THE PROVISION FOR THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN.
Two elements are essential to the process of thinking, the intellect and
the truth. One is within, the other is without. The one is subjective,
the other is objective. Two elements are also essential to the process
of volition, the will and the right. The one within, the other without.
The one subjective, the other objective. Before sight is possible, there
must be an eye and there must be light. The one is within, the other is
without. The one is subjective, the other is objective. Before hearing,
there must be an ear and there must be sound. The one is within, the
other is without. The one is subjective, the other is objective. Before
breathing there must be lungs and there must be atmosphere. The one
is within, the other is without. The one is subjective, the other is
objective.
No definition of man is large enough to accommodate the facts of his
nature, that does not embrace what he is without as well as what he is
within, what he is objectively as well as what he is subjectively. It
must not only embrace the intellect, but the truth which it thinks; not
only the will, but the right which corresponds to it; not only the eye,
but the light which gives it meaning; not only the ear, but the sound
which matches it; not only the lungs, but the atmosphere to which they
are correlated. Human nature is dually constituted, so that the larger
half of itself is outside of itself.
Illustrations of the same duality of constitution may be found on a
limited scale in the organic and in the inorganic worlds. The greater
half of the oak is not in the life germ of the acorn, but in the elements
of the soil and the sky which environ it. The larger part of the fish is
in the ocean which surrounds it. Most of the fuel which makes the heat in
the grate is not in the carbon of the coal, but in the oxygen of the air
which fills the room.
I.
The possession of a will and the capacity for choice make man a moral
being. Man’s will is bounded on every side by the laws of God. These laws
are only another name for God’s will. Man is made in God’s image and has
a will, as far as it goes, just like God’s will.
By choosing to act and to move along the lines of law which gather from
every whither about his will, he finds he can go somewhere, that he can
leave the narrow, provincial, and local neighborhood of ease and sense
and subjection, and find his life in that broad realm of freedom, that
belongs to him as a thinking and willing being.
At the termini of some railroads there are huge contrivances called
turntables. They are constructed of immense timbers and balanced on
pivots. They are large enough to accommodate the full length of a steam
engine. Iron rails are laid across these tables, of the same size and
the same distance apart as the rails which make up the lines of the main
track. When the train comes in from the far interior, the engine is run
out on one of these tables and turned round, so that the headlight faces
the main track again. Before the engine is ready to leave the short
track, however, the rails on the turntable must exactly correspond to
the rails on the main road. Then the engineer pulls the throttle, and
the great locomotive rolls past the circumference of its pivoted and
temporary resting place into commerce with the railways of the globe.
Imagine railway lines coming together about such a revolving table from
all the earth, so that an engine could pass from this circular platform
toward any quarter of the globe, the only condition being that the short
track on the table correspond to the rails of the long track on which it
was proposed for the engine to run, and you have an illustration, which
in some degree helps us to understand the relation of man’s will to the
laws of God.
Should the engineer undertake to get the engine from the table without
reference to the lines upon which it was intended to run, we know very
well what the consequences would be. He would not go far, and even
the little distance he should manage to make would be attended with
tremendous bumping and friction. All movement would be in the direction
of chaos and confusion. However great the expenditure of energy, no
point would be reached, and the end of the undertaking would be waste
and failure. If, on the other hand, we should imagine an engine on such
a revolving plane, capable of making fifty miles an hour, with no tracks
leaving it, we know it could not go anywhere, and besides there would be
no reason for its being. It would be without meaning. Before the distance
between one point and another can be passed by a train, two things are
necessary, an engine and a railroad. The one may be called subjective,
the other objective. The one implies the other. They are the necessary
elements of transportation. As long as the train keeps to the iron rails
laid for it, it moves without friction. It is only when the subjective
element jumps the track and essays to determine its own objective
direction, that trouble comes. Then it is that cars are ditched and
people killed or crippled. The laws of God run to and fro throughout the
whole earth. They cross and recross every realm. They pass through every
domain, physical, mental, and moral. They go straight through matter
and straight through mind. They lead under the sea and over the sea and
through the sea. Down through the earth and up through the air they may
be noted, embracing with their invisible tracks every square inch of soil
and sky. They insure the order of the universe, visible and invisible,
tangible and intangible. They reach from globe to globe and make possible
the commerce of the spheres. They run out into the infinitely great and
back into the infinitely small, and bind in unity the atoms and the stars.
