mean to fulfil our duty ought first, to live on as little as we can; and,
secondly, to do all the wholesome work for it we can, and to spend all we
can spare in doing all the sure good we can.
And sure good is, first in feeding people, then in dressing people, then
in lodging people, and lastly in rightly pleasing people, with arts, or
sciences, or any other subject of thought.
I say first in feeding; and, once for all, do not let yourselves be
deceived by any of the common talk of "indiscriminate charity." The order
to us is not to feed the deserving hungry, nor the industrious hungry, nor
the amiable and well-intentioned hungry, but simply to feed the hungry. It
is quite true, infallibly true, that if any man will not work, neither
should he eat--think of that, and every time you sit down to your dinner,
ladies and gentlemen, say solemnly, before you ask a blessing, "How much
work have I done to-day for my dinner?" But the proper way to enforce that
order on those below you, as well as on yourselves, is not to leave
vagabonds and honest people to starve together, but very distinctly to
discern and seize your vagabond; and shut your vagabond up out of honest
people's way, and very sternly then see that, until he has worked, he does
_not_ eat. But the first thing is to be sure you have the food to give;
and, therefore, to enforce the organization of vast activities in
agriculture and in commerce, for the production of the wholesomest food,
and proper storing and distribution of it, so that no famine shall any
more be possible among civilized beings. There is plenty of work in this
business alone, and at once, for any number of people who like to engage
in it.
Secondly, dressing people--that is to say, urging everyone within reach of
your influence to be always neat and clean, and giving them means of being
so. In so far as they absolutely refuse, you must give up the effort with
respect to them, only taking care that no children within your sphere of
influence shall any more be brought up with such habits; and that every
person who is willing to dress with propriety shall have encouragement to
do so. And the first absolutely necessary step toward this is the gradual
adoption of a consistent dress for different ranks of persons, so that
their rank shall be known by their dress; and the restriction of the
changes of fashion within certain limits. All which appears for the
present quite impossible; but it is only so far even difficult as it is
difficult to conquer our vanity, frivolity, and desire to appear what we
are not. And it is not, nor ever shall be, creed of mine, that these mean
and shallow vices are unconquerable by Christian women.
And then, thirdly, lodging people, which you may think should have been
put first, but I put it third, because we must feed and clothe people
where we find them, and lodge them afterwards. And providing lodgment for
them means a great deal of vigorous legislation, and cutting down of
vested interests that stand in the way; and after that, or before that, so
far as we can get it, through sanitary and remedial action in the houses
that we have; and then the building of more, strongly, beautifully, and in
groups of limited extent, kept in proportion to their streams, and walled
round, so that there may be no festering and wretched suburb anywhere, but
clean and busy streets within, and the open country without, with a belt
of beautiful garden and orchard round the walls, so that from any part of
the city perfectly fresh air and grass, and sight of far horizon, might be
reachable in a few minutes' walk. This the final aim; but in immediate
action every minor and possible good to be instantly done, when, and as,
we can; roofs mended that have holes in them--fences patched that have
gaps in them--walls buttressed that totter--and floors propped that shake;
cleanliness and order enforced with our own hands and eyes, till we are
breathless, every day. And all the fine arts will healthily follow. I
myself have washed a flight of stone stairs all down, with bucket and
broom, in a Savoy inn, where they hadn't washed their stairs since they
first went up them; and I never made a better sketch than that afternoon.
These, then, are the three first needs of civilized life; and the law for
every Christian man and woman is, that they shall be in direct service
toward one of these three needs, as far as is consistent with their own
special occupation, and if they have no special business, then wholly in
one of these services. And out of such exertion in plain duty all other
good will come; for in this direct contention with material evil, you will
find out the real nature of all evil; you will discern by the various
kinds of resistance, what is really the fault and main antagonism to good;
also you will find the most unexpected helps and profound lessons given,
and truths will come thus down to us which the speculation of all our
lives would never have raised us up to. You will find nearly every
educational problem solved, as soon as you truly want to do something;
everybody will become of use in their own fittest way, and will learn what
is best for them to know in that use. Competitive examination will then,
and not till then, be wholesome, because it will be daily, and calm, and
in practice; and on these familiar arts, and minute, but certain and
serviceable knowledges, will be surely edified and sustained the greater
arts and splendid theoretical sciences.
But much more than this. On such holy and simple practice will be founded,
indeed, at last, an infallible religion. The greatest of all the mysteries
of life, and the most terrible, is the corruption of even the sincerest
religion, which is not daily founded on rational, effective, humble, and
helpful action. Helpful action, observe! for there is just one law, which,
obeyed, keeps all religions pure--forgotten, makes them all false.
