The illustrations given in the last chapter will be sufficient to show
the danger of permitting the unselfish side of human nature to run wild
without serious control by the reason and by the will. To see things in
their true proportion, to escape the magnifying influence of a morbid
imagination, should be one of the chief aims of life, and in no fields
is it more needed than in those we have been reviewing. At the same time
every age has its own ideal moral type towards which the strongest and
best influences of the time converge. The history of morals is
essentially a history of the changes that take place not so much in our
conception of what is right and wrong as in the proportionate place and
prominence we assign to different virtues and vices. There are large
groups of moral qualities which in some ages of the world's history have
been regarded as of supreme importance, while in other ages they are
thrown into the background, and there are corresponding groups of vices
which are treated in some periods as very serious and in others as very
trivial. The heroic type of Paganism and the saintly type of
Christianity in its purest form, consist largely of the same elements,
but the proportions in which they are mixed are altogether different.
There are ages when the military and civic virtues--the qualities that
make good soldiers and patriotic citizens--dominate over all others. The
self-sacrifice of the best men flows habitually in these channels. In
such an age integrity in business relations and the domestic virtues
which maintain the purity of the family may be highly valued, but they
are chiefly valued because they are essential to the well-being of the
State. The soldier who has attained to the highest degree the best
qualities of his profession, the patriot who sacrifices to the services
of the State his comforts, his ambitions and his life, is the supreme
model, and the estimation in which he is held is but little lowered even
though he may have been guilty, like Cato, of atrocious cruelty to his
slaves, or, like some of the heroes of ancient times, of scandalous
forms of private profligacy.
There are other ages in which military life is looked upon by moralists
with disfavour, and in which patriotism ranks very low in the scale of
virtues, while charity, gentleness, self-abnegation, devotional habits,
and purity in thought, word and act are pre-eminently inculcated. The
intellectual virtues, again, which deal with truth and falsehood, form a
distinct group. The habit of mind which makes men love truth for its own
sake as the supreme ideal, and which turns aside from all falsehood,
exaggeration, party or sectarian misrepresentation and invention, is in
no age a common one, but there are some ages in which it is recognised
and inculcated as virtue, while there are others in which it is no
exaggeration to say that the whole tendency of religious teaching has
been to discourage it. During many centuries the ascetic and purely
ecclesiastical standard of virtue completely dominated. The domestic
virtues, though clearly recognised, held altogether a subordinate place
to what were deemed the higher virtues of the ascetic celibate.
Charity, though nobly cultivated and practised, was regarded mainly
through a dogmatic medium and practised less for the benefit of the
recipient than for the spiritual welfare of the donor.
In the eyes of multitudes the highest conception of a saintly life
consisted largely if not mainly in complete detachment from secular
interests and affections. No type was more admired, and no type was ever
more completely severed from all active duties and all human relations
than that of the saint of the desert or of the monk of one of the
contemplative orders. To die to the world; to become indifferent to its
aims, interests and pleasures; to measure all things by a standard
wholly different from human happiness, to live habitually for another
life was the constant teaching of the saints. In the stress laid on the
cultivation of the spiritual life the whole sphere of active duties sank
into a lower plane; and the eye of the mind was turned upwards and
inwards and but little on the world around. 'Happy,' said one saint, 'is
the mind which sees but two objects, God and self, one of which
conceptions fills it with a sovereign delight and the other abases it to
the extremest dejection.'[11] 'As much love as we give to creatures,'
said another saint, 'just so much we steal from the Creator.'[12] 'Two
things only do I ask,' said a third,[13] 'to suffer and to die.'
'Forsake all,' said Thomas à Kempis, 'and thou shalt find all. Leave
desire and thou shalt find rest.' 'Unless a man be disengaged from the
affection of all creatures he cannot with freedom of mind attend unto
Divine things.'
