The moral principle (whatever may be said to the contrary by complacent
thinkers) is really and to most men a principle of fear. The delights of
a good conscience may be reserved for better things, but few men who
know themselves will say that they have often felt them by vivid and
actual experience; a sensation of shame, of reproach, of remorse, of sin
(to use the word we instinctively shrink from because it expresses the
meaning), is what the moral principle really and practically thrusts on
most men. Conscience is the condemnation of ourselves; we expect a
penalty. As the Greek proverb teaches, "where there is shame there is
fear"; where there is the deep and intimate anxiety of guilt,--the
feeling which has driven murderers and other than murderers forth to
wastes and rocks and stones and tempests,--we see, as it were, in a
single complex and indivisible sensation, the pain and sense of guilt
and the painful anticipation of its punishment. How to be free from
this, is the question; how to get loose from this; how to be rid of the
secret tie which binds the strong man and cramps his pride, and makes
him angry at the beauty of the universe,--which will not let him go
forth like a great animal, like the king of the forest, in the glory of
his might, but restrains him with an inner fear and a secret foreboding
that if he do but exalt himself he shall be abased, if he do but set
forth his own dignity he will offend ONE who will deprive him of it.
This, as has often been pointed out, is the source of the bloody rites
of heathendom. You are going to battle, you are going out in the bright
sun with dancing plumes and glittering spear; your shield shines, and
your feathers wave, and your limbs are glad with the consciousness of
strength, and your mind is warm with glory and renown; with coming glory
and unobtained renown: for who are you to hope for these; who are _you_
to go forth proudly against the pride of the sun, with your secret sin
and your haunting shame and your real fear? First lie down and abase
yourself; strike your back with hard stripes; cut deep with a sharp
knife, as if you would eradicate the consciousness; cry aloud; put ashes
on your head; bruise yourself with stones,--then perhaps God may pardon
you. Or, better still (so runs the incoherent feeling), give him
something--your ox, your ass, whole hecatombs if you are rich enough;
anything, it is but a chance,--you do not know what will please him; at
any rate, what you love best yourself,--that is, most likely, your
first-born son. Then, after such gifts and such humiliation, he may be
appeased, he may let you off; he may without anger let you go forth,
Achilles-like, in the glory of your shield; he may _not_ send you home
as he would else, the victim of rout and treachery, with broken arms and
foul limbs, in weariness and humiliation. Of course, it is not this kind
of fanaticism that we impute to a prelate of the English Church; human
sacrifices are not respectable, and Achilles was not rector of Stanhope.
But though the costume and circumstances of life change, the human heart
does not; its feelings remain. The same anxiety, the same consciousness
of personal sin which led in barbarous times to what has been described,
show themselves in civilized life as well. In this quieter period, their
great manifestation is scrupulosity: a care about the ritual of life; an
attention to meats and drinks, and "cups and washings." Being so
unworthy as we are, feeling what we feel, abased as we are abased, who
shall say that those are beneath us? In ardent, imaginative youth they
may seem so; but let a few years come, let them dull the will or
contract the heart or stain the mind; then the consequent feeling will
be, as all experience shows, not that a ritual is too mean, too low, too
degrading for human nature, but that it is a mercy we have to do no
more,--that we have only to wash in Jordan, that we have not even to go
out into the unknown distance to seek for Abana and Pharpar, rivers of
Damascus. We have no right to judge; we cannot decide; we must do what
is laid down for us,--we fail daily even in this; we must never cease
for a moment in our scrupulous anxiety to omit by no tittle and to
exceed by no iota.