Whenever in any religious faith, dark or bright, we allow our minds to
dwell upon the points in which we differ from other people, we are wrong,
and in the devil's power. That is the essence of the Pharisee's
thanksgiving--"Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are." At
every moment of our lives we should be trying to find out, not in what we
differ from other people, but in what we agree with them; and the moment
we find we can agree as to anything that should be done, kind or good (and
who but fools couldn't?) then do it; push at it together: you can't
quarrel in a side-by-side push; but the moment that even the best men stop
pushing, and begin talking, they mistake their pugnacity for piety, and
it's all over. I will not speak of the crimes which in past times have
been committed in the name of Christ, nor of the follies which are at this
hour held to be consistent with obedience to Him; but I _will_ speak of
the morbid corruption and waste of vital power in religious sentiment, by
which the pure strength of that which should be the guiding soul of every
nation, the splendor of its youthful manhood, and spotless light of its
maidenhood, is averted or cast away. You may see continually girls who
have never been taught to do a single useful thing thoroughly; who cannot
sew, who cannot cook, who cannot cast an account, nor prepare a medicine,
whose whole life has been passed either in play or in pride; you will find
girls like these, when they are earnest-hearted, cast all their innate
passion of religious spirit, which was meant by God to support them
through the irksomeness of daily toil, into grievous and vain meditation
over the meaning of the great Book, of which no syllable was ever yet to
be understood but through a deed; all the instinctive wisdom and mercy of
their womanhood made vain, and the glory of their pure consciences warped
into fruitless agony concerning questions which the laws of common
serviceable life would either have solved for them in an instant, or kept
out of their way. Give such a girl any true work that will make her active
in the dawn, and weary at night, with the consciousness that her fellow
creatures have indeed been the better for her day, and the powerless
sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform itself into a majesty of radiant
and beneficent peace.
So with our youths. We once taught them to make Latin verses, and called
them educated; now we teach them to leap and to row, to hit a ball with a
bat, and call them educated. Can they plough, can they sow, can they plant
at the right time, or build with a steady hand? Is it the effort of their
lives to be chaste, knightly, faithful, holy in thought, lovely in word
and deed? Indeed it is, with some, nay, with many, and the strength of
England is in them, and the hope; but we have to turn their courage from
the toil of war to the toil of mercy; and their intellect from dispute of
words to discernment of things; and their knighthood from the errantry of
adventure to the state and fidelity of a kingly power. And then, indeed,
shall abide, for them and for us, an incorruptible felicity, and an
infallible religion; shall abide for us Faith, no more to be assailed by
temptation, no more to be defended by wrath and by fear;--shall abide with
us Hope, no more to be quenched by the years that overwhelm, or made
ashamed by the shadows that betray:--shall abide for us, and with us, the
greatest of these; the abiding will, the abiding name of our Father. For
the greatest of these is Charity.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Mr. Mill says, in his book on Liberty, that "Christian morality is, in
great part, merely a protest against paganism; its ideal is negative
rather than positive, passive rather than active." He says, that, in
certain most important respects, "it falls far below the best morality of
the ancients." The object of systems of morality is to take possession of
human life, to save it from being abandoned to passion or allowed to drift
at hazard, to give it happiness by establishing it in the practice of
virtue; and this object they seek to attain by prescribing to human life
fixed principles of action, fixed rules of conduct. In its uninspired as
well as in its inspired moments, in its days of languor and gloom as well
as in its days of sunshine and energy, human life has thus always a clue
to follow, and may always be making way towards its goal. Christian
morality has not failed to supply to human life aids of this sort. It has
supplied them far more abundantly than many of its critics imagine. The
most exquisite document, after those of the New Testament, of all the
documents the Christian spirit has ever inspired,--the _Imitation_,--by no
means contains the whole of Christian morality; nay, the disparagers of
this morality would think themselves sure of triumphing if one agreed to
look for it in the _Imitation_ only. But even the _Imitation_ is full of
passages like these: "Vita sine proposito languida et vaga est."--"Omni
die renovare debemus propositum nostrum, dicentes: nunc hodie perfecte
incipiamus, quia nihil est quod hactenus fecimus."--"Secundum propositum
nostrum est cursus profectus nostri."--"Raro etiam unum vitium perfecte
vincimus, et ad _quotidianum_ profectum non accendimur."--"Semper aliquid
certi proponendum est."--"Tibi ipsi violentiam frequenter fac." (_A life
without a purpose is a languid, drifting thing.--Every day we ought to
renew our purpose, saying to ourselves: This day let us make a sound
beginning, for what we have hitherto done is nought.--Our improvement
is in proportion to our purpose.--We hardly ever manage to get
completely rid even of one fault, and do not set our hearts on_ daily
_improvement.--Always place a definite purpose before thee.--Get the habit
of mastering thine inclination._) These are moral precepts, and moral
precepts of the best kind. As rules to hold possession of our conduct, and
to keep us in the right course through outward troubles and inward
perplexity, they are equal to the best ever furnished by the great masters
of morals--Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.
