M77 IN MEMOEEAM Rabbi Isadore Isaacsor GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE THE RELATION BETWEEN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF CHRISTIANITY IN EUROPE AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION BY H. S. NASH It PROFESSOR IN THE EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL AT CAMBRIDGE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. IQIO All rights reserved H tf COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped April, 1897. Reprinted September, 1897 ; January, 1902 ; July, 1907 ; June, 1910. IN MEMORIAM J. 8. CuihinK & Co. - Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A. s. a 943934 CONTENTS i PAGE How the Establishment of Christianity in Europe created a Question l II What Greece and Rome contributed to the Campaign against Caste. Their Definition of the Universal Indi- vidual and their Lack of Power to drive it Home . 27 III Biblical Monotheism puts the World in the Service of God, and conceives God as an Infinite Missionary Force in the Service of the Lowly 63 IV How the Separation of Church and State was Necessary, to the End that the Definition of the Individual might be completed. The Common Man gains thereby a Value above the Market Price 98 The Sovereignty of the Church, the Transcendence of the Idea of God, and the Isolation of the Moral Ideal in the Monastery, raised the Man without a Grandfather to the Spiritual Peerage ....'.. 146 viii CONTENTS VI PAGE History, not Cosmology, is the Marrow of the Christian View of the Universe. Communism behind the Mon- astery Walls. The Infinite Worth of the Common Man in Relation to the Category of Duty in Ethics . 185 VII The Creation of the Reformer's Conscience . . .223 VIII The Eighteenth Century as the Open Ground upon which the New Definition deployed its Forces. The Soul becomes a Citizen 263 The numerals in the text refer to the Notes at the end of the book. GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE MY aim is to show how the social 'question 'strikes its roots into the soil of that Mediterranean civiliza- tion in which Antiquity summed itself up, and out of /j* which Modernity issued. Aristotle declares in his / Poetics that History is less ethical than the Drama, id therefore less cleansing. If, however, it be possi- ble to find a clear thread of purpose running through the time-process, be it ever so slight, History itself becomes a drama, and the most cleansing of all dramas. It was because Aristotle saw little or no continuity, almost no steady, divine purpose in His- tory, that he estimated it so lightly. But our minds cannot walk the path from the first fire, kindled by human art in the thick of the forest primeval, down to the time when the machinery of the World's Fair in Chicago was all set in motion by touching a lit- tle button, without exaltation. Much more does it cleanse us of impatience and fear to see a terrible yet inevitable and inspiring question in the light of universal history, which, for our experience, is the light of eternity. We men and women of to-day are standing on the verge of a future whose course it is impossible to foresee. If we are to play our part 2 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. through, if we are to follow our duty home, we need both a cool head and a warm heart. The geologian deals with aeons as an Oriental monarch deals with his people's gold. To the impassioned reformer, a year is an age. The need of our time is a man- hood that shall gain a little just a little of the geologian's time-sense. I cannot hope to avoid the appearance of one-sided- ness. Political and Economic History are passed coo'ly by. The vast bulk of events is untouched. I shall seem to make ideas advance to the sound of the trumpet, like the things that happen in one of Dumas' novels. May be which is worse I shall appear to be writing a poor fairy story, and calling it philosophy of history. The one-sidedness, however, is conscious and avowed. It can deceive no one but myself, and I trust that even I shall escape. My excuse is that one- sidedness is worth while. In the hope of proving it, thereby defending myself against that righteous horror of easy generalization which is the best side of the intellectual life of our day, I venture to give a short syllabus of the main points that I desire to make good. (1) In the Mediterranean world, for the first time in history, the individual man was clearly defined. He was called " soul." The individual thus christened was a generic individual, there being nothing in him that could not become universal. In this definition was stored up a great stock of potential rights for the downmost men. It was to give rise to the work- ing unit of modern politics. (2) With the Establishment of Christianity the world gained a dogmatic conception of the universe that could furnish a driving power strong enough to I GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 3 force the definition down through the lowest stratum of society, as it lay under the hand of theory. At one time it seemed to the eye of flesh that the religion of Mithras would press Christianity hard in the strug- gle for the spiritual masterhood of the Roman Em- pire. That religion typified all the weaknesses of polytheism in its relation to our subject. Through the vast debris of myth and ritual the principle of individuality could not penetrate. (3) The monotheistic idea of God unifies and coor- dinates the spiritual goods of the race. It tolerates no spaces of barren silence in the universe, where the imagination of the reformer cannot live. (4) The unity of God involves the moral unity of all classes of men. This is a long step towards the idea of equality. (5) The unity of God entails a view of the world which puts it in the service of God. In lower relig- ions the Gods are in the service of men. As poly- theism clarifies itself, it rises into dualism. Still, the world and history are not plastic. But Biblical monotheism succeeds on the one hand in making God the keeper of the world's ideal, and on the other, in rendering the total life in time and place plastic under His hand. Hence the idea of God becomes both the ideal and the task of mankind. (6) Thus the potential bulks larger than the actual. The may-be and the ought-to-be gather in force on the frontiers of the is to daunt and disturb it, perhaps some day to break in upon and overcome it. That the possible thus acquires broad margins of sugges- tion out beyond the actual is a fact of deep signifi- cance in the history of the social ideal. 4 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. (7) The idea of Personality dawns on the Western mind. There's a good in each man, and for each man better than his best, the good of self-knowledge and self-masterhood. Personality means individuality creating itself. (8) This involves Freedom. Fate is that which cannot be assimilated. To the reformer Fate is the dead matter of society which he cannot hope to vital- ize. But to the Christian thought of Personality, that is, individuality creating itself through covenant with God, there is no Fate, save lack of time ; and the belief in immortality, the historical corollary of the belief in Personality, makes time no bar. (9) The climate of the period which established Christianity was transcendence. Transcendence, for our subject, means that the inner life of man is too large to find any suitable expression in social or political forms. Such a period of transcendence was necessary, to the end that the infinite worth of the common man might be authenticated and registered. (10) The sense of sin became part and parcel of common consciousness. It is a leveller and equalizer the mortal foe of aristocracy. (n) The idea of the Kingdom of * God is worked into the flesh and blood of the Occident, so that it becomes instinctive. Some day, with the idea of God left out for a while, it shall show itself as the belief in human perfectibility. (12) And so, the idea of Humanity rises, full and clear above the horizon. It amounts to this, that wherever you find man, you find the eternal goods, and therefore the highest worth. The scale of mar- ket prices for the common man is forever disarranged I GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 5 by the discovery in him of something that is above price. (13) Along with the idea of the Kingdom of God, the clear idea of Duty enters the Western mind. It is a new category in ethics. It involves, ultimately, a change from that view of society which would make it exist for the insurance of present rights, to a view of it as also existing to create rights. Just as the monotheistic concept of God puts the world in the service of the human ideal, so the idea of the Kingdom of God brings before the mind a world wholly made up of material plastic for Duty. (14) So far as theory goes, all this involves a revo- lution in human values. It matters not how far off the translation of the idea into institutions may be. Ideas are indestructible. Force stored up must some day break forth. With History, as with the God of History, a thousand years are as one day. (15) In a word, the establishment of Christianity in Europe creates the Reformer's Conscience, makes the world seem plastic to it, and gives to sociology that elemental man, of whom Rousseau preached, Burns and Wordsworth sang, and for whose sake Kant did his deepest thinking. To set this man free was the programme of the Revolution. These are the main points amongst those which I desire to make good. If as generalizations they are only half true, there is surely enough in them to justify the one-sidedness that is necessary to empha- size them, and thereby bring out the continuity of the social question which without them might appear to be sprung upon our time by economic, changes, but which, with them, is seen to be the last chapter 6 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. hitherto in the history of the Occidental view of the universe. " History does not study material facts and institutions alone ; its true object of study is the human soul." 1 It is only when seen in this light that the social question becomes spiritually inevitable. And whatever is both spiritual and inevitable pays its own way in our experience, no matter how heavy the taxes. \ Of course the later Mediterranean world could not have a social question, in our meaning of the phrase. That question can only be asked when a free State, more or less clearly conscious of itself, exists, and is recognized by humanity as being an investment for some considerable portion of its spiritual capital. But the central feature in the later history of Antiq- uity was the death of the State as a spiritual agent. It lost its capacity to carry the unseen goods, and gave place to a Church built upon a non-terrestrial, a transcendent view of life. Reason and conscience became absentees from the secular order. The causes of the soul were all appealed to the world beyond. There was a change of venue for every fundamental issue. A classic example is Augustine's balancing of the books in relation to the capture and sack of Rome. Inasmuch as the Goths respected the sanctity of the churches, he concludes that the gain was greater than the awful loss resulting from a blow that shook the ancient world to its centre. In such a period and climate the questions that live in the heart of the modern State could not be asked ; or, if some genius born a millennium before his day had asked them, a dying echo would have been the only answer. I GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 7 Seeing that the land lies this way, how shall we treat the subject ? Two ways open before us. Desir- ing to keep close to the question, one may gather together all the opinions of the men of the period touching property, usury, slavery, and similar matters ; and then, making this mass of opinions the basis, build upon it an inference concerning their opinions of the social structure, in case they do not express them for themselves. But this would be doing both too little and too much. Too little, because the emotional centre of gravity for these men does not lie here ; and consequently the opinions would be detached opinions and out of drawing with the total thought of the period. Torn from their context, they would be in effect misquotations, not conveying the whole mind of their authors. It would also be doing too much ; for, seeing that the heart of the period is elsewhere, these opinions would sometimes make the period speak with heavier emphasis than was in- tended, turning the Fathers into radical socialists, when as a matter of fact they could not have understood such men. The other way is to find the emotional centre of the period, even if we have to give the main part of our study to naked theology in order to find it. Having found it, we may then proceed to show how the opinions of the time upon specific questions radi- ate from it. This alone is historical interpretation ; for thus alone does the period tell its story in its own tongue. Moreover, in no other way can the full message of the period reach us. Even in dealing with an indi- vidual thinker, we rightly care more for his methods of thinking than for his thoughts. Thoughts come 8 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. and go, often leaving no trace, while the thinking is the man. Far more is this the case with a great period. What we wish to know, most of all, is not its opinions, but its concepts, the mother-ideas that give birth to opinions. It is through the relations between the organizing concepts, the central impres- sions of different periods, that the unity of history finds us. Through them we also gain the true measure of distances in the field of the human spirit. So far as multitudes of our opinions are concerned, we are at the other pole from Plato and Aristotle. But as regards the foundations of our culture, Plato and Aristotle are nearer to us than yesterday's news- paper. Isaiah and Lincoln are thousands of years apart in chronology. In logic they live within the same day. Finally, in no other way can we learn to appreciate the functions of this period in , the history of the social question. In terms of culture its work was to fuse classical and Biblical antiquity ; in terms of ecclesiology, to create an imperial Church which should bridle and tame the pioneer centuries of modernity. In relation to our subject, those two works were one, for their sum-total was the definition of the soul. That definition made a deep problem inevitable. Schelling has said that the greatness of a system of thought is better tested sometimes by its power to create questions than by its power to answer them. For example, Socrates did not even attempt to give the world a view of the universe. Yet he forced the Greek reason to put the question concerning man's place in the universe in a new way ; and out of that new question came the systems of Plato and Aristotle. So with the work of the period that I GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 9 established Christianity. It created a question. No way has so far been found to appropriate dwelling- places in the spiritual world, and take out patents for lordly tracts of celestial territory. In the infinite fields of the life to come, as the devout imagination surveys them, all souls find ample space either to wander free or to build for themselves eternal palaces. But when this "soul" comes to be translated into terms of the terrestrial order, when the "rights of man " stored up in the " soul " are brought out into the light of a political and economic day, the question touching house-lots and farms on the homestead of our race which we call the earth, takes on a sharp point, and the point is driven home to the heart of modern society. To make this plain is the objective point of these lectures. In a prefatory way, we may do it by put- ting together two of the primary maxims in ethics. The first is the utilitarian rule " Each man is to M NJi* iy ^ ^* v* :ount ^ or one ' n kdy f r more than one." The rrjT second is Kant's " Always treat humanity, whether T^ in yourself or another, as a person, and never as a Y y-^ thing." The first, without the second, is a form rtff without filling. The only ground for counting every- V J body as one, and nobody as more than one, is the r* presence in all men of a something or other which vf possesses such value that existing social forms and economic accumulations cannot bid against it. This is what Kant meant by treating humanity as a per- son, and not as a thing; because a thing is some- thing whose value finds its full expression in a present use ; while personality carries within it a value that transcends all immediate uses, and so has 10 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. the power to spur on such uses to self-enlargement, and the right to challenge existing social forms to expand and deepen, or else perish. Unless, now, there is this transcendent quality in humanity as such, the rule " Count every man as one and nobody as more than one " has no guarantee in the ground of things, no permanent safeguard in the constitution of the universe, and consequently it cannot stand up against the vast natural differences of equipment and function. Therefore Kant's rule is the indispensable underpinning of the utilitarian rule. To express it in another way, the social question is a moral question ; first, because its ultimate root is a choice between divergent ideals of the State, that is, between different ways of viewing and organizing the total human life in time and space ; and secondly, because, as a consequence, the question concerning the worth of the labor turns into a question concern- ing the worth of the laborer. In other words, the social problem, when run to the earth, reads as fol- lows : Is it possible to individualize the downmost man ? to make him really count as one ? We are in the current of a violent reaction against the eighteenth century. Its theory of a Social Con- tract is set down by all parties as a sociologic myth. Its State of Nature is considered a barbarian's para- dise. The Robinsonade has become an extinct type of literature there must be a sweetheart on the other end of the island. " Organic " is the contem- porary substitute for " Orthodoxy." Not to be or- ganic means to be excommunicated by the men who think. To be an eighteenth century man is to have been tlug up as a fossil and to have the primeval clay I GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE n still clinging to one's bones. All this is well, after its kind. But a danger attends it. In pouring out the bathing-water of individualism we may possibly spill out the baby, Individuality. The desire and need of our time is not less individuality, but an individuality that is more vital and deep, because more free from the tyranny of fate in the form of inherited standards. What is at stake in our social agitation is a vast extension of the area over which the principle of individuality operates. Just as science found a way through the barred doors of Laura Bridgman's senses, and gave to the woman, impris- oned within, the rightful privilege of expression, so are the missionary forces of society striving to create individuals in places where now there is a mere gross lump of humanity. The abstract doctrine of equality has value only as a revolutionary force. But the concrete doctrine is a permanent element in the so- cial constitution. It means equality in the right to be individual. Hence it draws after it the moral necessity of undoing political laws which make the individuality of some men a bar to the individuality of many men, and of removing certain economic conditions which make it impossible for masses of mankind to be individual at all. If the democratic view of things is not lost in the woods, the individualization of the men who are the mudsills of society is a necessity. It is the goal of universal history, unless history is to end with a march into the desert. But the necessity of individ- ualizing these men would never have been seen, if the establishment of Christianity had not issued in the clear definition of the "soul." That definition 12 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. takes note only of the staple of humanity, of what is or must become common stock with all men. The " soul " carries within it a value above all ter- restrial values. It conceals within itself a universal individual. He is defined, indeed, in terms of the other world. But he is defined, and so becomes footloose. Hereby the task of modern history is prescribed. Now individualization means moralization. A man is moralized when he is taken to heart by the highest conscience to be found, when he is brought within the pale of the highest known ideal. For example, in the shopping season just before Christmas, the days that try the souls of women, the girl behind the counter is moralized or not, according as the shoppers do or do not treat her as they would treat their peers, with their very best manners. In the history of morals there is steady change. Not only do individual du- ties come and go, but ideals themselves alter. Yet it always holds good concerning any given man at any given time or place, that he is moralized only when recognized as kith and kin by the highest working ideal above the horizon. Thus in Aristotle the free citizen is moralized, having a full share in the spiritual estate of his fatherland. The slave is not moralized, being "an animated tool." Athens, the combined Church and State can find and recognize herself in the citizen, since he is made after her likeness, counts as an individual, and stands within the pale of the spirit. The slave, on the con- trary, is like the marble chips and dust which the sculptor sweeps away from the foot of his statue, lying outside the limits of expression. A man then I GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 13 is moralized when he becomes a carrier for the spirit- ual goods, a representative of the highest conscious life. And the root of the social question is the problem How shall the downmost man bulk large enough before the terrestrial reason and conscience to force them to take cognizance of him ? It should not be hard to see the bearing of the first five hundred years of our era upon our great debate. The utilitarian's " Each shall count for one," without the Kantian "Always treat humanity as a person," is a form without a filling. But the Kantian maxim draws its sap and vitalizing juices from that generic individual, the " soul," which the first five centuries of our era conceived and defined. It was in this period that ethical theory and religious experience stored up values in the common man to such an ex- tent that he must needs become a person, an end in himself, and cease to be a thing, a means to the development of personality in other men. And so this period became the ethical climax of antiquity and the pioneer of modernity. It should also be easy to see how the theology, that constitutes the intellectual staple of those early cen- turies, bears upon the social question. Since the task of universal history is the individualization of the man at the bottom and the moralization of his func- tions, and since, without this, history sinks to the level of a physical process, this or nothing must be set down as the desire of humanity. Lewes once said that a fine English lawn was the embodied de- sire of many generations. Now the idea of God, if it be nothing more, is the embodied and transfigured desire of our race. Into it, as into a supreme good, 14 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. the sanctified wishes of men have poured themselves. By speculation upon it, the thoughts of man have cen- tralized and clarified themselves. Let it be granted, for the sake of passing argument, that the idea of God does not pay a single one of our debts to reason and conscience, but merely refunds all our debts ; still, we have in it the very best register of what has been deep in the heart of humanity. Therefore it is a fair inference that the history of the social question is in organic connection with the history of the idea which has recorded the noblest ventures of the heart and registered its most enduring gains. Feuerbach's famous thesis was that the Gods were just the dreams of men projected into an imagined being outside the dreamers. And according to him the absorption of all the Gods into the one God does nothing but deepen and intensify the dream. God is still made in the image of human need and aspira- tion. Suppose this to be true. Suppose Christian Theology to be merely a chapter in comparative my- thology. Its vast importance to our subject is not thereby lessened one whit. Nobody doubts that an insight of the Greek myths is essential to the under- standing of Greek art. Why, then, should it be doubted that an insight of Christian theology, as it was worked out during the period when the founda- tions of our culture were being laid, is essential to the history of labor ? The claims of the laborer upon a new estate in society are involved in that search for the " soul " or pith of man which was the main spiritual labor of those five centuries and the ten that followed them. But the "soul" cannot be separated from God. God is the seat of unity, the I GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 15 domicile of worth, outside the world. And the " soul " is the only seat of unity, the one spring and source of worth, inside the world. The new definition of the individual is historically inseparable from the conception of God. V It is well for us to seriously realize the affinity be- tween the social feeling and the religious feeling. I think it is fast becoming a matter of common remark that the deeper socialism of England and America is looking towards, if it has not already entered into, a religious phase. This is not a haphazard or passing attitude. The social and the religious consciousness are akin. If we strip religion of those features that make it a form of insurance, and then consider not its speculative explanations, but its emotional forms, it yields two main elements for our examination : first, a sense of the whole of things; and secondly, a feeling of admiration. Under the first head, all religions are attempts to organize the impressions of men upon the basis of some conception of the total life. Whatever the form that the religion and its theology assume, it gains its power from its ability to view the universe as a whole and to show the indi- vidual his place and meaning in it. In the debate now going on, called " comparative religions," one religion shall overcome and silence the others in pro- portion as it succeeds in proving that it takes more careful account of the whole of man's life than the other religions do, and puts it in more sane and per- manent relations with the base of all being called God. But socialism for its part has no other aim than to teach the individual that he cannot live unto himself; and that not the bare individual, but the 1 6 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. social individual is the necessary unit of feeling. It teaches him that he can live only by a deep- ening sense of the whole. This sense of the whole is indefinite and elastic. Let the bare indi- vidual once acquire it, and there's no such thing as stopping him until he brings up in some form of religion. Under the second head, all religions are attempts to supply men with objects of permanent reverence. We live by admiration. The feeling is of infinite .* grange. It goes from strength to strength until it bows down before the being and beauty of God. ? But always and everywhere any object is either tem- 3 porarily or permanently a religious object that calls .j out and holds the deepest reverence of which human- i ity at the time is capable. The worship of ancestors, ^ the worship of the saints, the religiousness of patriot- 4 ism, the subt 1 ^ connections between chivalry and the pf worship of iary, are enough to remind us that when the inui/idual is once borne out of the small but snug harbor of sense and self-interest upon the tide of admiration, he can make no port until he sees the object of his admiration identified or associated with God. Now the social movement draws all its power from reverence for humanity. If it were a merely economic movement, a war between the party of the lean and the party of the fat, it would not go far on the highway of history. Even if it were inspired by pity, it would sooner or later find its breath coming short and be forced to take refuge in the monastery. Its one and sole permanent spring is reverence. Hence it has religion implicit in itself, seeing that humanity cannot be permanently reverenced, through I GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 17 good report and evil report, unless its roots go down to a purpose deeper than the dust. When the two elements the sense of the whole and admiration are put together, it becomes clear on the one side that the social feeling is essentially religious; and, on the other side, that the religious feeling is essentially social. If now we make connec- tion with the conclusion that universal history sinks to a physical process unless the individualization and moralization of the downmost man be set as its goal, we shall know what it is that we must require of re- ligion, in order that the social question may be clearly asked and patiently and courageously dealt with. ^ The ethical root of the problem is the necessity of counting the commonest man as one. The area of K individuality must become coterminous with the area of society. On the one hand, society must judge itself by its capacity to create men. Th reformer, ^ working in the slums, seeking to make citiz, is o* t of things, is the type of man desired by a State tnat is truly democratic; that is, the State that is built on belief in the equal right of every one to be an individual. On the other hand, the individual must judge himself by his capacity to enter more and more deeply into an ever-widening number of relationships. The democratic gentleman is he who can find his peer in the greatest number of men of all sorts and conditions. Thus a maximum of energy making for an enlargement of the area of individuality is the heart of the State, while a maximum of relationships with every kind of people is the substance of the true individual. So then we require of a religion that shall either create a fund of resources for the demo- 1 8 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. cratic view of society or provide a place of invest- ment for its gains, that it shall reveal to us the prin- ciple of individuality as set deep in the being of God. If the deepest desire of humanity is that every man become an individual, then the idea of God, which either creates or registers the desires of men, must give an eternal foothold for that desire. While, however, the social feeling, to be permanent, must make alliance with religion, it need not be con- sciously religious all the time ; indeed, it may be uncon- scious of the connection for a considerable part of the time. Art and literature, science and law, may spend their whole store of attention upon the specific satis- faction of specific present needs, and their products can be called religion only by disregarding every rule of careful classification. Yet art and literature, science and law, are supremely concerned with the principle of individuality. With all of them the central article of faith is that the general and the particular dwell not apart, but together. Noble art gives us men and women who are perfectly definite and yet are univer- sal. The beautiful woman of high art is an individ- ual and at the same time a type, while an aggregation of poor portraits yields to us not a single individual and not one type. Classic literature is literature that has the right of translation into all languages, the freedom of all times and places, while it is absolutely true to the time and place of its birth. A system of law is good just in proportion as it conjoins the need of the State and the needs of the constantly chang- ing citizens. Science has no function except to find the unities of Nature in the lowest monad. All forms, then, of high human endeavor are vitally inter- I GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 19 ested in the principle of individuality. Their implicit creed is that the universal and the individual are inseparable, that the one is no more and no less deep than the other. If then religion such as the social problem requires it to be meets the highest forms of human endeavor upon this common ground of inter- est in the principle of individuality, we know what we are to look for as we enter on the study of our ne'riod. This also determines for us our first step. We must make the primitive tribal view of deity and humanity the starting-point. This may seem at first sight like bringing a simple thing from a far country in order to give it a fictitious value. Granted that a matter so remote from practical latter-day issues as Nicene Theology is yet within view of the most prac- tical question we know, why go so far afield as pre- historic history? Is it not like beginning with the Flood in order to understand the work of the Massa- chusetts Board of Health in relation to the water- supply? But no other beginning can give us our true bearings. The Tribe lies back of all history. The universal primitive religion was one form or another of the tribal religion. Upon the tribal basis the first states were built. The Tribe was the ground both of the caste system of India and the patriarchal system of China. It outcrops everywhere in Egypt. The political system of Greek and Rome rose upon it. The tribal view of the relation between gods and men, and between man and his world, is the first attempt at a view of the universe. Out of it Poly- theism and Pantheism grew. And against it, as 20 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. a background, the religion of Israel should be set, if its development is to become intelligible. Short of the Tribe, therefore, we cannot stop, if we would have a satisfactory beginning for our study of the growth of the Mediterranean world into a definition of the generic individual. On the one side, the end of the religious movement of humanity is to find a ground for the principle of individuality that shall be as deep as the bottom of all being. On the other side, the end of the social movement of humanity is to extend the area of the common good, i.e. individuality, until the right to be individual and the opportunities for being individual shall lie at the door of the lowest human life. To reach this end, the tribal organiza- tion must be completely outgrown, while at the same time it is true that without the Tribe history could not have begun. The Tribe was a mass of humanity, not an organic union of developed individuals. The individual as such did not exist outside the tribe. The non- tribesman was an enemy to be annihilated, if possible, anyway not to be realized. There is no true thoroughfare between one tribe and another, and no vital relationship between their members. Neither was there any individual, as such, inside the Tribe. The old people and the sickly had no rights. Infants brought into the world no value of their own ; they must be formally recognized by the head of the tribal family before they have a valid claim upon exis- tence. The individual is merely part of a lump of humanity. The Tribe is also the unit of experience. An illus- tration of this is found in the invasion of the Roman I GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 21 Empire by Christianity. One reason why the new religion made such rapid headway in the cities and equally slow headway in the country districts, so that non-Christians came to be called " Pagans " or " Back-Country-folk," was that the tribal family organization held its ground in the outlying districts. No individuals lived there, the tribal family being the religious unit. But in the cities the tribal organi- zation had been broken up. Individuals lived there, and it was upon individuals that Christianity asserted its claim. 2 Moreover, the Tribe or the tribal family was the unit of moral responsibility. Hence the feeling about guilt in the Greek Drama, and the early laws concerning penalties for the wrongdoing of anybody. His tribe was responsible for him. Corporations cannot die. The primitive man be- longed to an undying corporation, and did not breathe outside it. From this same quarter came the fact that the Tribe was the unit of legislation. The result is seen in the governmental methods of early empires. The Assyrian, the Persian, even the Greek empire, taxed, but did not legislate. The tribal head, the local king, with his constitutional assistants, did the law-making for the most part. His function towards the empire was discharged when he paid the imperial levy. The Roman Empire was the first to legislate as well as tax, the first to break through the tribal organization and recognize the men within it as individual citizens. 8 Again, the ground of membership in the Tribe had nothing to do with vicinity. The tie that bound men together was not territorial, but the tie of kinship and its religion. This non-territorial basis of the first 22 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. society keeps company with the non-existence of individuals in it or for it. The true State, which does not recognize castes or undying corporations, but knows only individuals, is necessarily built on the territorial basis of citizenship. Finally, the tribal idea of God gives no permanent foothold to the prin- ciple of individuality. The Tribe and its God are of one blood and one bone ; they are made of practically the same stuff. The altar is the table where they eat together. The tribesman differs from his God only in a quantitative way. Ares and Diomed are not essentially unlike, but the former has a far heavier spear and his battle-roar is far more than the head of Diomed can hold. The ultimate of thought is a vague notion of a substance of some sort, upon whose surface the differences that go to make up individual- ities are placed, while difference as such has no root in the substance itself. Now this is equivalent to saying that the principle of individuality does not take hold on the ultimate thought and has no share in it. The right of individuality is bound up with the reality and the sincerity of difference. But in the tribal the- ology difference has no rights. Down beneath the surface of difference are the abiding things, and their sole law is identity. It was inevitable that there should be no concep- tion of progress. Indeed, such a conception would have been out of place, and even a deadly danger. Bagehot rightly says, " Law, rigid, definite, concise law, is the primary want of early mankind." 4 The object is to create a cake of custom, and thereby establish' that "hereditary drill," which was essential to the existence of a great fighting machine. 6 For I GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 23 that was just what the Tribe amounted to; it was the first fighting-machine invented by man. And by means of it our race won its first great victories over Nature, and over the wild beasts that once on a time were a close second to us in the race for the posses- sion of the earth. Moreover, within such a society there could be no distinction between custom and law. That distinction appears only when the State is fairly in the field. It grows out of the classification of some things as neces- sary, of others as indifferent. But the tribal drill, aiming at an obedience so absolute that the individual would annihilate himself to clear a path for the Tribe, could not with safety permit any distinction to be drawn between the essential and the non-essential. All men must be absolutely alike in their goings on. There is no law save custom. All custom is sacred. It lies in the lap of the Gods, whose sole function is to guarantee it. As a direct consequence, the Present had no rights in relation to the Past. The Past was the seat of all authority. Religion, although it could never have been exhausted in ancestor-worship, was very largely that; and even its other elements were apt to be cast in the mould of ancestor-worship. Thus religion and canonic custom conspired to strip the Present of all authority. And in the absence of any distinc- tion between law divine and law human, the idea of change could nowhere find entry. Immutability was the ideal. Only the old could be true. The new was necessarily false. J Looking down the stream of history from the Tribe, we can easily see that, if there is ever to be a social 24 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. question, the individual must be set free from the overmastering grip of the tribal society, and that the Present must be emancipated from the tyrannous pressure of the Past. These two ventures have their fortunes afloat on the same ship. The connection between them is made plain by the relation between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the for- mer the individual stood forth in naked sovereignty over thought. And the same period undertook to sweep the Past out of doors as so much dust and litter. Our own century, on the contrary, seeking to restore the individual to his place in society, finds at the same time that it has the problem of authority on its hands. When the relation between the indi- vidual and the organism is taken seriously, the rela- tion between the Present and the Past must also be taken seriously. The connection between the libera- tion of the individual and the emancipation of the Present may thus be experimentally verified. It may also be seen in philosophy. It is found in the neces- sity and sanctity of difference. If the right to differ be conceded in one place, it commands the whole line. The right of one individual to differ from another individual and to seek within himself and in no external sanctuary the authority for the right, can- not exist apart from the right of the Present to differ from the Past, without going outside itself to be authenticated. So the liberation of the individual and the emanci- pation of the Present go on together. And both are indispensable, if history is to reach a social question. Otherwise the downmost man can never bulk large enough to force the highest working ideals to seek 1 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 25 intimate acquaintance with him. If the Past con- tinues to be all in all, if that which has been is alone sacred, that is, the measure of what ought to be, then a man may rise once in a while from the lowest class ; but only to leave it behind him, not to leaven it with his success. The fortune of the lowest class depends upon society's success in capitalizing the Future. The to-be must become at least as sacred as the has- been. We find one proof of this in the eighteenth century's conception of Nature. It was rather the entrenchment of an ideal than an inventory of facts. Nature was a storehouse of possibilities for the dis- inherited classes. It was the necessary ethical myth of the democratic dreamer, disguised as science. It was the high ground of vantage from which the ought-to-be assaulted the is, Another proof of a lighter sort is the widespread prevalence of humor among Americans. The reason for it is that we deal in the future more than any other people. Humor of a high sort grows only in the soil of love and sympathy, Humor of any sort is impossible outside the land of hope. Where the is measures the to-be, some form of rigid aristocracy must appear. And to such an aristocracy satire, not humor, belongs. Humor cannot prevail over wide areas of feeling unless the potential is steadily con- ceived as vastly larger than the actual. A true De- mocracy must live a great deal in the future. From that life it draws its most notable characteristics. This, then, is our conclusion. In order that a career may be opened to the man at the bottom, history must define the individual in terms of what is generic and universal. History must also so conceive the rela- 26 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. I tion of the Present to the Past that change shall become as sacred as the inherited constitution of society. It must come to pass that a given society, if it is to retain the right to exist, must be continually extending the experience of its best things to men who were at one time outside the pale of the best. But this second step, in reality, depends upon the first. The principle of individuality, once established, draws after it the principle of progress. And so everything hinges on the definition of the individual. II POLYBIUS says that in the ages before the Roman Empire the deeds of the oecumenical world by which he means the world that deserved the philosopher's attention were sporadic and isolated ; but that under the Empire history acquired a single body. 6 The early apologetes for Christianity used some- thing like the same thought as an argument, when they laid emphasis upon the fact that the one Christ, bearing final news concerning the one God, was con- temporary with the founding of the one Empire. 