The gradual, silent and half-unconscious modification in the type of
Morals which took place after the Reformation was certainly not the
least important of its results. If it may be traced in some degree to
the distinctive theology of the Protestant Churches, it was perhaps
still more due to the abolition of clerical celibacy which placed the
religious teachers in the centre of domestic life and in close contact
with a large circle of social duties. There is even now a distinct
difference between the morals of a sincerely Catholic and a sincerely
Protestant country, and this difference is not so much, as
controversialists would tell us, in the greater and the less as in the
moral type, or, in other words, in the different degrees of importance
attached to different virtues and vices. Probably nowhere in the world
can more beautiful and more reverent types be found than in some of the
Catholic countries of Europe which are but little touched by the
intellectual movements of the age, but no good observer can fail to
notice how much larger is the place given to duties which rest wholly on
theological considerations, and how largely even the natural duties are
based on such considerations and governed, limited, and sometimes even
superseded by them. The ecclesiastics who at the Council of Constance
induced Sigismund to violate the safe-conduct he had given, and, in
spite of his solemn promise, to condemn Huss to a death of fire,[14] and
the ecclesiastics who at the Diet of Worms vainly tried to induce
Charles V. to act with a similar perfidy towards Luther, represent a
conception of morals which is abundantly prevalent in our day. It is no
exaggeration to say that in Catholic countries the obligation of
truthfulness in cases in which it conflicts with the interests of the
Church rests wholly on the basis of honour, and not at all on the basis
of religion. In the estimates of Catholic rulers no impartial observer
can fail to notice how their attitude towards the interest of the Church
dominates over all considerations of public and private morals.
In past ages this was much more the case. The Church filled in the minds
of men a place at least equal to that of the State in the Roman
Republic. Men who had made great sacrifices for it and rendered great
services to it were deemed, beyond all others, the good men, and in
those men things which we should regard as grossly criminal appeared
mere venial frailties. Let any one who doubts this study the lives of
the early Catholic saints, and the still more instructive pages in which
Gregory of Tours and other ecclesiastical annalists have described the
characters and acts of the more prominent figures in the secular history
of their times, and he will soon feel that he has passed into a moral
atmosphere and is dealing with moral measurements and perspectives
wholly unlike those of our own day.[15]
In highly civilised ages the same spirit may be clearly traced. Bossuet
was certainly no hypocrite or sycophant, but a man of austere virtue and
undoubted courage. He did not hesitate to rebuke the gross profligacy
of the life of Louis XIV., and although neither he nor any of the other
Catholic divines of his age seriously protested against the wars of pure
egotism and ostentation which made that sovereign the scourge of Europe
and brought down upon his people calamities immeasurably greater than
the faults of his private life--although, indeed, he has spoken of those
wars in language of rapturous and unqualified eulogy[16]--he had at
least the grace to devote a chapter of his 'Politique tirée de
l'Écriture Sainte' to the theme that 'God does not love war.' But in the
eyes of Bossuet the dominant fact in the life of Louis XIV. was the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the savage persecution of the
Huguenots, and this was sufficient to place him among the best of
sovereigns.[17]
To those who will candidly consider the subject there is nothing in this
which need excite surprise. The doctrine that the Catholic Church is the
inspired guide, representing the voice of the Divinity on earth and
deciding with absolute authority all questions of right and wrong, very
naturally led to the conviction that nothing which was conducive to its
interests could be really criminal, and in all departments of morals it
regulated the degrees of praise and blame. The doctrine which is still
so widely professed but now so faintly realised, that the first
essential to salvation is orthodox belief, placed conduct on a lower
plane of importance than dogma, while the conviction that it is in the
power of man to obtain absolute certainty in religious belief, that
erroneous belief is in the eyes of the Almighty a crime bringing with it
eternal damnation, and that the teacher of heresy is the greatest enemy
of mankind, at once justified in the eyes of the believer acts which now
seem the gravest moral aberrations. Many baser motives and elements no
doubt mingled with the long and hideous history of the religious
persecutions of Christendom, but in the eyes of countless conscientious
men this teaching seemed amply sufficient to justify them and to stifle
all feeling of compassion for the victims. Much the same considerations
explain the absolute indifference with which so many good men witnessed
those witch persecutions which consigned thousands of old, feeble and
innocent women to torture and to death.
