
remains that, though conduct may be included more or less in every
religion, no religion has a code of conduct for daily life. Priests and
monks apart, the codes of conduct are not taken from religion.
But it must not be forgotten that neither Christianity nor Buddhism
professes to provide a code of conduct for this life. Judaism knew no
future life, and its aim was therefore to ensure success in this. That
is the reward offered to the righteous--success for them and their
children. There is no hint that this life is not good and worth living,
that love and wealth are not good things. On the contrary, they are held
out as the reward of the godly. The Judaic code was a good and workable
one for its age. But Christianity and Buddhism declare that this life is
not good; that it is, in fact, absolutely wicked and unhappy, and that
therefore all worldly pleasures and successes are to be eschewed as
snares. The codes given are ways to reach heaven, they are by no means
codes for ordinary life. Followed to their meaning, every Christian
ought to be a monk or nun and every Buddhist the same.
But this teaching of the evil of life is one that no one but a few
fanatics accept in its fulness, and heaven or Nirvana are ideas that do
not appeal to most men. In Latin and Buddhist countries a few with their
higher spiritual powers take their faiths very seriously, but the
majority try to make the best of both worlds. In Protestant countries no
one at all accepts the doctrine of the worthlessness of life. With the
immense majority of men of all nations life is held to be a great and
beautiful thing, to be used to its best advantage. The Latins with their
keener logic, seeing that the code of Christ is for the next world, not
for this, and therefore fit only for monks and nuns and not for men of
the world, divorce conduct from religion. Protestants, rejecting the
code of Christ for men of the world equally with the Latins, yet feeling
a need for a code of conduct, adopt the best current code of the day and
call that "Christian conduct." Thus are working religions built up. One
religion is all conduct, another half, another hardly at all--in theory.
But in fact, for ordinary life, is there any difference between the code
of a Latin, a Teuton, or a Buddhist? There is hardly any. Codes of life
vary very little, and that variation is due never to religious
influences, but always to the stage of civilisation and mental
development and the environments. In Scotland and North Germany it is
common for peasant girls to have a baby first and marry afterwards. A
Hindu or a Burman would be horrified at such a thing, just as a better
class Scotchman or German would be. But to the people who do it there
is no immorality. How do you explain this from religion?
Conduct is an instinct. It evolves according to the civilisation and
idiosyncrasy of the people. It is influenced by many causes. People, for
instance, who are not pleased by acting call theatres wrong, and so on.
Experience is also a factor. And the connection of conduct with religion
varies. Some people make it a great part of their religion just as
sanitary and social measures are included, other peoples make it less
prominent. But conduct does not proceed from religious creeds any more
than prayer or confession does. It may be slowly influenced by religious
teaching, but it has its own existence, and religious teaching is only
one of many influences.