When man, by the aid of his reason, discovers the truth of things, which
is the provision for his intellect, these laws appear as provision for
his will.
So truth and law, reality and righteousness, expressions of the thought
and will of God, are the everlasting facts to which man is to adjust his
intellect and will, if he is to cross the oceans, travel the continents,
and claim the possessions which in the universe belong to him. If he
misreads the facts, he will of course misread the laws which govern the
facts, and will thus be unable to get facts or laws to serve him. But
clearly seeing the truth of things, he is able to avail himself of the
laws of things. As long as he only saw things in the lump, and looked
upon the world as so much air and earth and fire and water, he missed the
subtle laws which regulate the atomic and molecular structure of bodies,
and failed to make them his servants. When, by the aid of observation
and experiment, he reduced the earth to its ultimate particles and came
to such knowledge of it as corresponded to the facts of it; when he
came to see the laws and drift of things, the tendencies and affinities
of things; he had only to put the productions of his will in line with
the way things were going, to have them serve him. Seeing that forces
have power to do work in proportion to their energy of position, and
applying this insight to the river with forty feet fall, he builds his
mill beside it and thus utilizes it to grind his wheat. Seeing what
soil and sunlight and rain can do when they combine to unwrap the life
in a seed, he commits his wheat to their benevolent tendencies and gets
a harvest of twenty bushels for every one he seems to lose. He studies
fire. He sees it wrap in flame and level in an hour fortunes it took a
lifetime to accumulate. He learns what a furious and awful force it
is. He gets insight into its real nature. He gets knowledge of it that
corresponds to the reality of it. He sees that it is only a flaming and
lurid method of movement. With the truth of it he gets the law of it.
So by the aid of volition, put forth in accordance with intelligence,
he contrives a machine corresponding to the laws of heat, as a mode of
motion. In this way he utilizes the heat that burned up his cities, to
transport him in ease and comfort over the country. He studies the stars
until his knowledge of them corresponds to them as they are; along with
this knowledge, he comes to an understanding of their laws, their uniform
methods of action. Then he builds his great ships and commits them to the
wild and storm-tossed sea, sure that his power to guide them will never
fail as long as law and order remain in the heavens.
That there is a natural order, with certain inhering laws, men readily
accept. That this order has the consistency of being developed in one
way; that there is a dip to things that must be followed; that there is
a clew, in accordance with which things may be worked; that there is
a trend, drift, and law of things that must be accepted and followed;
all this, men readily assent to. They do not attempt to farm the Sahara
Desert, for they know the conditions of harvests are not there. They do
not put out orange groves in Minnesota, nor plant cotton in Canada, nor
sow rice in British Columbia. They do not expect the soil that spews up
the ice to produce watermelons at the same time. They do not pretend to
navigate ships over the continents, and to lay their railway lines on the
surface of the sea. They fix their telegraph wires to poles by means of
little glass contrivances, and never attempt to send electricity through
the grape vine. Natural laws they know inhere in the facts of nature,
and are not read into earth and rock and river and atmosphere. They know
that necessary laws reside in the facts of condition, and that they must
study these laws to know the line of practical work they require. In
building a house of stone they know it is necessary to defer to the law
of gravity, that this law cannot be ignored or set aside, so they carry
up the edifice in such conformity to rule and line as that the center
of gravity falls in a line inside the base. They might prefer a house
built with reference to a different order of things, one in which the
center of gravity would fall in a line outside the base. But it is very
well understood among men that the law of gravity must be respected.
Even anarchists and nihilists, who seem to have irrepressible antipathy
for all ancient orders and laws and establishments, do condescend
sufficiently to respect the time-honored, even if slightly belated, laws
of gravity.
II.