7 In the same vein, Christian preachers have taken the three languages in which the words on the cross were written as typical of the threefoldness of the prepara- tion for Christ's work. Greek, Roman, and Jew built the highway over which Christianity marched to con- quest. The truth of this is a commonplace. Real classification, however, reduces the three to two the Greek and Roman on the one side, and Israel on the other. The twofoldness of our modern cult- ure has become more and more apparent since the Renaissance. Greek and Roman have drawn apart from the Semite, and stand together against him. But my aim in this and the two following chapters is 27 28 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. to show that, as regards the social question, the Greek and the Roman would have been helpless to level the road for it, unless the Semite had come to their aid, organizing and insuring their gains by means of his idea of God. I am not arguing for Christianity, but stating a fact which lies plain and broad upon the page of history. Without the religion that issued from Palestine, our great problem could not have been conceived nor the question asked. Whether without it we can hope for anything like an answer, is a point that does not here concern me. Both at Athens and at Rome the great step was taken from sacred law, or custom canonized and made immutable by the guarantee of the Gods, to rational law, a kind of law made by men and adapt- ing itself to the changing necessities of men. This was, in principle, the deliverance of the Present from the tyranny of the Past, and consequently, the estab- lishment of the principle of progress. A man-made law, in distinction from a God-made law as primitive man conceived it, could find no reason for being, save in the answer it gave to practical human needs. It could not take asylum in mystery or infallible authority. It must approve itself to sense and use, or surrender its place to a different law. Hence this movement away from sacred law was the potential liberation of the common man from the oppressive weight of existing institutions. Sacred law was the inherited property of the sacred tribes, and therefore they jealously guarded it from publication. It had the narrowness of the primitive tribal religion, into which no man, who was not of the tribal blood, might enter without profanation. But man-made law was ii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 29 common law. The conception of it went along with the dawning ideal of the free State. And the history of its growth is identical with the history of that State. The long controversy over the kind of law that is de Jure divino and the kind that is de Jure humano was, on its political side, a debate between the interests of one age and of one class of men, interests which had fortified themselves on the high ground of a sacred past, and so restrained the idea of rights within their own camp, and the interests of a later age and of a different class of men, who had no authority except the depth and permanence of their desires and the consequent necessity, under which the State found it- self, of taking them seriously. The law of the tribal society could not consciously recognize any interests save vested interests. By grace of necessity and the logic of deepening experience, interests outside the pale of vested interests might be allowed to contract a left-handed marriage with them. But no conscious recognition of them, as being in any final sense real and primary, was possible. Man-made law, on the contrary, was under heavy bonds to its own nature to do just this. It ultimately involved the rightfulness and even the sanctity of change, seeing that the or- ganic law was constitutional only in so far as it satis- fied changing human wants, and therefore had to keep broadening its area and deepening its reach. The publication of the Ten Tables which proclaimed law at Rome to be common property, and Lincoln's Gettysburg address with its immortal words " gov- ernment of the people, by the people, and for the people," - are chapters in a single book. The thought of a man-made law, as distinct from sacred 30 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. custom, carried under its heart the belief in the con- stitutionality of the permanent desires of the lowest classes. While, however, this great step was taken both at Athens and at Rome, it was not given to the former to go on to the full consequences of it. No great system of law was developed at Athens ; the profits of the movement from the Tribe towards the free State were not capitalized, so that they might become the world's property. What Athens, representing Greece, contributed to the campaign against caste, was not law but culture. The Greek and the Roman both sought the universal. But the former expressed it in terms of the interpreting reason rather than the forthputting will. He did not seek a constitution of rights that should give peace to an empire, but a cosmos of thought that should deliver the mind from the torture of a chaotic and self-contradictory experi- ence. Yet the universal which was the desire of Hellas strove to keep close to the earth and to take full cognizance of the individual things that make up the visible world. The Greek's view of the universe was the first philosophy. The aim of philosophy is a whole that shall fulfil the parts and not absorb them. This distinguishes it from mysticism; for thoroughgoing mysticism is in too great a hurry to reach its unity. The one pushes the many out of the mind. But philosophy is philosophy by virtue of its resolutely facing the question How shall we find and keep the one in the many without losing either ? Hence the universal it seeks must make itself at home in time and space and keep house with the individual. Ji GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 31 The true individual and the true universal travel together in history. This is shown by the relation between Socrates and his forerunners the Sophists, who stirred up war between the individual and the universal. They said, with Gorgias, nothing exists, meaning nothing universal ; if it existed it would be unknowable ; if it existed and were unknowable, it could not be made known to others. They said with Protagoras that man, meaning the individual man, is the measure of all things. The result was intel- lectual impressionism and social atomism. Socrates did not take the field against the Sophists as Aris- tophanes did, with "the good old times" for his shield, and satire for his sword; but with the very saying which seemed so fatal, " Man is the measure of all things." The cure for the wound was hidden in the spear that made it. The knowledge of the deeper self was the way to the generic self. Man is indeed the measure of all things, but not the man of impressions, nor the man of pleasures, but man the universal, the deep and permanently human. And when Socrates had shown this, the door opened wide into Plato's noble saying, God is the measure of all things. The connection is seen again in the relation be- tween Kant and the Enlightenment. The typical eighteenth century man would fain have set up the present as maker of itself, acknowledging no other kin. He was in no way a Sophist. On the contrary his dogmas, though few, were unhesitating, and he appealed to an infallible common sense. So he did not destroy because he was hopeless, but because he was a " hardened optimist." The belief in perfecta- 32 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. bility was bred in his bones. He insured his hopes, however, either in terms of pure sensationalism or of immediate feeling. Kant was as thoroughly an eigh- teenth century man as Voltaire, in his hatred of ex- ternal authority. If the Past was to go on living, it must pay its taxes by coming within the living pres- ent and demonstrating its indispensableness as an aspect of working consciousness. But the Present which thus asserts its sovereignty is not the present of a naked sensation or an immediate feeling. Its unit is an individual indeed, but a universal individual who will take nothing for his law that may not be law for all men. Thus the universal man is the measure of all things. Finally, the connection is seen even more clearly in the contrast of a man who is a mere leader of fashion with a prophet like Jeremiah. The former's standard of catholicity canonizes trifles and takes the barren places within its own little paddock for the footprints of Adam. There is nothing univer- sal here, no money current with the merchants of light, all are petty traders. No more is there any- thing individual to be found here. Fad and fate are lumped under the name of fashion. The true indi- vidual and the true universal die together. Jeremiah, on the contrary, was supremely individual. He felt himself to be set apart even from the womb. He takes the field almost single-handed against the whole visible Israel. And so he reaches the ideal Israel. He is catholic because he is greatly individual. It is plain then that the hope of a genuine universalism lies in the deepening and clarifying of self -conscious- ness. In guarantees for the principle of individuality II GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 33 is the heart of history wrapped up. In that quarter alone can money be struck that shall have currency wider than all classes and cliques. Greece wa^s the home of individuality. Nature had taken great pains to have it so. The land is wonder- fully broken up and parcelled out. There is no great river like the Nile, no plains like those of Mesopo- tamia, which caused civilization to flow in a broad but shallow channel. It is a land of explicit bound- aries and definite horizons. Too small and irregular in itself to suggest a continental mass, its character is intensified by the sea which surrounds it and well- nigh pervades it. In Nature's plainest handwriting it was willed that this should be a land where muni- cipal life should be intense and the principle of home rule find free play. If we are careful to remember that each of the little States which grew up here in such astonishing numbers was quite as truly a Church as a State, so that all the feelings which flow out of our hearts into so many channels, here ran in one very narrow and deep channel, we may imagine how strong was the grip of local piety and patriotism. At the same time and for the same reason there was no priesthood in the sense of Egypt, Chaldea, and India. Where the centre of the State was al- most within bowshot of the circumference, the priestly element could not widely differentiate itself from the lay. Here was given the possibility of a philosophy which is philosophy indeed, having no final authori- tative texts, no professional guardians of dogma ; but which, looking up at the sky and in upon the mind, thinks itself out, obedient to no laws save, those which are implicit in the desire to think and think straight. 34 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. We therefore find in Greece what we may call a lay- man's view of the universe. How significant this is, a glance at the history of modern times will show. Since the thirteenth century the laymen have gone on rising in value. They have brought with them the State and all that belongs to it, and are forcing theol- ogy to recast its categories so as to emphasize the divine immanence. The lay of the land in like manner made a great monarchy impossible. A developed monarchy de- mands a broad base. It must have large revenues and great armies : and the monarch must be far from the eyes of the great majority of his subjects. But in the Greek State every citizen might interview the king at almost any time of day. Familiarity put mystery out of the question. At the same time there could be no great army. The revenues did not permit it. The constitution of the primitive tribe, happily growing within the narrow frontiers of the City-state, vetoed it. The Greek soldier at his best, before the days of Alexander, was a foot-soldier. And the history of infantry on the whole has been the history of Democracy. As the result of this deliverance from the princi- ples of the primitive hierarchies and the early em- pires, Greece was the land where the magic word " Freedom " began its career. Mitford's defence of Sparta, Grote's enthusiasm for Athens, were not lit- erary gymnastics but the feeding of fires kindled in Hellas. The committee that spoiled the map of New York with their names for cities went to the Classical Dictionary, not because they knew the classics, but because Greece, like Rome, stood in their minds for ii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 35 liberty. Greece was free as no country before her was free. Her freedom was twofold, political and intellectual. The two together produced the first critical climate the world had seen. Questions be- came the order of the day, not for the school only or for some inner circle of speculative priests, but for the market-place and the highway. Into this critical climate the stream of time bore down from sacred antiquity the cake of custom that had created and at the same time immobilized the earliest socie- ties. The cake dissolved. To separate the part played by the Greek genius from the part played by opportunity and environ- ment is impossible. Racial character is the latter- day substitute for the old-fashioned sovereignty of God, a convenient asylum whereto the unnamable flees, while curiosity, pursuing until footsore, returns with its ignorance christened as wisdom. But con- cerning the working mind of Greece, wherein native genius cohered with the environment, we may say positively that it combined creativeness with a deep sense of limit and measure. The two things are not wont to go together. Their happy marriage in Hellas gave birth to an extraordinary ability to reach the uni- versal without abandoning the individual. And it was along this line that the great gains of the social ques- tion were to be made. A universal that flies off from the concrete individual, taking wing into mysticism, shall surely lack driving power in politics. An in- dividuality that withdraws from the universal into atomism shall as surely lack all power of appeal to the imagination. To see a clear and specific in- dividual having a definite address in time and space, 36 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. yet to see him in the light of the universal and as being capable of providing carriage for the weighti- est ideals, this and nothing less is what social reform demands. The Greek mind did the noblest pioneer work in this quarter by reason of the union it brought about between spontaneity and the sense for measure. This is seen in aesthetics. Beauty is that which completely conciliates the end and the means. In ^ a mere machine all is means and the end lies outside Vv JA it. A machine sometimes ceases to be a machine. k tC A locomotive flying through the night, its white Of plume shot through with gold from its own furnace ^y fires, is something moreithan a machine. But as a i- ^V^nachine it has its end outside itself, in getting peo- J? / pie to their homes. A truly beautiful object, what- xJjY ever its kind, enables the end to dwell within the means. Thus a beautiful face has its end within itself. Disinterested admiration has no desire to go beyond it to find its use. A noble deed, shin- ing by its own inner light, reconciles the mixed material of history and the divine purpose at work upon the material. Sidney's surrender of the cup of cold water on the battlefield enables us to for- get for a while the hideousness of war, and find peace in the loveliness of the deed, as if history had already reached the divine far-off event towards which she so slowly labors, and as if the pain of waiting for the perfect were ended. Beauty, in a word, is at the same time the victory of the true universal over the vague, and of the real individual over the atom. The Madonna is as individual as the woman in the street-car, yet she belongs everywhere. II GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 37 The Greek legends give us a striking example. Compare their hero tales with those of India, and straightway a great difference starts up. Widely apart as the Hindoo is from the Roman, at this point they meet. The hero of Rome, ^Eneas, is dressed in a cloud of divine influence that hides his individuality. The Hindoo hero also is clad in a cloud, not indeed of abstraction but of myth, so that at any crisis the path of the story may end in the sea. The Greek heroes, on the contrary, are as clear as a photograph and as generic as a noble portrait. Through Hawthorne and Kingsley they become as real to our boys as Robinson Crusoe. They have the buoyancy of the northwest wind in summer, with the perfect ' definition of landscape and cloudland which that kingliest of winds creates. The characteristic myths of Greece have the same nature. The foam-born Aphrodite is clear, just as the white line drawn by the sea around a sand-bar is clear, and has also its subtleness. Athene, born full-armed, is the leap of the day out of the deep of the sky, like the leap of the sun from the ocean. The Gods are thoroughly personified. There is no Fate in them. A Fate does indeed stand behind them, the indigested and unassimilated forces of dark nature. But they themselves are almost com- pletely individualized. They are not nature-forces wearing the mask of individuality like the Gods of Egypt. They do not make off into the mist like the Gods of India. As the result, the Greek epic, where the Gods and the men of Greece live and move in each other's company, is the perfection of narrative. Just as in Plato the myth and the syllo- 38 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. gism have kissed each other, so in the Iliad and Odyssey have myths and the story of adventure met together. The path does not end in the sea. The deeds and the doers of them are as definite as a good report in a newspaper concerning yesterday's fire, while they have the mystical charm of a noble J landscape in which sense and spirit blend. The Greek temple and statue betoken all this. In both of them form triumphs over matter, without losing the solidity of matter. The Egyptian temple impresses us by its grandeur, but it is the grandeur of splendid masses which sometimes oppress us by their weight. They do not have a truly spiritual character. The Semitic temple is not an organism but an aggregation of parts. It can grow indefinitely without losing itself, because it has no clear individu- ality to lose. But the Greek temple is all form and yet all matter. The stuff is taken up into the idea ithout becoming ghost-like. So, too, in the case of the statue. The divine and the human, as it was given to the Hellenes to see them, are wedded. The divine becomes visible. The visible is celestialized. The result is a thing called classic, and the classic, in Professor Norton's happy definition, is contempo- rary with all time. The reason is that it is both indi- vidual and universal. In theology the Greeks achieved a clear distinction between the human and the divine. Our own genera- tion is making a great stir over the harmfulness of the distinction between things sacred and things secular. The stir is justified by our needs. Yet it becomes us not to altogether forget our history while we are preaching our sermons. That distinction was, ii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 39 in its day, a notable achievement. It was a part of the redemption-money by which man purchased his free- dom from the tyranny of the past. Primitive law does not know the distinction. It identifies the sacred and secular. Each meal is a sacrifice. Every tri- fling custom is an article of the constitution. Police law and ethics are confounded. This confusion was necessary before the dawn of history, and even long after, inasmuch as man's primary need was discipline with an iron hand. But as the sun of history mounted higher, the confusion became untimely. The clear distinction of the human and the divine delivered the human individual both from the tyranny of the tribe, which was the first infallible church, and from the spiritual quicksand of Oriental confusion between deity and humanity. It may be thought that I have dwelt at undue and wasteful length on this subject of Greek genius and environment in relation to the principle of individu- ality. Unless however I wholly misread the signs of the times, one of the sore perils besetting us is a too direct approach to the social question. It is a reformation that we need, not a revolution. And to that end we need to convince ourselves that the stake of socialism is individuality. If we do not clear our minds on this point, we shall find ourselves hiring the Devil to fight the Lord's battles. And to clear our minds, nothing can be so good as the history of the principle of individuality. The higher forces of our age are split up and scattered. The men of culture and art, for the most part, either turn away from social reform or go into it with anxious ques- tionings and a looking over the shoulder. To see 4O GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. that the fortunes of art and of democratic society and of social reform are afloat on a single bottom should go far towards unifying our scattered forces. To know that the hope of a nobler culture for the world is bound up with the draining of the slums, with success in teaching grass to grow where now corruption reigns, is to close ranks for battle. And this knowledge comes through the study of the prin- ciple of individuality in its history. We are not then wandering in the fields, but digging at the roots of the social question, when we try to show that Greece made her contribution to the campaign against caste by discovering that the classic, the universal ele- ments of the world's experience, can be got at only by going deeper into the individual man. The deep- ened sense of individuality draws after it a deeper sense of the universal. In terms of the reason the necessity of this is plain. So long as a man remains part and parcel of a great cake of habit he is not dis- turbed by questions and consequently has no need of philosophy. Inconsistencies and contradictions do not trouble his slumber, although they may be swarm- ing about his pillow. The fine and easy rule it has always been done this way and in no other insures his rest. When the cake of habit breaks up, when the Tribe ceases to be the unit, and a man by himself begins to count for one, mental difficulty and its attendant wonder arise. Thus is philosophy born. A cosmos of experience is necessary. Problems thrust them- selves on the mind. And an insoluble problem means either suicide or the monastery. The difficulty must either open into a deeper intellectual universal- II GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 41 ism or be denied by mysticism. Thus the deepened sense of individuality results in logic. Things taken all together seem to deny their connection with con- sciousness. The broken bridge is rebuilt by a system of definitions. The saddle-maker and Alcibiades are brought within the definition, man. Thus again science, in the Greek and modern meaning of it, results. Things taken all together seem to deny con- nection with each other. Such a denial of connection is chaos. The mind overcomes it by a deepened sense of law, a larger view of the whole. And thus, finally, history arises. Until the individual acquires wings of ecstasy, so long as he has hands and feet, he must find a meaning in the past. He must either have a philosophy of history or deny history. So, writing up the wars of small states, he creates a possession for all time. We find then that individualism and universalism in Greece are two forms of one force. The clarifica- tion of self-consciousness undoes the tribal aristocracy, and thus helps to define the elemental man and create a new unit for sociology. The bent of clear thought is by nature against the grain of an aristocracy built up on birth or money or prowess. For, in the first place, in order to find its saving unities it must find the things that have the widest range in distinction from the things that have a narrow range, the eternal as distinct from the transient. And in the second place, clear thought works away from the outer world, the world of the eye, towards the inner world, the world of the unseen. Things that were of supreme import to the primitive aristocracy become matters of indifference. The sacred genealogy takes \ 42 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. its place as one phenomenon amongst a vast mass of phenomena. To constitute an aristocracy there must be something classed by itself. To be thrown into a heap is fatal to it. And this is what philosophy does with aristocracy. Only the universally valid can become a law of thought. And the only true aristo- crat is the thinker. With the logic of the inner life the history of the outer life kept step. The political unit of Greece had been the City. Aristotle could not conceive the ideal Free State as containing more than a hundred thou- sand people. Many a Greek could walk around his fatherland in half a day without starting a hair, and some could do it before breakfast. But in the empire of Alexander the City lost heart and meaning. It became like a broken vase, so that the good Greek could no longer pour his best life into it. The old unities were shattered. The individual was turned loose. How shall he make a new home for himself ? The parallel with our own day is suggestive. Our inherited theological and confessional systems have been seriously shaken. The conscience stands alone and almost unprotected. Church and Bible no longer stand as bulwarks between it and the overwhelming mystery of being. The physical universe looms up larger and more terrifying. Where find or build a new home ? The external steadily fell in value. Zeno urged people not to build gymnasiums in their cities, because the care of the inner life ought to be the supreme concern. This bodes ill to the Olympic games. There's a steady movement towards the time when Marcus Aurelius says, " Some men hunt hares and ii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 43 some hunt Quadi." He made this entry in his diary when he was in the thick of a campaign against Rome's enemies. Try to fancy Fabius saying, " Some men fight fleas and some fight Carthaginians." Renan truly says concerning Marcus' warfare : A thing that is done because there might be something worse is never well done. Plainly the body and all that it inherits is going below the horizon of spiritual vision. The soul is outstanding. The heart of antiq- uity forsakes politics. The higher life and mind ebb away from those things for which Leonidas counted it great gain to die. Clear thinking, helped on by this fall in the value of the external, issued in the distinction between the Natural and the Positive. The Sophists first drew it. The Stoics made it a permanent principle. " Nature " denoted for them the larger world of reality, which refused to come within any given insti- tution or set of institutions. Indeed, it affirmed that a fortune of some sort lay outside all existing insti- tutes, and that the outstanding soul must go forth to find it. The vast significance of the distinction will dawn on us, if we run our eyes down to the eighteenth century, where it outcrops across the whole field. The " Positive " includes all existing institutions and laws. " Nature " means that possibility of indefinitely better institutions and laws which lies in wait for the legislator. When Jefferson said that the tree of liberty needed to be periodically watered with blood, he was working this vein with dynamite. The " Bill of Rights " in English and American constitutional development draws much of its strength from this distinction. Wrapped up in it is the authority to 44 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. freely criticise the whole political and social structure as it exists at any given time, while calling out loudly for a better one. Visible institutions must show and make good their title deeds before reason and use. Perhaps the latent power of the distinction will dis- close itself even more plainly if we contrast Greece with the Orient in general on the one hand, and with India in particular on the other. Stanley said that the East is an unburied Pompeii ; because custom still reigns there, and life is shaped by canonic traditions. Whatever is good is level to the past, and higher level there cannot be. Is it not plain then that in the Greek doctrine concerning the Positive in relation to the Natural there is a great contribution to the eman- cipation of the laborer, in that it makes social change a part of the law of righteousness ? The contrast with India finishes the demonstration. In that land the tribal ideal, thanks to the environment, hardened into the caste system. The existing frame of society was eternized. Buddhism came on the field, and under its attack the Positive disappeared. But it dragged with it into the gulf of forgetfulness all political institutions, inasmuch as its doctrine of illusion made history itself a non-ethical process. Thus Buddhism, while abolishing caste, had no lasting efficacy as a political force. It healed souls, but it took them away from the visible order. It could not create or assist in creating a Free State. In politics it had little re- forming power. The Greek conception of the Posi- tive in relation to the Natural did possess this power to a high degree. While it laid the foundation of right deeper than all existing institutions, it did not destroy those institutions in principle, but compelled II GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 45 them to keep open house to improvements. It did not undo history, but put the spur to it. The Natural is within the Positive, being the promise and potence of an enlarged and deepened Positive. Thus the dis- tinction is a door through which the potential enters in to criticise and reform the actual. Philosophy, aided by the times, made another sig- nificant gain, the clear distinction between the mate- rial and the spiritual. This means that a new world is coming above the horizon, whither the imagination could escape from a visible world wherein interest scornfully forced right to the wall. When Socrates, towards the close of the Republic, is asked where the constitution of his ideal community is to be found, he says," Perhaps in heaven." We have seen how the individual was being driven out of society into him- self. This " heaven" is the home of the larger self. It is a brave land and a broad where the disinherited man can gather about himself a brave estate. Exter- nal difficulties cease from troubling, and the men who are wearied with trying to make the crocked paths straight may rest their imaginations. Let it not for a moment be thought that the world of imagination is no more solid than the world of ghosts. Plato's Republic is not such stuff as dreams are made of, but has the pith of constitutions, and contains the promise of social change. Once more, the comparison with the monastic mysticism of India will instruct us. The Buddhist doctrine of the inner life has great depths and sweetness and a most subtle charm. Nothing in Greek experience can hope to match it. If we were studying the history of quietism and seek- ing perfect rest for the single soul, we should net 46 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. stay long in Hellas. It is the idea of society, how- ever, that we are studying, and the consummation we devoutly desire is an organization of life in time and space, in other words, a State that shall say with Aristotle: Noble living in time and space, noble life in terms of existence within the visible world, is the end of law. Thorough-going monastic mysticism breeds men of noble patience and untiring gentle- ness. But the true reformer's conscience cannot be trained by it. To the making of that goes, along with other things, a sturdy sense of the reality and worth of the historical. And herein the Greek doc- trine of the spiritual shows its superiority to the Hin- doo doctrine. Spirituality does not logically undo its hold upon the visible. It has in it the promise of a kind of spirituality which may, on occasion, throw the tea overboard in order to save the soul. The saint does not altogether disown the citizen. Again, Greece created theoretical politics. Now what philosophy is to self-consciousness, political theory is to the. State. It must be reasoned out and go deep into the nature of things in order to find the common root of different conceptions. It is there- fore under heavy bonds not to identify the accidents of the State with its essence. Moreover, it is obliged to concede a standing-ground for the questioner inside the social order, and to make criticism in some sense constitutional ; for otherwise it is not theory, but mere political habit backed by force. The attempt of the Greeks to give a philosophical explanation of the State is conclusive proof that we have left behind us the tribal stage of humanity, wherein the State was also a Church, the Church's one test of the becom- ii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 47 ing and the practicable being the practice of gray an- tiquity. We have reached the stage where authority must build upon use, and law derive its sanctity from the common good. The true State cannot get along with the caste principle. And the appearance of political philosophy is a plain indication that the tap- root of the caste principle has been cut by reason. Finally the Stoic cosmopolitanism was won. The Stoics very happily illustrated the bearings of Greek experience upon sociology, for they kept them- selves more or less in society and politics, although they were often homesick and heartsick. Hence they make clear the influence of Greek philosophy upon social law. Their cosmopolitanism removes the distinctions between nation and nation, between class and class. Such distinctions are no better than sur- face debris. Below them all is man as man. And this universal humanity is the sole test of real values. Thus, under the very feet of existing institutions is found a definition of man that summons traditional classifications and standards of value before an au- thoritative auditing committee. Humanity, written large and taken largely, is now the trustee of all things that are really worth while. All these gains were partially organized under three heads : first, philosophic monotheism ; second, Aristotle's theory of development ; third, science. As to the first, the doctrine of the unity of God draws after it the unity of society. Its possible bear- ing upon the social interests of the downmost man is parallel to the bearing of the dogmatic belief in the unity of Nature upon the intellectual fortunes of the smallest things. The unity of Nature authenticates 48 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. to reason the innate right of the dust to be weighed and interpreted. In like manner the unity of God must eventually authenticate to reason and con- science the innate right of the lowest man to be reverenced and counted. As to the second head, Aris- totle's theory of development grew out of the standing problem in Greece, how get together the eternal, that which truly is, with the temporal, that which changes, without destroying either ? The theory did not have any career before it in antiquity. But that does not belittle its momentous significance. The idea of development is an absolute necessity for any one who refuses to identify himself with the past, while keeping up his connection with it. Without that idea there can be in the end but two classes of men : those who are contemporaneous, but never look back ; and those who are always looking back, but are never contemporaneous. Aristotle's theory is the first explicit foundation, on the philosophic side, of the problem of history which is the moralization of the common man. For it affirms progress to be fun- damental in Nature, and "the idea of progress, of development," says Guizot, " is the fundamental idea contained in the word civilization" 8 . As to the scientific view of the universe, it was no accident that the science upon which our view of the universe rests, came to light along with the Democracy of Greece. The free and fearless look at the cosmos that is the spirit of science, and the free and fearless look of man at all his fellow-men that is the spirit of Democracy, cannot permanently exist apart. And science, in the long run, makes steadily for the pos- sibilities of a true Republic. Every stroke of work it n GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 49 does proclaims the spirituality of the visible world, seeing that to be spiritual means to be pregnant with meaning, and to be full of primary and abiding inter- est. Consequently, science compels the highest good to put itself on intimate terms with man's life in its terrestrial forms. But in the very midst of these great portents and prophecies of the new world the birth-mark of the old world is everywhere apparent. Slavery colored all. In Aristotle's theory of life, leisure, the mother of culture, must be supported by slaves. Handwork was in disrepute. Plato, in the Laws, forbade the free- man doing it. Lucian, in his essay called " The Dream," confides to us his motives for his choice of a profession. He felt a desire in early days to be a sculptor, but was turned from it by the fact that it was handwork. Better be a second-rate litterateur than a Pheidias. A new and far-nobler aristocracy, an aristocracy of mind, had driven out the old. It was, however, a downright aristocracy, and took up a strongly sceptical attitude towards the spiritual capacity of the masses. Plato says in the Timaeus, " To find out the maker and Father of this universe is difficult, and when found, it is impossible to make him known to all." To hold and fortify this position would bring one necessarily to the idea of a teaching caste. Plato's monotheism here breaks its point just as Aristotle's does on slavery. We have an aristocracy of intellect that shows its color very plainly in the second century in the debate between the Catholic Church and Gnos- ticism. The Gnostics would have turned the Church into a spiritual club. They stratified humanity. There 50 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. are souls to whom the deepest truth belongs by right, so that the universe cannot part them from it. But the mass of men have no claim to the highest. And Basilides, one of the noblest of the Gnostics, said that at the end of the world God would bring enor- mous ignorance upon the mass of souls, lest the desires that could not be fulfilled should persist in them, thus making hell eternal. 9 However deeply colored this dogma may be by Oriental feeling, it is by no means wholly out of drawing with something in Plato himself. He is very far indeed from a re- ligion of redemption with its attitude of aggressive hopefulness towards the commonest man. The Father of the universe cannot be made known to all. The one and only best thing is beyond the reach of the masses. The root of aristocracy is deep as God. The Stoics also reveal this fatal flaw in the Greek view of the world. In them the liberated individual of antiquity, the outstanding soul, reached a defini- tion of man that contained nothing but his universal essence. They embodied the kindliest spirit of their time and place. Gentleness and pity came more and more to be central in their ethics. Slavery was declared to be contrary to Nature. Pliny calls his slaves "my friends." The emphasis wholly ceased to fall on social distinctions. If Epictetus could have met Burns, he would have joined heartily in his " A man's a man for a' that." The physical, that is to say, that which is external to the conscience and alien to the working will, lost its power to withstand the will. Stoicism exalted ethics to the supreme posi- tion. A man's character is his fate. Yet they had not the power to drive their defini- ii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 51 tion home. Their eschatology wets the bowstring. Eschatology means simply the opinions men have about the upshot of nature and history. The " Last Things " are the things that come out of the fiery criticism called the Judgment Day, in the shape of pure gold, while all other things are dross. Escha- tology, then, is the imaginative preservation of the abiding values. It is the doctrine concerning the spir- itual substance underlying phenomena. The Last Things are the real things as the reformer views reality. Now the Stoic eschatology pictured the ex- isting order as coming to an end in a cosmic bonfire, in order that a new cycle of being, essentially like the old, might follow it. But this is to put at the end of the world a no-man's land, where the writs issued by the working conscience do not run. To what purpose the splendid emphasis on morality and the moralizing of the universal man, if at the last ethic is to lapse into physic ? Stoic eschatology, if taken seriously, puts out the fire of enthusiasm on the hearth of the universe. And even if it is not taken seriously, but is regarded as a freak of fancy rather than a sincere work of imagination, at least, it gives the conscience no aid in its desperate battle against the massive and inert, if not actively obstructive, forces of society. "The universe is anonymous," say Win- wood Read; "it is published under the secondary laws." 10 He speaks as an optimist. He views the world in terms of a development which is resistless, because backed by all the resources of Nature, and therefore his agnosticism does not undo his hopeful- ness. It was not so with the Stoics. Their escha- tology practically published the universe under the 52 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. secondary laws, but without that modern enthusiasm for the universe which may temporarily strengthen and equip the conscience. The Stoic doctrine either meant nothing or it meant a half-confessed pessimism. It was impossible for the reformer, upon such a footing, to remain whole-hearted. The righteousness of the reformer means nothing but whole-heartedness in the presence of great odds. That lost, the road to dualism and the monastery is inevitable. Ages that are characterized by social unrest are necessarily ages which have a great burden of pain to carry. What is going on to-day proves it. Civilization has brought increased capacity for pain. The free State educates its members to take note of their neighbor's wrongs. In the comparative absence of war the nerves of the average man become sensitive to his own and his fellow's hurts. Improved methods of communication bring near what was once far away. The newspaper gathers for us all the world's evil re- ports. Thus the material for pain and the capacity for pain grow together. And the conscience that refuses narcotics of any kind, be they the narcotics of the clubman, the culturist, or the monk, can only stand up to its work by grace of a conception that puts the best and deepest things of the universe into society, and keeps them there. But the Stoic escha- tology made the best more or less of an absentee. A weak and faltering doctrine of Last Things im- plies a weakness of the will. For eschatology is just the translation of principle into cosmic conclusions. The will and the imagination are inseparable, being the inner and the outer aspects of the same function. Imagination is the aesthetic of the will, being the ii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 53 process by which the ethical purpose asserts its sovereignty over the materials of the visible world. Through imagination the will gives itself a trium- phant spiritual body, and thus claims history for its own, asserting the right of eminent domain in the uni- verse. It was because Aristotle saw this truth so plainly that he declared the drama to be more ethical than history, since history was largely matter without form. It is here that the poetic faculty has its spring. For great poetry is only one form or another of the belief in the equivalence of matter and form, of the ideal and the actual. And poetry ceases to be great and becomes, as is largely the case with the poetry of to-day, a series of swallow-flights, when the dog- matic belief in the ultimate equivalence of the ideal and the actual is lost. Hegel's Philosophy of His- tory affords us a good illustration. Its charm is due to the equation it institutes between the real and the rational. The equation is carried through at the cost of much arbitrariness in the treatment of details. It is in many ways a feat of the imagination. It has all the charm and some of the defects of a fairy tale, yet the aggressive reason, braced by it, goes forth to make its fortune. Thus the Stoic doctrine of Last Things meant that the reforming will was weak. Man's character is not his fate after all. The reformer is sure to exchange his heroism for pathos. And when pathos once creeps in, the reformer begins to put himself out of the combat. The definition of the universal man which Stoicism achieved, it could not, by its own strength, drive home. The subject of Stoicism opens straight into the inner 54 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. life of the Roman Empire, for neither could Stoicism without the Empire have become the great force it was; nor could the Empire without Stoicism have understood itself in terms of law. Rome was the residuary legatee of antiquity, and through her it did its creative work upon modernity. She won this imperial place in history by conquering the Mediter- ranean world and welding all its lands into a single State. She gave to the ancient world the first long deep breath of peace it ever drew, and the last. As an Empire, she finished the crushing process which the hammer of Assyria had begun. The petty nations lost their frontiers. The numerous tribes were thrown together as upon a heap. The levelling power of such a process and its ultimate effect upon religion and ethics cannot be overestimated. Provin- cial boundaries disappear. The principle of vicinity on a vast scale is substituted for tribal kinships. Wholesale syncretism follows. The Empire not only afforded a vast field over which civilization with its constructive forces could operate, but it brought over- whelming reinforcements to those critical energies of Greece which were busily sapping the foundations of the ancient aristocracies. When Caesar invaded Gaul, he found aristocracy rampant. Servitude was widespread and of the harshest kind. At the same time there was no true political action, no unity between the tribes, no State, no principles of justice save those which superior power chose to recognize. But Rome levelled those tribal monopolies of law and order to the ground. When a true State came in, there entered a possibility of real law, and therewith the extension of the area of rights. ii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 55 So far as racial genius is concerned, there is no contrast more amazing than the one between those kindred people, the Greeks and the Romans. The Romans had no mythology of their own worth speaking of, no cosmogonic nor theogonic myths. Their reli- gion was almost wholly cultus. Sacred formulae, having the combined efficiency of an immutable liturgy and the secrets of magic, continued to the last to be the official religion. They had no songs at prayer, as the Greeks had. The prayer must be recited from memory, word for word, letter for letter. They had no epic of their own. Their Gods were personified abstractions rather than persons, such as silver the son of copper ; so that they could not marry as the Greek Gods did, being destitute of all flesh- colored individuality. For a long period, says Varro, they had no images. 