There is an obvious contrast between the points of view from which
morality and religion consider the problem of life. Whatever may be
your views as to what your duty is, it is plain that the moral
interest centres about this idea of duty. That is, the moral interest
seeks to define right deeds and to insist that they shall be done. It
estimates the rightness of deeds with reference to some ideal of life.
But however it conceives this ideal, it makes its main appeal to the
active individual. It says: "Do this." The religious interest, on the
other hand, centres about the sense of need, or, if it is successful
in finding this need satisfied, it centres about the knowledge of that
which has delivered the needy from their danger. It appeals for help,
or waits patiently for the Lord, or rejoices in the presence of
salvation. It therefore may assume any one of many different attitudes
toward the problem of duty. It may seek salvation through deeds, or
again it may not, in the minds of some men, appeal to the active
nature in any vigorous way whatever. Some religious moods are passive,
contemplative, receptive, adoring rather than strenuous. It is
therefore quite consistent with the existence of a religious interest
to feel suspicious of the dutiful restlessness of many ardent souls.
"They also serve who only stand and wait."
{171}
Such is sometimes the comforting, sometimes the warning word that
seems to many to express the religious interest.
This general contrast between the two interests assumes many special
forms when we consider how moralists--that is, teachers who especially
emphasise the call of duty--may stand related to the two postulates
upon which, as we have seen, the higher religions base their appeal.
Religion, in our sense of the word, depends upon asserting: (1) That
there is some one highest end of existence, some goal of life, some
chief good; and (2) That, by nature, man is in great danger of
completely failing to attain this good, so that he needs to be saved
from this danger.
Now the first of these two postulates religion has frequently,
although not always, shared with the moralists, that is, with those
who devote themselves to teaching us how to act rightly. Aristotle,
for instance, based his ethical doctrine (one of the most influential
books in the history of morals) upon the postulate that there is a
highest good. Many others who have discussed or have preached
morality, have asserted that all obligations are subject to one
ultimate obligation, which is the requirement to act with reference to
the highest good. Yet this agreement as to the highest good turns out
to be not quite universal when one compares the opinions of the
teachers of religion, on the one hand, and of the moralists on the
other. Popular and traditional morality often takes the form of a
little hoard of {172} maxims about right acts--maxims whose relations
to one another, and to any one highest goal of life, remain obscure.
Each maxim is supposed to define a duty. Of course it also tells us
how to win some special good or how to avoid some particular evil. But
what this special duty has to do with winning any one highest good is
not thus made explicit. And since many who make traditional morality
prominent in their minds and lives are unaware of the deeper spirit
that indeed, as I hold, underlies every serious endeavour, these
persons simply remain unconscious that their morality has any
religious motive or that they are dealing with the problem of
salvation. Even some professional teachers of duty are mere legalists
who do not succeed in reducing the law which they teach to any
rational unity. And for such people the postulate which religion makes
the head of the corner is rather a stumbling-stone. They doubt or
question whether there is any highest good whatever or any pearl of
great price. Yet they illustrate the essential feature of morality by
insisting that certain deeds must be done.
But, however it may be with the first of the religious postulates, it
is the second (the postulate that we are naturally in very great
danger of missing the true goal of life) which leaves open the greater
room for differences of interest as between the religious teachers and
the teachers of duty. Suppose that we are in agreement in holding that
there is a highest {173} good. Nevertheless, the question: How far is
man naturally in danger of missing this supreme goal? is a question
which, since we are all fallible mortals, leaves room for many
varieties of opinion. How I myself view the matter, I told you in our
first lecture. And to me the religious need seems an insistent and
clear need. But many moralists are partisans of duty as a substitute
for religion. And they are often much more optimistic regarding human
nature than I am. In their opinion the goal can be reached, or at
least steadily approached, by simple dutifulness in conduct, without
any aid from other motives that should tend to our salvation.
There is, then, a pearl of great price. But--so such teachers
hold--why sell all that you have to buy that pearl, when by nature you
are able to win it through a reasonable effort? Dutifulness is the
name for the spirit that leads to such an effort. And dutifulness, say
these teachers, is as natural as any other normal function. "No
general catastrophe threatens our destiny," they insist. "Why not do
right? That is in your own personal power and is sufficient for your
deepest need. You need cry out for no aid from above. You can be saved
if you choose. There is no dark problem of salvation."
To such optimists the intensely religious often respond with that
strange horror and, repugnance which only very close agreement can
make possible. Near spiritual kin can war together with a bitterness
that mutual strangers cannot share. In this case, {174} as you see,
the goal is the same for both parties to the controversy. Both want to
reach some highest good. The cheerful optimists simply feel sure of
being able to reach, through action, what the earnestly devout are
passionately seeking by the aid of faith. Yet each side may regard the
other with a deep sense of sacred aversion. "Fanatic!" cries the
partisan of duty to his religious brother. "Mere moralist," retorts
the other, and feels that no ill name could carry more well-founded
opprobrium. The issue involved is indeed both delicate and momentous.