The time was when men accepted the existence of a moral order with the
same implicit, unquestioned confidence, that all men to-day accept
the existence of a natural order. In Homer’s Themistes we have an
illustration of this confidence. The very word by which the decision of
a judge is described attributes it to Themis, the invisible embodiment
of justice. Thus the judge is but the channel through which the decision
passes from the unseen moral order into the Greek court of justice. The
judge is not respected because he has authority to make the decision, but
because his vocation makes him the vehicle through which the decision of
a higher power is rendered. Moses said to the people of Israel, “Thou
shalt not lie,” “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,”
but these were not his words simply, but the words through which a
moral order was interpreted. The solemn and awful import given to these
commands did not arise from the vehicle through which they passed into
the Hebrew social order, but from the fact that they inhered in the very
constitution of man as a social being, and when they were uttered, they
were felt to come from the God who fashioned man’s life and set him in
communities and states. They had the same sort of authority in the moral
realm that the declarations of Newton, concerning the power of gravity,
had in the natural. Newton did not conceive in his own brain the laws of
gravity, he saw them and formulated them. Nor did Moses create the Ten
Commandments, he saw them and interpreted them. The laws of gravity were
transcripts from the will of God concerning matter, the Ten Commandments
were transcripts from the will of God concerning men. When natural
bodies come together, it would be found that they always attracted each
other in proportion to their mass and inversely as the squares of their
distance. When men come together, it would always be found, that if they
were to live together in harmony and health; if they were to advance and
get above the planes of the brutes and the savages; they must abstain
from lying, and stealing, and adultery, and thus be truthful, and honest,
and virtuous.
The laws of gravity were not arbitrary rules, ordained to oppress suns
and systems without rhyme or reason. Order of some sort had to be
preserved among the millions of blazing, rolling worlds. Nor were the Ten
Commandments arbitrary lines of conduct imposed upon men at the pleasure
of a great, omnipotent tyrant. Men could not live apart, out of touch and
contact with one another. Thus living, they were lower than the beasts
that perish. They could not live together without rules of some sort
to regulate their lives. And laws which looked to the preservation of
truthfulness, honesty, and virtue, were thought better than laws which
looked to the production of lying, dishonesty, and adultery.
Because of the impetus given to the studies of material science within
recent years, by the discoveries of scholars, the attention of men has
been directed to the objects of the natural world and the laws which
regulate them. Discoveries into the nature of heat, light, etc., has had
the same effect upon the human mind that the discoveries of the gold
fields in the West had upon the people of America in the early days.
People abandoned fields and shops and stores and went in search for
gold. The attention of the civilized world has in this generation been
directed to the consideration of outward facts. There has been promise
here of earthly fortune. Conviction as to the existence of a moral order
with its rewards and penalties is not so deep and abiding as it once was
among English speaking people. But it is well to remember that the moral
laws of the universe have not in the meantime been suspended, because
men have not seen proper to consider them and to act with reference to
them. They are just as real and as unfailing as ever. When accepted and
followed, their presence is seen in health, in political stability, in
intellectual progress. When ignored and forgotten, their presence is seen
in disease, in political corruption, in mental stupidity, in sham and
emptiness. In one way or another they always manage to get in their work.
They never sleep, they never tire, they are eternally present to bless
or to curse, to lift up or to cast down. They get round to every man’s
home, and sooner or later to every man’s life, bearing honor or dishonor,
legitimate reward or righteous infamy. They are not to be bribed,
whitewashed, or bulldozed; they come clean, unvarnished, and unveneered
to posit their labels on every man’s character; and whatever is read on
the label, absolutely defines the content. Irrespective of money, titles,
place, or rank, they come. The president in his seat, the judge on his
bench, the preacher in his pulpit, cannot escape. If the president gets
labeled pigmy, pigmy he is. If the judge gets classified fraud, fraud he
is. If the preacher gets down as trimmer and sham, trimmer and sham he is.
III.
How are we to find moral laws? Just as we find natural laws. When we find
the truth of natural bodies, reason sees the laws which inhere in them,
and prudence dictates such action on our part as these laws require.