Other illustrations of a less tragical kind might be given. Thus in
cases of child-birth the physician is sometimes placed in the
alternative of sacrificing the life of the mother or of the unborn
child. In such cases a Protestant or freethinking physician would not
hesitate to save the adult life as by far the most valuable. The
Catholic doctrine is that under such circumstances the first duty of the
physician is to save the life of the unbaptized child.[18] Large numbers
of commercial transactions which are now universally acknowledged to be
perfectly innocent and useful would during a long period have been
prohibited on account of the Catholic doctrine of usury which condemned
as sinful even the most moderate interest on money if it was exacted as
the price of the loan.[19]
Every religious and indeed every philosophical system that has played a
great part in the history of the world has a tendency either to form or
to assimilate with a particular moral type, and in the eyes of a large
and growing number it is upon the excellency of this type, and upon its
success in producing it, that its superiority mainly depends. The
superstructure or scaffolding of belief around which it is formed
appears to them of comparatively little moment, and it is not uncommon
to find men ardently devoted to a particular type long after they have
discarded the tenets with which it was once connected. Carlyle, for
example, sometimes spoke of himself as a Calvinist, and used language
both in public and private as if there was no important difference
between himself and the most orthodox Puritans, yet it is very evident
that he disbelieved nearly all the articles of their creed. What he
meant was that Calvinism had produced in all countries in which it
really dominated a definite type of character and conception of morals
which was in his eyes the noblest that had yet appeared in the world.
'_Above all things_, my brethren, swear not.' If, as is generally
assumed, this refers to the custom of using profane oaths in common
conversation, how remote from modern ideas is the place assigned to
this vice, which perhaps affects human happiness as little as any other
that can be mentioned, in the scale of criminality, and how curiously
characteristic is the fact that the vice to which this supremacy of
enormity is attributed continued to be prevalent during the ages when
theological influences were most powerful, and has in all good society
faded away in simple obedience to a turn of fashion which proscribes it
as ungentlemanly! For a long period Acts condemning it were read at
stated periods in the churches,[20] and one of these described it as
likely, by provoking God's wrath, to 'increase the many calamities these
nations now labour under.' How curiously characteristic is the
restriction in common usage of the term 'immoral' to a single vice, so
that a man who is untruthful, selfish, cruel, or intemperate might still
be said to have led 'a moral life' because he was blameless in the
relations of the sexes! In the estimates of the character of public men
the same disproportionate judgment may be constantly found in the
comparative stress placed upon private faults and the most gigantic
public crimes. Errors of judgment are not errors of morals, but any
public man who, through selfish, ambitious, or party motives, plunges or
helps to plunge his country into an unrighteous or unnecessary war,
subordinates public interest to his personal ambition, employs himself
in stimulating class, national, or provincial hatreds, lowers the moral
standard of public life, or supports a legislation which he knows to
tend to or facilitate dishonesty, is committing a crime before which, if
it be measured by its consequences, the gravest acts of mere private
immorality dwindle into insignificance. Yet how differently in the case
of brilliant and successful politicians are such things treated in the
judgment of contemporaries, and sometimes even in the judgments of
history!
It is, I think, a peculiarity of modern times that the chief moral
influences are much more various and complex than in the past. There is
no such absolute empire as that which was exercised over character by
the State in some periods of Pagan antiquity and by the Church during
the Middle Ages. Our civilisation is more than anything else an
industrial civilisation, and industrial habits are probably the
strongest in forming the moral type to which public opinion aspires.
Slavery, which threw a deep discredit on industry and on the qualities
it fosters, has passed away. The feudal system, which placed industry in
an inferior position, has been abolished, and the strong modern tendency
to diminish both the privileges and the exclusiveness of rank and to
increase the importance of wealth is in the same direction. An
industrial society has its special vices and failings, but it naturally
brings into the boldest relief the moral qualities which industry is
most fitted to foster and on which it most largely depends, and it also
gives the whole tone of moral thinking a utilitarian character. It is
not Christianity but Industrialism that has brought into the world that
strong sense of the moral value of thrift, steady industry, punctuality
in observing engagements, constant forethought with a view to providing
for the contingencies of the future, which is now so characteristic of
the moral type of the most civilised nations.