But moral rules, apprehended as ideas first, and then rigorously followed
as laws, are, and must be, for the sage only. The mass of mankind have
neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly as ideas, nor
force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws. The mass of
mankind can be carried along a course full of hardship for the natural
man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the narrow way, only by
the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion. It is impossible to rise from
reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius without a sense of constraint and
melancholy, without feeling that the burden laid upon man is well-nigh
greater than he can bear. Honor to the sages who have felt this, and yet
have borne it! Yet, even for the sage, this sense of labor and sorrow in
his march toward the goal constitutes a relative inferiority; the noblest
souls of whatever creed, the pagan Empedocles as well as the Christian
Paul, have insisted on the necessity of an inspiration, a living emotion
to make moral action perfect; an obscure indication of this necessity is
the one drop of truth in the ocean of verbiage with which the controversy
on justification by faith has flooded the world. But, for the ordinary
man, this sense of labor and sorrow constitutes an absolute
disqualification; it paralyzes him; under the weight of it, he cannot make
way toward the goal at all. The paramount virtue of religion is, that it
has _lighted up_ morality; that it has supplied the emotion and
inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly,
for carrying the ordinary man along it at all. Even the religions with
most dross in them have had something of this virtue; but the Christian
religion manifests it with unexampled splendor. "Lead me, Zeus and
Destiny!" says the prayer of Epictetus, "whithersoever I am appointed to
go: I will follow without wavering; even though I turn coward and shrink,
I shall have to follow all the same." The fortitude of that is for the
strong, for the few; even for them the spiritual atmosphere with which it
surrounds them is bleak and gray. But, "Let Thy loving spirit lead me
forth into the land of righteousness";--"The Lord shall be unto thee an
everlasting light, and thy God thy Glory";--"Unto you that fear My Name
shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in his wings," says the
Old Testament; "born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of
the will of man, but of God";--"Except a man be born again, he cannot see
the kingdom of God";--"Whatsoever is born of God, overcometh the world,"
says the New. The ray of sunshine is there, the glow of a divine warmth;
the austerity of the sage melts away under it, the paralysis of the weak
is healed; he who is vivified by it renews his strength; "all things are
possible to Him"; "he is a new creature."
Epictetus says: "Every matter has two handles, one of which will bear
taking hold of, the other not. If thy brother sin against thee, lay not
hold of the matter by this, that he sins against thee; for by this handle
the matter will not bear taking hold of. But rather lay hold of it by
this, that he is thy brother, thy born mate; and thou wilt take hold of it
by what will bear handling." Jesus, being asked whether a man is bound to
forgive his brother as often as seven times, answers: "I say not unto
thee, until seven times, but until seventy times seven." Epictetus here
suggests to the reason grounds for forgiveness of injuries which Jesus
does not; but it is vain to say that Epictetus is on that account a better
moralist than Jesus, if the warmth, the emotion, of Jesus' answer fires
his hearer to the practice of forgiveness of injuries, while the thought
in Epictetus's leaves him cold. So with Christian morality in general: its
distinction is not that it propounds the maxim, "Thou shalt love God and
thy neighbor," with more development, closer reasoning, truer sincerity,
than other moral systems; it is that it propounds this maxim with an
inspiration which wonderfully catches the hearer and makes him act upon
it. It is because Mr. Mill has attained to the perception of truths of
this nature, that he is--instead of being, like the school from which he
proceeds, doomed to sterility--a writer of distinguished mark and
influence, a writer deserving all attention and respect; it is (I must be
pardoned for saying) because he is not sufficiently leavened with them,
that he falls just short of being a great writer....
The man whose thoughts Mr. Long[11] has thus faithfully reproduced is
perhaps the most beautiful figure in history. He is one of those consoling
and hope-inspiring marks, which stand forever to remind our weak and
easily discouraged race how high human goodness and perseverance have
once been carried, and may be carried again. The interest of mankind is
peculiarly attracted by examples of signal goodness in high places; for
that testimony to the worth of goodness is the most striking which is
borne by those to whom all the means of pleasure and self-indulgence lay
open, by those who had at their command the kingdoms of the world and the
glory of them. Marcus Aurelius was the ruler of the grandest of empires;
and he was one of the best of men. Besides him, history presents one or
two sovereigns eminent for their goodness, such as Saint Louis or Alfred.