11 But all these defects seem to have been the defects of a great virtue. No people ever gave such logical expression to the principle of measure. Land was laid out by the square, and no notice was taken of the running streams that sought to break up the rigidity of the square. The legion was a most perfect union of fighting power in the individual with precision in the clamping of individ- uals together. The camp was as clear and regular and unvarying as a proposition in the lower mathe- matics. The one God that was original with Rome was Janus, the God of the beginning and the end. This principle of measure with its horror of the un- assimilated and unregulated showed itself on a higher level as a sense for law. The State at Rome was all in all. Law was logically before and superior to religion. Theology, such as it was, was not a speculation, but a 56 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. branch of law. The Gods had no address save Rome. In all primitive societies the priest was the centre of the idealizing forces that enabled men to eternize themselves. In Greece his place was taken by the poet and the philosopher ; in Israel by the prophet. But in Rome he was mainly supplanted by the great lawyers who proudly called themselves " sacerdotes juris." By reason of commerce and war there grew up at Rome a constantly increasing number of "broken men," men wholly outside the sacred Tribes, having no grandfather in terms of the sacred genealogies and therefore having no God in terms of the patrician the- ology. Between these men, the disinherited classes or the masses on the one side, and the privileged and prerogatived men or the patricians on the other, there was waged a party conflict that frequently threatened to break into open war. The result of the conflict was a true State that slowly acquired sovereignty over the sacred Tribes, and broke down one after another the privileges within which the aristocracy lay in- trenched. The spirit of this State gave itself to the making of a new kind of law. The old kind was called fas, sacred privilege more or less monopolized by the few. The new kind was jus, the possession of all. The constitutional history of Rome has its main interest in the unfolding of the properties of that new kind of law. The logic of this new law in- its bearing on our subject was not fully expressed until the Empire suc- ceeded the City. The political forms of the old world were now badly shaken, if they were not altogether shattered. Great numbers of men who were politi- II GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 57 cally disinherited drifted to Rome. The law had to assimilate them under peril of fatal congestion in the body politic. Then again, the vast size of the State little by little dwarfed the aristocrat until he looked relatively far smaller in the eye of the law. An aristocracy in the narrow sense of antiquity needs a State with snug boundaries in order to maintain itself. Where the imagination sweeps across a con- tinent as it does in America, privilege and preroga- tive must needs look smaller. The genius of Rome embodied in the Empire must, for its life, widen its political sympathies. Cicero, although he spoke be- fore the days of the Empire, expresses its logic when he said, " I maintain it as a universal principle that there is no nation anywhere so hostile or disaffected to the Roman people, none so united by ties of faith or friendship, that we are debarred from admitting them to the right of citizens." M " The extension of the franchise was the key-stone of the Roman system." 13 The reasoned cosmopolitanism of Greek philosophy now gets the support without which the mightiest conception is unable to make its fortune, the support of circumstance. The universalism of the greatest State of antiquity, yea, of all history, if we judge it by sweep and continuity of life and variety of terri- tory, reinforced cosmopolitanism. The time and place cohered with the idea. Not man as Greek or African or Syrian, but man as man had to be the subject and inspiration of the idealizing thought of the Empire. Thus Stoicism and the Empire join hands. The deepening sense of humanity penetrates the law. The result is the dogma of equality. As far as natural law is concerned, all men are equal. 14 58 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Slavery is against Nature, for freedom is the birth- right of man. 15 Isolated Greek thinkers had said this many a time before. But when the law of the world affirmed it as a dogma, the effect was as the discharge of artillery to the firing of a few skirmishers. Along with this legal authentication of the Stoic defi- nition of the universal man, went another great achieve- ment of Roman law, the transition from status to contract. Once more we see the solidarity between universalism and individualism. The individual now gets wholly foot-loose, acquiring the will-making power in its absolute form, while, as a part of the same move- ment, the individual is universalized. The new State which built itself up on the ruins of the tribal states had to take the individual, not the Tribe, as its unit. It was also under bonds to find the common stock of all its citizens. Coin that should be current with the men who had grandfathers and with the men who had not, must be struck at the public mint. The imperial politics could thrive only by striking root down into the common humanity. The result was the splendid definition of Justice given in the Institutes: "The steady and abiding will to give to each man what belongs to him." 16 The clear idea of Justice does not appear until a true State is formed. For such a State entails the neces- sity of dealing with every man who in any way be- longs to the State, as if he were in some sense to count for one. Moreover, where the idea of Justice is clearly conceived, the idealizing forces of society must have entered into the law, even as they are doing with us to-day, after a long and well-nigh ex- clusive attention to the other world. The definition ii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 59 of the Institutes contained the promise of a vast extension of the area of rights. Yet Rome with all her greatness could not out- grow the tribal principle. I will not speak here of the horrors of the circus and the slave system. For it may be argued that they were thrust upon Rome by the result of her masterhood in the art of war. But above those levels, and within the precincts of a really human conception of humanity, we find something that reveals a fundamental fault in the whole system. It is the apotheosis of the Emperors. The process of apotheosis was something far deeper than servility in the subject conspiring with vanity in the ruler. It was a necessity of the State. There was no means of insuring the existence of the State except religion. In the worship of the Caesars the Empire reverenced its own law. There was no other way in which pagan Rome could guarantee the gains she had made for civilization. Yet the very thing that was necessary to her was in logic her undoing. For it was a reversion on a vast scale to the tribal religion. The solidarity between the deified Pontifex Maximus and the primitive Priest- King is beyond all doubt. Thus apotheosis affirmed the aristocratic prin- ciple in terms of the godhood, of that which for the thought of the time if not in fact, was deepest in being and therefore ultimate in history. The worship of the Emperor undid the definition of equality that the logic of the Empire demanded. Again apotheosis violated the divine unity and enacted polytheism in terms of organic law. But the unity of God is necessary to the unity of hu- manity; for the idea of God registers and clarifies 60 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. the desires of men. So the deification of the Em- peror undid that unity of humanity upon which alone the Empire could securely build. The powerlessness of heathen antiquity to carry out the programme of individualizing and moralizing the downmost man is brought into midday light by the Stoic idealization of suicide, which should rather perhaps be called the Roman theory, inasmuch as it became so essential a part of the Roman phase of Stoicism. The Stoic feeling was, as Leckey says, "always near the suicide level." They had a favor- ite saying, " If the room is smoky, let us leave it," the room being of course society and the State. Plainly this is to give up the fight, to declare that life as a whole is incapable of being moralized. And if the best men say this about their own lives, they having the advantage of the best religion and culture of the day, what is likely to be their creed touching the mass of men ? I hope that I shall not wade too deep into theology. But the necessity of the subject, taken largely, forces me to point out that apotheosis, being part and parcel of polytheism, is part of the small change of panthe- ism ; and that pantheism, steadily viewed, " identifies the possible with the actual." 17 It yields either no margin or a narrow margin between the is and the may-be. At this point in the history of the social idea the significance of the conception of God as per- sonal life begins to appear. The Personality of God means that the thing which the best men supremely desire, the Supreme Good, while it is immanent, in other words cannot be separated from the visible pro- cesses of life, is also transcendent, which means that n GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 6 1 it has in it infinitely more than has yet been real- ized through these processes. Sociologically speak- ing, it is the deification of the potential. Great stores of promise are thus imagined to be lying in wait, back of history, biding their time to come to the shores of light. v Grouped with apotheosis and suicide is the idea of Mr Fate. Trendelenbury affirms that it is the dogmatic iV expression and justification of social inertia and indi- vidual indolence. An illustration of the truth of this may be found in the greedy welcome given by the ri/ upper classes in England to the Malthusian doc- trine. Quite independently of the question whether the Malthusian dogma is correct, it is certain that it was quickly capitalized by those who wished to fend off attacks on the existing constitution of society. Now the premise in all appeals for Democracy, for that kind of social and governmental structure in which the man who works with his hands really counts for one, is this : theology, philosophy, science, ethics, separately or altogether, must so state the relation between society and the fundamental life, that every part of society shall be alive with the hope of the best things for every other part. Democracy must insist on its own idea concerning the moral capacity of the universe. Every social ideal levies a certain contribution upon the stores of the seen and unseen worlds. The democratic social ideal cannot be saved except by faith in its right to impose the heaviest taxes. But the belief in Fate, in any form, is the belief in something that successfully and for- ever refuses to be taxed. Fate is just that portion of ultimate being which will not come to any sort of 62 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP, n terms with men's desires, even though they be the deepest desires of the best men. History cannot remain a moral process unless the downmost man become individual. But this result cannot be reached, cannot even be looked forward to with hope, unless there is a regnant trust in the superiority of the future over the present, a dominat- ing conviction that the possible underlies and over- laps the actual. It is clear that Greece and Rome could not preserve the capital they had gathered for the emancipation of the laborer. Pagan antiquity must go outside itself, to look for another view con- cerning the substance, end, and scope of history. Ill DEMOCRACY and the social question must always go together. The work of Solon, the career of the Gracchi, above all, the phenomena of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are sufficient evidence. In the democratic question the point is the right to gov- ern or the freedom of the suffrage. In the social question it is the right to enjoy, in the highest sense of the words, or freedom of opportunity. It is plain that we are dealing with two aspects of a single movement. The difference is in the means of ex- pression, not in the principle. The debate over the suffrage and the possibility of its indefinite extension is concerned with the national life only in so far as it is organized into a State. The social question is con- cerned with the same life as a total that is too large and many-sided to be exhausted by any form of organization. It is also plain that, while the social life is larger than the State, the two must in the long run keep step with one another. The fortune of Democracy as a principle of government is made or lost by its behavior as a social principle. The suffrage means nothing when taken as a ingle act. It amounts to something only when it presses a character. The significance of the act of voting is that it betokens such a character in the 63 64 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. voter that the State and the society which seeks ex- pression through it are able to recognize themselves in him. For example, when the right to vote is given to the Indian, it will indicate, if wisely given, that he is no longer outside the body politic, whether as savage warrior or the government's ward, but forms part of the area of citizenhood. The ultimate question in the debate over the suffrage is, How far out and down may we hope to push the qualities and faculties that go to the making of a citizen ? The ground of Democracy is optimism touching the masses; and the things that are believed to be possible in the case of the average man must bulk very large if the democratic ideal is to get and keep a foothold in history. We need not be daunted by critical agnosticism, when examining a pure matter of fact. We are studying a period throughout whose whole extent it held absolutely true whether it is always true or not that need governs theory. There was no critical movement on foot ; or, if there was, it had not power enough to stand in the way and keep humanity from interpreting the unseen elements and forces of the universe in the light of its own desires. Between the dreams and plans of that period and the problems of our own time we are seeking a connection. We may say without fear of contradiction that no view of the State can gainsay man's permanent view of the world ; and that the opinions we hold regarding society must draw their sap from our opinions concerning life in its totality. It would raise a laugh to speak of a democratic metaphysic. Metaphysic is as democratic as pure mathematics, and no more. Yet our enjoyment of in GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 65 the laugh does not impair the truth of the proposi- tion that even as a man thinketh in his heart about the relation in which he stands towards the funda- mental forces of the universe, so is he bound to become. Therefore, that deep desire of humanity which expresses itself in the democratic ideal must, like all great desires, after one fashion or another, "prie" into "the interior" of things, unless, "like the martlet," it would "build in the weather on the outward wall" of the world, "even in the force and road of casualty." The State is the total human life as organized in time and space. Speaking of the State as if it were a person, we say that it must desire to find itself and recognize itself in the lowest man, if the democratic ideal is to be a working ideal and not a self-confessed illusion. Desire is that function of consciousness in which man goes forth from himself upon objects not yet attained. The object of desire for the democratic State is the common man. His ideal capacity for good is the preoccupation and thesis of Democracy. Consequently the State, in order to become and remain consistently democratic, must conceive of itself as being a missionary force that sallies forth from existing institutions to create citizenhood in men who have never been citizens. It must believe the common man to be capacious of all that is best in its own eyes ; and so, under pain of disloyalty to itself, must seek to bring him into close communion with the highest political and social ideals. For example, let Boston be thought of as truly municipal, supremely concerned with the wise man- agement of its own estates ; not an aggregation, on F 66 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. the one side, of men of business and pleasure who house in it for some part of the day and year, and, on the other, of a mass of people who are content if both ends meet ; but a true municipality, the best mind and conscience within it gladly lending them- selves to the city in order that the community may become self-conscious touching what is best to do and self-directed towards doing it. Let this real municipality be also thought of as truly democratic. The existence of " slums " must then become as great a torture to Boston, as a flaw in his accounts to a fine and honorable accountant. If the mind and conscience of the city were aristocratic, the slum question might be treated as if it went no higher than the point of view of the public health, and the motive for draining the swamp might be nothing better than a wish to protect the well-to-do from con- tagion. Inasmuch as the consistently aristocratic view of things has not bound itself, for its life, to prove that all men are native to the best things, the existence of a " slum " does not threaten to undo its conception of the universe. But a city, self- consciously democratic, has its whole creed at stake. " Bostonian " involves a character which denies itself unless it universalizes itself. The city must there- fore picture itself as going forth in desire that cannot rest, until it finds its characteristics in the lowest class within the city limits. Again, " America " stands for a high valuation of the common man. The generation before the war believed with its whole heart in manifest Destiny ; meaning that Nature and God, singly and together, would take care of the American ideal. It meant in GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 6/ also that Americans were under heavy bonds to history. This however was secondary. The pri- mary thing was that God and Nature had insured America. For our own generation the order of thought is changing. Our duty is becoming the primary thing and the guarantee of God is beginning to appear as the standing-ground of our duty. We no longer think of ourselves, even for a moment, as a people free from problems. On the contrary, problems many and difficult press us hard. If the fair plan of our forefathers is not to pass into the limbo of worn-out dreams, "America" must come to stand for an impassioned longing to realize the demo- cratic ideal. The old buoyant hope must remain, but taking more and more the form of a missionary motive, impelling us to a nobler public spirit, a greater capacity for municipal and national self- sacrifice than any people before us has known. America, thought of as a Person, must be thought of as going forth in desire to widen and deepen the range of citizenhood. The State, then, i.e. the total human life organ- ized under the conditions of time and space, can only become and remain democratic by setting a high valuation on the average man and registering its valuation in terms of the universal life, however that universal life be named. Now God is the name that, by common agreement in the past, men gave to the fundamental life conceived as one and self- consistent. And the history of the idea of God is the history of opinion concerning the one univer- sal that underlies all particulars. Therefore it is not possible to separate the question, How did the men 68 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. of the Empire think about the State? from the other question, How did they think about God ? The man of our time may conceive that he, for one, is able to get along politically without a metapolitic that takes note of God. If he succeeds even tempo- rarily, he does so by means of the evolutionary view of the universe. But in the first place it is the extreme of presumption to affirm that evolution has closed its accounts with the idea of God ; and in the second place the men of antiquity did not possess the evolutionary view. We are therefore forced to take their conception of God into metapolitic in order to determine the carrying power of their social ideal. In looking about for a thinker to represent the theology that underlay the Empire's opinions about the State, we need not make long search. The choice must fall upon either Plato or Aristotle. The Oriental religions that invaded the Mediterranean world to contend with Christianity for the mastery, gave the Empire religious impressionism, but con- tributed nothing to its thought. In Plato and Aristotle antiquity cleared its mind in relation to God, to the utmost of its power. And between Plato and Aristotle we need not be delayed. While Plato will always have the subtler charm and deeper pro- phetic power over souls, Aristotle is the more repre- sentative of his race. In him the main lines of approach to the central problems more truly meet. And just because he is less religious and prophetic than Plato, he covers the ground of universal Greek expression better than he. While discussing the nature of the State and in order to emphasize the thought that the men of his ra GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 69 day could not live the higher life without it, Aristotle says that man outside the State is either brute or God. 18 If this stood by itself, it would be unfair dealing to take it as an expression of his view con- cerning the relation between God and society. But in the light of his main conclusions, we do him no violence by so taking it. Of the social character of God he has no conception. God is the infinite monad, the absolute. While He is the moveless cause of motion, He is not in the deepest sense crea- tive. He is defined as pure and infinite reason, as a kind of thought whose material is thought itself. One of the most precious parts of Aristotle's system is his doctrine of the will. It is here that he corrects the intellectualism of Plato and so keeps the Idea closer to the ground. But in his definition of God the doctrine of the will goes incurably lame. God is will in the most secondary sense. In essence He is contemplative reason. The ideal for the sage is leisure plus clear thought. In experience his leisure is broken by practical necessities and cut off short by death ; while, by the necessity of the human constitution, his reason is blurred by sensation that cannot be wholly assimilated, and well-nigh over- powered by feelings that refuse the bridle. God, on the contrary, has infinite leisure, and the matter upon which the Eternal Reason works is not sensation, but reason itself. The sum of the thing is that Aristotle's conception of God is essentially Greek, in that it is essentially aesthetic. The Greek view of the cosmos is at bottom static, not dynamic. Aristotle's Analysis of the functions of the will in psychology, his theory 70 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. of development in cosmology, move straight towards a dynamic view. Yet in no sense does he reconstruct the fundamental conception of the universe. Those great thoughts about development and the will do not indeed lie on the page of his system, they go too deep for that. But they do not begin to go deep enough. And when he comes to the idea of God they altogether lose their footing. God is not a Creator, but a contemplator. Aristotle's idea of God is consistent with his view of the State as a whole. He does not face the problem of founding a State. The men of the early times had done that work. Nor does he touch bottom in dealing with the problem of perpetuating the State, in spite of his deep discussion of government. The men of Marathon had done that. When he comes to the end of his ethics, he lets us into his secret by portraying a sage who is in effect a philosophic monk. He half surrenders his distinction between the prac- tical and the speculative virtues, and quite dulls the edge of its final corrective value in relation to Plato's intellectualism, by making the speculative virtues sov- ereign and the practical virtues altogether secondary. It is no accident that the mediaeval scholastics took his noble words hereon as the text for their monastic view of the reason. The forces that found States and make history are very imperfectly accounted for by Aristotle. The core of culture and worth as he sees them is a leisure that lives within a house that coarser hands have built, and through its windows " contemplates the universe with peace." God is the Summum Bonum, the thing supremely to be desired. He is not the Desirer. If now we in GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 71 take the idea of God as the pulse of deepest thinking, this way of conceiving Him can only mean that the philosophic ethic of antiquity lacked the dynamic, the creative, the missionary elements. That God, the fundamental life, is not thought of as a Desirer, not conceived as an infinite missionary force, plainly indicates that the highest reason and conscience ex- isting in history are not missionary, do not think of themselves as standing in a relation of creative desire towards the masses. It must be remembered that Church and State were identical in those days. Hence the significance of this flaw in the idea of God is far greater than it would be to-day, when, thanks to the separation of Church and State, much bad theology may be current for some time within the bounds of the Church, without breaking into the precincts of the State. Where there was a single society, a flaw in the idea of God was more portentous. Consequently it is of the deepest significance that God, as Aristotle conceives Him, does not create, does not bring up the ought-to-be out of the deep of the unknown. He contemplates the is. The existing order of things is the substantial order. The potential has little or no margin beyond the actual. So long as this is the case the democratic ideal, in whose history the social question is an inevitable cli- max, is partly based on stubble. The democratic State, so-called, is an aristocratic Democracy. It is largely a society for the insurance of existing rights, not for the creation of new ones. Herein is found the mighty difference between etaphysical and prophetical monotheism.. The phil- osophic monotheism of Greece looks away from his- / 72 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. tory and society. The will is confined to the lower virtues. The intellectual love of God, quietistic in tendency and making towards some theory of ecstasy, is the goal. This comes out clearly in Neoplatonic mysticism. The logical conclusion of the process would be an Occidental Brahmanism. For Brahm is the flight from the world, personified. 19 The world as such the world as it lies in time and space has no real, no spiritual being, it is an illusion. His- tory is not the stuff of a permanent will, and so can- not be permanently stuff for the conscience. But for prophetical monotheism history is not thought away ; it is put in the hand of a Holy Will, and thus becomes the abiding material of conduct. It is the function of all monotheism to deliver man from the primitive theology that put the Gods in the service of the world, and thus make it possible to put the world in the service of God. And since God is never con- sidered as one, in the deepest sense, without being also considered steward and guardian of the non- material, the spiritual values of society, to put the world in the service of God is equivalent to making it plastic to the moral ideal. All monotheism does this so far as intention goes. But only Biblical monotheism does it with success. The God of the Bible is not, as with Aristotle, contemplative reason ; nor is He, as with Brahmanism, personified monastic meditation. He is conceived as holy, as free from and sovereign over Nature. There are no dark and hidden elements in Him. He knows Himself completely. He has all the powers of the universe in His hand. And he makes Himself known in no character save that of creator. in GENESIS _OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 73 Psychologically the Old Testament doctrine of crea- tion is in closest connection with an impassioned criti- cism of the world's system of measurements and the world's standard of values. The Exodus was a pro- test against the heathen theology. It was equally a protest against the heathen sociology. The clear space of attested Old Testament history stretches from the founding of the State by Moses to the death of the State and the birth of the Church in the Exile. In terms of pure theology, the heart of this period is the development of the unitary idea of God. But theology is no more a vestal virgin than philosophy. Both are married to the working necessities of man- kind. The process by which this monotheistic idea was given to men was worked out through the use and growth of a new type of statesmen, the prophets. Statesmen they were in the deepest sense. The unit of their feeling and thought was not the individual, but the nation. The object to which all their desires went out was the regeneration of the nation. They were not, like the priests, stewards of an inherited capital, discharging a fixed constitutional function. They might be chosen from any rank. In some cases they were literally men of the people. Amos is an example. In all cases they were men for the people. They faced the aristocracy and the mon- archy with equal fearlessness. They were irrepres- sible Protestants against the existing state of society ; believing in the omnipotence of the spiritual process, forever attacking the society of their times and hold- ing up the picture of a perfect society. They were great historic individuals, who could not shut them- selves up within the established order. 74 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. The very mention of divine election to-day makes us shy like a colt at a bear. But the Old Testament doctrine of election is part and parcel of the pro- phetic refusal to eternize the existing social order. In the case of the individual it is illustrated by Jeremiah. He was convinced that the work which made his life a thorn in the side of the politicians and a burden to himself had its root in the will of God. God had separated him from the crowd for the work, and had set him up as the public con- science of Israel. In the case of the people, it is grandly illustrated by the divine choice of Israel. For Israel is God's people not by nature but by grace. The heathen people and its god were part- ners by nature, bone of one bone, flesh of one flesh. Before time began, they were wedded to each other. Israel, on the contrary, had a definite beginning in time. The national existence hung on God's free and sovereign deed; and this sovereignty of God, just as it made God the free creator of Israel's being, so did it make Him the unsleeping critic of Israel's political and social habits. In this way, that which was involved by the Greek doctrine of " Nature," namely, a critical attitude towards the positive or the apparent social order, becomes a vastly more deep-laid as well as more aggressive programme of social reform. Compare Hesiod and Homer, as ancestors of the conscience, with Moses. In the case of the former, although the animal may not, as in Egypt, masque and con- fuse the personal, yet the ground is littered and cumbered with myths. Beneath the things that do appear, and even close to the surface, are dark nature- in GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 75 processes that refuse to be translated into the lan- guage of human hope. There is no thoroughfare from the bottom of being to the working conscience. But in the Old Testament doctrine concerning crea- tion and its correlative doctrine concerning Nature as lying in the hand of a personal will, the very root and reason of the universe is thought of as the source of the vitalizing forces that work for the betterment of the lowly. Without wading into metaphysics, we can affirm it as a matter of history, that the Personal- ity of God as conceived in Israel meant, when com- pared with the ideas of God entertained by the other peoples of antiquity, a belief in the maximum of possi- , \ bilities in the line of personal and social good. Thus . the potential acquired indefinite, for practical pur- poses infinite, margins outlying beyond the actual. Hence the belief drew after it a belief in the maxi- mum of personal and social responsibility and activ- ity. When we sincerely believe in the possibility of a thing, take it home to the heart, it blows the trumpet in our Zion. We are on fire to realize it. So the Old Testament dogma about the creative per- sonality of God involved the sovereignty of the ought- to-be over the is. With the unity of God goes the deepening of self- consciousness. The result in ethics is analogous to the results of the discovery of unity in all natural law. Science has brought the far-off very near. However deep may be the wounds temporarily in- flicted upon the inner life, in the end the effect must be to dignify it, seeing that the unity of law neces- sitates the conviction that self-consciousness is not a bastard, but the legitimate heir of the cosmos. Even 76 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. so does monotheism deepen self -consciousness, by first unifying the ideal goods of the race, and then mak- ing them all kith and kin to the man who believes that only the best can be good at all. Polytheism weakens and dissipates the consciousness of com- munity between the highest good and the seeker after goodness. Monotheism concentrates and inten- sifies it. This holds true in the history of every form of monotheism ; it is as true in Egypt and India and Hellas as in Palestine. There is however a notable difference between the course of monotheism in these lands and its course in Israel. Everywhere save in Palestine monotheism was reached by a reason that held itself more and more aloof from the out-of-door world. It was the crown of a theoretical process, not of a great practical experience. The result was that in those countries the unity of God undid the will that had gone into the conduct of affairs. But in Israel the unity of God strengthened the will. This comes out in the sense of sin that is so funda- mental in the prophetic economy. There was no doctrine of sin in esoteric heathenism. Sin was gotten rid of either by intellectualism as in Greece, or by a mystical theory of illusion as in India. The deliverance from the doctrine was dearly bought. The price paid was the swallowing up of the practi- cal reason in the theoretic reason. Monotheism in Israel ran no such course. The sense of sin kept growing deeper. It was related to the conception of God as a creative, redeeming, and reforming will. Man as organ of that will finds himself set firm and fast in the visible order of things. The deepening self-consciousness that re- in GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 77 suits from monotheism does not dissolve his con- nections with history, but strengthens them. He becomes not a quietist, but a Puritan. Herodotus, praising the conduct of Athens in the Persian war, says that her grand efficiency proved liberty to be a forceful and forth-putting thing. In the light of his immortal story this applies to the Greeks as a whole in contrast with the Orientals. Freedom meant greater capacity for work. The free Greek could outlast the Oriental in public spirit, outbid him in the expenditure of self. To view the world as a school of Freedom plainly meant to assess the re- sources it offered to human betterment at a very high figure. The Greek conception of life got larger values out of the universe than the Oriental. Now the men of the Old Testament, the prophets, far out- went even the Greek in sociologic assessment. They had no cosmogony, far less a theogony. The philo- sophic Greek conceived the process of Nature as toilsome and not always direct or free from waste. Even the Gods had to be improved on, and the old Gods contended with the new for the right to exist. The view of the universe that succeeded this theogony laid the foundations of modern science, and if a scien- tist were speaking at this point, he might balance the books between the Greek and the men of the Old Testament in a way very unlike my own. But it is the genesis of the reform movement in sociology that we are studying. And under this aspect the vastly greater significance of the Old Testament is beyond doubt. Aristotle, who summed up Greek experience down to his time on the philosophic and scientific side, 78 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. also hit the very centre of it on the ethical side when he formulated his theory of the riddle, the so-called Golden Mean. Ethic here made large concessions to prudence, and allowed the practicable to carry through some serious amendments to the ideal constitution of society. But the prophet of the Old Testament would not listen to the first word about the practi- cable. Long after the exile, when the last of the prophets had been dead for two hundred years, the thought of the practicable gained a wide place in Judaism, in the so-called Wisdom Literature. But the Prophet did not know it. In the story of Genesis, the world with all its order is a deed of divine free- dom. God has but to speak Let there be light, and light is. This self-same creative freedom watches forever over the sacred history. No real or lasting power of resistance is conceded to environ- ment. Yea, the very environment is a deed of divine freedom. There is no middle here, only prophetic devotion to the absolutely best. Anything short of this is idolatry, a worship of an unreal and empty <, God and good. Is it not plain then that the man of the Old Testament assessed the resources offered by the union for social betterment at a vastly higher figure than the Greek ? The doctrine of the freedom of God permanently guarantees the freedom of man in society. Now the belief in social freedom means just the conviction that there's something better than society's best. The ideal holds the whip. Rest in the actual is only temporary. The constitution is not fixed, but plastic. Thus the principle of progress strikes its root as deep as the very being of God. And so God, the fundamental life, is conceived as in GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 79 in deed and in truth the thing supremely to be de- sired, the Summum Bonum, but that is not the deepest thought about Him. Primarily He is the Desirer. That is what the doctrine of God as free and creative, in relation to our subject, comes to. We are presented with an out-and-out dynamic view of the universe. The master-word is not philosophy, the search of man after Truth, but Revelation, the search of Truth after man. The deepest life of God is in motion towards history. God is an infinite mis- sionary force. His entire purpose is bound up in the moralization of man. " Let us make man in our image, after our likeness " is the motive ; " Be ye holy, for I am holy " is the goal. It may easily be said that Levitical virtues are mixed up in the centre of this thought with perma- nent virtues. Practically however the force of the objection is much weakened by the fact that even to-day people who profess to believe in the Sermon on the Mount make much of the mere externals of life, and by means of them classify men; while theoretically the objection quite misses the point, see- ing that nobody denies evolution in morals. Morals Y undoubtedly change. There is none the less a stable V core, and no matter how widely one period differs from another in the phenomena of ethics, especially > in the etiquette of morality, they are still one at heart. The single permanent ethical element is devotion to the best we know. This is the living and energizing cause in morality. The effects, what we call morals, change when the cause plays upon a different set of conditions. Hence a saying like " Be ye holy, for I am holy " is not to be criticised for its setting, but 80 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. estimated by its heart. The heart of it is that the standard for human perfection is the character of God. Therefore the saying is one in kind with Christ's " Be ye perfect even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." The goal of God's self-reve- lation is an intimacy between man and the highest good. Nor is it one class of men who are thus to be brought within the precincts of the best. The pro- phetic thought does indeed, for the most part, confine itself to Israel. But inside the nation all men are within the horizon. Joel is representative when he says " I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh ; . . . also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit" (ii. 28 f.). And this is St. Peter's text for the sermon on Whitsunday. In logic there is no difference between the two. The latter is the unfolding of the former. God is conceived as an infinite missionary force. The divine j perfection is the pledge of human perfectibility. It should be easy to see, from what has been said, that the Messianic idea and the monotheistic idea, as the prophets conceived them, are inseparable ; that they are related as the seen and the unseen aspects of a single moment, as the outer and inner side of one process. The whole nature of God, when con- ceived in this dynamic way, is plainly under bonds to itself to press the cause of humanity home. From this results the out-and-out teleologic character of Old Testament religion. Schleiemacher spoke truth when he made this a fundamental note in the Chris- tian religion, and contrasted