Many other influences, however, have contributed to intensify, qualify,
or impair the industrial type. Protestantism has disengaged primitive
Christian ethics from a crowd of superstitious and artificial duties
which had overlaid them, and a similar process has been going on in
Catholic countries under the influence of the rationalising and
sceptical spirit. The influence of dogmatic theology on Morals has
declined. Out of the vast and complex religious systems of the past, an
eclectic spirit is bringing into special and ever-increasing prominence
those Christian virtues which are most manifestly in accordance with
natural religion and most clearly conducive to the well-being of men
upon the earth. Philanthropy or charity, which forms the centre of the
system, has also been immensely intensified by increased knowledge and
realisation of the wants and sorrows of others; by the sensitiveness to
pain, by the softening of manners and the more humane and refined tastes
and habits which a highly elaborated intellectual civilisation naturally
produces. The sense of duty plays a great part in modern philanthropy,
and lower motives of ostentation or custom mingle largely with the
genuine kindliness of feeling that inspires it; but on the whole it is
probable that men in our day, in doing good to others, look much more
exclusively than in the past to the benefit of the recipient and much
less to some reward for their acts in a future world. As long, too, as
this benefit is attained, they will gladly diminish as much as possible
the self-sacrifice it entails. An eminently characteristic feature of
modern philanthropy is its close connection with amusements. There was a
time when a great philanthropic work would be naturally supported by an
issue of indulgences promising specific advantages in another world to
all who took part in it. In our own generation balls, bazaars,
theatrical or other amusements given for the benefit of the charity,
occupy an almost corresponding place.
At the same time increasing knowledge, and especially the kind of
knowledge which science gives, has in other ways largely affected our
judgments of right and wrong. The mental discipline, the habits of sound
and accurate reasoning, the distrust of mere authority and of untested
assertions and traditions that science tends to produce, all stimulate
the intellectual virtues, and science has done much to rectify the chart
of life, pointing out more clearly the true conditions of human
well-being and disclosing much baselessness and many errors in the
teaching of the past. It cannot, however, be said that the civic or the
military influences have declined. If the State does not hold altogether
the same place as in Pagan antiquity, it is at least certain that in a
democratic age public interests are enormously prominent in the lives of
men, and there is a growing and dangerous tendency to aggrandise the
influence of the State over the individual, while modern militarism is
drawing the flower of Continental Europe into its circle and making
military education one of the most powerful influences in the formation
of characters and ideals.
I do not believe that the world will ever greatly differ about the
essential elements of right and wrong. These things lie deep in human
nature and in the fundamental conditions of human life. The changes that
are taking place, and which seem likely to strengthen in the future, lie
chiefly in the importance attached to different qualities.
What seems to be useless self-sacrifice and unnecessary suffering is as
much as possible avoided. The strain of sentiment which valued suffering
in itself as an expiatory thing, as a mode of following the Man of
Sorrows, as a thing to be for its own sake embraced and dwelt upon, and
prolonged, bears a very great part in some of the most beautiful
Christian lives, and especially in those which were formed under the
influence of the Catholic Church. An old legend tells how Christ once
appeared as a Man of Sorrows to a Catholic Saint, and asked him what
boon he would most desire. 'Lord,' was the reply, 'that I might suffer
most.' This strain runs deeply through the whole ascetic literature and
the whole monastic system of Catholicism, and outside Catholicism it has
been sometimes shown by a reluctance to accept the aid of anæsthetics,
which partially or wholly removed suffering supposed to have been sent
by Providence. The history of the use of chloroform furnishes striking
illustrations of this. Many of my readers may remember the French monks
who devoted themselves to cultivating one of the most pestilential spots
in the Roman Campagna, which was associated with an ecclesiastical
legend, and who quite unnecessarily insisted on remaining there during
the season when such a residence meant little less than a slow suicide.
They had, as they were accustomed to say, their purgatory upon earth,
and they remained till their constitutions were hopelessly shattered and
they were sent to die in their own land. Touching examples might be
found in modern times of men who, in the last extremes of disease or
suffering, scrupled, through religious motives, about availing
themselves of the simplest alleviations,[21] and something of the same
feeling is shown in the desire to prolong to the last possible moment
hopeless and agonising disease. All this is manifestly and rapidly
disappearing. To endure with patience and resignation inevitable
suffering; to encounter courageously dangers and suffering for some
worthy and useful end, ranks, indeed, as high as it ever did in the
ethics of the century, but suffering for its own sake is no longer
valued, and it is deemed one of the first objects of a wise life to
restrict and diminish it.