But Marcus Aurelius has, for us moderns, this great superiority in
interest over Saint Louis or Alfred, that he lived and acted in a state of
society modern by its essential characteristics, in an epoch akin to our
own, in a brilliant centre of civilization. Trajan talks of "our
enlightened age" just as glibly as the "Times" talks of it. Marcus
Aurelius thus becomes for us a man like ourselves, a man in all things
tempted as we are. Saint Louis inhabits an atmosphere of mediaeval
Catholicism, which the man of the nineteenth century may admire, indeed,
may even passionately wish to inhabit, but which, strive as he will, he
cannot really inhabit. Alfred belongs to a state of society (I say it with
all deference to the "Saturday Review" critic who keeps such jealous watch
over the honor of our Saxon ancestors) half-barbarous. Neither Alfred nor
Saint Louis can be morally and intellectually as near to us as Marcus
Aurelius.
The record of the outward life of this admirable man has in it little of
striking incident. He was born at Rome on the 26th of April, in the year
121 of the Christian era. He was nephew and son-in-law to his predecessor
on the throne, Antoninus Pius. When Antoninus died, he was forty years
old, but from the time of his earliest manhood he had assisted in
administering public affairs. Then, after his uncle's death in 161, for
nineteen years he reigned as Emperor. The barbarians were pressing on the
Roman frontier, and a great part of Marcus Aurelius's nineteen years of
reign was passed in campaigning. His absences from Rome were numerous and
long. We hear of him in Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Greece; but, above all,
in the countries on the Danube, where the war with the barbarians was
going on--in Austria, Moravia, Hungary. In these countries much of his
"Journal" seems to have been written; parts of it are dated from them; and
there, a few weeks before his fifty-ninth birthday, he fell sick and died.
The record of him on which his fame chiefly rests is the record of his
inward life--his "Journal," or "Commentaries," or "Meditations," or
"Thoughts," for by all these names has the work been called. Perhaps the
most interesting of the records of his outward life is that which the
first book of this work supplies, where he gives an account of his
education, recites the names of those to whom he is indebted for it, and
enumerates his obligations to each of them. It is a refreshing and
consoling picture, a priceless treasure for those, who, sick of the "wild
and dreamlike trade of blood and guile," which seems to be nearly the
whole that history has to offer to our view, seek eagerly for that
substratum of right thinking and well-doing which in all ages must surely
have somewhere existed, for without it the continued life of humanity
would have been impossible.
"From my mother I learned piety and beneficence, and abstinence not only
from evil deeds but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my
way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich." Let us remember
that, the next time we are reading the sixth satire of Juvenal. "From my
tutor I learned" (hear it, ye tutors of princes!) "endurance of labor, and
to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with
other people's affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander." The
vices and foibles of the Greek sophist or rhetorician--the _Graeculus
esuriens_--are in everybody's mind; but he who reads Marcus Aurelius's
account of his Greek teachers and masters, will understand how it is that,
in spite of the vices and foibles of individual _Graeculi_, the education
of the human race owes to Greece a debt which can never be overrated.
The vague and colorless praise of history leaves on the mind hardly any
impression of Antoninus Pius: it is only from the private memoranda of his
nephew that we learn what a disciplined, hard-working, gentle, wise,
virtuous man he was; a man who, perhaps, interests mankind less than his
immortal nephew only because he has left in writing no record of his inner
life--_caret quia vate sacro_.
Of the outward life and circumstances of Marcus Aurelius, beyond these
notices which he has himself supplied, there are few of much interest and
importance. There is the fine anecdote of his speech when he heard of the
assassination of the revolted Avidius Cassius, against whom he was
marching; _he was sorry_, he said, _to be deprived of the pleasure of
pardoning him_. And there are one or two more anecdotes of him which show
the same spirit. But the great record for the outward life of a man who
has left such a record of his lofty inward aspirations as that which
Marcus Aurelius has left, is the clear consenting voice of all his
contemporaries,--high and low, friend and enemy, pagan and Christian,--in
praise of his sincerity, justice, and goodness. The world's charity does
not err on the side of excess, and here was a man occupying the most
conspicuous station in the world, and professing the highest possible
standard of conduct; yet the world was obliged to declare that he walked
worthily of his profession. Long after his death, his bust was to be seen
in the houses of private men through the wide Roman Empire. It may be the
vulgar part of human nature which busies itself with the semblance and
doings of living sovereigns; it is its nobler part which busies itself
with those of the dead. These busts of Marcus Aurelius, in the homes of
Gaul, Britain, and Italy, bore witness, not to the inmates' frivolous
curiosity about princes and palaces, but to their reverential memory of
the passage of a great man upon the earth.