it with the aesthetic re- ligion of the Greeks. In modern times there has been a righteous reaction against the abuse of teleology. in GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 8 1 Spinoza's sweeping indictment of final causes was fully deserved by a system that often dignified old woman's knowledge with the name of theology and covered up intellectual laziness with infallibility. But Spinoza sweeps out the jewel with the dust. Reli- gion, as a social force, is necessarily teleologic. The more thoroughly social it becomes, the more com- pletely teleologic must it be. The teleologic view of things when grounded by religion in the being of God, conceived as personal, means, first of all, that the universe can be endlessly made use of; that the practical reason can assess it without stint in the service of the social ideal. There is no dark nature-force that constitutes a no- man's land for the reformer's conscience. There is no fate in God. He is wholly intelligible to Himself, and therefore everything in Him is spiritual capital for the social process. To conceive life as Personal means to conceive it as understood by itself and so translatable. Science rests on belief in the intelli- gibleness of Nature. To this reduce the unity of law, the indestructibility of matter, the persistence of force. True society, permanent society, which means a society wherein the best men can always find themselves, because the highest ideal goods are stored in it, a society wherefrom men shall not need to abscond into monasticism in order to be true to their best selves, rests in like manner on the intelli- gibleness of God. Without this it must dwindle and pine away. Underlaid by any other conception, the roots of the relations that interknit to make society must inevitably dry up because they lack depth of earth. G 82 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. The out-and-out teleologic view of things means, in the second place, that a divine purpose hides within the social present ; that the purpose is larger than the vessel that tries to contain it and bound it ; and that the good of to-day must be forever outgoing itself and opening into a richer to-morrow, if it would not be disloyal to the soul within it. Just as in Schiller's "Song of the Bell," so here, the mould must gladly break in order that the purpose within it may reach its end. It is at this point that we see how Israel's incapacity for art is the defect of a great virtue. The prohibition of images as an aid to wor- ship, which was fatal to the possibility of art under the conditions of antiquity, gets its ethical and social meaning when we compare Israel with Egypt. The worship of Nature, the identification of the Gods with animal forces, meant that there was no gap, anyway v^ {f* 10 g reat gap, between the seen and the unseen worlds. The prohibition of images, on the contrary, went along with a conception of the holiness of God that dug a great gulf between the two worlds. If we do but remember that the two worlds in the Old Testament are not the earth on one side and a tran- scendent heaven on the other, but that the other world is just a storehouse of possibilities which shall some day enter history with reforming power, we should be able to see that the aesthetic incapacity of Israel was a defect attendant on vast moral serious- ness. To prohibit images was to declare that the unseen and holy Will, at work in sacred history for the perfecting of society, could come within no visible form. To refuse to worship the visible was to set the future free. m GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 83 Old Testament religion is a religion of redemption. It assumes and persists in an aggressively hopeful attitude towards the life of the people. Thus taken, a single glance enables us to see that the religion of the Old Testament and the democratic view of things, however they differ as to ways and means, however widely they may be separated in their pictures of the last things, do yet in fact have the same sky-line. Both believe in human perfectibility and their belief is impassioned. Democracy stakes all upon the possi- bility of carrying individuality to the outmost edge of society. The Old Testament stakes its idea of God on the possibility of making the commonest Israelite a native within the things of eternity. As Isabella pledged her crown jewels for the discovery of the new way to the East, so God pledges His holiness in order that all may know Him, from the least even to the greatest. The all-holy one has created man. The creation is a common creation. There is no possibility of such a myth as that in India, according to which one class of men is created from the head of a God, and another from his feet. Society is not stratified, but is of one piece from top to bottom. The proof of this is found in the popularization of monotheism. In no people save Israel was so much as an attempt made to render the unitary idea of God the people's property. Wherever the idea was achieved, it remained esoteric knowledge, knowledge that did not circulate outside the inner circle of the educated and speculative. The metaphysical mono- theism of Greece was for the most part a splendid spirit that spoke only to scholars. Therefore the at- tempt to popularize monotheism was in itself a grand 84 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. act of faith, faith in the sovereign value of the idea itself, faith also in the spiritual capacity of the com- mon man. As plainly as human thoughts can ex- press anything, did this undertaking proclaim an absolute conviction that the lowest classes were level to the highest knowledge, and that the constitution of our common humanity called for no mysteries that should be the prerogative of the few. And so the success that crowned the attempt to popularize mon- otheism was one of the great steps taken by history towards Democracy. For the unity of God draws after it the unity of the race and the unity of society. The logic of monotheism limps unless it brings up at last on the conception of a nation, a church, a humanity, within whose pale there are no distinctions save temporary and economic ones. The caste prin- ciple has no foothold anywhere within it. The monotheistic idea of God, as the prophets conceived it, entailed an impassioned belief in human equality. Compare the Old Testament with Plato. The sacred nation of prophetic thought was in truth provincial. Beyond the frontiers of this one people the best things, for the most part, did not travel. Plato also was by reason of his exaltation of his own race provincial, quite as provincial as the prophets. But compare them as their thought and plan holds good over the territory they try to cover. Within Plato's commonwealth, while there are no castes in the technical sense, yet there are lines of separation drawn so clearly and with so much suggestion of permanence, that we are led into a thoroughgoing aristocratic view of things. But in the prophetic commonwealth all distinctions are removed. There's -A ui GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 85 one God, one good, for all men. One capacity for receiving the good is ascribed to them all. Aggres- sive universalism inheres in prophetic monotheism. In it the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of men, are implicit. Moreover Old Testament theology is not a scho- lastic theology, it never smells of the lamp, but is close to the market-place and enters without effort into politics. Theology, as we know it, has been thought out and systematized in places intellectu- ally remote from burning practical issues. The think- ing of the prophets was done in a very different fashion. They were deep in the most practical ques- tions of their day. Consequently a translation into economics was always close at hand. This is shown in the teaching about covetousness. Since there is but one God and He the Creator, the whole land be- longs to Him and to Him alone. Therefore earth- hunger is a sin not only against the unity of society but also against the unity of God. The primal sin is idolatry or denial of the monarchy of God. Out of it as an unseen root grow two cardinal sins, adultery and covetousness. That they should be treated as if on anything like a level goes quite against the grain of modern feeling. Yet they are practically level with each other before the prophet's eye. They are thought to be equally deadly in their results, since the one shatters the unity of the family, and the other shatters the unity of the commonwealth. The New Testament estimate of covetousness is abso- lutely, though not relatively, the same. " No covet- ous man, who is an idolater, hath a share in the kingdom of the Christ and of God" (Eph. v. 5). 86 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. "The love of money is the root of all evil" (i Tim. vi. 10). Upon other sins falls an emphasis differ- ent from that of the Old Testament. So there is a difference of perspective. But the quality of the as- sessment is identical. Covetousness is the self-same denial of monotheism, the exaltation of the creature above the Creator. Theology dominates economics. There is no haggling with a commercial view of things. All matters are taken into the light of an absolute and uncompromising ideal. The idea of justice has the self-same color of abso- luteness. In the first place, the individual does not exist apart from the nation, and consequently there are no barriers against the attempt to immediately translate the individual's conscience into public law. Then again there is no heaven for feeling to take refuge in. The righteousness of the individual is inseparable from the righteousness of the people. The impassioned longing for personal holiness joins with intense patriotism, and the allied forces dash resistlessly against the politician's emphasis upon caution and worldly wisdom. Kenan's History of Israel has great value in this connection. As an ob- jective history it fails. But as a book written with intense subjectivity, and written by a Frenchman who cannot, for the life of him, help seeing universal history in the light of the French Revolution, it is profoundly instructive. The highway of ideas runs plain from Isaiah to 1789. Renan somewhere says that the permanent antithesis of higher experience is between the man of culture and the moral agitator. The former thinks that the Graces cannot be success- fully worshipped save in a temple whose mudsill is a ill GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 8/ submerged twentieth. He acknowledges with sorrow that it is a heavy price to pay, but the Graces are worth it. The reformer, on the contrary, demands absolute justice; and if culture is unable to keep house with it, he cries, Let culture perish ! Now it is plain that the Old Testament is not the book of the culturist. Rather is it the text-book of a Puritan Democracy. The idea of justice sweeps all before it. Expedience is brushed aside. The artistic sense, if it resists for a moment, is put down. The prophets could not be on good terms with the ancient Jewish State. The burning ideal of a perfect law carried them to positions which the king and the courtiers might well think involved high treason and disloyalty to the fatherland. Long before the Assyrian and Baby- lonian annihilated the visible Jewish State, the un- faltering logic of prophetism had taken the soul of meaning out of it and left it standing, as a hollow shell, before the piercing eye of conscience. This is not however the result of pessimism, but of the stanchest optimism. The prophet gives up the apparent Israel because he is sure of the ideal Israel. The present State, with its awful imperfections, loses its moral significance, because the future and perfect State fills his eye. The perfection of God draws after it the perfectibility of man. The idea of God as one and holy must be unravelled before this plan of a perfect community can be given up. Therefore, in most striking contrast with the Stoic doctrine of Last Things, stands the Old Testament view. Pro- phetic thought, as it faced the problem of evil, found closed against it three ways that offered retreat to the Greek or Hindoo. First, the aggressive mono- 88 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. theist was necessarily a radical monist, so that he could not get rid of evil by a more or less dualistic version of matter ; for this would have been to undo his dominant thought. There could not be for him any such thing as inherent evil. Again, he could not take the road of the Hindoo theosophist and rate matter and its inherent evil as an illusion ; for this would have undone his definition of God and man laid down in terms of will. ' And finally, he could not take the speculative aesthetic way, thus reaching a view of evil as the necessary background of the good. Marcus Aurelius gives us an illustration of this when he speaks of apparent evil as an after-effect of the beautiful. Thus social wrong might be looked on as a vile mud-puddle that necessarily follows the rain, as a secondary result of the evolution of social law. A good modern illustration would be the attitude of an artist defending the existence of unsanitary houses for country laborers, on the ground that they blent well with the landscape. The man of the Old Testa- ment could understand neither Marcus Aurelius nor the artist. It has been said that Spinoza's acosmism has a Jewish root, and the saying is true. But the full truth is that Spinoza's acosmism is intellectualistic, and consequently holds aloof from the practical world ; while prophetic acosmism is ethical and intensely practical, descending upon the existing social order with its whole weight. Spinoza had the Greek in him as well as the Jew. The Greek saw and stated all things in terms of Being. Whatever is, no matter what it is, has a certain right to be. It is a phenom- enon amongst other phenomena. But the Jew saw in GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 89 and stated all things in terms of Worth. Compare the Apocalypse of Daniel in the Old Testament, or the Apocalypse of John in the New, with Spinoza's Ethics. To the apocalyptist the "World" stretches in bulk five-sixths of the way around the horizon. To Daniel it is the mighty Image. Beside it the ideal is as a little stone. Yet the " World," the rec- ognized power in contemporary history, vast as it is in bulk, does not thereby acquire any title to exist- ence. The stone is small indeed, but it is cut out without the aid of human hands. God, the Eternal, cuts it out. It smites the "World" and fells it to the ground. Thus the impassioned belief in the " end of the world " means that the process of moral- ization is to become triumphant and absolute. The " end of the world " is not a metaphysical or transcen- /\ dent process, but an event in history. The purpose ^ towards which all history moves, comes close to act- ual political and social institutions, yea, comes so close that they shrivel up, as the earth would shrivel if the sun came near. The idea of the Judgment Day is a fiery criticism passed by the ought-to-be upon the is. The problem of the laborer called for a view of the universe that should make the future sovereign over the past. The Greek and the Roman gave great gifts in his cause. They undermined the worship of the past, thus destroying the sacredness of the present state of things. But Greek and Roman alike lacked foothold on the bottom of being. This foot- hold the Biblical organism of ideas afforded. It was, in the eyes of the culturist and the statesman alike, shockingly intolerant. Tacitus described its mes- sengers in later days as men abhorred by the human 90 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. race. Whether the men of the Bible were right or not in their dogmatic certitude is a question that lies outside our province. The only thing for us to con- sider is that, as a matter of fact, they had such a cer- titude, underlying the very foundation of the mind. The Bible is an intolerant book, neither giving nor taking quarter in its war with opposing ideas of God and man. When therefore we consider that the in- tolerance is the intolerance attending a conception of the fundamental life that involved the unity of so- ciety, the perfectibility of man, the equality of men in all essential things, and the triumph of absolute justice in a new heaven and a new earth, is it not plain that social reform acquires by means of it a long lever wherewith to pry wrong out of its place ? The Old Testament strikes no truce with the evil forces on the earth. It has no sort of patience with the crooked paths, as if they were crooked by grace of the constitution, but demands that they be made straight. It does not deal in pathos, for pathos is not a quality of the reformer. Its one word is action God's action and man's. The imagination is the aesthetic of the working will. In the long run mankind is moved more by the clear pictures of things than by the patient analy- sis and the carefully reasoned statement. If the Bible contained no true message from the heart of things to the visible world, if it were nothing more than the poetry of the conscience, it would still possess an importance in the history of the social question that is only now beginning to be appreciated. Sooner or later that question must ally itself with religion. Simple ethics will not serve its turn, for y V W in GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 91 ethics deal with a bare ought-to-be. This is not enough to permanently brace the will in its wrestle with the stubborn "World." The ought-to-be must become in a measure a present and assured posses- sion. Such a change involves the change from ethic to religion ; for religion possesses what ethic struggles for and reveals the ought-to-be as resting upon an eter- nal is, namely, the character of God. When the social movement reaches a critical stage, it is very possible indeed that it may make haste to get religion, and that, too, of the Biblical kind, seeing that the thought of the Bible runs clear from a dogma of creation by a holy will to a dogma of judgment by the same will, and so contains the material for a reformer's view of the universe. If it is nothing more than the poetry of conscience, it is an absolutely unique book. This Biblical organism of ideas took flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. We count the nation happy that has a hero, because in him it sees embodied the deepest ten- dencies of its past as well as the clearest prophecies of its future, so that through him it knows itself and finds itself. From the point of view of the social question, the Christ is the Hero of Humanity. We are not concerned, be it remembered, to discuss the historicity of the New Testament records. For our present purposes it matters not whether the Christ was the creator of Christianity, or, as Strauss put it, Christianity's dream. The dream was at least taken for fundamental reality, and inasmuch as we are studying the history of a certain body of opinions and their effect upon social ideals, not their nature as true or false, we are indifferent just now to the whole discussion. 92 GENESIS. OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP The Christ was believed to be both the head of humanity and the final revealer of the deity. In a twofold sense He was ultimate, as synonym of what is deepest in being and as synonym of what is final in history. In the Judaism of the centuries before Christ, two ideas, related, yet distinct and sometimes even separate, the Logos idea and the Messianic idea, had developed. Whatever thought went into the first was concerned mainly with the connection be- tween God and the world. Whatever thought went into the second was taken up with the contrast between the beggarly historical present and the rich historical future. In the New Testament conception of Christ these two ideas were interfused. And in this way the social question acquired a lever incomparably more efficient than the Old Testament by itself could provide, for the main element in the Greek view of the universe was thus taken into the mind. The prophet had no eyes save for the end of things. The philosopher's wonder spent itself on the nature of things. The dogma of the Incarnation, coming after a period that introduced the Biblical to the Greek point of view, while it remained wholly loyal to the Old Testament emphasis upon the will of God in man and so gave no hint of putting the Greek problem of reason at the centre in place of the pro- phetic problem of conscience, yet permitted the Greek conception to come within the pale. Consequently all the mysteries of being, the whole bulk of the universe, struck an alliance with the Messianic idea and allowed it to mobilize their powers in the service of the social end. Philosophy passed into theology, and theology, becoming Christology, was dramatized in GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 93 in terms of history. The deep and enduring powers of the universe are first taken up into the being and beauty of God. The whole nature of God is then conceived as an infinite missionary life, an aggres- sive moralizing force moving upon history. This force and life incorporate themselves in an historical person. He that sees Christ sees God. There is nothing worth while beneath Christ or above Him. Here or nowhere is the Supreme Good. And the footsteps of the Supreme Good in time and space lead from the celestial commonness of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth to the redeeming death on Calvary. In the mythology of Greece was wrapped up a new art, the classic art of the world. Aphrodite rising from the sea prefigures that impregnation of sense with spirit that gives birth to the beautiful. In the New Testament Christology is wrapped up a new conception of society. Is it not written in so plain a hand that it may be read by starlight ? No fate, nothing that defies the social will or leads it across the deep only to find a wilderness, lurks at the root of things. The free will of God is omnipo- tent, so that whatever has being is material for free- dom. And God does not hide Himself far from history, but in the Incarnation gives Himself to the uttermost through a life lived in history. This life, it is true, proclaims a kingdom not of this world. That does not mean however a kingdom not in this world, but a kingdom that has, once and for all, dis- owned the world's favorite argument, the sword, put- ting the cross in its place. The Old Testament dogma of creation cut the root of dualism ; it ex- pelled from the human mind the thought that there 94 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. is anything in the universe that can permanently resist the best. The New Testament dogma of Incarnation is the logical climax of the dogma of creation, in that it describes God as giving His own very best, in order that the commonwealth of good- ness may be grounded. And by the dogma of the Second Coming nature and history are put into the hands of the Christ who is God's best, as clay is taken into the hands of a master sculptor. The impregnation of sense with ideas gives art. The impregnation of history with the sovereign good- ness, a process perfectly real for the Christian consciousness, whether real in fact or not, what shall it give to thought but a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness ? Moreover the emotional centre of gravity in that plan of a new world is found in the men of low estate. The prophetic thought of the Old Testa- ment unfolded in the presence of a vast heathen empire. Heathenism stood for power divorced from right. As one political prospect after another closed against the little Palestinian State, the prophets came more and more to identify the ideal Israel, the people who stood for right supreme over power, with the lowly. When the State disappeared in the Exile, the Church that succeeded it brought with her to the light and as an essential part of herself the dogma that the poor are God's own folk. For was not Israel the laughing-stock of the nations in point of power and wealth, while yet she was the Eternal's estate in history ? The Psalms abound in the feeling. The New Testament has it everywhere. It sings triumphantly in the Magnificat. It speaks m GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 95 through the Beatitudes with the self-possession of a law-giver. The Epistle of James is on fire with it (v. 1-5). St. Paul gives it a doctrinal signifi- cance by affirming that the lowly were God's chosen material for church-building (i Cor. i. 26 ff.). It even incorporated itself in an important institu- tion, for the diaconate was created by the dignity and worth of the poor. The apostolic experiment in communism had the same root. It was not in- spired by the idea that private property is wrong, but by an exalted estimate of humanity, set ablaze by the belief in an impending judgment of the world. " Fairy stories," says Lowell in his address on De- mocracy, " are made out of the dreams of the poor." Now dreams, persisted in, harden into material for laws and even constitutions. And the dream if we choose to call it so was in this case em- bodied in the Messianic idea, was therefore rooted deep in revelation, and so was authenticated by the idea of God. Addison says concerning the clergyman who be- longed to the Spectator's Club that, whenever he attended its meetings, he gave each member of it a new taste for himself. No finer definition of a ntleman is to be found. The function of a true gentleman is to open up to those he meets new sources of self-respect within themselves. How per- fectly the Christ realized Addison's ideal in regard to the lowly ! Viewed as the synonym of God, He is always seen in the society of the outcast and the downtrodden. Thus the highest things, the deepest mysteries of the eternal, bespeak a place for them- selves in the lives of the men of lowest degree. 96 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Unless the best that the world knows can be made native to the humblest, God's self-revelation is made of none effect, and the men who are its stewards become as soldiers who throw away the sword to fight with the scabbard. Christ gives to every man He meets a new taste for himself that cannot pall. The fact that Christ delights above all to meet the lowly proclaims, as the Church understands Him, that, failing success in this quarter, the wars of God must end in defeat. There is a beautiful story in the Talmud to the effect that, if ever the Messias is to be found, He shall be found at the gate of Rome, amongst the sick and wretched. The gate of Rome stood for the slum of the Mediterranean world. When the Messias of the Christians took upon Himself the masterhood over history He incorporated this parable in His life. He taught His followers plainly where to look for the treasures of God. Therewith came into the Occident a new passion, what has been well called "the love of the unlovely." The Greeks were an artist people. Christians, if Christians indeed, must be a reforming people. Where the treasure is there must the heart be. If the perfect hides itself amongst the disinherited classes, thither must society go under pain of being forsaken by the perfect. Thus did the market value of the common man rise vastly, in terms of what were to be, for near two thousand years, the ruling ideas of the Occident. And thus was a great addition made to the poten- tial rights of the downmost man. A man's rights, in the long run, are determined by the closeness of his relations with what is highest in the eyes of mankind. in GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 97 This alone insures his self-respect and guarantees his prerogatives. It also safeguards his innate rights, by making it the bounden duty of the higher humanity to see to it that his rights are realized. IV THE conflict in the inner life of antiquity was be- tween the citizen and the man. The trioal polity made citizenhood and humanity coterminous; for outside the bounds of the Tribe the virtues had no binding force, the stranger being an enemy. The City-State, built upon the primitive tribal foundation, could not inherit the full intensity and fighting power of the tribal organization without also inheriting its narrowness. But this narrowness gave way before the combined logic of thought and of circumstance. Greece worked out the logic of thought. The great colonial movement of the eighth and seventh cen- turies B.C., the habits of adventure and travel, the restless curiosity that discovered a frontier of experi- ence only to go beyond it, the jostle and collision of local customs, the destructive result of criticism, and the constructive search for the common elements which it made necessary, all these manifold forces brought the Greek mind to the declaration of Socrates that he was a citizen of the world. The Stoics colored this logical and ethical movement with religion. A great number of their leaders came from the eastern parts of the Mediterranean world, where the Greek and the Oriental mingled. They brought with them the aptitude of the Oriental for feeling so deep that 98 CHAP, iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 99 it outgoes his powers of analysis. In their hands cosmopolitanism became a dogma. The citizen of the old school was driven off the field by the man. Humanity now bulked too large to come within any existing polity. Rome worked out the logic of circumstance. Com- pleting the task of Alexander and his successors, the Empire broke down the walls between the ancient nations and turned their experience into a common enclosure. The larger part of the world lay beyond the view of the average man of the Empire, Meso- potamia and Persia in part, India and China almost altogether. Though the men of science took note of the outlying peoples, upon the working imagination of the Mediterranean world they had very little effect. But the Empire by itself was large enough to be a world unto itself. Our imagination cannot handle an unlimited material, and whatever exceeds our stint is as if it were not. Rome threw together so great a number of widely differing peoples, compelling them to keep the peace and in some way discover their common stock, that there was no need of going out- side her bounds. All the forces that could be brought into the field in the warfare between the citizen and the man were mobilized for the breaking up of local- ism and the widening of sympathies. The ancient States perished. The vast World-State that pushed itself into their place was to the average, and even to the educated man, hardly so much a State as a whole world in itself. So the frontiers of humanity were pushed far out beyond the bounds of citizen- hood in all its ancient forms. Another movement accompanied this tendency 100 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. towards universalism. In proportion to the deteriora- tion of the inherited standards of value and according to the degree in which local traditions lost their hold, the life within the individual grew larger. The widen- ing of the outer world and the deepening of the inner went on together. The connection is not accidental, but inherent. There must be a saving unity some- where. So long as the words and deeds of the sacred past stand, dressed in majesty and awe, before the present, that unity is found outside. No matter how many inconsistencies and even glaring contradictions may gather about the text of the law, the fact that it is law and brings its own authority with it, denies them the right of speech. Let it happen, however, that the authority of the past begins to trip and stumble, and they shall all become articulate. Then the saving unities of life must be found elsewhere. When difficulties thicken upon the outer world, the inner world presents itself as an asylum secure from contradiction and promising peace. Thus the ten- dency towards imperialism drove consciousness in upon itself. Political universalism was accompanied by an interior view of life. All over the Mediter- ranean world subjectivity deepened. Amongst the Jews it resulted in the substitution of prayer for sacrifice, of the synagogue with its preaching for the Temple with its Levitical establishment. Amongst the Gentiles it resulted in emphasis upon self-know- ledge as the only road to salvation. Meditation and silent communion took the place of warfare and for- eign travel. Reason and conscience sought for the universal life called God or Nature, and hoped to find in its society the definition of the universal individual. iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE IOI It is always difficult to realize the greatness of a commonplace. Things that succeed in having them- selves taken for granted, do it at the cost of their power to fix the attention. The penalty attached to an idea that ceases to be a problem and becomes an established principle, is the loss of its power to excite wonder. Thus the separation of Church and State has become so completely a .commonplace, of constitutional law for us Americ^ris/ that we da not readily appreciate its historical significance, : We con- sider it a matter of course. In Europe also the' tide is setting so strongly towards it, that within a cen- tury or two it is sure to become a fixed maxim of universal political practice. Naturally, then, since we know that universal history in its present stage seems to be on the side of the maxim, and since we know that manifest destiny will take care of it, we are not apt to look to the roots of it, or, if we do, we interpret it in terms of our dominating individualism. We readily appreciate it so far as it involves the emancipation of religion from the use of force and so far as it insures the right of each individual to worship God in his own way. But the profound significance of the distinction for the conception of society escapes us. It is well, first of all, to remind ourselves that the separation of Church and State is a downright novelty, and that even in our own day it lacks recognition amongst much the larger part of man- kind. It is of course wrapped up in the history of the Occident, yet even there it is in part not yet explicit, as in Russia; while in the other quarters of the world it either finds no recognition at all, or 102 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. such recognition as is granted it has been almost mechanically imported from the West, as is the case in Japan. In primitive times Church and State were everywhere identical. The king of the tribe was also the priest. In Egypt the Pharaoh was believed to be the son and vicar of the Supreme God. China has brought the primitive view in its integrity down to our own day; -for the Imperial Gazette y the oldest newspaper in the world, raises men to sainthood e-xactly as >Qaean Victoria raises a man to the peer- age, and as' our President brevets an officer in the army. In Greece a man was a churchman because he was a statesman. Aristotle exercised both func- tions when he said that the State, although it origi- nated as an answer to the problem of bare existence, had its real significance in the fact that it made noble living possible. In Rome the emperor was pontifex maximus. In Israel the Book of Deuteronomy com- bined the purposes of the United States Constitution and the Westminster Catechism. Mohammedanism, wherever it goes, carries with it the identity of Church and State. So it would be within bounds to say that in the religious experience of the race, as it stretches from the days before history began to our own time, the clear distinction between Church and State has not been more than one part in a thousand. It is generally safe to conclude that two phenom- ena, both of them novel, which lie within the same tract of experience, have some direct connection with each other, although it may be logically perilous to venture upon saying what the exact connection is. Humanity is an organism, not an aggregate, and iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 103 everything in its history plays the double part of cause and effect. An illustration may be found at our doors. The bicycle has affected many forms of trade, is bringing in dress reform, and has entered politics in order to get good roads. A humorous illustration is found in the famous argument upon the proportion between the number of old maids liv- ing in a certain part of England and the quantity of clover growing there. Old maids keep cats; cats kill the field-mice ; the less field-mice, the more bees; the more bees, the more efficient the cross- fertilization. Consequently the quantity of clover varies with the number of old maids. Now the social question is one phenomenon as new in history as it is notable in itself. Greece and Rome made an attempt at it, but taken in the scope and power of social reconstruction which it has to-day, it is new to the Occident, while outside the Occident it has never been heard of. A second phenomenon, even more striking in its novelty up to the present, is the distinction between Church and State. It is knit into the very warp of modern history, as that history came out of the Mediterranean world. It antedates the birth of the principle of nationality, and has assisted at the genesis of every existing nation. It goes as deep as the foundation of modern politics. Moreover, not only is the distinction ingrained in the history out of which the social question has come, but the currents of the Mediterranean world were plainly flowing towards it centuries before the dis- tinction was achieved. On the one side of that world, the Jewish side, the State had died in order IO4 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. that the Church might be born ; and the Church, when born, found the conditions of her growth shaped at every point by the existence of a heathen over-lord, wielding a power so mighty that permanent resist- ance was hopeless, so that the one thing for higher Jewish politics to make up its mind on was the recog- nition of the heathen empire as established at least for the present in the mastery of temporal things. The prophets had been individuals of so large a make that it was not possible for them to live at peace with the Jewish State of their time. And the growth of the Messianic Idea after the Exile, the development of the belief in immortality, the celes- tialization of the things which the best Jews ac- counted best, moved in the same direction. Thus the situation called for a distinction between Church and State, and Judaism was the pioneer of Christian- ity in this field. On the other side, the Graeco-Roman side of the Mediterranean world, the invasion of the Empire by Oriental religions, bringing mysteries of all sorts with them, the deepening of self-conscious- ness, the spiritualizing of the cosmos, the attempt of Neoplatonism to found something like a Church, were pregnant portents of a society built on a foun- dation different from that of the ancient societies. As in Judaism, so here we see the outstanding indi- vidual trying to make for himself a home larger than any ancient state, yea, larger than all the states of antiquity put together and worked into one total by the Empire. The State, in the largest and deepest form that antiquity could give to it, was not equal to the task of housing the universal individual. There- fore, the separation of Church and State aiming, as iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 105 it does, to furnish the supply to this demand, may fairly be called the ethical climax of antiquity. Here, then, we have two great phenomena within the same tract of time and space. That they are connected in some way is certain. The most ar- dent socialist would surely go into bankruptcy, if he were not convinced that his cause has roots as deep as history; for, unless history takes him seri- ously, how shall he take himself seriously ? If the social question is a patch on history, he must be a patch on society. So we are sure there is a con- ection between the two phenomena, and we would willingly take a certain risk of error in affirming the exact connection. But if what I said a little while is true, the risk is not great. The larger house for itself by the universal individual was the Christian Church. The separation of that Church from the heathen State was necessary, if the indi- vidual was to be clearly denned and dogmatically universalized. Inasmuch as the whole point of the social movement is in the question How far out and down can we carry the principle of individu- ality ? the logical connection between the two phe- nomena should be as plain as the historical. To the Church was committed the task of capital- izing the spiritual gains of antiquity, thus laying foundations for a new and more democratic type of society. This is not saying that there were not some heavy losses undergone when the Church took upon herself the work of the State. But we are not wont to waste our time in computing the number of acres lost to tillage in America by reason of ,our rivers, seeing that rivers are as much a part of the nature 106 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. of things as farms. The transfer of the spiritual problem from the State to the Church was inevita- ble; it was demanded by the State itself. Greek philosophy after Aristotle steadily weakened in the desire to know for knowledge' sake, and strengthened in the desire to live in peace with the universe. Stoi- cism, with its growing emphasis on immediate feeling, its appeal to the common consciousness, its develop- ment of allegory in order to find the nobler idea of God in the most out-of-the-way and unlikely places, represented what was deepest in the movement of the times. Art was practically dead in the third century. When Proclus, the head of the Neopla- tonic School in the fourth century, expressed the wish that all books might be destroyed save the Oracles and the Ph&do, he gave speech to the deep- est need of the Empire, the need of something universal and authoritative. The larger life of the ancient State forced upon it certain tasks in the line of a deeper and broader society. The expan- sion from the local to the human, to use Conte's phrase, was the work called for. This involved, for one thing, a definition of man transcending all the political forms of the time ; and, for another thing, a driving power that should force the definition down through the lowest stratum of society. The heathen State was unequal to those labors and accordingly passed them over to the Church. The function of monotheism is to put the world in the service of God. The idea of God is the idea of something that carries its value within itself, and is therefore insured against the changes and chances of the life in time and space. This is the emotional sub- iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 107 stance of the distinction between the finite and the infinite. It was no accident that the lyrical mood came upon Greek literature before Greek philosophy began. The epic mood was over. The unfettered joy in action gave way to a deepening sense of the limitations of life. The heart, sick of change, relieved itself in poetry. And this altered mood heralded the problem of philosophy. How find unity in the mani- fold ? Man needs the Eternal, because he cannot so act as to eternize himself, cannot create the " timeless book " or work out the undying deed, unless he finds himself in relation with something that is not a means to an end ; something that, by identifying the means with the end, keeps its worth at its own command. When Tennyson sings, " And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood," he expresses the same yearning after something that has a value above time and circumstance. The nine- tieth psalm expresses it in the grandest style. The Eternal is the dwelling-place from one generation to another, of the men who would fain think the thoughts that do not go down with the sun. Prophecy is alive with the feeling ; "all flesh is grass. . . . The grass withereth, the flower f adeth ; but the word of our God shall stand forever" (Is. xl. 6-8). The first end of monotheism is to put the world, the change- able, that which has no permanent value of its own, in the service of God, the unchanging, that which has its own value in its own keeping. We here come into view of the vast social sig- nificance of the theological controversies of the third 108 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. and fourth and fifth centuries. The men of our day who cry down all dogma in the interest of the practical things are, without meaning it, narrowing the practi- cable. What men shall undertake to do is determined by what they conceive to be possible. A caucus at the back side of the moon is a part of no man's pro- gramme. The practical is an elastic quantity. To keep it indefinitely elastic is the function of dogma ; for dogma is a bold sally of reason and imagination into that world unseen and beyond, that larger, infi- nitely larger world, which insists on calling the basis of the visible world a false bottom, and regards its bounds, although guaranteed by the social constitution, as a temporary arrangement having no guarantee in the eternal. The democratic ideal, therefore, has a very real interest in the debate between Athanasius and Arius over the iota. The debate between the Chris- tian and the heathen concepts of God involved a warfare of ideals for humanity. The dogma of the Incarnation completed the dogma of creation and revelation. It affirmed that there is nothing in God which may not come into relation with mankind. It was all in the interest of the common man. The genealogies of the Zeus-descended kings belonged to an aristocratic society. The idea of caste makes the limitation of the lowly a permanent part of the con- stitution of the universe. Metaphysical monotheism left the shoemaker outside the pale of the best. But the dogma of the Incarnation was all in the interest of the common man. It assured him that he was kith and kin with the highest, that he was in ever- lasting partnership with the best. Although it was expressed in Greek terms, it drove home the essential r iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 109 thought of the Bible; for the Bible is the book of witness to the downmost man's capacity for the high- est things. When Athanasius contended for the full meaning of the words " God became man," he did it in order that he might go on with full power to the words "in order that man might become divine." And "man," as he viewed him, took in the saddle- maker on the same terms with Socrates. Yea, " Man " included the lowest slave. He had equal right of entry with Caesar into the holiest. Nicene dogma declares in effect that there is no stint to the practicable. The practical becomes in theory indefinitely elastic. And the man whose spiritual boundaries are thus pushed far out beyond all present accomplishment is the universal man, that definition of the common essence of all men for which antiquity was seeking. This definition was made inseparable from the definition of God, the highest good. The common man is accordingly thought of as being in abiding covenant with that which has value in itself, independent of all circumstance. Therefore, "he ceases ... to have a bare market price." 