No one, I think, has seen more clearly or described more vividly than
Goethe the direction in which in modern times the current of morals is
flowing. His philosophy is a terrestrial philosophy, and the old
theologians would have said that it allowed the second Table of the Law
altogether to supersede or eclipse the first. It was said of him with
much truth that 'repugnance to the supernatural was an inherent part of
his mind.' To turn away from useless and barren speculations; to
persistently withdraw our thoughts from the unknowable, the inevitable,
and the irreparable; to concentrate them on the immediate present and on
the nearest duty; to waste no moral energy on excessive introspection or
self-abasement or self-reproach, but to make the cultivation and the
wise use of all our powers the supreme ideal and end of our lives; to
oppose labour and study to affliction and regret; to keep at a distance
gloomy thoughts and exaggerated anxieties; 'to see the individual in
connection and co-operation with the whole,' and to look upon effort and
action as the main elements both of duty and happiness, was the lesson
which he continually taught. 'The mind endowed with active powers, and
keeping with a practical object to the task that lies nearest, is the
worthiest there is on earth.' 'Character consists in a man steadily
pursuing the things of which he feels himself capable.' 'Try to do your
duty and you will know what you are worth.' 'Piety is not an end but a
means; a means of attaining the highest culture by the purest
tranquillity of soul.' 'We are not born to solve the problems of the
world, but to find out where the problem begins and then to keep within
the limits of what we can grasp.'
To cultivate sincere love of truth and clear and definite conceptions,
and divest ourselves as much as possible from prejudices, fanaticisms,
superstitions, and exaggeration; to take wide, sound, tolerant,
many-sided views of life, stands in his eyes in the forefront of ethics.
'Let it be your earnest endeavour to use words coinciding as closely as
possible with what we feel, see, think, experience, imagine, and
reason;' 'remove by plain and honest purpose false, irrelevant and
futile ideas.' 'The truest liberality is appreciation.' 'Love of truth
shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in
everything.'[22]
In the eyes of this school of thought one of the great vices of the old
theological type of ethics was that it was unduly negative. It thought
much more of the avoidance of sin than of the performance of duty. The
more we advance in knowledge the more we shall come to judge men in the
spirit of the parable of the talents; that is by the net result of their
lives, by their essential unselfishness, by the degree in which they
employ and the objects to which they direct their capacities and
opportunities. The staple of moral life becomes much less a matter of
small scruples, of minute self-examination, of extreme stress laid upon
flaws of character and conduct that have little or no bearing upon
active life. A life of idleness will be regarded with much less
tolerance than at present. Men will grow less introspective and more
objective, and useful action will become more and more the guiding
principle of morals.
In theory this will probably be readily admitted, but every good
observer will find that it involves a considerable change in the point
of view. A life of habitual languor and idleness, with no faculties
really cultivated, and with no result that makes a man missed when he
has passed away, may be spent without any act which the world calls
vicious, and is quite compatible with much charm of temper and demeanour
and with a complete freedom from violent and aggressive selfishness.
Such a life, in the eyes of many moralists, would rank much higher than
a life of constant, honourable self-sacrificing labour for the good of
others which was at the same time flawed by some positive vice. Yet the
life which seems to be comparatively blameless has in truth wholly
missed, while the other life, in spite of all its defects, has largely
attained what should be the main object of a human life, the full
development and useful employment of whatever powers we possess. There
are men, indeed, in whom an over-sensitive conscience is even a
paralysing thing, which by suggesting constant petty and ingenious
scruples holds them back from useful action. It is a moral infirmity
corresponding to that exaggerated intellectual fastidiousness which so
often makes an intellectual life almost wholly barren, or to that
excessive tendency to look on all sides of a question and to realise the
dangers and drawbacks of any course which not unfrequently in moments of
difficulty paralyses the actions of public men. Sometimes, under the
strange and subtle bias of the will, this excessive conscientiousness
will be unconsciously fostered in inert and sluggish natures which are
constitutionally disinclined to effort. The main lines of duty in the
great relations of life are sufficiently obvious, and the casuistry
which multiplies cases of conscience and invents unreal and factitious
duties is apt to be rather an impediment than a furtherance to a noble
life.