When we come to truth, on the moral plane, or to such knowledge of the
facts as corresponds to the truth, reason, unless perverted, sees the
laws that reside in them, and conscience dictates that these laws should
be obeyed. Conscience unerringly and infallibly approves the right. By
the aid of the light which is thrown upon it when the intellect comes
into relations of knowledge with moral truth, it recognizes the laws the
will ought to follow. These laws make up a part of the truth. Before
the right can be recognized, the truth must be seen. When that which
the intelligence takes for truth is not the truth, the conscience will
recognize laws for the will to follow that do not correspond to the laws
of God. It has often happened that what the intelligence took for truth
did not correspond to objective reality, and hence was not the truth;
hence the conscience has often approved and suggested lines of action
that were at variance with that which was essentially and eternally
right. Those who followed the dictates of conscience, however, under
such conditions, did, under the circumstances, right. To have refused to
follow conscience would have increased their confusion. A man in the bog,
with the certainty of death before him, ought to follow the guide that
appears, even though he should not know how to lead him out of the swamp.
Conscience never fails to come as near recognizing the right as the
intellect comes to discovering the truth. When that which the intellect
apprehends as truth corresponds to objective reality, we may be sure that
the laws which inhere in it, and which conscience suggests as the ones
the will ought to follow, correspond to the laws of God. One’s conscience
may lead him wrong, but only when the intellect has led him wrong. St.
Paul’s conscience led him wrong when it impelled him to persecute the
Christians of the early church, but it was because that which he held for
truth did not tally with the outward facts, and hence was not the truth.
Had the supposed truth which he held while persecuting the Christians
been real truth, then in persecuting the Christians he would have done
right. The reversal of conscience resulted from the incoming of new
truth, or such knowledge as was sustained by the outward facts. The
conscience of the Hindoo mother that leads her to throw her child into
the River Ganges is as good as the conscience of the Christian mother
that leads her to carry her child to the Sunday school. The trouble with
the Hindoo mother is not with her conscience, but with her religious
knowledge; it does not correspond to the facts of the order of the moral
and spiritual universe. We are to determine the value of the affirmations
of conscience by determining the value of the knowledge out of which
those affirmations grow. Knowledge is valuable in proportion to its
correspondence with that which is real. As often as the intellect grasps
the truth, the conscience will suggest the right that accompanies it.
There is no truth of a moral nature that has not its attendant right.
IV.
We know the moral truth as we know material truth, through its relations.
Relation makes the difference between chaos and cosmos. To define any
natural object is to place it in its relations. We could not define
oxygen without naming the elements to which it is related. To take it
out of relation is to take from it any meaning. Error is wrong relation.
When the mind assigns a place to an object other than that which really
belongs to it, in the order of which it forms a part, we call this
error. If, seeing the parts of a house scattered over a field by a
storm, we should confound a sleeper with a rafter, we should take it from
its proper place and take away its meaning as a part of the building. All
of our knowledge is of relations and not of sensations, as Hume taught.
Sensations set the mind to classifying and comparing, and the knowledge
it comes to is of relations. Take the sensations the mind has when a
red object is presented to the eye. Does not the mind begin at once to
distinguish this sensation as one of redness from other sensations that
are of different colors?
Is not its reality as a particular color constituted for us by its
relation to colors, by its place in the scale of colors? If there was but
one color, and that color the one we now know as red, how could we know
it as such? How could we call it red unless to distinguish it from some
other color with which we, for the time being, compared it or contrasted
it? So true is it that reality is constituted for us by the sum of its
relations, that if the relations of things are maintained, no increase
or diminution of the quantity of things related will be detected in our
knowledge of them. If the earth were compressed into a sphere no larger
than a marble, no one could know it if the relations among the objects
which make it up were the same.
Again, the earth might be enlarged until it should be a billion times
larger than what it is; yet this could not be known as long as men and
gates and spoons and saucers and houses and cuff-buttons were enlarged
in the same proportion. The leaf of a man’s dining table might be ten
miles square, and the ball of butter on his table as big as the Stone
Mountain in Georgia; yet if cook, and cat, and stove, and water-bucket
were increased in the same ratio, he would not recognize any difference.
V.