20 He acquires an ideal value. And this means that he has in him something which cannot be bought or sold, something which can only be come at through the loving gift of a freeman to his peers. Hereby the foundation of the idea of Justice is laid bare. The marrow of the idea is that each man has an equal claim with every other man upon the full development of himself. 21 Not that all men are equal in the abstract sense, but equal in the right to a free development of whatever powers and possibilities are severally stored up in them. Inasmuch as no eye 110 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. save the eye of Omniscience can know beforehand what possibilities are locked up in any given indi- vidual, although placed by birth on the lowest level, it is clear that for all human vision the possibilities of that individual are indefinite. When however the lines of sight run out at every point into the indefinite, we have a practical infinite. This, then, is the foundation of the idea of Justice. The com- mon man, the unit of society, has practically infinite possibilities before him. Now the idea of Justice or Right is embodied in the State. Without that idea the State is a marriage of convenience between the classes and the masses, to be dissolved at the whim of either party, when the whim happens to be backed by power. Hence the State, as the organism of right, must either surrender all its sanctity, all that in it which makes it a Fatherland, for which men are glad to throw away the dearest thing they own as though it were a trifle ; or else must undertake to see to it that the obstacles which are heaped up before the door of the individuality latent in this or that class of men shall be removed. The Institutes defined Justice as the fixed disposi- tion to give every man his own. But " his own " is either a larger or smaller amount of naked material goods, in which case the State must soon lose all hold on the imagination and become the private establishment of the man with the heaviest fist ; or else it is an indefinite quantity of possibilities, which eventually takes refuge in the conception of the com- mon man's nature as an infinite thing. We may find help here in a parallel with the eighteenth century. Rousseau and Burns and Wordsworth, who discovered iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE / k v ? o us the elemental man, also introduced us to the Nature-Sense. 22 The worshipful attitude towards com- mon things, that finds its food in a religious or half religious estimate of them, is in closest sympathy with the reverent attitude of the State towards the day-laborer. The discovery of an infinite value in the common man is indispensable to a State that is to be broadly democratic. We are not here concerned with theology except as one element in the total cause of certain ideals, with their resulting standards of value. But in the line of genetic study we may safely affirm that the authorita- tive declaration that the second Person of the Trinity, whose being was pledge of the being of the world of man and guarantee of its perfectibility, was of one essence with the eternal Father, is not an affair for scholastics, like the question touching the number of angels who can dance on the point of a needle. On the contrary, the dogma is in company with the publication of the Ten Tables at Rome. For I repeat that there is no ultimate standing-ground for the idea of right, save in the conception of man's nature as infinite and so possessing a value above the market price. Whether it is possible in our day to express that infinite quality in man in terms of an evolutionary view of the universe and without help from the idea of God is a fair and necessary question. But that it was impossible in the epoch of the Nicene creed to get along without such help is beyond all possibility of doubt. With the apparatus at their command, the Church Fathers had but one way open to them for permanently grounding their- valuation of the common man as infinite. They did it, and could 112 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. do it, only in terms of his relation with God. And by so doing they wrought a work of deepest import to modernity ; for modernity was drilled and catechised, for the first fifteen hundred years of its life, in the patristic view of things. And that all this is not fairy gold, vanishing when you touch it, but, in potence, current money of the mer- chants, is proved by the development of canon law. That Church which is separate from the State is not a company of mystics, sweetly dreaming on things to come, but a masterful corporation, with a decided talent for dominion over this world and a strong hand on the reins of society. The marvellous con- federation of churches in the second and third cen- turies, which came to be called the Catholic Church, is quite as much a part of terrestrial history as the Achaian League or the Holy Alliance. We must not let ourselves be deceived by the supposed parallel between the relation of Church and State in America and their relation in the Mediterranean world. The State in America is a Christian State. Although the name of God is not found in the Constitution, the Christian idea of God is inbred in the minds of law- makers. There is some friction, and signs, perhaps, of more. Yet on the whole Church and State amicably divide the field ; and the State, by claiming the school question for its own, successfully asserts its dignity, not allowing the Church to monopolize the spiritual. But the Roman Empire was a heathen State, opening by the backdoor into a Church built on the heathen view of the universe ; while the Church opened by the backdoor into a State, built on the Christian view of the universe. It was there- iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 113 fore in some sense a conflict of Church with Church and of State with State. And when Constantine con- firmed the rights of the Bishops as Judges, he was assisting at the creation of a spiritual empire that was to find its greatest representative in Hildebrand. The men who passed over from heathenism to the Catholic Church took their natural individuali- ties with them. Origen is strikingly like Plotinus. Ambrose is a Roman senator of the highest type, turned Christian and made a bishop. Augustine is a Cicero of deeper mind and larger make. The leaders and governors of the Church carried the personal equation with them when they forsook heathenism. At the same time they burned their ships behind them. When our forefathers left the mother-country and came to our own dear land, they brought with them the English habit of mind in matters of government. At the same time, owing to the fact that they " settled down on bare creation," as Webster said in his Plymouth oration, bringing with them none of the inherited establishments that both adorned and cumbered the ground in the mother- country, the constitutional principles most active in the England of their day got a free field. So, in some measure, wrought the leaders of the Catholic Church, when they had passed from heathen- ism to Christianity. They did not go over-seas. But they did almost as much in effect. To become a Christian was well-nigh equivalent to disowning one world and appropriating another. There was no longer a single element of the old life whereon sus- picion might not fall. So far as it was psychologi- cally possible, the convert made a clean break with 114 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. his past. As a consequence, those causes of the soul or the universal man, which the men of deep heart and high reason from Socrates down had been plead- ing, were now carried up to a court wherein they were sure of a much fuller and fairer hearing. One result was that the ground was cleared for a fierce attack on the positive. The theory of the' social contract is of such vital importance in the growth of modern political ideas that it will stand another reference. In historical extent it goes back as far as modern political theory goes ; for it was either implicit or half-explicit in the scholastics of the thirteenth century, and wholly explicit from 1 500 to 1800. As to its intrinsic meaning, it is a necessary fiction. According to Aristotle, that which is last to appear in the analysis is deepest in nature. When a new thought takes possession of the mind, it masters the imagination, and to do that, it must have asserted its dignity in terms of time. Being the deepest thing, it must have been prior to all other things. The tendency to put what is dearest to the heart first in time is well-nigh irresistible, even to men who have begun to make use of the concept of evolution, while by men who have not discovered or utilized that con- cept the tendency is not to be withstood. The theory of contract is, then, an inevitable fiction, translating into fact an inevitable idea, as Plato translated such ideas into myths. The idea is the right of the pres- ent to freely criticise all the precedents of govern- ment which the past hands down. It is the death of the illusion of divineness that clothed and veiled the social structure within which the individual finds iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 115 himself, so that it stands out in clear day as some- thing made through men, for men; and so, to be altered by man, when his interests demand a change. The theory of the social contract projected this right to criticise the whole social order into the re- motest past, in order to dignify it. The right to criticise is inseparable from the power to create. It was imagined therefore that men had consciously created government and society. Hence they could deliberately and with authority undo them, in order to make a way for better forms. Sir Henry Maine gives Roman law as the chief cause of the theory. 23 This however is to make a whole out of a part. Roman law furnished all the terminology and a con- siderable portion of the experience that went into it. But feudalism is another main element in the total cause. And still another is the separation of the Church and the State, with the monastic organization of the spiritual life in which the Church finally brought up. The working reason and the quickened conscience of the Mediterranean world, standing within the Church and looking out and back at the life they had abandoned, necessarily took up a questioning, even when it was not a wholly depreciatory attitude towards the traditional order of things. The Fathers preached the duty of obedience to the Emperor and did it with perfect honesty. They abounded in loyal comment on St. Paul's words " The powers that be are ordained of God " (Rom. xiii. i). Yet in spite of themselves their acceptance of Christianity threw suspicion on the title-deeds of the whole governing order. Nothing remains divine in the, eyes of men when they can see its limits. The meadow that Il6 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. slopes to the sea confesses its parochial mind. The Fathers saw what was for them the whole heart of things standing quite aloof from all political forms, and speaking through sacraments and sacramental relations that had not the slightest direct connection with the State. Necessarily the whole political order largely lost its divineness ; ceased to be mysterious and infinite ; no longer conveyed or interpreted the highest things. In effect it fell from the level of the natural to the level of the positive. J It is in keeping with the characteristics of the Latin Fathers that we should have to turn to them rather than to the Greek Fathers, in order to find the Christian development of the idea of Natural Law. Because they were Latins, consequently less speculative, they kept closer to the ground. They were nearer the questions that drew the attention of men of affairs. Now, Tertullian, Lactantius, and Ambrose practically agree that there is no real law but Natural Law. Thus Lactantius says : " Humanity is to be preserved if we wish rightly to be called men. But what else is this preservation of humanity than the loving a man because he is a man? " And then, falling upon Cicero because in his De Officiis he does not give full play to humanity, he says : " This professor of wisdom plainly keeps men back from acts of kindness and advises them carefully to guard their property, and to preserve their money-chest, rather than to follow justice. ... If Cicero were now alive, I should certainly exclaim : Here, here, Marcus Tullius, you have erred from true justice; and you have taken it away by one word, since you meas- ured the offices of piety and humanity by utility." M iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 117 The law of love is alone according to Nature. The likeness between Lactantius' book and Cicero's De Officiis is very striking. But the light of similarity makes the unlikeness even more striking. Cicero was a practical statesman, as well as a theorist. Hence, while, as a theorist, he believed in Natural Law alone, and, consequently, in absolute justice, in practice he concedes broad ground to utility. So his views are stratified, not of one piece, and such strati- fication is apt to be found in every statesman who is in some measure speculative. The ideas are allowed to use their wings, yet never to soar beyond reach of the falconer's voice. But there are no strata in Lac- tantius. Like the political reasoners of the French Revolution, he cuts his constitution out of whole cloth. Absolute justice shuts out utility. Natural Law is the only law. The Greek and the Latin word for Righteousness were both exposed to an ambiguity from which our word is free. They included the social and political along with the individual righteousness. There was the same ambiguity or if the expression is pre- ferred largeness of meaning in the Old Testament conception of righteousness. In the New Testament, also, while the personal in its distinction from the legal and social got its full rights, yet, by reason of the central position taken by the idea of the Kingdom of God, the individual righteousness is not separated from the social, as it is with us. The result of the am- biguity is plainly seen in the Latin Fathers. Right- eousness before God and rectitude, legal rectitude in all social relations, are lumped together. ,For example, Tertullian, arguing for the identity between the God of Il8 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. creation and the God of the New Testament, empha- sizes the continuity between the Law of Nature and the Gospel. 25 Since he lacked the assistance of the idea of evolution which enables us to reverence the past, without either making it a dumping-ground for our opinions or sacrificing to it our own individu- ality, it is easy to guess how far he would go in read- ing back the Sermon on the Mount into the so-called Law of Nature, and how little standing-ground would be left for the so-called positive law. Lactantius says that while Justice includes all vir- tues at once, there are two chief virtues that cannot be kept away from it, piety and equity. 26 This would find its parallel in the thought of a lawyer of our day who should resolve all law into equity and then identify equity with the New Testament code of ethics. In the light of such theory it is not surpris- ing that the main color of most of the state laws that came within the ken of Lactantius was deep black. Ambrose says : "The foundation of Justice is faith. . . . Christ is the object of faith to all. The Church is as it were the outward form of justice, she is the com- mon right of all." 27 The Church the common right of all. Striking and pregnant do those words appear, when we consider that the Church is to become inde- pendent of the State, and that the text for all high theory is the Bible. Finally Eusebius clearly shows how Christian apolo- getic had to argue in its plea for the divine origin of Christianity. His argument in substance is that the religion of the New Testament is as old as creation : and that Christianity is identical with Natural Law. 28 According to all, the sole authority for the Law of iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 119 Nature is the omnipotent will of God, and that ap- pears to shut out all thought of compromise so far as theory is concerned. At this point we can see clearly the result of the union between the Biblical idea of God, and the contemporary ideal of Natural Law. The vague Stoic phrase, "life according to Nature," became perfectly definite. The Stoics had no text-book for society. Homer made a very poor Bible for a Puritan, even after allegory had done its best to provide exegetical rose-water. But the Chris- tianized Latin had a clear, complete, and sufficient Bible, with an authoritative cosmology and a noble outline of history running back to the very beginning of things. Whether the cosmology was scientific, whether the history was authentic, is not in evidence. There was an impassioned belief that such was the case, and it is the belief alone that is before us. It must be said again that the mass of men are moved to noble issues more by splendid pictures than by clear arguments. The poetic imagination has done far more for the average will than the philosophic reason. It must be granted, then, that the fact that the Bible provided the imagination with a straight and well-kept highway back to the very day of crea- tion is a fact of great weight in our study of the connection between the Graeco-Roman conception of Natural Law and Christianity. The Puritan in the Christianized Latin had a vast advantage over the Puritan in the Stoic. He could and did make a clean sweep of the positive, the accidental, the half- and-half thoughts of all kinds. Only the natural remained. Tatian furnishes us with a fine illustration of the 120 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. radicalism that might result. He carried cosmopoli- tanism to the full length of its principle. Because there is one God, there must be one polity. There can be no multiplicity of rulers. No more can there be differences in the standards of training. Educa- tion must be absolutely universal, and the same in kind for all men. There must not even be any dis- tinction of sexes, and women must study philosophy. 29 Few indeed went so far as this. And one swallow does not make a summer. Yet one robin prophe- sies a spring. We are not taking a census, but study- ing the logic of systems. Tatian's radicalism is the logical carrying out of the alliance between the abso- lute monarchy of God, as it is in the Bible, and the Stoic doctrine of Nature. So the fact that he stands practically alone does not impair his significance. It is true that the object upon which the criticism of the Fathers falls is political and social life. The Church is divine and unchangeable. They do not train their battering-ram upon their own walls. It is also true that their criticism of the political and social order is mostly at long range. The Church was rapidly moving towards a monastic view of life ; and theories about the political and social order by men who stand outside it are apt to strike with the force of a spent ball. But the soul that is now re- treating from the State may some day return, and bring these theories with it. The outstanding individual, the definition of the universal man sought for by antiquity, finds classic expression in Tertullian's appeal to the Soul that is by nature Christian. His words carry greater weight if we keep in mind the fact that they have a strong iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 12 1 family likeness to the Stoic appeal to the common consciousness. He says : " I call in a new testimony, yea, one which is better known than all literature, more discussed than all doctrine, more public than all publications, greater than the whole man I mean all that is man's. Stand forth, O Soul. ... I call thee not as when fashioned in libraries, fed in Attic academies and porticoes, thou belchest wisdom. I address thee simple, rude, uncultured, and untaught, such as they have thee who have thee only : that very thing of the road, the street, the workshop." * After remarking that Tertullian, like many another man with a talent for adjectives, sometimes mistook a handful of mud for an argument, hence the word "belchest," it is to be observed, first, that the words, " greater than the whole man, I mean all that is man's," describe man in his essence, apart from all his belongings. On the one hand the reference is to the elemental man, all the inherited differences of place and prerogative being stripped off. In trifles men differ, in essence they are one. On the other hand the reference is to the potential man hidden within every man and waiting for the summoning cry of faith to come forth. In the second place the words, " as they have thee who have thee only : that very thing of the road, the street, the workshop," give expression to the Christian feeling that the riches of God are hidden in the com- mon man. Here must the spirit of history dig to find her fortune ; for if she does not find it here, she shall find it nowhere. The possibility of full likeness to God is stored up in the man of the road and the workshop. Philosophy had a doctrine very like this in principle, 122 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. the doctrine concerning the microcosm, man being accounted as the universe writ small. But the doctrine could not compare, in scope and driving power, with the Christian teaching concerning man as made in the image of God. The latter recognized none of the dis- tinctions that loomed so large before the eyes of phi- losophy, and sought, in the most aggressive way, to make its doctrine the small change of debate. On this subject Tertullian is representative. All the apologetes worked the same vein. Adversaries like Celsus reproached them for trying to make free spirits out of common clay. To entrust the deepest secrets of the faith, the inmost mysteries of divine knowledge, to carpenters, slaves, and swineherds, was like trying to shut up the blessed sun in a kitchen. But the apologetes gloried in their philosophical shame. Tertullian says : " There is not a Christian workman but finds out God, and manifests Him . . . though Plato affirms that it is far from easy to discover the maker of the universe ; and when He is found, it is difficult to make Him known to all." 31 The lowest men were believed to be capable of entering into the highest things. Compare the feeling of Plato in the passage from the Timceus just quoted by Tertullian. Compare also the Stoics. Their undeniable likeness in respect of ethics to the Christians serves to bring out more clearly the contrast. They were, at best, half-hearted in their estimate of the common man. The Christians were whole-hearted. The common man, the unit of measure for the Catholic Church, was given full suffrage in the Kingdom of God. Surely, universal suffrage in things divine must eventually have a bearing upon suffrage in things iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 123 human. However otherworldly any set of ideals may be, in the long run that which is highest in thought must turn out to be deepest in being. The ideal must become actual and the rational real, under pain of losing their rational and ideal character. In times of crisis, there are lifted up above the level of contemporary politics conceptions which it is the task of centuries to carry out. So was it with that great crisis in the world's history which ended with the estab- lishment of Christianity. The conception of the ele- mental man, as carrying his own value within himself, because in covenant with the Eternal, looked out over society and the State, with prophecy of a far future. The elemental man has his worth assessed in terms of indestructible being and is endowed with immor- tality. It is not an immortality like that of Homer, where there is something like immutability of func- tion, almost a "moral stratification of persons," the servant on this side death continuing as servant on the other; where also the total gain of life on the other side is so slight that it does not command the imagination. Nor is the doctrine like that in Egypt, where life on the other side has high color and yet retains the aristocratic caste, since the King alone is the Son of the great God. Nor, again, is the belief like that of India, where the doctrine of transmigra- tion, by bringing the animal and the visible too close to the ethical, makes it very difficult for the latter to be disentangled. Nor, finally, is it like the primitive belief in immortality, as it still holds in China, the individual as such having no worth of his own but going to swell the dignity of the family. The Christian doctrine gives perfect equality in death. 124 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Amongst the multitude of inscriptions from the cata- combs not one has yet been found that records the burial of a slave or a freedman, although beyond doubt a large part of those whose bodies were buried there belonged to one or the other of those classes. The Christian slave was buried not as a slave, but as a man. Besides, the individual as an individual is endowed with immortality. He belongs to nobody but himself and God. And this entire right over himself, ex- pressed in the language that has most effect upon the average imagination, in terms of everlasting- ness, along with the perfect equality that wipes out all differences between class and class, makes the Christian belief in immortality cognate to ethical monotheism, in its influence upon social structure. Monotheism puts the world in the service of God. Immortality makes the common man indispensable to God. The handworker, being immortal, is quite as immortal as the man with a hundred grandfathers. So far as the prerogatives of life on the other side are concerned, he stands level with the Emperor. This feeling comes out nobly in words like Tertul- lian's : " The thing we must not do to an emperor, we must not do any one else." This suggests that the estate of the laborer, bestowed on him by the dogma of immortality, is not wholly in Spain. And the suggestion is turned into a demonstration by the administration of the Christian sacraments. Baptism was one and the same for all men. It was the pledge of spiritual equality. 33 The Lord's Supper provided one bread for all. The two sacraments together published to the world daily the belief that in the presence of the absolute good, the things that sepa- iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 125 rate the privileged and the unprivileged man are as nothing. Of a piece with the doctrine of immortality in its effect on the dignity of the common man was the doctrine of Providence. Here, again, the Christian doctrine was like the Stoic; but the unlikeness was far more fundamental than the likeness. The Stoic doctrine halted and hesitated. The Christian doc- trine was unfaltering and tireless. It was thought that a personal Providence watched over the doings and happenings of the humblest soul. That he should be guilty of the smallest sin, or that the slightest evil should befall him, was accounted matter of serious import to the Almighty. It was as if the highway of the universe were made to run through the heart of humanity, and, consequently, all the resources of the universe spent to keep the road in repair. Taine expresses wonderment that the English and Ameri- cans could so interest themselves in a book like The Wide, Wide World, the story of what went on in a young girl's heart, drawn out through three vol- umes. The explanation of it is the Christian doctrine of Providence in its Protestant form. The whole effect of the doctrine in general was to make Chris- tians of every degree take themselves with profound seriousness. Here was a striking contrast with the heathenism of the Empire. The dignity of the inner life of the lowly was asserted with incomparably greater authority and power of appeal. When the Church conquered the Empire, the citi- zen had gone off the stage of the higher life. The man had come ; not man in terms of the terrestrial order, although some day he may re-enter that order, 126 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. carrying with him the spiritual capital for wider and deeper relationships. This is the answer to one of the demands that antiquity made upon the Church. The elemental man is clearly conceived and explicitly stated. The other demand was a sufficient driving power to force the definition down, in theory, through the low- est stratum of society. The answer to this demand was a jealous, aggressive religion, rapidly building up a vast system of dogma on the basis of infallibility, and brooking no rivals. Heathenism was tolerant. There was always room for one more God in the Pan- theon. This easy-going tolerance might, from some points of view, be accounted a virtue. But so far as our subject is concerned it simply meant the lack of leverage. Good-natured syncretism and elastic eclec- ticism are always the front door of scepticism. They go along with a lack of clear dogma concerning the un- seen foundation of experience, and with a woful want of certitude and positive conviction. Only a reli- gion possessing entire certitude and claiming absolute verity could answer the second demand of antiq- uity. And in this connection it is worthy of remark that the religion of the Bible was the first to make dogmatic instruction an essential part of religion. Primitive religion never dreamed of such a thing. Its whole capital was ritual. But mono- theism, by deepening and clarifying self-conciousness and by rooting individuality in God, makes dogma more important than ritual. Hence the growth of the catechism in the Jewish and Christian churches. And hence the educational significance, for the masses of the people, of the unitary idea of God. iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 127 The two answers taken together gave a great lift to the market value of the common man. This shows itself in the new value set on human life. The exposure of children and abortion were common heathen practices. The Church treated them both as murder. Suicide was invested with romantic in- terest. Socrates had condemned it on the ground of loyalty to Athens. But patriotism as a motive had lost well-nigh all its power. The Empire found noth- ing to put in its place. The Church however re- placed it with the infinite worth of humanity as made in the image of the Eternal. Suicide was accounted a deadly sin. To overcome the romantic charm with which it had been clothed, it was treated as if worse than murder. The use of the Burial Service was forbidden. Consecrated ground refused entrance to the suicide's body; and eventually the canon law and afterwards the civil law commanded that the body, a stake having been driven through the breast, should be buried at the place where roads met, in order that every common thing might walk over it. Again, the Church set her face like a flint against the gladiatorial games. It was to the credit of Greece that they never won favor in that part of the Empire. Yet no public voice condemned them. Cicero, Seneca, might dislike them, but even they and their peers never spoke out. And there was no public opinion whatever against them. But Athen- agoras expressed the common Christian feeling when he said : " To see a man put to death is much the same as killing him." 34 The very moment the Church had power, the games were put an end to. Reverence for humanity was to be the supreme law. 128 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. In this way is completed that definition of the uni- versal individual on which antiquity had been labor- ing. A man is moralized when the highest existing organism of terrestrial life recognizes itself in him. The Catholic Church, looming above the State, was the highest organization of ideal life. And the Church, or, better, the ideal humanity speaking through her, saw its total self in the slave at work in the fields; yea, even in the unborn babe within the womb of the slave woman. Nor is this mere theory; for it rapidly passed into discipline and canon law, and canon law was to have a profound influence upon the law of modern States. This reverence for humanity has, therefore, the same importance in the history of the idea of society, that the scientific dis- covery of the infinitely little has in the history of thought. If Plato were thinking out his thoughts to-day, his ideal would be deeply affected by the microscope; because the microscope has widened the range of idealism, by increasing for the mind the capacity of phenomena to contain and carry the supreme idea, law. In precisely the same way did the discovery of essential humanity in the unborn babe of a slave woman so that abortion on the lowest level of society was considered a deadly sin mean great things for the idea of society, seeing that wherever humanity is discovered, thither must the social law ultimately extend itself. A practical ex- ample is found in the history of Factory Legislation in the nineteenth century. The mainspring of the whole movement has been not the economic but the humanitarian motive. So, new rights of labor were wrapped up in that reverence for humanity which iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 129 Christianity made part and parcel of higher Euro- pean feeling. y- The highest, the common good is individuality. We are considering the contributions of antiquity to the campaign for the enlargement of the area of that common good. Greece and Rome made great gains for the cause. The Church separated from the State, and housing the outstanding individual, capitalized the gains of Greece and Rome while indefinitely in- creasing them by means of an aggressive monothe- ism. And although the separation of the Church from the State drew the conscience out of society, yet the Church was never so monasticized that she did not keep one foot firmly planted in the world. There- fore the gift of the Church to the cause of labor, its universalistic conception of humanity, was not bought by bare negation. Windelband says well : " It is the essence of the Christian conception of the world that it regards the Person and the relations of Persons as the essence of reality." 35 It is this deep sense of the solid reality of the human individual that equipped the Church for the work of shaping the raw mate- rials of modernity, and assisting at the birth of great States. Here, once more, the parallel with that other great religion of redemption, Buddhism, is instruc- tive. Buddhism fully rivals Christianity in the nurt- ure of the gentler virtues. But the price it pays for power in this direction is a heavy one, no less than the loss of capacity for state-building. This is one of the reasons, if not the main reason, for the failure of Buddhism in its birthplace. It is indeed true that there was no great enduring empire in India, like Rome, to crush out tribal distinctions, 130 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. along with the castes built upon them, and so build a road that should afford easy progress to the Bud- dhist doctrine of equality. But another and deeper reason lies in the nature of Buddhism itself. Its doctrine of equality has its root in pessimism and il- lusionism, in the belief that all phenomena, the social and political order included, are unreality, are noth- ing. But it is plain that no State was ever founded, or can be perpetuated by such a doctrine. The Aryans who conquered the Punjaub had the Homeric pride of race. The Anglo-Saxons, wherever they have gone on their mission of conquest, have carried the same spirit, often brutal but always masterful. It shows its brutality in the Englishman who calls a Hindoo gentleman " nigger," and in the American frontiersman who accounts the dead Indian the only good one. The story of its masterfulness, on the other hand, is written all over the world. Now the Hindoo caste system had at least this merit, that it kept alive the feeling of self-respect and dignity, and so trained men who could mightily endure, long after they had lost the art of conquering. States are born not of the sense of nothingness but of the sense of worth. The conquest of conscience is not enough. The earth also must be conquered. The mystical and brooding reason gives the peace of the inner life. But the Pax Romana, the ordered, growing life of law, can alone give that steady self-possession of society which is the escape from barbarism. The ecstasies of contemplation are dearly bought, if they undo the working and governing will. No doctrine of equality that is built on pessimism can assist in the birth and breeding of free States. iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 131 A religion that is to play the part persistently and well, and so help steer the fortunes of our race towards the democratic ideal, must reach the doctrine of equality not by levelling down, but by levelling up. It must retain the solid sense of worth and personal dignity, that has distinguished every effi- cient race, and at the same time put the ground of pride under the feet of the man at the bottom. Christianity does this thoroughly in idea, and always more or less in practice. By the conception of God as Personal, as a Holy Will, aggressive, creating, and dominating, it makes out-and-out quietism on any great scale impossible. Where the prime thought is not man's search for God, but God's search for man, the ascetic ideal cannot go the full length of its rope ; since it follows from that thought that God can and does come out of Himself and draws near to the practical man, the man whose pith is will rather than meditation. In His office of Great Companion He is not shut up with the monk in his cell, but is inti- mate with the peasant. And since the central ele- ment in the conception of God is forthgoing and redeeming will, there is no question but it must become sooner or later the central element in the conception of man. Monastic mysticism can play a noble preparatory part in Christianity ; but, until the Bible is destroyed, it cannot become an all-organizing principle. The Biblical idea of God and man creates a sense of individuality deeper and more persistent than that of Homer's heroes, and at the same time puts the standing-ground of pride under the feet of the down- most. It accomplishes this through its doctrine of 132 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. sin and grace. That the consciousness of sin is a great leveller, witness its growth in the early days of the Empire and its connection with cosmopolitan- ism of the Stoical type, and with the deepening sense of equality in essential things. It is impossible to read Epictetus without seeing that the two were in organic relation. Of course what we call the sense of sin may be a very mixed affair. External mis- fortunes, personal failure, a succession of bad crops, may make their contribution to it. That however is not our concern ; for we are dealing with its effects, not its causes. And there can be no question that the growth of the consciousness of sin in the Empire betokened the undermining of the ancient aristocra- cies. The Manual of Epictetus, the Enchiridion of Seneca, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, justify the opinion. They all agree that for all men, the beginning of wisdom is the profound sense of one's weakness and faultiness. And upon that ground there is no distinction of persons. An amusing illustration of the anti-aristocratic bent of the sense of sin occurs in the life of Lady Huntington. The Duchess of Buckingham attended her chapel at Bath. Afterwards, feeling that she had been entrapped into doing an indecent thing, she wrote to Lady Huntington, to express her horror that she should associate her high birth with Tom, Dick, and Harry in groanings over sin. " It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as the common wretches that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good breeding." A iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 133 serious illustration is found in a recent book by Nietzsche upon the genealogy of the moral sense. He argues that the source of the sin-consciousness is in the powerlessness and resentment of the worth- less and inefficient. The weak majority thus en- deavor to undermine the power of the efficient and successful minority. 36 The sense of sin is an implicit defence of the rights of the weak. The Stoics did not however succeed in driving the sense of sin deep down. Both the Greek and the Roman were proud of their virtue. Seneca affirms that in one thing the wise man outdoes God Himself, for while God owes it to His nature that He fears nothing, the wise man owes it solely to himself. 37 " We justly boast," says Cicero, " of our own virtue, which we could not do if we derived it from the Deity and not from ourselves." M The Stoics wrote often concerning the proper frame of mind in which to face death. But in their thoughts " repentance for past sin had absolutely no place." 