The same issue may become only graver in its intensity when, in a
given case, a religious man and a moralist agree as to _both_ of the
main postulates of religion, so that for both there is a highest good
to seek and a great peril to avoid. For now the question arises: What
way leads to salvation?
Suppose that the answer to this question seems, at any point in the
development of human insight, simply doubtful. Suppose mystery
overhangs the further path that lies before both the religious
inquirer and the moralist. In such a case the religious interest meets
at least a temporary defeat. The religious inquirer must acknowledge
that he is baffled. But just this defeat of the religious interest
often seems to be the moralist's opportunity. "You cannot discover
your needed superhuman truths," he then says. "You cannot touch
heaven. You remain but a man. But at all events you can {175} do a
man's work, however hard that work is, however opposed it is to your
natural sloth and degradation, however great the danger of perdition.
Perhaps nobody knows the way of salvation. But a man can know and can
daily do each day's duty. He does not know how to attain the goal. But
he knows what the goal is, and it is better to die striving for the
goal than to live idly gazing up into heaven." In such a case, even if
the moralist fully recognises the depth of our need of salvation, and
the greatness of the danger, still the strenuous pursuit of duty often
seems to him to be a necessary substitute for religion. And then the
moralist may regard his own position as the only one that befits a
truth-loving man; and the religious interests, which appear to fix the
attention upon remote and hopeless mysteries, may seem to him
hindrances to the devoted moral life. Against all dangers and doubts
he hurls his "everlasting No." His only solution lies in
strenuousness. He is far from the Father's house. He knows not even
whether there is any father or any home of the spirit. But he proposes
to face the truth as it is, and to die as a warrior dies, fighting for
duty.
But of course quite a different outcome is, for many minds, the true
lesson of life. The religious man may come to feel sure that the way
of salvation is indeed known to him; but it may seem to him a way that
is opened not through the efforts of moral individuals, but only
through the workings {176} of some divine power that, of its own
moving, elects to save mankind. In this case the classic doctrine that
grace alone saves, and that, without such grace, works are but vanity,
is, in one form or another, emphasised by religious teachers in their
controversies with the moralists. The history of Christianity
illustrates several types of doctrine according to which divine grace
is necessary to salvation, so that mere morality not only cannot save,
but of itself even tends to insure perdition. And in the history of
Northern Buddhism there appear teachings closely analogous to these
evangelical forms of Christianity. So the religious interests here in
question are very human and wide-spread. Whoever thus views the way of
salvation can in fact appeal to vast bodies of religious experience,
both individual and social, to support his opposition against those
who see in the strenuous life the only honest mode of dealing with our
problem. Whoever has once felt, under any circumstances, his
helplessness to do right knows what such religious experience of the
need of grace means. Hence it is easy to see how the earnest followers
of a religion may condemn those moralists who agree with them both as
to the need and as to the dangers of the natural man. In fact the two
parties may condemn each other all the more because both accept the
two postulates upon which the quest for salvation is based.
Yet even these are not the only forms in which this tragic conflict
amongst brethren often appears. {177} I must mention still another
form. Suppose that, in the opinion of the followers of some religion,
not only the knowledge of the way of salvation is open, but also the
attainment of the goal, the entering into rest, the fruition, is, for
the saints or for the enlightened, an actual experience. There is,
then, such a thing as a complete winning of the highest good. So the
faithful may teach. Hereupon the moralists may adopt the phrase which
James frequently used in opposing those who seemed to themselves to be
in actual touch with some absolute Being. The only use of the opinion
of such people, James in substance said, is that it gives them a sort
of "moral holiday." For James, quite erroneously, as I think, supposed
that whoever believed the highest good to be in any way realised in
the actual world, was thereby consciously released from the call of
duty, and need only say:
"God's in his heaven,
All's right with the world."
In such a world, namely, there would be, as James supposed, nothing
for a righteous man to do. The alternative that perhaps the only way
whereby God can be in his heaven, or all right with the world, is the
way that essentially includes the doing of strenuous deeds by
righteous men, James persistently ignored, near as such an alternative
was to the spirit of his own pragmatism.