We enter the world of humanity, which is the realm of morality, through
the family. Here we open our eyes to the light, and here we have the
first intimations of truth, which is provision for the intellect, and of
righteousness, which is provision for the will. The truth of the family
is the sum of the relations which subsist among the members of it. The
family consists, we will say, of father and mother, and children. Here
is a man and a woman, then, bound together by the relation of marriage.
The children are related to the parents as offspring. The children are
related to one another as brothers and sisters. Altogether they are
one and they are many. There is unity and there is difference. In the
relations implied in the names husband and wife, father and mother,
parents and children, brothers and sisters, we have the truth of the
family. We know the family and can only know the family through these
relations. Take the relations away, and you take the family away. There
cannot be a husband without a wife, a father without a mother, parents
without children, and children without a father and a mother. Abiding in
these relations, which make up the truth of the family, wrapt up with
them and growing out of them, are the laws of right which the will is
to obey. The relation of marriage is accompanied by certain obligations
and duties which husband and wife are to observe. These obligations
and duties are divine laws, because marriage is a divine relation. The
relations involved in the term parents, are attended by certain necessary
laws the father and the mother are to observe with reference to children.
The names of child, brother, sister, imply relations that in turn imply
laws the child is to follow with reference to parents, and brothers and
sisters are to regard with reference to one another. These laws, which
grow out of the relations which constitute the family, are not arbitrary,
artificial, or accidental. They have not been formed by the opinions of
men, nor formulated in the legislative assemblies of men. Legislative
bodies have, perhaps, confirmed them and reproduced them in statutes,
but this was not to create, but to transcribe what was already present.
The laws with reference to which the members of a family find themselves
placed are as essential and constitutional as the laws governing natural
objects, which we define when we say bodies attract each other in
proportion to their mass and inversely as the squares of their distance.
These are subtle and invisible principles which cannot be read out of
rocks and logs and moons and suns. Displace rocks and logs and suns and
moons, and the apparent power of these laws would not be seen, but upon
the appearance of the natural objects, they would be immediately grasped
and dominated by the power of the laws.
We pass from the family into the school. Here again we find laws already
laid for the will to follow. They grow out of the truth, constitutive
of the school, and this truth is made up of the relations subsisting
among the members of the school. There are teachers, whose duty it is to
control and to instruct. There are children, whose duty it is to learn
and obey. The school is an institution, the object of which is to lead
young minds into a knowledge of the earth, its continents, seas, rivers,
and mountains; into a knowledge of language, its structure, uses, and
the meaning of its terms; into a knowledge of humanity, its races,
governments, and religions. If children are to share in the benefits of
the object for which the school is established, they must observe the
laws which inhere in the very constitution of it.
They must obey the teacher, they must study the books, they must be
polite, forbearing and kind to one another. It often happens that a child
enters the school and refuses to follow the laws that reside in the
structure and purpose of the school. He is willful and conceited, and
thinks his own way better than the necessary and essential way ordained
for him. He has the same sort of experience the engineer has who attempts
to run his engine from the turntable, without reference to the railway
lines laid for it. There is friction and trouble. Various methods of
punishment are resorted to with the view to get his will to move along
the lines laid for it. If rebuke and punishment fail, then he is turned
out, to attempt the stupid and insane experiment of getting himself
through the world without reference to the laws fixed for his will to
obey. Of course he does not go far. He turns up sooner or later in the
jail, the hospital, the penitentiary, or the poorhouse.
Leaving the school, we find ourselves citizens of the state, members
of society. But we do not go into society like an ax-man in a frontier
forest to clear a place for his house, his fence, and his field. Methods
of conduct are already prescribed, lines of action are already fixed, and
the laws which claim our obedience are already formulated. Society is an
organism of mutually dependent members; the object of it is the equity
of all, the welfare of all, and the liberty of all. Equity, liberty,
welfare do not come by accident. Men cannot reach them out of touch and
contact with one another. They are only possible to men living together,
and only possible in conformity with certain conditions, and in the
observance of certain laws. These laws lie folded in the nature of men as
social beings. They are fundamental, and Aristotle saw them when he said,
“man is by nature a political animal.” The germs of government and law
are in the depths of every man’s being, as the germs of the oak are in
the acorn. Wise men, living in society, have seen the truth of society,
made up of the relations subsisting among people living together.