39 The thought of sin, pressed home, is an attack upon the aristocratic principle. And Christianity presses it home. The emphasis on sin was one of the things that distinguished Israel amongst the peoples of antiquity. The New Testament, inheriting this emphasis, greatly increased it. The whole body of ideas contained in it centres in the death of Christ and its relation to sin. And so, when the higher life of the Empire went into the Church, its own feeling of sin was intensified. The monotheistic idea dug a single channel for it to flow in. The Person of Christ made the channel yet deeper. - To be truly a Christian was to know in one's heart that, whatever 134 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. one's inheritance from an aristocracy whether of birth or culture, one did not win thereby the least footing before God. It may seem like a joke to say that the doctrine of the Fall enriched humanity. But it is sober fact. Dogberry desires the complete description of his con- dition to contain the important item that he is " a fel- low that hath had losses." Dogberry's word is not sterling in philosophy, yet this remark is weighty. The memory of former high estate is more enriching than a comfortable living well in hand. The past is secure. It is also a free field for the idealizing forces of our nature to work upon. The Christian dogma of the Fall made the common humanity rich, because it declared that a splendid estate of God-likeness and spiritual equality between the lowest man and the highest had once been held in fee by every man. Its full significance becomes more apparent, if we com- pare it with the doctrine that took its place in the philosophy of religion outside Christianity. In every case, it was dualism. Wherever in antiquity men outside the Bible thought deeply and long about the interests of the inner life, one or another form of dualism resulted. Now dualism, in relation to the history of the so- cial question, involves two things. First, it means that the world in time and space is not wholly mate- rial for the redeeming will and can never become such, a larger or smaller part of it being given over to the enemy. At this point the doctrine of the Fall is in radical opposition to dualism, because it declares that the viciousness which seems to be ingrained in the constitution of society is due in no degree to the in- TV GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 135 herent nature of matter itself, but has resulted from acts of human will. What the will has done, the will not man's will, but God's can undo. Secondly, dualism means that man can be saved only by aban- doning some part of his equipment. The part aban- doned is sure to be the body. Hence dualism draws after it a more or less complete abandonment of the citizen's life to the powers of evil. The dogma of the Fall sets itself against dualism at this point also. For when logically taken, it declares the whole of man's nature to be in the same bad plight. There is no part of him that is immaculate, while his body plays scapegoat. His total self is flawed from top to bottom. The dogma of the Fall is in harmony with the con- ception of God as Will, and helps to make possible a monistic anthropology. That we men of the evo- lutionary creed can express this without the aid of the dogma is not, for present purposes, to be either affirmed or denied. It is certainly possible that we may be expecting too much of the evolutionary view ; and it is even probable that when the first flush of our youthful enthusiasm has cooled, some of our old foes may return to the assault. But whether this is so or not, it remains certain that, the mental and historical conditions being what they were, the dogma of the Fall was much superior, for sociologic development, to any and every form of dualism. If it be a myth, it is a myth created by the Biblical estimate of humanity's capacity for future perfection set against the dark background of what man now is. And let it be remembered that to the Biblical estimate of humanity aristocratic and inherited distinctions are 136 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. trifles lighter than air. So the dogma of the Fall is social universalism on its night side. The doctrine of the Fall connects with the doctrine of Grace, as man's necessity connects with God's opportunity. The Christian is never born a Christian, but always made one. In the Old Testament God is not related to Israel as the God of the primitive tribe was related to the tribe. He is not bound by a tie of nature, but all depends on His own free choice. Israel is therefore historically a sort of creation out of nothing. Hence the ground of natural pride is cut from under man's feet. And in the New Testa- ment the root of all heresy is to suppose that one has any merit of his own (i Cor. iv. 6). Humility is not so much a virtue as the vital breath of all virtues. The single ground of pride is God. But when the Christian finds himself in God, he finds his lowliest neighbor alongside him. He himself is an indi- vidual and counts for one in his own sight by reason of Christ's handiwork and that alone. He is false to Christ, denying the unity and monarchy of God, unless he believes that, so far as natural equipment goes, so far as all that he inherits from ancestry is concerned, the lowliest human being has as good a claim as he upon God, the same right to individuality. The radical sense of sin that Christianity brought into Europe is consequently a great achievement. It is such for the individual. No man of our breed and culture can possibly look upon his own life with the self-satisfaction natural to the Greek and Roman. For, thanks to Christianity, it has become almost an instinct with us to measure ourselves not by ourselves, iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 137 and not by our neighbors, but by God, by the infinite good. 40 It is such for the history of society. What is bred in the bone of the individual must eventually show itself in the blood of society. Here also there will appear some day the same passion for compar- ing one's self with the perfect. The doctrine of sin is cognate to the Biblical conception of the Kingdom of God. The aristocratic view of life was in principle un- dermined. No form of dualism can accomplish that work ; for while it may achieve a doctrine of equality, the price paid is that the civic world, the laborer's world, loses its sacredness. And since that world must be continued in existence, to the end that the wild beasts may not eat up the saint, or the food- supply fail, before his process of self-mortification is happily completed, the result is sure to be that sanctity becomes a specialty ; so that the political and social order lacks the direct service of the best men and women. But the consistent Christian view un- dermines the aristocratic principle not by degrading history, but by exalting the capacity and work of the common humanity. The patristic view was very far indeed from being the consistent Christian view. Yet it successfully naturalized in the Occident the thoroughly Christian conception of individuality as being the pith and marrow of reality. No theory of illusion weakens it. It is stanch and solid. The whole nature of God guarantees it. And the nature of any one man, no matter how low his social stand- ing, was by the Church's creed just as rich in the possibilities of eternal individuality as the nature of any other man, no matter how high his standing. The 138 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. presence of an immortal " soul " in every man gave him in theory a transcendent value. The theory did not stay in the air. That it had power to move the will and mould institutions, the Church's system of charities plainly proves ; for the system had its root in this new estimate of the spirit- ual capacity of the common man. Not in the bulk of Christian charities during the first four centuries and not in their novelty is found the key to their connec- tion with the history of the social question. Judaism after the Exile did the pioneer work in this as in many other matters. Jewish and Christian charities grow out of one principle and are therefore parts of one story. The contrast is with the heathen world. In the Empire the long prevalence of peace and the banishment of war to far-distant frontiers gave neighborliness a chance to develop. Private gener- osity did some notable things; and it was far out- done by imperial paternalism. The political situation at Rome forced on the authorities, almost at the point of the sword, the conviction that it was the duty of the State to see to it somehow that its citizens got a living. The nobler emperors spent money freely and often wisely in behalf of their people. The picture of Trajan amongst the orphan children he had taken care of shows how greatly tenderness and sympathy had deepened. It is true that even in bulk the im- perial largess was outdone by the private generosity of Christians ; for in the records of the Church there are many instances of men and women giving the whole of large fortunes to schools, orphanages, and hospitals. And when the census of all the work done by the Church in this quarter during the first four iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 139 centuries is taken, the work of the Empire both private and official is put wholly in the shade. Yet it is not by their bulk so much as by their prin- ciple that the Christian charities make a great figure in the history of the social idea. The imperial lar- gess went to the well-born, or at least to the middle class in a word, to citizens. Their root was not a consistent humanitarianism, but was largely political, the aim being to stave off the decay of the citizen class. 41 The Christian foundations and endowments on the contrary looked to all mankind. The only hospitals the Empire knew were for the benefit of soldiers or the slaves of rich landowners. 42 Christian hospitals were for all classes and all nations. The difference of principle comes out strikingly in the contrast between the Christian and the heathen clubs. The latter were mutual insurance societies of a social nature. The former were designed for the same end, but they always gave alms to the poor. This indicates that giving to the poor is a constitu- tional element in the Christian view of the world. And this is frankly expressed in the liturgy, the offertory for the poor becoming an integral part of the Eucharistic service. Gifts to the poor thus became for the first time an organic part of the high- est worship. The cause of the poor was symboli- cally laid on the altar. And this for the reason that the idea of God was inseparable from the ideal of man. The principle out of which charities grew was reverence for humanity at large, humanity as it is in God. Charity, when it became a popular habit, was undoubtedly vulgarized. A common phrase in wills and deeds of a later day conveying property to 140 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Church uses was " for the healing of my soul." It was thought that alms extinguished the flames of hell. "As water puts out fire, so alms put out sins," was a common text for sermons. Beyond question this was utilitarianism of a vulgar kind, and all the worse because enthroned as theology. That fact however has no bearing. The movement of the Church towards charities is not thereby robbed of a particle of its significance for our subject. An American millionaire builds a library for his native town. Possibly he is impelled by a desire to give his pride and name a wide airing. None the less, the fact that he spends his money in this way, rather than in raising a high stone wall about his estate, is symptomatic of a certain public opinion, and above all, of a deep popular desire for the means of educa- tion. Even so, the significant thing for us is not that a larger or smaller part of the money that went into charities was given in order that men might escape from hell, but that this particular method of insur- ance against damnation was considered effective. Homer's men sacrificed hecatombs to please the gods. The rich men of the Empire, who passed over to Christianity, gave their goods to feed the poor, in order to be saved. It demonstrates as clear as day that the poor and lowly have acquired a new and potent claim on the interest and attention of the world. They are an altar on which Christians lay their sacrifices. Money given to and for the poor was thought to have atoning power for sin, because the poor were supposed to be of very high price in the estimate of God. The key to that splendid outburst of enthu- iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 141 siasm, that almost fanatical almsgiving, is reverence for the universal humanity. The churchmen who inspired and guided the movement believed that in giving to the lowly, they were giving to the Christ. Chrysostom cries out: "O madness. The Christ comes to thee in the dress of the poor, and you do not touch Him." 43 Once more, commenting on Christ's words, " I was an hungered," he says ; " he who comes to thee (hidden in the poor) is a friend, being at the same time friend and benefactor and lord." 44 He and all others who led the common folk felt about themselves and in effect spoke about themselves, as the sculptor feels, who stands before a rough block of marble that conceals within it the possibility of a noble statue. Each deed of service brought the hidden divine beauty nearer the light. In that "love of the unlovely," which led highbred women to do the roughest sort of kitchen and table work, while ministering to beggars, with the enthu- siasm of a girl going to her first ball ; and which sent men of noble birth to make themselves literally the servants of servants, with the fire of soldiers going upon the charge one thing and one thing alone can be seen, the conviction that humanity, wherever found, has an infinite value. The zeal for charities ran into all sorts of reckless giving. Chrysostom speaks for well-nigh everybody when he says that " almsgiving is the first of trades." 45 Augustine declares that "the rich man has nothing from his riches but what the poor man begs from him." 46 Hermas compares the rich to posts on which vines lean : the rich' themselves bear no fruit, but by supporting the vines (i.e. the 142 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. poor) they share in the efficiency of their prayers. 47 Isidore commends giving even to one whom the giver knows to be a pretender and a liar. 48 Ambrose was sober-minded and cautious. But there were not many who kept their heads as well as he did. Both the worker in Associated Charities and the labor leader of our day would vehemently fault the doctrine of almsgiving held by nearly the whole body of the Fathers : the former because it debauches the man- hood of the poor ; and the latter because he wants not alms but justice. Without spending time either in defence or accu- sation of the Fathers, it may be dogmatically affirmed that both sorts of critics, if they went a little deeper, would be surprised, seeing that what the labor leader demands "justice, not charity" is precisely what the Fathers as a whole think they are giving. They preach charity as a matter of justice. Tithes, when first imposed, were meant to be mainly for the sup- port of the poor. 49 All property vested in God. Therefore, the tithe was the acknowledgment of His title, His own property being returned to Him through the hands of the poor. Hence, the tithe was a matter of bare justice. The whole estate of the Church was looked on as the poor man's estate, and this idea did not lose its force until the feudal system came in. 60 Gregory the Great says flatly that the Christian who gives to the poor must not flatter himself that it is an act of compassion on his part; for it is bare justice, because the goods received from a common Lord ought to be enjoyed in common. 51 This is substantially the feeling of Lactantius, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Augustine, and, iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 143 so far as I know, of all the Fathers who expressed an opinion on or near the subject. The continuity of feeling from the Fathers down may be proved. Bourdaloue in modern times ex- pressed the patristic feeling admirably when he said : " The man who gives an alms is not liberal ; he is pay- ing a debt ; 'tis the legitimate property of the poor which the giver cannot refuse without injustice." 52 It is plain that these ideas of the Fathers were not meant to be ornaments. Through the unbroken succession of monastic teachers and preachers they entered largely into the common stock. It is true that the Fathers were quite as zealous in affirming that the divine will ordained the perpetuity of pov- erty ; and that the poor man, to be a Christian, must respect the existing order of things. But when the dogma concerning the divine will, in its old sense, shall have lost its grip upon the lay will, when the duty of obedience shall have ceased to be the heart of virtue, the poor man may take a different road to the assertion of justice. Then, perhaps, the pious thoughts of the Fathers may become part of the powder for a revolution. It must however be steadily kept in mind that theories concerning property and poverty are in no sense the marrow of patristic thinking. Consequently, to call them Socialists would be a serious abuse of words. Their intention was to exalt the worth of the humanity they believed to be common to all sorts and conditions of men. The attention they gave to the economic side of things was purely incidental. Their view of life has importance for the history of the social question because it shows, first, that the 144 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. disinherited classes have now attracted the perma- nent attention of the world's picked men and women; and second, that since it was the outshining of the gospel that called attention into that quarter, the gospel itself gives guarantees that the interests of the Christian reason and conscience shall continue to be directed thither. The fortune of Christianity is in the long run to be made or marred by its ability to idealize the cause of the men of low estate. The form the idealization assumes must change. The task abides. There are typical acts in history, acts wherein desire and deed perfectly content each other, as idea and matter blend in a noble statue ; so that, forever after, men come up to them and look into them to behold the prophecy of the humanity that must be. Sidney's gift of water on the battle-field is such a deed. Lincoln, in the streets of Richmond just after Lee had abandoned it, and lifting his hat to the negroes crowding about him, wrought another; for his act represented America, and through him America showed reverence to those who were to become her citizens. But the greatest of all typical deeds was wrought by the Christ, when He washed the feet of His servants. By the terms of the creed He was both God and Man. So the Church was bound to see her whole career prefigured in His deed. He alone is Christlike who makes himself the min- ister and interpreter of the humanity that is unseen save by the eye of faith. In Plato's myth of Glaucus truth is portrayed as a sea-god, befouled by weeds and shells ; and the work of philosophy is to remove them, and let the god's beauty gladden the light. iv GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 145 According to Christianity, the possibility of highest manhood is pent up within the down-trodden and the brutalized. Unless that possibility is given a fair field for self-development, either in this world or the next or both, Christianity wholly misses its aim. DURING the fifth century the secular life of the West went into bankruptcy. The terrestrial order of things sank below the threshold of the higher con- sciousness. Three dates serve as convenient points for memory, the sack of Rome in 410, the second sack in 456, and the abdication of the last emperor in 476. Although the last event has more formal than real meaning, yet, taken with the other two, it stands for the departure of the State from the field of the spirit. In the palmy days of Greece and Rome the State was also a Church, the secular and ideal inter- ests of the race making a single cargo. Now the State has become unseaworthy, and the ideal interests are no longer entrusted to its care. The Catholic Church henceforth monopolizes them. The soul is an absentee from the world's politics. On the Christian side, and long before the fifth century, this had become a matter of course. The attitude of the Church towards the State had not, indeed, been conformed to a cast-iron rule, but^changed somewhat with the times. Thus, as Ramsay says, a new period began with Hadrian. The relations so sorely strained since the days of Nero eased up. Hadrian's evident desire to come to an understanding with the Christians was heartily appreciated. The 146 CHAP, v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 147 bishops, representing the statesmanship of the Church, stood on the platform of conciliation. 63 The main feeling of Christians, as represented by the bishops, permitted Christians to hold office and serve in the army. Hence Tertullian must not be taken as rep- resentative of the whole Church of his time, when he says, " Nothing is more foreign (to the Christian) than public affairs." So, too, we must discount the action of a Synod like the fiercely puritanizing one of Elvira, which ruled that whoever held the office of a duumvir must, during his period of office, keep away from church. For not only was Spain a pro- vincial diocese, but that action was taken in the heat of a violent persecution. And, of course, when Chris- tianity became the established religion of the Empire, the radical puritanism represented by Tertullian had no longer any real standing-ground. Nevertheless, after all this has been said, the proposition that the higher thought of the times, as embodied in the Church, did not take any serious account of the State in the West, remains substantially unimpaired. Enough is not yet said. Because the Church had been for four centuries always distinct from the State and opposed to it most of the time in matters of vital moment, because also the opposition was stated in elementary terms by reason of that fundamental enmity between monotheism and polytheism which caused the more rigid Christian to detect the stains of idolatry everywhere in the social and civic life, the attitude of the Christian reason and conscience towards public matters may be taken as not repre- senting the deepest mood of the Mediterranean world. But this suspicion is removed when we look to the 148 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP side of heathenism and find the same tendency. Since the days of Socrates it had been a stock subject for debate in the schools, whether the philosopher could stay in politics or must live as a private citizen. The Epicureans and Sceptics answered with an emphatic negative. The Stoics, by reason of their emphasis on law and their ideal of life according to Nature or in keeping with the whole of things, kept far closer to public interests. Yet even they found the footing slippery. Their cosmopolitanism was in some respects like the pretentious cosmopolitanism of our own day, a citizenship in everywhere, having a root in nowhere. Two things make plain the point towards which the undercurrents of feeling were moving. First, the fact that Stoic ethic was gradually sucked into the deepening religious current of the Empire, until in the third century it wholly ceased to be a philosophic ethic and became religion almost pure and simple. Philosophic ethic endeavors to find the saving unities of life within the bounds of this world. The first clear attempt at such an ethic had been made by the Greeks. Before their time ethic was either absorbed in religion, or was a mere collection of moral maxims, without any centre or organizing concept. Greek philosophy, beginning with Socrates, set itself to the task of working out a reasoned ethic. The resulting independence of religion had lasted in the schools for centuries. The Stoics, standing nearer the popu- lar consciousness than any other school, had never so completely separated ethic and religion. They had gone however a considerable distance. And now the attempt was wholly given up. No saving unity could be found except in religion, and seeing v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 149 that the visible world had by this time lost most of its sap, while the traditional religious forms were no better than ruins, there could be little question that the religion called for would look beyond this side of things. The other phenomenon is the Neoplatonic theory of reason. It ended in intellectual ecstasy. The forebod- ing of this appeared even in Aristotle, in the emphasis he lays on the contemplative as compared with the practical virtues. But in Aristotle the body of thought was soundly immanent, whereas the Neoplatonists, although they did their best to be true to Aristotle, well-nigh absorbed the seen into the unseen. True rational unity cannot be found in the sphere of ter- restrial experience. The scientific and even the sin- cerely philosophic reason cannot attain unto it. The only road is through a dialectic that is the asceticism of the mind. When Plotinus says, following Plato indeed, yet with much heavier emphasis, " The mind is the place of the body," M he spoke a word that, however deep its truth when rightly taken, if taken as he took it, rings the knell of scientific real- ism. If man must swoon into unity with the divine, then, plainly, the long struggle of the Greek mind to conciliate the One and the Many has ended with the triumph of the One. The Many are driven off the field. The manifold is swallowed up in the unity. In a word, the religion of the Empire had become, in the third century, a religion with both eyes on the other side of things. 55 And in the worship of the Emperor the Empire unconsciously confessed that the State must become a Church on a deeper reli- gious basis than the experience of Greece and Rome 150 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. provided, in order to insure the ideal goods of the Occident. The Mediterranean world was ripe for the Catholic Church. The intellectual life of that Church fused the Greek and the Biblical views of the universe. A book that appeared in the fifth century, the Pseudo-Dionysius. in some respects striking in itself but more striking because of its profound influence over the ecclesiasti- cal thought of the next one thousand years, stands for this fusion. Neoplatonism and Christianity are interknit. The dominating idea is the divine mon- archy. The cosmos finds its frame in Christ. But the Biblical doctrine concerning the Kingdom of God has gone far away from the centre. In its place is the immortality of the individual and his communion with the unseen. The story of his pilgrimage up through one sacramental stage after another is beau- tifully told. But the difference between this book and the Bible leaps at the eye. In the Bible, the line of vision runs along the earth, through history, to the second coming of the Christ, the consummation of history, the new heaven and the new earth. Here, on the contrary, the line of vision runs up away from the earth, through the sanctities of heaven, to a tran- scendent God. Now this book was synchronous with the departure of the State from the stage of the higher life. The connection goes deeper than chro- nology. The two facts not merely have the same date, they acknowledge a common root. We need not lament over the losses attending the fusion of the Greek and Biblical views, as if the one sacrificed thereby most of its beauty, and the other most of its moral leverage. The case is not so. v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 151 The aim of history, as seen in the light of modern Democracy, was a definition of the individual that should include the qualities of the common man, thereby entailing a new conception of society. To achieve this aim, the diverse and even conflicting elements of antiquity must be fused. The one thing most needed by the rough centuries following the fifth was an imperial working will. The Empire had once given the world such a will, but the Empire was dead. And besides, the new imperial will must be of another sort. Under the mental and spiritual con- dition of the time, it could not rest upon anything short of absolute dogmatic certitude. George Eliot, in the preface to Middlemarch, speaks of the " later-born Theresas " who " were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could per- form the function of knowledge for the ardently will- ing soul," who therefore "found for themselves no epic life, wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action." The words are profoundly true. There is a vast amount of emotional waste nowadays. Hosts of people whom Nature never de- signed for criticism and logical argument are driven to seek peace and strength along this road, and exhaust a large part of their feeling and of their capacity for stanch and simple character in paying the inevitable toll. Our comfort however is that the apparent waste is for the most part necessary waste, and consequently not waste at all. Ahead of us lies a higher type of social will in Church and State. Individuals must pay heavy taxes in order that such a will may come. Our conditions however are not unlike the early 152 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. mediaeval conditions merely as regards mental appa- ratus of every kind. We also differ fundamentally from them in this, that our task is less difficult. We do not have to create a society and a government. However serious the faults in the construction of contemporary society, the house we live in, it is a house, for all that. Now it is possible, when the house is built, when there are social and govern- mental forms that, spite of blundering, have a large measure of real efficiency, it is possible for many men, who cannot with justice be called triflers, to sit on cushions in the window-seats, reading, analyzing, speculating, doubting. But the proper work of the centuries from the fifth to the thirteenth, we must remember, was nothing less than to create a society, to hammer out new and efficient governmental forms. So great a task could not be coped with by men who criticised and doubted. The free play of mind around problems was largely surplusage, and as much out of place as leisure would have been behind that stone wall at Gettysburg, where the high tide of Southern gallantry stayed its course. The one spiritual need of the time was men of imperious certitude, of dominating and even tyrannical con- viction. To make such a certitude possible, the Greek and Biblical views of the world had to sacri- fice, each of them, important characteristics. A single world resulted. There were fatal flaws in its unity, which the Reformation and the Renaissance brought into glaring light. But the men of the early Middle Ages had no inkling of them. So far as they knew and felt, their world was of one piece, from top to bottom. V GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 153 The idea of God became transcendent. The visi- ble order seemed so narrow and mean that the things which men esteemed could not find befitting enter- tainment within it. The treasure of the world lay outside the world. To an immanent view of the universe the visible order has permanent value in itself. If life were long enough, the scientist might gladly prolong, through what is now a lifetime, his study of earthworms, and their next of kin. To the transcendent view, the visible order has no meaning above the symbolical. Its highest value is to be as the tussock of grass from which the lark rises for his song. This transcendent view was necessary. The dis- tinction between the sensuous and the supersensuous, the visible and the spiritual, as that age conceived it, was an indispensable chapter in the history of the hand-laborer. The cause of the laborer is logically bound up with an idealizing view of the universe. Up to our own time it has not been possible in the Occident for such a view to even think of a career independent of religion. We must remember that all religions contain a transcendent element ; for the lowest religion implies some sort of criticism upon the reality that surrounds and besets the working will. It suggests, if it does not actually provide, a world wherein the imagination, the aesthetic other self of the working will, may live a freer life. The his- tory of religion is therefore, when taken broadly, the history of the idealizing will in humanity. And the story of the growth and purification of the religious consciousness is, for our present purpose, the story of the way in which the deepest purposes of our race 154 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. have clarified and concentrated themselves. The culmination of the process in antiquity was Biblical monotheism. 66 At this point the idealizing will of humanity occupies a position of the most relentless criticism upon social and political realities. Schelling said that there was no supernatural in Homer. God and visible Nature were one, and God is but another name for the process of Nature. It was a necessary consequence that the fields of the natural and the ethical were not marked off from each other. They were confused. 67 It resulted from this confusion that man and society as they came under the eye of the observer were too apt to be set up as the measure of man and society as they ought to be. The local kept down the universal, and the citizen bounded the soul. But the Old Testament drew a broad distinction between the natural and the ethical. The conception of God as holy gave clear expression to the desire for a good larger than all the goods to be found in the world of eye and ear. Every view of the world reflects the social will. The Old Testament view, carried to the length of its principle by the New Testament doctrine concerning the Kingdom of God, reflected the impassioned long- ing for a perfect society, and thereby vehemently impeached the finality of existing society. I will not attempt to make plain the great differ- ence between the Biblical and the mediaeval views of the supernatural. All that concerns us is the fact that, given the Biblical view on the one side and on the other the intellectual and social conditions of the Mediterranean world, the mediaeval conception of the life of God and man was both an historical v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 155 necessity and a great contribution to the cause of the laborer. It proclaimed, in the shape of a dogma held to be essential to salvation, the impossibility of society according to Homer and the Roman patri- cian. It exalted the soul, that is, the universal man, the staple of humanity in all men, far above the citi- zen, with his inherited privileges and tenacious pre- rogatives. It cleared a space for the imagination to play and work over. To persistent and stubborn longings after a perfect society it opened the gate into a field where the writs of terrestrial aristocracies did not run. It gave imaginative outlet to the deep- est desires of the best men and women ; and at the same time stored them up in dreams and books, until they should grow strong enough to make for themselves a body, and enter the field of politics. The Biblical idea of the Kingdom from Heaven gives way to the idea of a kingdom in heaven. This heaven is the counterpart of the individual who was being defined. As an absolute individual standing outside all relationships save that with God, a sort of celestialized Robinson Crusoe, he carries with him this vision of heaven as a world outside the world. The thought of this world above, a brave land where all is perfect, was inseparable, under the conditions of the time, from the conception of the soul as "the seat and domicile of the highest good." 68 The shift of the centre of imagination to the other side fell in with the shift of the centre of gravity from the ancient State to the absolute unit, the soul. It should not for a moment be thought that this estate of " splendid having and royal hope " which the common man, defined as soul, entered upon, was 156 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. an estate in the air. The world above, as a concep- tion and estimate of life, pre-empts and holds a large place in consciousness and consequently presses steadily down upon the lower world. Tyrants, if they perfectly knew their trade and could altogether have their way, would not let their people dream this dream of heaven; for heaven, after all, is but an idealized earth. Man cannot think of God unless in an anthropomorphic way. His visions of the next world take shape and color from his experience of this. Therefore the doctrine of heaven, as the place where the impassioned desires of men for a perfect state are to disencumber themselves of all the circumstances that hem in the higher will on earth, must inevitably have its due effect upon ter- restrial polities. There can be no thought without speech ; and all enduring thought will without fail recast language to its own end. So, in the upshot and issue of things, the vision of heaven shall color the conception of earth. There has never been a labor problem in the Orient. Neither has there been a clear and catholic doctrine of heaven. The Occidental heaven is the home of the universal individual. The thought of it cannot lie for fifteen hundred years on the common mind, and not inspire attempts to translate it into the life of time and space. Upon the basis of the transcendent idea of God, of the outstanding individual, of the vivid picture of the other world, and upon the absolute autocratic certitude which enfolded all these ideas, the Church established herself in the West. The establishment was not like the one in Constantinople, where the Emperor dominated the bishops ; nor as in the v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 157 England of to-day, a lay Parliament being sovereign. The Church was separate, and more and more self- controlled. In this way alone did the movement towards the separation of Church from State reach its climax ; for the separation could not become com- plete until the Church became sovereign. Gibbon, in a famous sentence, described the Papacy as the ghost of the Empire. It was not a ghost in any sense, unless power based on belief in the unseen is ghost-like. It was an empire as real as that of the Caesars. From the day when Ambrose made Theodosius bow to church discipline to Hildebrand's day at Canossa, a main-travelled road stretches, as plain and broad as that from the founding of Rome to Augustus. The sovereignty was quite as truly the demand of history as the Empire. Such a thing had not been heard of before. In the primitive view of the world religion dominated the State, the king and the high priest being identi- cal. But the case before us is totally different. First the Church is separated from the State and organized on a self-sufficient basis. Then, having taken into her charge all the ideal interests of humanity, she proceeds to dominate the State. What is the connection between the sovereignty of the Church and the social question ? The key is found in the fact that the Church's sovereignty is built upon the conception of the universal individual as, on the one hand, having infinite worth in him- self and, on the other, standing foot-loose and free towards all human institutions and traditions on the ground that they were too small to contain him. The individual is now become the seat of all real 158 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. values. Imagination does not move outside the range of the things that concern his eternal welfare. Heaven and earth are concerned in his smallest sin. The angels, the supreme spirits, are gladdened by his triumph. The sacraments, the priesthood, and the whole apparatus of an infallible Church are put in play in order to save the one thing that is per- manently worth while in the universe, his soul. Secular institutions hang loose upon him, they do not become him. The eighteenth century man who shook himself free from all institutions because he felt himself too large for them, and who sat down to draft out of his inner consciousness a perfect constitution that should be not unworthy of him, is the lawful de- scendant of this common individual whose soul is the pearl of great price. The thought of him is as little a whim as the thought of gravitation. It passed into the very blood of Europe. Social uni- versalism was wrapped up in him, for he was not one whit a specialist, all that he had of value being generic and translatable. Hence his plan for him- self, although drafted in the language of the other world, was really this world's dream of its own per- fection. Napoleon once said that it was his work to open a career to all the talents. By this doctrine of the soul's heaven, the objectified form of the high- est spiritual career was opened to the lowest man. Within the province of that soul there was no dis- tinction of persons. From hut to palace it was one and indistinguishable. Its value was so vast that in its presence terrestrial prerogatives became trifles. Of course this was largely theory. In practice kings v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 159 and lords had a talent for bulking larger in the churches than other men could. But the theory never ceased to sound from the pulpit. Moreover there never lacked men who in one way or another acted on it. The Popes, in their highest estate, com- pared the spiritual power to the sun, and the secular power to the moon, whose light is all borrowed. The illustration could never have won the approbation that Europe gave it, and have gone east and west, north and south, unless the Church had mastered the wills of men ; and that, not by force, but by appeal to the unseen interests of the world. The illustration, there- fore, is quite as significant, to say the least, as the solidest phrase in Magna Charta. It owed its whole power, as the Church owed her whole establishment, to the deep-rooted conviction that the universal indi- vidual was a thing of infinite worth, and to the ex- pression of the conviction in terms of a transcendent view of life. It involved the conclusion that the sun of the ideal had risen upon the downmost man, and that any idealizing movement in history must hence- forth take large account of him. The doctrine of heaven and what went with it was thus a highly imaginative way of saying that the potential was indefinitely larger than the actual, the possibility of growth in the men of low estate vastly greater than the actuality. Of necessity the Church that attained sovereignty over the mediaeval reason and conscience was an out-and-out monastic Church. For the reason and conscience in question were the faculties of the clearly defined individual, who stood putside all ter- restrial relationships ; and the idea of God that ac- 160 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. companied this idea of man put Him largely outside the visible order. Hence the Church that embodied these two ideas was bound to be ascetic. To think of God, the fundamental life, as aloof from terrestrial interests, leads the best men and women to find their life also outside the world. The growth of monasticism had kept step with the secularization of the Church in the third and follow- ing centuries. 59 After Montanism had failed in its attempt to carry the Puritan ideal through the length and breadth of the lay life, when once Catholicism made up its mind to keep house with the world, the path to the monastery was soon beaten hard. The puritanizing spirit, more and more ill at ease in its close contact with the social life of the times, a contact that was made necessary by the reconcilia- tion of the Church with the State, sought a home of its own, and joining forces with the ascetic views that prevailed more and more, built a Church within the Church. The logic of the inner life of the whole Mediterranean world had long been making in that direction. Consciousness was disrupted and life split into an inner and outer side. A hard-and-fast dis- tinction was drawn between reason and revelation, between sense and spirit. Seneca, by good rights, should have been a monk, because his Enchiridion needed but a little holy water to make it, as far as it went, a monk's manual. But he didn't dare to be a monk. He stayed in society and made up for his lack of moral fibre by the luxury of a good cry over his sins. The pathetic absent-mindedness of Marcus Aurelius betrayed the heartache of a man who could find no peace in this world, for whom the springs of v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 161 joyous life in society were nearly stopped up. The motto of Plotinus The flight of the one (pure rea- son) to the One (God) told the secret of the world's deepest desires. All brooks emptied into the river of monasticism. In the fourth century the movement began to be a stampede. Well-nigh all the best men, about all the great men, took larger or smaller part in it. The men of mark who stood up for the full rights of the secular life might have been counted on the fingers of one hand. Just one first-rate figure, Theo- dore of Mopsuestia, was on that side. Ebert calls a book, written in the fourth century and idealizing the ascetic life, the Robinson Crusoe of the day. 60 It hit the common feeling full centre. Not only did the current of past centuries flow towards monasticism, but the needs of the centuries to come demanded it. One cannot see how, without it, the Church could have withstood feudalization ; and that would have been tantamount to putting her upon a thoroughly aristocratic basis. It is harder to see how Europe could have maintained any literary continuity worth speaking of without the help of the life in the monasteries. And to go still deeper and view the matter in its connection with our subject, monasticism was necessary in order to fulfil the re- treat from the outer world to that inner world where the common man was to first win a complete emanci- pation. In the outer world he was held fast by the traditions of society. But monasticism laid the axe to the roots of those traditions. The declaration that the world was worthless and so must be aban- doned was the negative side of the conviction that 1 62 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. the essential man in every man was infinitely worthy. Wundt well says that the clear separation between this side of things and the yon-side was a great step in ethics. So long as the spirits of the departed were supposed to be chained to the graves or places near the graves, they were dependent upon the liv- ing and therefore, while inspiring fear, lacked ideal dignity. But the clear separation between the two sides of the grave enhanced the freedom and dignity of the dead, and so raised the value of the world be- yond as a place of storage for ideals. 