It is probable that as the world goes on morals will move more and more
in the direction I have described. There will be at the same time a
steadily increasing tendency to judge moral qualities and courses of
conduct mainly by the degree in which they promote or diminish human
happiness. Enthusiasm and self-sacrifice for some object which has no
real bearing on the welfare of man will become rarer and will be less
respected, and the condemnation that is passed on acts that are
recognised as wrong will be much more proportioned than at present to
the injury they inflict. Some things, such as excessive luxury of
expenditure and the improvidence of bringing into the world children for
whom no provision has been made, which can now scarcely be said to enter
into the teaching of moralists, or at least of churches, may one day be
looked upon as graver offences than some that are in the penal code.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] St. Francis de Sales.
[12] St. Philip Neri.
[13] St. Teresa.
[14] 'Cum dictus Johannes Hus fidem orthodoxam pertinaciter impugnans,
se ab omni con ductu et privilegio reddiderit alienum, nec aliqua sibi
fides aut promissio de jure naturali divino vel humano, fuerit in
præjudicium Catholicæ fidei observanda.' Declaration of the Council of
Constance. See Creighton's _History of the Papacy_, ii. 32.
[15] I have collected some illustrations of this in my _History of
European Morals_, ii. 235-242.
[16] See, e.g. his funeral oration on Marie Thérèse d'Autriche.
[17] See the enthusiastic eulogy of the persecution of the Huguenots in
his funeral oration on Michel le Tellier. It concludes: 'Épanchons nos
coeurs sur la piété de Louis; poussons jusqu'au ciel nos acclamations,
et disons à ce nouveau Constantin, à ce nouveau Théodose, à ce nouveau
Marcien, à ce nouveau Charlemagne ce que les six cent trente Pères
dirent autrefois dans le Concile de Chalcédoine: "Vous avez affermi la
foi; vous avez exterminé les hérétiques; c'est le digne ouvrage de votre
règne; c'en est le propre caractère. Par vous l'hérésie n'est plus, Dieu
seul a pu faire cette merveille. Roi du ciel, conservez le roi de la
terre; c'est le voeu, des Églises; c'est le voeu des Évêques."'
[18] See Migne, _Encyclopédie Théologique_, 'Dict. de Cas de
Conscience,' art. _Avortement_.
[19] See on this subject my _History of Rationalism_, ii. 250-270, and
my _Democracy and Liberty_, ii., ch. viii.
[20] 21 James I. c. 20; 19 Geo. II. c. 21. The penalties, however, were
fines, the pillory, or short periods of imprisonment. The obligation of
reading the statute in churches was abolished in 1823, but the custom
had before fallen into desuetude. In 1772 a vicar was (as an act of
private vengeance) prosecuted and fined for having neglected to read it.
(_Annual Register_, 1772, p. 115.)
[21] The following beautiful passage from a funeral sermon by Newman is
an example: 'One should have thought that a life so innocent, so active,
so holy, I might say so faultless from first to last, might have been
spared the visitation of any long and severe penance to bring it to an
end; but in order doubtless to show us how vile and miserable the best
of us are in ourselves ... and moreover to give us a pattern how to bear
suffering ourselves, and to increase the merits and to hasten and
brighten the crown of this faithful servant of his Lord, it pleased
Almighty God to send upon him a disorder which during the last six years
fought with him, mastered him, and at length has destroyed him, so far,
that is, as death now has power to destroy.... It is for those who came
near him year after year to store up the many words and deeds of
resignation, love and humility which that long penance elicited. These
meritorious acts are written in the Book of Life, and they have followed
him whither he is gone. They multiplied and grew in strength and
perfection as his trial proceeded; and they were never so striking as at
its close. When a friend visited him in the last week, he found he had
scrupled at allowing his temples to be moistened with some refreshing
waters, and had with difficulty been brought to give his consent; he
said he feared it was too great a luxury. When the same friend offered
him some liquid to allay his distressing thirst his answer was the
same.'--Sermon at the funeral of the Right Rev. Henry Weedall, pp. 19,
20.
[22] See the excellent little book of Mr. Bailey Saunders, called _The
Maxims and Reflections of Goethe_.