Accompanying these relations, and counterparts of them, they have
discovered the laws necessary to insure the equity, liberty, and welfare
of all. These laws have been embodied in constitutions, enactments, and
statutes. To carry out these laws and to make them prevail, certain
institutions have been established, a body of men whose duty it is to
execute the laws, a Judiciary, whose duty it is to interpret and expound
the laws, and a legislative body, whose duty it is to repeal old laws
that did not work well, and to frame new laws to meet the exigencies of
new conditions. To protect the rights of all, certain penalties have
been made to accompany the violations of laws. To make these penalties
real, and to inflict them upon the proper parties, courts and jails and
penitentiaries have been established.
So we see, as the acorn cannot grow without appropriating the elements
already prepared for it in the soil and the sky; and as the carbon cannot
burn without laying hold of the oxygen already existing for it in the
atmosphere of the room; and as the fish cannot swim without utilizing
the water already adjusted to its fins; so man cannot fill out the
possibilities of his being without obeying the laws he finds already
ordained for his will, when he comes into the world. These laws converge
about his will in the home where he first sees the light, and are always
deducible from the particular relations in which, at any time, his moral
life is placed. They are as real as the laws of heat and motion and
gravity. They run out from the home through the school, and from the
school through all the continents of the social realm. They grow out of
the truth of the facts of the family, the school, and society. They are
as fundamental, necessary, and divine as the family, the school, and
society. By observing them, man is able to turn into his character the
tenderness of the home, the learning of the school, and the resources of
society.
VI.
The authority of the laws which govern society is not found in the fact
that the laws have been made by the will of the majority, or the will of
the minority, or by the will of a king, or by the wills of any or all
of the people; but because they are founded in the constitution of human
nature. The basis for the constitution of human nature is the mind of
God, who created man in his own image. Social laws have authority, then,
because they are consonant with the nature of man, and have their source
in the will of God.
It is easy to show, however, from the records of history, that nations
have often lived under laws imposed upon them that contradicted every
principle of human nature. Men were accustomed once to find the laws
of society as well as the laws of nature, not from the study of men,
or from the study of the objects of nature, but in the depths of their
own imaginations. In former times men met in convention and council and
determined by resolution the shape of the earth and the sun’s method of
movement. They also subjected themselves to the criticism of posterity
by cutting the heads of the people off who did not agree with them. But
it gradually dawned on the human mind that to find out for certain the
shape of the earth it might be well to devote a little study to the earth
itself. Thus it happened that in the course of events men ceased to read
laws into God’s material universe from the boundless realms of their
fancy and conceit, and fell upon the more rational habit of taking the
laws that were already there. Herein is the difference between mediæval
and modern times.
The disposition to read laws into nature, without reference to the
facts of nature, was in line with the programme to read laws into the
social realm without reference to the facts of human nature. The laws of
astronomy to-day are such as have been found by a study of the stars. The
laws of chemistry are such as have been found by a study of the atomic
structures of bodies. One might fall out now with the celestial laws of
Ptolemy, and head a movement to set them aside. But it is not rational
to fall out with the astronomical laws of Norman Lockyer, for that is to
buck against the sun, and to make faces at the stars. Lockyer’s laws came
straight to him from the skies, and find their value and verification in
the close calculation of every steamer that sails on the wide, restless
sea. The laws of civilized nations to-day are such as have been found
by a study of the facts of human nature. To quarrel with them is to set
one’s self against the way man is built. It would not do to say that the
social laws of civilized peoples to-day are exact transcripts from the
will of God concerning the conduct of social life. Men do not now, and
perhaps will not for a long time, read aright the facts of human nature.