61 In the same vein, it may be said that the substitution of the one God of monotheism for the many Gods of polytheism, added vastly to the ideal capacity of the unseen world, since Gods like the Gods of early Rome, Gods who had no residence save at Rome, could not have freedom or self-masterhood. In a similar way the monastery was a pledge of the independence of the spiritual view of things and of its ultimate masterful- ness. Confronting the castle, it bespoke the reality of a world where the low-born stands level to the noble. The man without a grandfather within its walls was raised to the spiritual peerage. The separation of the Church from the State, the independence of the Church, the building of an in- terior Church through monasticism, were so many steps towards the isolation of the moral ideal. It was the one way in which that age, with its forms of life and categories of mind, could prove itself to be deeply in earnest with morality. Epictetus had said : " To what sort of occasion wilt thou postpone thinking thyself worthy of the best things ? " 62 The words were spoken by a slave to his own deeper nat- v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 163 ure. Tertullian bade the soul of the common man stand forth and exercise its suffrage in the Kingdom of God. The task of history, as interpreted by the social movement, is to individualize the downmost. To be individual is to be moralized ; and to be moral- ized is to be within reach of the world's best things, to lie open to what it accounts its mysteries, to be a logical candidate for its prerogatives. Now it was the social function of the monastery to make one absolute level of humanity within its walls. It thus had its proper part to play in the preparation for our times. While its entire scheme of life was tran- scendent, it was nevertheless on the earth, planted as solidly as the baron's castle. The man of antiquity carried with him into the monastery the ideas, economic or bordering on the economic, which were the staple of thought in the world he abandoned. Let us take stock of them. The Greeks and Romans had no Political Economy in our sense of the word. Their economics consti- tuted a chapter not a very prominent one either in their theory of politics; while politics were only ethics on the grand scale. Socrates opens the dis- cussion in the Republic by saying that the State is the greater man, that the needs and problems of the individual's character are written by it in so bold a hand that they are easily read. Economics, so far as they are discussed at all, came in through this door. Aristotle's main question was not What constitutes a day's wage? but What elements go into the char- acter of a true citizen and what conditions favor such citizenhood ? Antiquity in general agreed with the 1 64 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Greeks and Romans. In the Old Testament eco- nomics are a part of theology. The Book of Deuter- onomy is in hearty agreement with Plato's Republic as to its aim : the salvation of the State is the objec- tive point. Economics, therefore, were directly and altogether ethical. How to make men was the one concern. There are tendencies of our own times that may serve to render sympathy with this primitive point of view easier than it used to be. It was only a little while ago that our Political Economy still kept much of that air of pseudo-infallibility which it brought out of the eighteenth century. The science, in its early history, considered itself an exact science. Not the changeable thing called human sentiment or ethical feeling was the subject for study, but something that was as fixed and stable as the laws of Nature, even the laws of wealth. But now the unity and immuta- bility of the science appear to be breaking up. The ethical element is pushing itself in. Our century inherited a State built by men of a most dogmatic habit of mind in things spiritual as well as temporal. They bequeathed to us certain well-settled principles of polity. We have not been able, however, to keep them settled. Criticism has shaken the old supports, and disturbed the unseen foundations of society. The motives that drew their sap from the sense of divine authority everywhere present in the world of our fathers are dying at the root, so far as large numbers of men are concerned. Thus the question of State-making is coming to the front. Economics, dealing with that larger question, finds that the in- vestigation opens at many points into the field of v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 165 ethics. Aristotle's point of view How shall we make good citizens? has far more bearing upon economics than it used to have. The boundaries of the science, that were once supposed to be exact, be- came in some critical places uncertain and wavering. A measure of sympathy with the primitive view of economics is easier than it was a while ago. As a consequence of antiquity's uniform position in this matter, Economics, when treated with any dis- tinctness, were brought into the light of a statesman- ship that aimed at the prevention of revolution. The Greek City-State, being small and highly organized, lived largely on its nerves. The rich and the poor were at close quarters all the time. The machinery of government was easily manipulated. Hence Greek political theory, including economic theory, was for the most part a study in the causes and cures of revolution. Plato's ideal of righteousness is a law, written and unwritten, that shall keep every man in his place, not permitting the shoemaker to write to the newspaper, or the motorman to read Emerson. Aristotle thought that righteousness, meaning social righteousness, should chiefly concern itself with what we call the problem of distribution. The aim of Political Economy, then, was to under- stand, not the laws of wealth, but the laws of social stability. The Romans too, so far as they had any theory of economics, made it a foot-note to the definition of the good and useful citizen. And the fact that the thinkers of antiquity started and ended with ethics, seeking a definition of the ideal citizen and adjusting economics to it, is the reason why they come by so broad and short a road to some 1 66 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. doctrine of equality. Even Aristotle, after he has keenly criticised the communistic schemes of his time by saying that the communists must attain something deeper than an equality of possessions, namely, an equality of desires, himself affirms that the social law, righteousness, must aim at the prevention of great riches and poverty. And Plutarch, when he praised the legislation of Lycurgus for aiming at equality, unquestionably spoke for the best mind of his day. 63 The distance from the highest political conscience to the question of demand and supply is in our day a long one. In antiquity it was only a step, and a short one at that. With the two points already made goes a third. Nature and her functions came close to the surface. Human activity played an insignificant part before theory. Charles Lamb, discussing in his charming way the origin of the habit of saying grace, assigns the first grace to the hunter's age, when, owing to the uncertainties of hunter's luck, "a bellyful was a windfall." That is a humorous illustration of the closeness of primitive human life to natural condi- tions. There must be in most of us something that sympathizes with Goethe, who had a sense of being shut in at the winter solstice and a sense of expan- sive joy when the days began to perceptibly lengthen. If the first signs of Spring send the sap of new life with a rush to our hearts, what must have been the exultation in the eyes of our New England ancestors when, after a hard winter, they saw the first blue- bird ? They had few barricades against Nature, while we have many. Had they not been Puritans, they would have caught, as we cannot, the thrill of v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 167 the sick king's words : " O Westmoreland, thou art to me a summer bird, that ever in the haunch of winter, sing'st the lifting up of spring." The well-to-do classes of Greece and Rome were better housed and lived under a kindlier sky than our ancestors. And the roads of the Empire were the best the world knew until the other day. But so far as the closeness of Nature to human experience went, they, because of their Paganism, felt it far more deeply than we ever can ; so that man's part in the economy of production bulked very small before their eyes. Nature lay close to the surface of economic activity. There was no appreciable gap in theory between the raw material and the finished product. Such a thought as the conquest of Nature, a com- monplace with us, never visited their minds. Reli- gion conspired with economic conditions to disguise the significance of man's activities in the universe. Its tendency is seen in the feeling of Herodotus touching Xerxes' bridge over the Hellespont. He expressed the common sentiment and that was a deep form of the feeling of Cuddie's mother, when she lifted up her voice against the atheism of winnowing-machines because they forced the Lord's hand and created a breeze before the time. The effect of this belittlement of man's part in the economy of the world is seen in the Greek theory of art. They conceived that art had no function save to imitate Nature. 64 And they the most creative people in matters of beauty the world has ever seen ! Their function in history was to develop and define the individual. Through them history drew the first deep breath of freedom. Aristotle spoke for the 1 68 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Greek genius when he described the essence of virtue as energy, forthputtingness, the imposition of form upon matter. All this stands in clear light against the background of Oriental passiveness. Yet this same people, when they came to the theory of art, could so little understand their own significance, that they set a very low estimate on man's work in Nature. The closeness of Nature to the surface is seen again in Aristotle's belief that property acquired by trade had no root in true law. Only the gains of agriculture, of fishing and hunting, are natural gains. Only the first-hand yield of Nature is ethically sound. How broad a basis in universal feeling such notions have had, is suggested by the following passage from Jefferson's Notes on Virginia. " Generally speak- ing, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandman is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good enough barometer whereby to measure its corruption. . . . Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." 65 All of this, barring the sceptical and sar- castic words " if ever he had a people," would have been heartily seconded by Ambrose, the great bishop of Milan who pictured the peasant as Nature's consort. Still another example is the view of raw material and resultant property rights entertained by Roman law. The primitive feeling was that man was in no sense a creator of values. Hence the first opinion of law was that the owner of the raw material must v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 169 be in some sense the owner of the finished product, no matter who did the finishing work. And spite of the growing division of labor, and the many difficulties caused by this clod-hopper's theory of values, it continued to be held until the time of Augustus. In the division of legal opinion which then became marked, the old theory was stoutly defended on the ground that "without the aid of Nature, no sort of thing can be made." The new view was that the man who, for example, cast bronze into a statue, acquired a complete title by paying for the raw material without going besides through a legal process by which the original owner formally sur- rendered his rights. 66 Such primitive realism in economics should in logic keep company with the crudest realism in metaphysics. In point of fact the two are often found together. Dr. Johnson, who refuted Berkeley by kicking a stone, also had profound contempt for trade, and was certain that the business of England, then entering the manufacturing stage, would soon return to the solid basis of agriculture. Out of the views described grew, as a fourth point, the failure to appreciate commerce. Plato desired to have his ideal city planted well inland. Aristotle condemned money made by commerce, as compared with money made by farming, on the ground that it is artificial. Hence he would have shut out from any part in government the man who had made his money in that way. And, along with all this, antiquity had a deep- seated prejudice against interest. Interest was iden- tified with usury, and usury was accounted contrary I/O GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. to Nature. Plato, in the Laws, forbids interest. No debtor was to be legally bound to pay it. Thus it was put on the footing of a gambling debt to-day. Aristotle condemned it on the ground that metal is barren, producing nothing, so that interest is an unnatural growth. So the thinker who summed up the idealistic development of Greece does not rise above the peasant's economic realism, when he comes to the question of credit. Even at Rome, whither the plunder of the world had all gone, and where the money-lenders and capitalists of the Empire lived, even at Rome the men whose thoughts did not set with the sun held, without exception, to the same view of interest. Cato the Elder, in the preface to his treatise on Agriculture, says that lend- ing money on interest is dishonorable; and that, accordingly, the forefathers made the law that the thief should be compelled to make twofold com- pensation, but the man who took interest fourfold. Cicero reports that Cato held lending on inter- est to be as bad as murder. 67 The Old Testament takes the same ground. The permission to lend to a non-Israelite (Deut. xxiii. 20) confirms the assertion that antiquity had an inbred horror of interest, seeing that interest taken from a man out- side the pale of Israel was regarded in effect as a part of the law of war. Without exception, then, the higher thought of the old world considered interest contrary to Nature. Another part of the common stock of ideas was the theory of the minimum in wants. Epictetus puts it well : " The measure of possession (property) is to every man the body, as the foot is of the shoe. If v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 171 then you stand on this rule (the demands of the body) you will maintain the measure; but if you pass be- yond it, you must then of necessity be hurried as it were down a precipice. As also in the matter of the shoe, if you go beyond the (necessities of the) foot, the shoe is gilded, then of a purple color, then em- broidered : for there is no limit to that which has once passed the true measure." ^ In the same vein Plutarch approves Lycurgus for the outlawry of all needless and superfluous wants. 69 Upon this point all the men whose opinions carried weight were agreed. Herakleides of Pontos was, perhaps, the only philosopher of any name who defended luxury. 70 And he was a thinker no better than third rate. For us, the multiplication of wants is a true and important law. 71 But for antiquity the minimum of wants was the only law, and everything above it was unnatural and hateful. Sceptics, Epicureans, Stoics, might differ fundamentally at other points. Here they agreed. These six ideas the inclusion of Political Econ- omy in Ethics, the lively interest in the prevention of revolutions, the nearness of Nature to the surface of feeling, the contempt for commerce, the horror of in- terest, and the dogma of the minimum in wants were the common stock of antiquity. In one form or another they became the small change of every one who dealt with his neighbor in moral goods. Neces- sarily, the outstanding individual who shook off all the forms of existing society, who entered the monas- tery in order that he might insure in terms of the other world that definition of man which took in the goods common to all men and only those, carried 1/2 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. with him this capital of the world's deepest experi- ence. If we remember that monasticism was the isolation of the moral ideal ; that the monks were the Puritans of their time, and that consequently they were the men who had a grand passion for goodness; that their conception of God was not a scholastic mono- theism, willing to compromise with popular polytheism and often unclear in its outlines, but an absolutely clear and simple and uncompromising monotheism with vast driving power; and that the Church they helped so largely to build up, was infallible or noth- ing, it is easy to foretell the conclusion of monasti- cism touching the central points of economics. Those conclusions were inevitable. The very warp of the monastic mind must be unravelled, in order to avoid them. It is necessary to emphasize this with all our power. For, without it, we shall not appreciate the significance of monasticism in the history of the social idea. Consider, then, in the first place, that the monks created nothing in this quarter, but inherited the ideals of all antiquity; and in the second place, that the monasteries were the places where for cen- turies the Puritans of the world, with everything to favor them, free from entangling alliances with oppos- ing social points of view, having a vacuum so far as one was possible in time and space, concentrated and specialized the moralizing forces of their age, and we may be prepared to estimate aright the weight and momentum with which those ideas descended upon the youthful mind of modernity. Imagine the genius of monasticism, the universal individual of antiquity who has abandoned society v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 173 and taken with him the stock of ideas just described, looking back upon the terrestrial order of things he has left behind him. He lumps the whole of it as positive, with no root in Nature. To us it seems odd that a man in his senses could hold the monastic life to be the primitive life. We can understand his con- clusion, that the life of his time was irredeemably bad, and that he must flee from it as Pilgrim fled from his native city, his fingers in his ears and crying "life, life." But how he should hold the ascetic regime to be the one with which history began, we cannot see. That however is just what he did. Nilus, addressing his fellow-monks, says, " It is good to go back to the blessed life of the ancients." The monastic life is the primitive life. 72 Civilization, with all its mate- rial, social, and political wealth, is an afterthought, a mere episode in the divine drama. Yet, after all, this need not surprise us. If the man of antiquity was to justify even to himself his retreat from society, there was but one way for him to think. Given the stock of opinions he inherited, the path of his mind was plainly marked out for him. Josephus, commenting on the sacrifice of Cain, says that God preferred Abel's sacrifice, because Cain, being an husbandman, offered to God gifts that were artificial; while Abel's sacrifice consisted of things that grew of themselves. 73 This is a single in- stance out of hundreds that might be collected from Jews and Christians and Gentiles. The reasoning of Josephus on Agriculture came to the same thing as Aristotle's reasoning on Commerce. One strain ran through the higher mind of the whole Mediterranean world. The logical mould in which ideas about the 174 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. true and abiding core of all things were sure to be cast was the category of identity. The moderns have finally won the category of relation. There is for us no unity without a manifold. The will or mind that is not in relations is a bare empty shell. The real is the related. We have attained the thought of evolution. Thanks to it, two thoughts come within our reach which the men of antiquity could not attain unto. In the first place, we can conceive that change is inherent in law, that the changeable, as such, may be as orderly and righteous as the unchangeable as such. This thought the ancients could not reach. Aristotle's theory of development looked towards it, but his theory made no headway after him and did not even succeed in re- constructing his own basal view. Only the immuta- ble could be true. The famous motto of St. Vincent of Lerins, making the body of Christian truth to be that which had been held everywhere and always and by everybody, was simply the common logic of the whole world used and canonized by an authoritative Church. That which changes is inherently bad. Is it not clear that men who were dominated by this feeling were constrained by the necessities of their own mind to think, not only that what was dearest to them must be deepest in the universe, no man, whatever his mental apparatus, can ever think other- wise, but that it was the earliest thing in time ? that it was primitive ? that history began with it ? In the second place, thanks to the concept of evo- lution, it is possible for us to think that the second thing in a series may be better than the first, and the third better than the second, and the last best of all. v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 175 But without the help of that great concept, men had to believe that the second was either worse than the first or identical with it. There could be no real history when once men betook themselves to meta- physics. The base of all things was the unrelated, self-identical, inmost being of God. And the unit of measure in the idealizing interpretation of visible things was the human monad answering to the divine monad, simple and persistent and immutable. History was not thought of as a real process. Con- sequently when a man like Philo, the great Jew, under- took to interpret the sacred past, he necessarily read whatever had a hold on his mind back into the earli- est stages. The best must be first. History's one value was to be symbolical of the eternal verities, and they are the same in every age. Whatever is good, is immutable. It has to be remembered that the Christian con- sciousness had no logical apparatus of its own. When the life and mind of the New Testament came to be speculatively construed, every term and con- cept used in the process had been shaped in the workshop of Greece. When therefore the superb moral enthusiasm of Christianity took up these cate- gories of antiquity, when monastic rigorism put in play the inherited apparatus and by means of it assessed the institutions and traditions which consti- tuted terrestrial society, there was just one thing that could happen. The higher Christian life as the monk understood it had to be pictured , as the primi- tive and elemental life. On the lighter side of the subject, the puritanizing feeling about ornament is in evidence. The Apos- i;6 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. tolic constitutions say : " Do not paint the face, which is God's workmanship." 74 Clement of Alexan- dria thinks that shaving is wrong, for God meant man to have a beard as the symbol of strength and authority. 75 It is "against Nature to pierce the ear." 76 Cyprian, voicing an old and widespread opinion, declares that ornaments in general are the invention of the fallen angels ; and that adornment is against truth. 77 The monks carried this reasoning to the full length of its principle. They condemned the whole of civilization as being a corruption of Nature. The monastic life was the world's return to health. Thereby life shone out in the beauty it had when it left God's hands. On the more serious side, the story of the so- called Puritan conscience is in evidence. As a rule, the people who make the most bother about it are they who are least burdened with conscience of any kind. But the to-do made over it is proof of its reality. And as a phenomenon of modern life, its history is closely related to the social question. The first period in the history is prophetism in Israel. The prophets were the earliest Puritans, irreconcilable with the standing social order, always protesting. The second period is the outburst of regenerating enthusiasm caused by* Christianity. The epistle to Diognetus calls Christians the soul of the world. The back-bone of the practical argument for Christianity was always the appeal to the lives of converts. Men who yesterday looked on the fashionable heathen sins as good form do now altogether disown them. The Christians were the soul of the world; and the soul looked with v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 177 austere eyes on the body, which was contemporary society. The third period is the conflict between Montanism and the Catholic Church. The latter was seeking to come to an understanding with the Empire ; while the former looked with horror upon such a course. The fourth period is the triumph of monasticism. Henceforth there are to be in effect two Churches, the outer and the inner. The outer Church makes and keeps some sort of terms with society. The inner Church totally condemns and disowns society. Through the Middle Ages the monastery, confront- ing the castle and the town, housed the Puritan con- science. Now and then appeared signs that some day the enclosing walls must give way and the Puri- tan conscience invade society. The struggle of the Franciscans over the question of taking the monas- tic vow of poverty seriously, and the visions and prophecies of Joachim of Fiore who deeply influ- enced Francis, showed that the two Churches could not permanently divide the field between them. The career of Savonarola, his bonfire of toys, is the first pronounced outbreak of the pent-up conscience. The fifth period is the Protestant Reformation, especially on its Calvinistic side. The two Churches are now unifie*d. The monk puts on citizen's clothes, marries, and votes. The Puritan conscience takes " thorough " for its watchword. It sets out to draw a straight furrow from side to side of society. Rigor- ism becomes a great social and political, force. Had it not been for the fact that the monks main- tained this continuity of conscience, it is possible that serious men of to-day might read Pepys' diary and 1/8 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. never start a smile when they come again and again to passages which prove that no leader of fashion nowadays could dwell more fondly than he on the subject of brave clothes. This is the surface hint of a very deep tendency. If we inherit the equipment of our reason from Greece, we inherit the equipment of our conscience from the Bible through the monks. Monasticism made the Stoic doctrine of Nature a radi- cal principle. If we date the beginning of modern history from the fourteenth century, surely the fact that for a thousand years before it the monastery was the home and fortress of the conscience, has a signifi- cance almost beyond estimate. The history of the great monastic orders shows plainly that the heart of Europe was in the movement. No sooner did one order decay than a new and more thorough one took its place. Throughout the whole period during which the foundations of modernity were being laid, the high thinking and true living of the world were done almost wholly in the monasteries. We may as easily bow the law of gravitation off the planet, as suppose that contemporary political and social theories do not broadly betray the consequences of that fact. And the effect must convey the quality of the cause. Seeing then that the cause is an infallible conviction touching the infinite worth of the common, the univer- sal individual ; seeing also that the attendant concep- tion of Nature ran the knife just below the sod, cutting the roots of traditional and aristocratic valuations and assessments; and seeing, finally, that monasticism fostered a kind of conscience that knows no com- promise, who can doubt concerning the quality of the effect? v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 179 The judgment of the early monks on civilization was colored by their abhorrence of life in the great cities. No one city has ever dominated the world's imagination in a degree to be compared with Rome. Far more even than Paris to France was the capital to the Empire. Now luxury in Rome went to hideous lengths. Friedlander has striven with great force to qualify the traditional opinions on that point. And with a measure of success : for it should be clear that the impassioned pictures of Christian apologetes and Roman satirists are not altogether solid data for a conclusion. Yet, after he has done his best, there is enough left to constitute an absolute " tragedy of dis- sipation." And as for amusements, it was a fair ques- tion whether the stage in the matter of foulness did not outdo the amphitheatre in the matter of brutality. The other cities of the Empire followed Rome's suit at such a pace as their lesser wealth permitted. No wonder that conscience cried out against the whole affair. There had been growing up amongst the Romans themselves a feeling in favor of country life. Virgil manifests it in the sweet and subtle nature- sense of the Eclogues and Georgics. Varro expressed it in sober prose when he wrote, " Divine nature gave the fields, human art built cities." The modern version of that saying is Cowper's, "Man made the city, God made the country." Civilization was coming under suspicion in the minds of the very men who had almost a monopoly of its prerogatives. As regards luxury, the monks did but apply the maxim " thorough " to the feeling of later antiquity. Marcus Aurelius, in his catalogue of things to be thankful for, writes, " I learned (from my Governor) ISO GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. to want little," and "from Diognetus to desire a plank bed and skin." Make the emperor a dogmatic monotheist, giving no quarter to half-truths, and he would easily exchange his crown for a cowl. It was not more than a step to the adoption of the life of poverty as the ideal life. How consistent the step was with the deeper convictions of the idealist, is shown by the striking resemblance between the Platonic Republic and the Mediaeval City of God. Plato's ruling class is exactly like the monks in the two fundamental things, refusal of marriage and disowning of property. There is no close literary connection between the two ideals. The connection is deeper than literature, it is one of life. Both the Platonic Republic and the Mediaeval City are studies of social unity. They agree as to the things necessary to peace. One of them is that there must be no private property amongst the best men. Only so could the social divisions resulting from wealth be gotten rid of. But while the two polities largely agreed at this and some other main points, they differed in that the one was bare theory, while the other was an achievement. The Monastic City was more than a dream, it was even more than an experiment, it was a fixed constitution for the spiritual life. Rousseau said to the eighteenth century: Let us return to Nature. The monks thought that they had succeeded in returning strange as their thought may appear to us. They had stripped off everything con- ventional and thrown all artificialities upon the muck- heap. The elemental and essential remained. The monk was the outstanding individual of antiquity now at last wholly foot-loose. He confederated him- v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 181 self with other men of like mind, to found a new kind of society. Nobody could join it, unless he disowned all that looked most precious in the light of the exist- ing social constitution. The monk was the yokefellow of the fundamental, a consort of the eternal, a revolu- tionist who believed that no half -measures could cure the ills of the world. The inner Church which housed him stood on the basis of extreme otherworldliness. But she kept one foot planted firmly in this world. And little by little the inner Church mastered the outer Church. The monks, the "regulars," got the better of the " seculars" or non-monastic clergy; until at last the monastic view of society, heading up in Popes of imperial type, fought and conquered the Empire. The dark side of monasticism is very easy to see. The Christian who looks at it from the standpoint of St. Paul shall find in it a vast deal of spiritual vulgar- ity, a method of "milking righteousness " wholesale. The man of reason is shocked by its superstitions, the man of taste by its partial glorification of dirt. The statesman will condemn it, because by its vows of poverty and celibacy and obedience it makes a full share in the life of the family and the State impossible for the picked men and women, thus forcing the State to be either a shadow of the Church or a policeman's alliance. But we stand at none of these points of view. Caesar killed more than one man in Gaul, it is believed. Yet by his conquest of Gaul he wrought a great work for history. So with monasticism. What- ever its defects, however out of the question it is for the Christianity of the future living in the presence of the free State, none the less it wrought a great nega- 1 82 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. live work for the free State itself by putting all the political and social forms of antiquity into disrepute, and at the same time it accomplished a great positive work by assessing the universal individual at so high a figure that the State which is to contain him and satisfy him must be a State of far deeper root and wider scope than the free State of antiquity. Monasticism gave to Occidental literature a new epic, the epic of poverty. It is a far cry indeed from Homer to the bones of the Saints. Yet the bones of the Saints stood for something that lay beyond the reach of the heroes. The lives of the Saints were the main food of the higher imagination of Europe for centuries. They were the higher novel of the people who read. There is no better test of what is in the mind and heart of a period than its greater novels. They have philosophy and psycho- logic analysis ; but not enough of either to keep them aloof from the majority, and so they both answer to and mould popular ideals. They express that portion of the deep thought and chastened feeling of the day which finds entrance into the common language. Now the lives of the Saints were largely fact, al- though each in its measure had a flowing drapery of fiction. The proportion does not concern us. It is enough that they were the novel, the drama, the hero stories of the better Europe, the Europe that had aspirations, that refused to recognize the dead weight of brutality and inertia as the normal or even the average humanity. The saint, who at death left behind him his bones to be worshipped, might be - in a majority of cases probably was a man of low degree. He therefore represented the common, the v GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 183 elemental man. If the highest good, as Democracy views it, consists in making the common man stand level to the noblest things, then surely we are not off the trail of the social question when we discover the saint, the spiritual hero of a long epoch, focussing the imagination of the world upon this common individ- ual. The epic of poverty made elemental humanity shine brighter than the bravery of warriors and the splendor of kings. Renan, in his address at the Spinoza anniversary of 1877, referring to the love his humbler friends gave him, said, " Their judgment (in such matters) is almost always that of God." 78 The thought may be carried farther. The vital changes in history are in the main changes in the organs of opinion. In a monarchy of the consistent Oriental type the king's judgment is a dogma, and the opinions of all others may be such stuff as wind is made of. In Greece and Rome the opinions of the citizen had in them the making of law. But citizenhood was limited, so that a large part of the lowest class was shut out. The area of public opinion must be widened. And the lives of the Saints, by making poverty heroic and installing the children of the poor as rulers of the imagination, helped to prepare for that vast exten- sion of the area of public opinion which is the signa- ture of our own time. Without the aid of the monks Wordsworth could probably not have made the lives of the poor the subject of his song. The history of the materials of poetry and romance is fundamental for our present study. No cause can go far that does not create material for poetry. The world has had aristocratic 1 84 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP, v epics, not in plenty, yet in sufficient quantity. The democratic epic has not yet been written. But if ever it is written, then the student of the world's literature in some far-away age, looking back from his vantage-ground, may be inclined to set down the lives of the Saints, with their deep hold on the imagination of Europe, as an essential part in the story of its genesis. VI FROM the fifth century onward the Church was alone in the field of higher history. The self-glorifi- cation of the Teuton has sometimes left to the Church, so far as the development of the State is concerned, hardly more than a step-motherly function. The stream of Anglo-Saxon liberty is described as flow- ing by grace of its own inherent strength, from its springs in the German forests, through a steadily broadening channel, into the expansive freedom of the nineteenth century. The Barbarians who broke down the Empire were constitutional noblemen trav- elling incognito. Hegel did well when he put the goal of universal history a few miles beyond Berlin. Englishmen and Americans would argue with him in friendly fashion that he should have made his phi- losophy of history a circular letter with a blank space where London or Washington might have been put at pleasure. That however is a mere detail. Luckily for myself I acquired at the outset a right to be one-sided in the other direction by frankly con- fessing that I meant to be one-sided. I am therefore under no obligation to set up a clearing-house and balance accounts, showing how much the new races brought and how much the Church gave. And when it is said that the Church was left alone in the field of 185 1 86 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. higher history, what is meant is that she monopolized the spiritual and intellectual interests. The whole inner life was under her control. In her hands and hers alone lay for a long while the work of driving home the definition of man which issued from the union of forces in the Mediterranean world. The unit with which the Church operated was an individual who, in principle, was outside and inde- pendent of the relationships that constitute the fam- ily and the State. He derived none of his value from them. And when he found himself on the plane of his highest duties he did not find himself in debt to them to the extent of a single primary obligation. This is the meaning of the distinction between the ethic of the common life and the ethic of perfection. The former concerned the man who stuck deep in the affair of the visible world. The latter concerned the man whose mind was bent wholly upon the other world. The ethic of perfection then was the code of the absolute individual, who carried his own value in himself, depending on no connection save that with God. His relation with his neighbor was not in the deepest sense a part of him. He was the derived monad in relation with the sovereign monad. The Church, taking this absolute individual as her unit in spiritual measures and assessments, made his salvation her objective point. By her doctrine of in- fallibility she sought to insure him, and guarantee his eternal worth. And by her sacrifice of the Mass and her map of Purgatory she sought to keep open for him the road that runs to the centre of things. The fact that the individual, taken absolutely, was the unit in the mediaeval plan is disguised by the impe- vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 187 rial institutionalism of the plan. We are apt to asso- ciate the individual with Protestantism ; and to think that the Roman Catholic Church, the direct heir of mediaeval Christianity, is the antipodes of Protestant- ism in this matter. What can be less individualistic than the order of the Jesuits, which takes men of every nation and leaves them no local color, no flavor of the soil ? which drives full home the principle of absolute obedience ? Yet this very example favors the propo- sition. The Jesuits are the logical climax of the search of the absolutely individual soul after an as- sured salvation. Of course, no institution so vast as the Roman Catholic Church can be described in one sentence or many. Numerous elements mix in its constitution. I would not therefore be thought guilty of the irreverence of describing it in a phrase. But as to the point in issue, if we keep in mind, on the one hand, that the Jesuits are the last of the great monas- tic orders, embodying the genius of mediaevalism in its splendid rally against Protestantism ; and, on the other, that monasticism is in essence the surrender of a man's relationships in order that the man himself may be saved, the proposition may look more reason- able. Extreme Protestantism inherits the unit of me- diaevalism man conceived as a spiritual monad without the apparatus that can alone enable the unit to do its perfect ecclesiastical work. Let the human monad, standing outside all terres- trial relationships, once become the unit; let the idea of God as transcendent keep it company ; let a conception of revelation to match this idea of God and man be developed; then let the resultant de- mand become explicit and imperious and the 1 88 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. mediaeval scheme commends itself as the logical ecclesiastical expression of the principles contained within that definition of men in which the experience of the Mediterranean world summed itself up. The Roman Catholic Church to-day is the rightful expo- nent of an imperial individualism that invests its gains wholly in the next life. It is no accident that Hildebrand, the first to suc- cessfully assert the sovereignty of the Pope, should also have carried through the demand for the celi- bacy of the clergy. The two things go together. The papacy wins whatever title it may possess to permanent, spiritual worth by its fidelity to the logic of the universal individual. Various historical causes contributed to its rise. For example : the existence of the Roman Empire, Constantine's removal of the capital, the destruction of important centres of ancient Christianity by Mohammedanism. But it would be a great error to suppose that these elements com- pose the whole cause. Undoubtedly without them the papacy would not have been. Nevertheless it is a greater thing than they by themselves can account for. It is the thorough working out of a certain view, the transcendent view, of the universe with the superb moral genius of the Bible for its inspira- tion. Hildebrand then was not only strategic but con- sistent in coupling together his war with the Empire and his war with the married clergy. Without the triumph of the monastic principle, the transcendent interpretation of the universe would have stood on one foot. While, however, monasticism thus invaded and con- quered the Church, there was something in the make vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 189 of Occidental monasticism that set it apart from Ori- ental monasticism. The latter has no affinity for history. Schopenhauer truly represents it, when he describes the will in the world and in man as the root of all evil, and ascribes to the contemplative rea- son the obligation and the power to undo the work of the will. This is consistent quietism. But Western monasticism had a different strain in it. The axes of the monks, who made so many broad clearings in the forests of Europe, ring in unison with the axe of the American pioneer. The monks in Europe tamed Nature. In India they got rid of Nature by self-absorption. Moreover the monks of the West developed a magnificent discipline. Bene- dict made the Rule a system of ascetic tactics. The founders of the later orders elaborated his rule, until it grew to be as complete and as masterful in its way as the tactics of the Roman Army. The monks left society, but not to forget it or be forgotten by it. They left the world in order to rule the world. The genius of the Western Church is clearly and broadly prefigured in Augustine. One of his books, the City of God was the first out-and-out creation of Christianity in literature. Origen's great work on Dogmatics was largely Greek in the make of its thought. But Augustine gave the world a new kind of book. The striking thing about it is that its mat- ter is not philosophy, but the philosophy of history. The Greek view of the universe gave small space to history. Its philosophy began with crude cosmology, and slowly rose to the problem of unity in the mani- fold. In Socrates thought, abandoning the attempt to find the key to unity in the world outside con- 1 90 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. sciousness, entered deep into consciousness to find it. Plato and Aristotle, standing on his ground, tried to make the outer and inner world cohere in reason. But all the while philosophy remained in essence cosmological. The central question stood fast. The changes touched mainly the material handled. Whereas in the earlier period the material lay out- side, now a considerable part of it lay inside the reason. Yet the pith of the problem continued to be How find a middle term between being and becoming? How hold to the reality both of that which never changes and that which is forever changing ? Along this road the inner world could not get to its full rights. Consciousness had no right of way ; it was annexed to the cosmos. After Aristotle, the interests of philosophy turned more and more towards the practical. Ethics took the sceptre. But the decay of speculative capacity, that went on at the same time, put it out of the ques- tion for the deepening moral feeling of Stoicism to have its due effect in any fundamental change of view. The Stoic doctrine concerning the last, the ultimate things, slipped back from ethic into cosmol- ogy- The religious interest attaching to Greek philoso- phy centred in its conception of pure being. This is illustrated by Neoplatonism, in which Greek rea- son kindled its own funeral pyre and ascended to heaven on the wings of mysticism. Greek philoso- phy never set a becoming value on Greek art. To art the human was central. The divine gave up a large part of its mystery in order to become at once intelligible and beautiful. To philosophy, on the vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE igi contrary, humanity was not central. As Hegel says, Greek thought, instead of being too anthropomorphic, was not anthropomorphic enough. Hence, while Herodotus and Thucydides wrote classic histories, history as such had little to say in the philosopher's sum of wisdom. The reasoned view of the world lagged behind the practical standard of the men who by their sweat and blood made the Greek view of things a possibility. Even to Aristotle history meant little. He measured it with the drama, to its sore hurt. To the " master of those who know " history was not much above a patch on the universe. If it was not an episode in the cosmic drama, it was a very poor poem full of episodes. In the Bible things look the other way. History is the marrow of the universe. The sum of things is a good nine parts humanity to one of cosmology. The story of man's doings on the earth is not an episode, but the whole drama. The cosmos is the stage, nothing more. The highway of being runs through the heart of man, not through the stars. The hearth-fire of God's world is not the sun, but the conscience. The result of this overpowering emphasis on man's part in the world is seen in the very build of the Bible. No other sacred book has anything like its unbroken story from the first day of creation down. The critical question touching the value of that history as a history need not rise here. The bare fact that it was in this road and no other that the prophetical mind travelled is the whole point. The contrast with the Greek philosophy could not be broader. 