Nevertheless, it is true that there have indeed {178} been, amongst
the religiously minded, many who have conceived the highest good
merely in the form of some restful communion with the master of life,
merely as tranquillity in the presence of God, or merely as a
contemplative delight in some sort of beauty. And it is true that some
of these have said: "The saints, or at all events the enlightened,
even in the present life, do enter into this rest. And for them there
is indeed nothing left to do." To such, of course, the moralists may
reply: "You enlightened ones seem to think yourselves entitled to a
'moral holiday.' We strenuous souls reject your idleness as unworthy
of a man. Your religion is a barren aestheticism, and is so whether it
takes the outward form of an ascetic and unworldly contemplation or
assumes the behaviour of a company of highly cultivated
pleasure-seekers who delight in art merely for art's sake and know
nothing of duty." To such believers in salvation through mere
attainment of peace, James's criticism rightly applies. In these
lectures, as I ask you to note, I have never defined salvation in such
terms. Salvation includes triumph and peace, but peace only in and
through the power of the spirit and the life of strenuous activity.
But such partisans of the religion of spiritual idleness as I have
mentioned may nevertheless return the moralist's scorn with scorn. If
they are advocates of art for art's sake, of mere beauty as the
highest good, they find the restlessness of the {179} moralists hectic
or barbarous. If they are mystical quietists, they regard mere
moralism as the struggling of a soul that is not saved. If moral
endeavour were the last word, they insist, we should all of us be in
the Hades of Sisyphus. And no doubt their scorn, even if ill-founded,
deserves consideration. For even the most one-sided emphasis upon any
aspect of spiritual truth is instructive, if only your eyes are open.
Such are some of the ways in which, in the course of human history,
the religiously minded and the moralists have been divided. To sum up:
Certain of the lovers of religion have, upon occasion, condemned
moralists, sometimes as legalists who do not know that there is any
highest good, sometimes as vain optimists who ignore the danger of
perdition, sometimes as despisers of divine grace, sometimes as the
barbarous troublers of spiritual peace. Certain moralists, in their
turn, and according as they ignore or accept the postulates upon which
the religious interest is based, have condemned the devout, sometimes
as the slanderers of our healthy human nature, sometimes as seekers in
the void for a light that does not shine, sometimes as slavish souls
who hope to get from grace gifts that they have not the courage to
earn for themselves, sometimes as idlers too fond of "moral holidays."
And, as moralists, their common cry has been, ever since the times of
Amos: "Woe unto those who are at ease in Zion."
{180}
We have reviewed, then, some of these conflicts. I hope that you see
upon what general issue they all alike turn. The moralists are
essentially the partisans of action. They seek a good. But their great
postulate is that there is something right for us to do. Therefore the
issue is that between our need of something not ourselves to save us
and our power to win a greater or lesser good through our own moral
activity. Whoever so exclusively emphasises the fact that the divine
is not of our making, and that its ways are not our ways, and that its
good is something beyond our power to create or attain of
ourselves--whoever, I say, so exclusively emphasises these things that
he makes light of our efforts to attain the good somewhere comes into
conflict with moralists. Whoever, as moralist, so exclusively appeals
to our own energies that he seems to hold that our duty would be just
as much our duty, "If we were alone upon the earth and the gods
blind," somewhere meets the religious opponent who mocks his pride, or
despises his restlessness, or laments his contempt for the divine
grace.
Now these conflicts are, I insist, no merely speculative
controversies. They play a great part in history. They have darkened
countless lives. And they grow out of motives deep in human nature.
What is here most important for us is that they point us toward our
new source of insight. What a narrower way of living can divide, a
deeper and {181} truer mode of living can unite. Our problem assumes a
new form. Is there any mode of living that is just _both_ to the moral
and to the religious motives? Is there any way of reconciling our
need, of a grace that shall save with the call of the moral life that
we shall be strenuous in the pursuit of our duty?
Let us here approach this problem from the side of our moral
consciousness. For at this point we are already familiar with the
religious need. Does there exist amongst men a type of morality that,
in and for itself, is already essentially religious, so that it knows
nothing of this conflict between duty and religion? I reply, there is
such a type of morality. There is a sort of consciousness which
equally demands of those whom it inspires, spiritual attainment and
strenuousness, serenity and activity, resignation and vigour, life in
the spirit and ceaseless enterprise in service. Is this form of
consciousness something belonging only to highly and intellectually
cultivated souls? Is it the fruit of abstract thinking alone? Is it
the peculiar possession of the philosophers? Or, on the other hand,
does it arise solely through dumb and inarticulate intuitions? Is it
consistent only with a highly sensitive and mystical temperament? Does
it belong only to the childhood of the spirit? Is it exclusively
connected with the belief in some one creed? To all these questions I
reply: No.
This sort of consciousness is possessed in a very {182} high degree by
some of the humblest and least erudite of mankind. Those in whose
lives it is a notable feature may be personally known only to a few
near friends. But the spirit in which they live is the most precious
of humanity's possessions. And such people may be found belonging to
all the ages in which we can discover any genuinely humane activities,
and to all those peoples that have been able to do great work, and to
all the faiths that contain any recognisable element of higher
religious significance.