One thing is certain, however: in the making of laws among civilized,
republican peoples, reference is had to the facts of human nature, and
not to the fancy of those who wish to govern. It cannot be disputed that
the right facts are considered from which to make deductions. This means
a complete change of front in the modern world over the ages past. There
are doubtless many minor laws on the statute books of the liberal and
progressive nations of the earth to-day which are not in accordance with
the nature of man; but it seems that any rational person is compelled
to admit that the great legal trunk-lines conform to the essential laws
of human nature. Take the Constitution of the United States. Some one
has said that the apple from which Newton deduced the laws of gravity
was two thousand years falling. He would have been nearer the truth if
he had said six thousand years. The Constitution of the United States
is as clearly a deduction from the facts of human nature, as were the
laws of gravity from a study of falling bodies. The convention that met
in Philadelphia to frame the Constitution of the United States, in 1787,
was called to order on the top of the centuries. The members had such
advantage of position as made it possible for them to look all down the
ages. They were in a position to see all sides of human nature, under all
forms of government.
In the preamble to the Constitution, they specified certain objects for
which, in their esteem, this government should be formed—union, domestic
tranquillity, justice, liberty, welfare. Any government constituted by
a document like that has for the basis of its existence the facts of
human nature, as really as the law of gravity has for the basis of its
existence the facts of the stars.
VII.
If it is necessary that man grasp the truth of things before he can
determine the laws of things, we cannot fail to see how important it is
that he have a proper theory of knowledge.
Man’s idea of law will correspond to his theory of knowledge. When the
French people accepted Locke’s theory of knowing they immediately applied
it to the laws, establishments, and institutions of the nation. They
concluded logically, if all knowledge is of sensations, then there can
be no authority for the belief in God, the immortality of the soul, or
the divinity of law. These are universal and transcendent facts, but
the mind has no capacity to know universal or transcendent facts. So
society was to be dissolved into its constituent atoms, in order that
individuals could arrange their lives on a universal, go-as-you-please
principle. All existing laws and institutions were to be obliterated.
Everything that was up was to be put down. There are to-day, scattered
through the civilized states of Europe and in some parts of the United
States, men who want to emancipate the people from the dominion of all
authority. All this grows out of the fashionable and sensational theory
of knowledge taught first by John Locke and David Hume, and within recent
years by John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. Here is the source of
anarchy. There is not an influential anarchist in the world, but is one
upon the basis of the physiological theory of knowledge. There is no
objective reality, but such as is composed of material atoms. These have
got their arrangement and collocations without the agency of any great
co-ordinating mind. They come together in pairs and clusters and groups,
by the aid of no power but such as issues from the unknowable. A man
is no more a criminal for killing people than is the Mississippi River
for overflowing its banks and drowning people. Men are mere products of
nature, and their thoughts are only secretions of the brain. Laws and
institutions are just the brain deposits of animals we call men, as dams
across rivers and cells in gums are the deposits of the brains of beavers
and bees.
In a document found on the person of a recent anarchist arrested by the
authorities in England, it is asserted that the purpose of the anarchists
is to put down all political, religious, and military authority; to burn
all churches, palaces, soldier-barracks, fortresses, provisions, and to
destroy all that has lived till now by business-work without contributing
to it. From such documents we are to understand that the anarchists take
it for granted that all laws and institutions among civilized peoples
have been imposed arbitrarily by those who govern upon those who are
governed; that the parties to be governed have as much right to ignore
them as the governing parties had to make them; that there is in the
universe no moral order to which the political and social orders among
men correspond; that every man has the privilege of setting up his own
order; that every engineer has the right to ignore the rails laid for the
flanges of his wheels on the long roads leading out from the turntable,
and the inestimable subjective liberty of pulling open the throttle
valve and running out into the country according to his own sweet will.
Suppose all the anarchists in the world should be sent to some great
island so that they could test their own theories, would they not be
under the necessity of founding some sort of a government? They would
have to construct roads, devise ways and means for lights, water, and
for protection against individual violence. Would they not have to bind
themselves together by some kind of social contract, or compact? If a
number of men should unite themselves into a syndicate for the purpose of
building houses without reference to the laws of gravity, if they should
declare it as their set purpose to so build houses as that the center
of gravity should fall in a line outside the base, the whole company
would be tried for lunacy and confined in the insane asylum. So the most
summary and straightforward methods should be adopted for ridding society
of all that class of men who propose to manage human affairs without
reference to the facts of man’s nature and the laws of the universe. It
is a question whether they should be put into an insane asylum or into
a jail, for it is hard to determine which they have the most of: insane
stupidity or insane meanness.
Society has made great advances, but every increment of progress has been
along the lines of the eternal laws of the universe. Those laws were here
before man appeared upon the stage of action; they will be here when he
is gone. Men may doctor themselves with error about truth, and error
about right, until they come to be great imbeciles; but the truth and the
right will remain clear and immortal for the intellect and the will of
the wise and the good.
VIII.
It is important, as never before, for those who see the truth and
recognize the right to declare the same with all authority. It is said
that the Emperor Henry IV. stood shivering two whole days and nights
in the snows of the courtyard of Canossa Castle, suing piteously for
permission to throw himself, in agonized submission, at the feet of
Hildebrand. That he was shunned by his subjects more absolutely
because of the ban that was upon him than he would have been had he
been afflicted with the smallpox. This incident illustrates for us the
authority wielded by the Church of the Middle Ages. The Church was then
felt to be in touch with tremendous power. Its fulminations carried
terror to the hearts of kings and subjects. What the Church declared
should be done, or should be left undone, the people felt could only be
disregarded at the peril of all hope for time and eternity. It not only
declared the duties men were under the necessity of observing in order to
save their souls, but the kind of thoughts men were under the necessity
of thinking concerning the shape of the earth, the movements of the
stars, and the structure of the human body, in order to save themselves
from the odium of heresy. The Church reigned without a rival in all the
civilized world. She was not expected to give any reason for her actions
or her utterances. When she determined what the order of the solar system
was, the brains of men were compelled, without question, to acquiesce.
Even to doubt was to deny the faith. The Church dictated the policy of
the stars without being at the trouble of studying the stars; and no
other sidereal opinions were tolerated but such as she formulated and
published.
But the minds of scholars and students, in different parts of Europe,
began to reach other conclusions concerning the nature and order
of things than such as had been ecclesiastically settled for them.
Copernicus saw that the heavenly bodies did not move in accordance with
the teachings of the Church. And when the Venetian scholars looked
through the telescope of Galileo at Padua, and saw Jupiter and his
satellites, a central sun and revolving planets, the authority of the
Church on the subject of astronomy was gone. In this way the Church has
been forced to give up one position after another. The people, seeing she
had no foundation for the opinions she held concerning nature, began to
question the value of her opinions concerning God, and heaven and hell,
and right and wrong.
Now the Church must regain her note of authority. She must do this by
seeing what the laws are which grow out of the facts of condition. The
laws of the family are to be deduced from the truths of relation which
constitute the family. These will be seen to coincide with the old laws
uttered from Sinai. The laws of society are to be deduced from the truths
of relation which constitute society. These, it will be seen, are summed
up as was said of old in the formula, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself.” When men get through framing laws for the regulation of
human conduct, from a study of the facts of human nature, they will
find to their amazement that they have reinstated the Ten Commandments,
and that Sinai is not a burnt out volcano. They will find that the Ten
Commandments are still the foundations of social health, and harmony,
and progress. God wrote them for Moses on tables of stone because he had
already written them in the nature of man. The laws of gravity can no
more be read out of the world of space than the Eternal Decalogue can be
read out of the world of human life. So the man of law should speak with
the same authority as the man of science, without apology and without
misgivings.
_BEAUTY._
“If the endeavor to analyze the world is a trifle, it is
because the world is such. The sum of things can have no second
intention, nor can it be characterized by any trait that is
not included in itself. Some things are sweet, but what is our
sense which perceives them; some things are good, but what is
our conscience which judges them; some things are true, but
what is our intellect which argues them; some things are deep,
but what is our reason which fathoms them? Everyone who thinks
deeply, must have reflected that, if the purposes and results
of man’s practice are vanity, so also must be those of his
speculation. Goethe said, that there was no refuge from virtues
that were not our own, but in loving them; and Ecclesiastes,
that there was none from the vanity of life, but in fearing and
obeying God. So, also, from the vanity of speculation there
is no refuge but in acquiescing in its relative nature, and
accepting truth for what it is.”