1 92 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Again, no other religious interpretation of life, as antiquity knew it, has a clear plan of the connection between the historical present and the consummation of history. But the men of the Bible build their house upon this connection. Read Amos or Isaiah, and see how the present borrows all its meaning from its relation to a perfect day of God and of man that is to dawn upon the earth. The hinge of idealizing Greek thought is the contrast between two worlds, both present and both persistent, the outer world of sense and the inner world of reason. The hinge of prophetic and apostolic thought is the contrast between the tragedy of imperfection called the his- torical present and the splendor of perfection called the Day of the Lord, or the Second Coming of Christ. The uniqueness of the Bible is the result of the fact that the men of the Bible have no eye for anything save man and his fortunes. History is all in all. Not without cause, then, is the first distinctly crea- tive work of Christianity in literature a philosophy of history. The occasion of Augustine's book was the capture of Rome by the Goths in the year 410. The people of the Empire, when the capital fell, thought that the solid earth beneath their feet was rocking. The heathen laid the blame upon the Christians. They said that the Gods, because the presence of Christianity in the Empire was hideous in their eyes, had permitted this dreadful thing to happen. In defence of Christianity Augustine wrote the City of God. He undertook to show, mainly by the use of Biblical material, that a plain pathway of moral pur- pose runs from the beginning of history to its end. His attempt proves that a new conception has come vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 193 into the mind of Europe. Tennyson's " far-off divine event " is in view. What we nowadays call the philosophy of history is of direct Christian descent. When the eighteenth century turned theology out of doors, so that it was no longer possible to answer doubt with some dogma that drew its material from the unseen and the beyond, a different sort of theodicy was called for, one that should deal more with the visible, the here and the now. The answer was a philosophy of history, whose object was to show the footsteps of the Eternal, the enduring worth-while, down the ages. The main cause in the genesis of this new study I do not say the whole cause was Christi- anity. The mediaeval house having fallen, the spirit- ual consciousness had to build a new home for itself. That it went about the work in this way is for the most part due to the Biblical view of the universe. The philosophy of history, unless the idea of development came to its aid, would be a tale told by an idiot. The vast debt which that great con- cept owes to the Bible has never been fairly acknow- ledged. The thought of progress did not take the field as a principle of science. History and sociology first made explicit use of it. The eighteenth century the clue to so much that is vital in our experience gave birth to it. And the history of the concept, when it shall have been soundly written, will make plain the fact that the root of the thought was not in that century a scientific view of the world, but a moral interpretation of history ; and that this inter- pretation resulted from the long pressure on con- sciousness of the Christian view of things. o 194 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Augustine wrote another book which goes to show that a new element had entered the mind of the Occident. It is the Confessions the first autobiog- raphy. Here also the Christian tendency completes what was begun by the Greeks and Romans. The Socratic "Know thyself," the Pythagorean Golden Sentences, the Stoic rule of self-examination, are all part of "the nobler business of looking into our- selves," as Gregory Thaumaturgus expressed it. But the Christian consciousness throws upon it an empha- sis beyond the best men of Greece. Since the keep- ing of man's soul is the work of God Himself ; and since the issues of eternity turn on the state of the heart, man's inner life must needs become the focus of study. At the same time the inner does not exclude the outer. The life of the individual as a whole is in the divine plan. Plotinus, the great Neoplatonist, did not wish to be questioned concerning his ancestry; not because he was low-born, for we have no evi- dence that way, but for the same reason that he blushed to find himself possessed of a body. Plu- tarch's man went off the stage and the mystic came on. With the Christians, also Plutarch's man departs. In his place came a man, to whom, as to Plotinus, the soul is the main interest; but who, unlike Ploti- nus, possessed or rather was possessed by a concep- tion that represented the Eternal as putting His own holy will into history. He therefore looked upon his whole life, outer and inner, as being of interest to God, and as being, through the length and breadth of it, part of the story of a divine education. So he wrote an autobiography. vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 195 The appearance of the autobiography indicates the presence and sovereignty of the principle of individuality. Augustine is the first of a long and growing series. The members of it differ widely. The Confessions, Cellini, Rousseau, Stuart Mill, New- man, what a varied company ! Yet they have a common root. Christianity conspired with what was best in Greece and Rome the deepened sense of individuality in order to aid in developing the native genius of the modern peoples. The first autobiography resulted from a point of view that combined the mystical with the historical and, in a measure, gained in subjective depth, without losing grip on objective conditions. The interest in autobiography is at home with the interest in universal history. As a matter of fact, they have grown and thriven in the same tract of time, the same field of space. As a matter of logic, they have their common root in the belief that the deepest purpose of the universe runs through human- ity in its terrestrial surroundings. Rousseau, in the opening words of his Confessions, declares that the Almighty, after making him, broke the mould. Cellini is an almost incredible union of naive Greek delight in his own voluptuous passions with a relig- ious idea that he was predestinated by God. If one could only get a Calvinist and a Satyr to agree to make one man, that man would be Cellini. Evidently the principle of individuality takes itself with profound seriousness. No doctrine of illusion or preexistence weakens its tenacious hold on the power of assessment. But this is equivalent to say- ing that the historical process as a whole has ethical 1 96 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. significance, is worth-while; for illusionism, being sceptical regarding the spiritual reality, the worth- while of the visible world, hurls the same destructive doubt against the objective footing of the individual. Along this road all history takes to the water. To gain the harbor of inner peace, the outer order is thrown overboard in order to lighten the ship. But the Confessions of Augustine indicate that the Greek sense of measure and beauty and the Roman sense of law are, in the long run, to be upheld and braced by Biblical monotheism. The deepening of the inner life must, in the upshot of things, involve the sanctity of history. Although the soul, in the interest of clear definition, plays absentee for a while from terrestrial society, yet it cannot remain an absentee. The true principle of individuality draws after it a ceaseless agitation to widen the area over which the principle applies. And such agitation goes to the training, not of quietists but of social reformers. What has been said about Augustine prepares us to understand why with him the doctrine of the will became so important. Through him psychology for the first time in the history of philosophy came near to attaining, if it did not actually attain, the primacy. He is consequently of fundamental significance in the intellectual succession from Socrates to Kant through Descartes. And in his psychology the will became central. In Socrates thought and will ran together. Aristotle cleared ground for the will, and in so doing brought philosophy nearer to statesman- ship. Even in him however the will suffered ship- wreck through his conception of God. Now the will stands for the outgoing and creative function, vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 197 while reason stands for the contemplative. Reason lives in order to make its outlook ever wider and wider until, if it may be, the vision is as broad as being. The will lives in order to bring into being what is not. Aristotle, by conceiving God as infinite leisure to think pure thought, fails to give permanent registry to a great body of forces that go to the making and remaking of States, and to the conquest of the earth. The splendid enthusiasm for reason, the impassioned desire to know for the sake of knowledge, found noble and clear expression in him. But the doctrine of the will must go far deeper than he carried it, if a true Democracy is to be born. The primacy of the will in Augustine's psychology, along with the place of psychology in the foreground of philosophy, is a matter of great weight. Whether we say, looking backward from him, that the will of the Empire spoke through him ; or looking forward, that he forebodes the will of the imperial Church, the import of it for the history of the social idea can- not be made light of. When psychology assumes the primacy in philoso- phy, and when the will acquires the primacy in psy- chology, a most significant step has been taken. Aristotle's doctrine concerning the will went hand in hand with his theory of evolution ; and the two to- gether marked out a road from the static view of the universe upon which Greek thought agreed, to a dy- namic view. The fundamental difference between these views is that the latter clears a space for those forces of the universe which have not yet been mobilized. A man cannot be an earnest evolutionist unless he assesses at a high figure the possibility 1 98 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. of new things in the world. Otherwise there is no bridge between his thought of law and his thought of change. And then his idea of law recognizes only the unchangeable as constitutional in the universe ; whether it be the unchangeableness of the idea, if he be an idealist; or the unchangeableness of the atom, if he be a materialist. Evolution has no place in the heart of things. What seems to be evo- lution is in truth a mere flirtation carried on between the Cosmos and the notion of change, with no real purpose of marriage, so far as the former is con- cerned. The universe is therefore insincere, and the crust of reality breaks beneath the foot of the realist. The sole alternative is that he shall take wing into a religious idealism, a mysticism, which reduces Nature and History to symbolical terms, and thus denies the spiritual reality of change. The cause of a true Democracy stands or falls with the dynamic view of the universe. Change must be sanctified. Law must seek a marriage with evolu- tion. And if this is to come to pass, will must become primary in metaphysic. Hence the signifi- cance of Augustine. The cause of his tendency is complex. For one thing, Rome spoke through him. A true State, that is, a body politic which, on the one hand, takes the individual, not any class of men, for its unit and, on the other hand, is in some sense an organism of justice, seeking to give to each indi- vidual whatever belongs to him, must recognize, im- plicitly or explicitly, the possibility of progress. It may be that the forms of thought, dominant at the time, do not permit an explicit recognition. None the less, some roundabout way of getting to the goal, vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 199 which is the idea of progress, is certain to be discov- ered. For another thing, the Catholic Church spoke through Augustine. The victory of the Church over the Empire, the removal of the seat of political au- thority to Constantinople, the organization of the episcopate, with the existence of an episcopal centre like Rome, were all prophetic of the marvellous im- perial society, half spiritual and half secular, which was to master the reason and imagination and con- science of the Occident. A great Church, like a great State, must come at the thought of progress, although it be through a night-march by which it turns its own flank. Its favorite dogma may be im- mutability. Yet it will never sacrifice its existence to consistency. A vast institution is like a vast capi- tal permanently invested. It draws other capital after it. Its dogmas are not speculative theorems, but partake largely of the nature of laws, and there*- fore yield to the necessity of adaptation. Finally, the Bible moulded the mind of Augustine more or less after its own mind, and the pith of its own mind is the conception of a sovereign and good will press- ing on from creation to the consummation of history. Taking these three things together, we probably have the cause for Augustine's main tendency in meta- physic, and the explanation of his importance in the history of the change from the static to the dynamic view of the universe. From the lack of this conception of will came the emanational and dualist'ic theories of philosophy. " Pagan Antiquity," says Baur, " never got beyond the antithesis between spirit and matter, was unable to conceive a world produced by the full creative 200 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. activity of a purely personal will." 79 " In contrast with this," says Windelband, "the peculiarity of Christian philosophy consisted essentially herein, that in its apprehension of the relation between God and the world, it sought to employ throughout the ethical point of view of free creative action." ^ It may seem like fishing with a drag-net when the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed are brought in as contributors to the cause of true Democracy and as essential chapters in the history of the social question. Yet even the most consistent agnostic, in these days of historical study, does not hesitate to concede great value to dogma in the past. We may differ very widely in our valuation of dogma as an element in present experience, while heartily agree- ing about its influence on the formation of social tissue. Now the first article of the creeds is belief in the Almighty Creatorhood of God. The creation of matter itself is one of the main positions taken up by Christian Apologetics against Greek philosophy. It is here that the dogma of creation out of nothing finds its purpose. Metaphysically meaningless, it is full of ethical meaning. The Greek view of an un- created matter is part and parcel of dualism. The dualism may be ever so refined, still it cannot be wholly rubbed out. And dualism in any form means that there's something in the universe that success- fully resists the rational and ethical process. The belief in creation out of nothing signifies that the Christian consciousness will not admit that the con- stitution of the universe contains any elements that can permanently withstand the triumph of the good. So it either involves or results from the conviction that vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 2OI all being is moralizable. Suppose that the Christian consciousness had created God in its own image, not contrariwise. The sociologic value of the belief in ab- solute creation would be greater rather than less. It would be a deeper symptom in the history of the race. It would stand for a mortal antipathy to fatalism and consequently to every form of social and personal sloth, and, in the outcome, for faith in a maximum of redeeming and reforming energy. Hence the dogma betokened the clean break of Christianity with heathenism. The theory of ema- nation was utterly abandoned. The step to evolution was made inevitable. 81 Emanation means that at every remove from the first divine step in Nature and history things grow feebler and less capacious of good. The flat dogmatic denial of emanation leads sooner or later to the conviction that the remove is in truth a growth, an accession of new resources, an increase in the depth and reach of the phenomenon. Therefore it was in principle the expulsion of pessimism, a buoy- ant trust that all good things are within the reach of our common humanity. The divine freedom draws human freedom after it. The emphasis on freedom is a dominant note in the teaching of the Fathers. Even Augustinianism, which seems to totally exclude it, does not succeed in doing so nay ; does not really aim at such a result. The object is to cut the ground from under human pride. Augustine reached his end by the doctrine of sovereign grace. Freedom as a natural* attribute of man is certainly destroyed. Not so with freedom as a divine gift communicated without man's desert. God is absolutely free. He chooses men to be His 202 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. friends. They become His agents in the world. They disclaim all merit in the matter. They therefore have not freedom in the formal sense. But freedom in the material sense they possess in the highest degree. Because material freedom means simply the power to become something different from what one now is. And the man who is chosen by God to be His friend is thereby endowed with the power to be made over from head to foot. God's choice pays no respect to persons. It might be successfully argued that Augustine does not free the character of God from arbitrariness, but there would be no shadow of reason for saying that he makes God out to be a Being who takes account of human prerogatives. On the contrary sovereign grace lifts the poor out of the mire and makes him a prince in the realm of the spirit. The human side then of Augustinian theory is that human nature, if God touches it, becomes absolutely free as regards the world and the whole terrestrial environment. In re- lation to God the man who is redeemed disuses the word " freedom." In relation to Nature and the con- stitution of society he is absolutely free. Anyway, barring Augustinianism, the Fathers uni- formly emphasized freedom in the material sense, freedom as the power to become something infinitely superior to what one actually is. Of course it was not political freedom that was in debate. It must however be carefully observed that the freedom affirmed is not shallower than political freedom, but deeper. It is declared and the full authority of the Bible and Church is used to sustain the declara- tion that the lowest human being contains the pos- vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 203 sibility of a change that shall make him, in the end of things, peer to the angels. This sort of freedom really goes deeper than civic freedom and assesses the capacity of the average man at a far higher figure. Some day it is bound to tell upon theories concerning the State. The Christians were accused of violating the most sacred traditions in giving up the established customs of the heathen world. The defenders of Christianity had to assert the right to change. The heathen ac- cused them of flying in the face of Nature. Aristotle had said : " Slaves are incapable of happiness or free- will." 82 Much of Aristotle's narrowness was out- grown in the centuries after him. Yet to the very last the opponents of Christianity threw it in the teeth of Christians that they were attempting the impossible when they set out to find the full likeness of God in the poorest slave. Even Neoplatonism, with its spiritual intensity, made shipwreck here. To them the " soul " or " spirit " or " reason " is not a task of self-realiza- tion laid upon all men, but a special endowment, a sort of noble fate bestowed upon a few. 83 Thus humanity is stratified. In the Christian view, on the contrary, the glowing thought of the divine redeem- ing will fuses humanity into one mass, of common grain from top to bottom. The "soul" was not so much a gift as a task, a task of self-realization laid upon all men and within reach of all. So the Chris- tian belief in freedom, as over against the heathen con- ception of human nature as fixed on certain lines and at certain levels, meant that humanity was to be con- ceived as indefinitely elastic, as having unlimited ca- 204 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. pacity for change upward. The " soul " in every man says to him: "Thou oughtest, therefore thou canst." I said that Occidental monasticism differed from Oriental monasticism in that it had a capacity for history. I have tried to show that this is wrapped up in the Biblical idea that the deepest thing in God is a forthputting will. There's one outstanding fact in the constitution of European monasticism which, if not the proof of this, is at least its symbol, the adop- tion of labor as essential to perfection. The labor re- quired was almost wholly hand-labor, either field-work or copying. The noblest philosophers of Greece had failed to appreciate the moral significance of hand- labor. Aristotle, who by reason of his strong ten- dency towards realism should have been led to understand this matter, is a striking illustration. Hand-labor had no ethical worth in his eyes. Even to Plutarch, kindly by nature and profiting by the wisdom of later centuries, such work had little spir- itual meaning. He says : " One of the greatest and highest blessings Lycurgus procured his people was the abundance of leisure, which proceeded from his forbidding to them the exercise of any mean and me- chanical trade. . . . The Helots tilled their ground for them. . . . To this purpose there goes a story of a Lacedaemonian who, happening to be at Athens when the courts were sitting, was told of a citizen that had been fined for living an idle life, and was being escorted home in much distress of mind by his con- doling friends ; the Lacedaemonian was much surprised at it, and desired his friend to show him the man who was condemned for living like a freeman." 84 Monasticism adopted labor as essential to self-real- vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 205 ization. Augustine wrote a treatise against the purely contemplative life, taking the ground that without hand-labor self-masterhood was not possible. The monasteries of Egypt made it a rule to receive none who were not willing to work. Benedict, following their lead, made labor fundamental in the pursuit of holiness. His rule required eight hours' out-door work in summer, six in winter. Origen, commenting on the Lord's Prayer, says :" The command to pray without ceasing can only be obeyed by making our whole life of duty an unbroken prayer." An abbot, in later days, commended copying as most helpful to salvation : " You pierce the devil with as many blows as you trace letters on the paper." Laborare (meaning largely hand-labor) est orare. In this ascription of ideal worth to hand-labor the Neopythagoreans and the Stoics led the way. Marcus Aurelius expresses gratitude : Because I "learned from my governor to work with my hands." Philo, the Jew, went further than the idealists of the Empire. " God exhibited labor to men as the prin- ciple of every good and every virtue ; " and, again, " All good things are born from and grow out of labor as from a single root." 85 The Church took these thoughts and drove them in with a dogma. Epipha- nius, one of those men who can never entertain any opinion without making it part of a creed, said : "There's no servant of God who does not, for obtain- ing salvation, work with his hands." 86 It is true of course that, as Jerome says, the rule of -labor was "not so much for the sake of the body as to save the soul." 87 Not the conquest of the earth, but the conquest of conscience is the aim. But that is not to the point. 206 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. The subject is the idealization of hand-labor. For a thousand years the spiritual aristocracy of Europe preached and practised the principle that without such work a man could not reach the highest virtue. No pleader for Christianity would be so foolhardy as to maintain that the modern estimate of free labor derives from monasticism any appreciable part of its sap. It is the product of an industrial age. Still, the monastic estimate of labor does symbolize, on the one side, Christianity's appreciation of the practical, its antipathy to the aristocracy of intellectualism ; and, on the other, the fact that on the Christian plan of things, the doctrine of the will is primary. The conquest of the conscience is the direct object. But in the long run that is impossible without the con- quest of the earth. The monastic idealization of labor is closely con- nected with the monastic theory about the minimum of wants, and this, again, with the theory about property. We have seen that the minimum of wants was a maxim in the ethics of antiquity. Hesiod to this point : " Fools who do not know how much more the half is than the whole." And the Cynics: "Virtue is freedom from wants," as if everything above the earth were artificial. But the men of the Empire formulated this, for the most part, from the individ- ual's point of view. The man who seeks distinction in virtue must have few wants, that he may be de- livered from the necessity of giving hostages to fortune, that he may be insured against disaster to his life-plan, and thus become and remain his own master. But the Fathers and the monks, while preaching the higher Cynicism and Stoicism, did not vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 207 confine themselves to the individual's point of view. They rather grounded the minimum of wants on the individual's duty to the whole race. Thus Clement of Alexandria : "All things are common." Luxury " is not human, nor is it in keeping with the idea of common possession." 88 The doctrine of the minimum does not get its full emphasis until it is associated with the denunciation of covetousness. The Fathers and the monks work in the Biblical vein. Covetousness is a deadly sin. In the first place it violates the divine sovereignty, making man a little god. In the second place, it sins against the unity of humanity and dissolves society. The social power of the belief in aggressive monotheism plainly shows itself at this point. Com- pare the Church's teaching about covetousness with contemporary heathen teaching. A Stoic Seneca, for example thought of himself as in some ways the mate and peer of the gods. To the Christian, on the contrary, the divine monarchy was absolute. Hence a Seneca while in practice he was less an individual than the monk, because he held to the position in society which the monk abandoned in the matter of theory was more of an individualist. The monk's mind, held fast in the grip of the divine monarchy, could not but see the individual in the light of the whole. Besides, the monks did not long live as hermits. They soon created a new kind of society. And within the limits of that society they gave free rein to theory. Hence their practice, although it covered a limited field, was in its make far more socialistic than the Stoic practice. The individual is the unit, so long as 208 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. the eye is towards the outer world, and so long as the question is " What shall I do to escape from Vanity Fair ? " But as soon as the monk has sure footing on a fixed hope regarding the other world and from that high ground looks down upon this world, the individual ceases in large measure to be the unit and the existing social structure is judged from the standpoint of the race. The minimum of wants is now seen to be an absolute duty because anything above the minimum trespasses on the rights of mankind. So we step naturally into the theory of property which the Fathers formulated and the monks car- ried into practice. Anastasius of Sinai, discussing Christ's words about the mammon of unrighteous- ness, says they do not refer, as some think, to prop- erty gotten by wrong means, but to everything in excess of absolute necessities. 89 Jerome writes : "The one can only win what the other loses; thence the saying, 'Every rich man is an unrighteous person or the son of one.' " ^ Chrysostom cries out to a rich lady : " Of how many poor, O woman, does thine arm bear the robbery ? " 91 To possess property was felt to be a dishonor. Gregory Thaumaturgus, on his death-bed, forbade his friends buying a grave for him, requiring that his body be buried in common ground. The principle of property in common ought to rule in one place anyway, the place where the bodies of men return to the dust whence they were taken. Ephraem of Syria, just before he died, gave away the only bit of property he possessed, his old man's staff. On the threshold of the perfect life, he joyously vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 209 washed his hands of the last stain made by private property. The men who did such things believed that the absolute minimum of wants was the only cure for covetousness. "You must avoid the sin of covetousness," says Jerome, " and this not merely by refusing to seize upon what belongs to others, for that is punished by the laws of the State, but also by not keeping your own property, which has now become no longer yours." 92 The vow of poverty is the only cement that can hold a truly ethical society together. 93 The monastic life. was to realize true social unity. Salvian says that the only justification for a priest's having property is in the fact that through his hands the money of the rich passes into the hands of the poor. He is God's middleman. By his means, the sin against Nature committed by the rich is in some measure corrected. Anything above the minimum of wants is a robbery. Through the Church, the partial restoration is brought about. Now if this held true of the whole priesthood, how much more of the monks, whose reason for existence was to carry the puritanism of the time to the length of its principle. The most explicit communism is taught by the Fathers and practised by the monks. Adam, it was said, had no property of his own; for, while the whole earth was for his use, no part of it belonged to him. "Thou shalt communicate in all things to thy brother, and shalt not say thy goods are thine own; for the common participation of the neces- saries of life is appointed to all men by God." 94 According to Augustine, property originated in the 2IO GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Fall and in fratricide. Cain and Romulus, founders of the terrestrial city, are types of the property- getter. According to Rousseau : " The first man who, having fenced off a piece of ground, could think of saying, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries, and horrors would not have been spared to the human race by one who, plucking up the stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called out to his fellows : Beware of listening to this im- postor ; you are undone if you forget that the earth belongs to no one and that its fruits are for all." 95 The thought is identical, although Augustine's words are more severe, on the whole, than Rousseau's. Again, Augustine writes in more sober fashion : " God has made the rich and the poor of the same clay, and one earth bears them both. . . . 'Tis through Emperors and Kings of the world that God gives the human law of the human race. Take away the law of the Emperors, and who will dare to say, * This villa is mine ' ? " % Nilus to nearly the same point. Speaking about the rulers who sought to check the exodus from the city of men to the city of monks in the wilderness, he declares that their authority is not by- Nature but by mere custom ; " the only life that is after the mind of the Creator is the life without property, having all things in common." 97 No man can be truly individual and have anything beyond his clothes and daily bread. Without poverty, no perfection. Virtue of a high order is irreconcilable with wealth. If a man would be more careful of his soul than of his property, he vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 211 must become a monk. 98 The monastic writings of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries all agree in this matter. The monks looked through existing society and behind it saw an ideal host of ideal individuals, each one owning nothing save himself. Property then has no root in the nature of things. Its only title is positive law ; it is the creation of the State. Many an economist of our day might repeat that last proposition, even as Cicero anticipated it, since the growth of private property is bound up in history with the formation and development of government. But his assertion would probably resemble Augustine's only in form, differing radi- cally in substance, for the reason that his economics are not touched by the dogmas about sin and the Fall. For him, the growth of the State is as truly a process of Nature as the movement of the tides. And so, to say that the right to private property de- pends upon the State would not necessarily impair the ideal rightfulness of private property. To Au- gustine's mind, on the contrary, the State was neces- sitated by sin. On account of sin in the world, God allowed it. Inasmuch as sin cannot be gotten rid of until the Judgment Day, the State must continue. Consequently, private property must continue. But it has no ground whatever in equity as distinguished from positive law. In true humanity it lacks all root. To sin it owes its origin and to sin its con- tinuance. Its title-deeds cannot pass muster in the supreme court of morality, the monastery. The logic of this conception came boldly into the light when the problem of reconciling puritanism with the housekeeping necessities of a religious es- 212 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. tablishment did not confront the mind. The sects that opposed the Catholic Church could be more consistent. Logic is a luxury that few practical men can afford. Augustine was illogical because, being bishop in a State church, he had to be a statesman as well as a Puritan. The Manichaeans, however, were not wrestling with that double question. Hence, strik- ing straight out into a broad inference from the above reasoning, they ruled that " no baptised person should possess property." " Pelagius, also, and his followers combated private property. 100 They saw the prob- lem from one side. They achieved the glory of con- sistency at the cost of practicalness. For their logic, if pressed home under the conditions of those days, would have turned Christianity into a vast monastery. The dual work of the Mediaeval Church would have become impossible. She was to give free career to the splendid passion of the elect for perfection and at the same time maintain a concordat with the State. Augustine's theory became the explicit programme of Occidental Christianity. Two worlds lie beside each other. Two classes of people those who are fully in earnest with virtue, and those who are only earnest in part compose two Churches, the Church of the saints, and the Church of the average Chris- tians and worldlings. There are two levels of duty. All who have a passion for goodness find no stopping- place short of the monastic " counsels of perfection." On this level there is no private property. No saint can awn his own farm. In the Pseudo-Isidore it is written : " We know that you are not ignorant of the fact that hitherto the principle of living with all vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 215 things in common has been in vigorous operation among good Christians, and is still so by the grace of God ; and most of all among those who have been chosen to the lot of the Lord, that is to say, the clergy." 101 But all men cannot be clergy and monks. All men cannot be saints. There's a half-way house of goodness, wherein the bulk of Christians live ; and any one of them may own his own farm, if strength of arm and force of mind enable him. And so, by dint of having two Churches, which yet are made one through the inner Church's domination over the outer, the problem which the Manichaean did not face is, for the time, successfully met. Rigorism is specialized and localized. The Church keeps house with the State, yet satisfies the perfectionist. This disposition of things answered the purpose for a thousand years. Yet it is easy to see that some day the arrangement must break down, and the thought that is taken with all seriousness in the monastery seek its fortune outside. Such economic teaching as the monastic type of Christianity incor- porated in both theory and practice cannot but be- come, sooner or later, a threat to the world's vested interest. Take Ambrose as an example. He affirms that the Christian idea of justice shuts out the thought of private property. It is not consonant with abso- lute justice, as Scripture has revealed it, "that one should treat common, that is public, property as private. This is not even in accord with Nature, for Nature has poured forth all things for. all men for common use. God has ordered all things to be pro- duced, so that there should be food in common to all, and that the earth should be a common posses- 214 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. sion for all. Nature, therefore, has produced a com- mon right for all, but greed has made it a right for a few." 102 Using the very terms of Roman law, he declared that private property rests upon usurpation. Arming himself with an etymology used by Lac- tantius and Varro before him, he said that homo, coming from humus, indicates that if things were to Nature's liking, all property would be common prop- erty, since the name for man is derived from the common earth. And he made Ahab, murdering Naboth, in order to get his vineyard, the type of the money-getter. Ambrose referred to the Stoics as workers in the same vein of natural law. But observe the differ- ence between him and them. Their doctrine of Nature was vague and impersonal, and had no au- thoritative text. His doctrine derived itself from the will of an absolute personal Creator, and was there- fore definite and clear. Above all, he had the Bible for his text, authoritative and simple. Plainly, thought like his was not lunar politics. Some time or other, some way or other, it must tell upon ter- restrial housekeeping. To show the continuity of thought, and at the same time suggest that such ideas might easily break out of monastic bounds, it is enough to refer to Wycliffe. He taught, following Augustine, that private property originated in sin. Going further than Augustine, he taught, in effect, that divine grace alone could give a sure title to property. This is like the Manichaean position, and yet unlike it; like it in that both are more fearlessly logical than Augustine ; unlike it in that the Manichseans, being vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 215 consistent ascetics, were on the retreat for the world, while Wycliffe was advancing towards it. His trans- lation of the Bible into the common tongue, and his opposition to the hierarchy, pointed out the road he was on. In his conception of the Church, the rigor- ism of the monastic programme is not far from enter- ing terrestrial politics. The opinions of the Fathers about interest can easily be foreseen. The common feeling of antiquity, incorporated within a popular religious movement of great depth and momentum, had its conclusion fore- ordained. There is no need to gather many exam- ples, when every Father who touched the question had just one thing to say. A brief reference to two points will serve. First, as to theory. Aristotle's notion that money is barren was universally accepted. The interest- taker was defined as "a man who produced noth- ing." 103 Gregory of Nyssa writes : " What is the difference between the thief, who secretly takes the property of another; the assassin, who takes pos- session of the goods of his victim ; and the rich man, who, in demanding interest, appropriates what does not belong to him?" 104 The general maxim was that Christ "did not take away the law of Nature, but confirmed it." 105 Since, then, interest had no root in Nature, it was outside the pale of Christianity. Ambrose puts the whole thing in a nutshell, when he says, "Where the law of war holds, there the law of interest holds." 106 In the matter of discipline. The councils that took hold of the question dealt with it just as Augus- tine dealt with the question of property, drawing 2l6 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. a broad distinction between the laity and the priest- hood. Priests were forbidden to take interest under severe penalties, sometimes going as far as deposi- tion. 107 The council of Elvira extended the prohi- bition to the laity. It stands alone. 108 Yet the exception is pregnant with suggestion. Held in the heat of a great persecution, it pressed farther than other councils the antagonism of the puritanism within the Church to the world outside. And Elvira, while solitary amongst the councils, finds company elsewhere. The Emperor Basil, in the eighth cen- tury, undertook to prohibit interest at Constanti- nople. Of course he failed. His son Leo, rescinding the law, said, by way of preface, " The human race cannot be governed by spiritual laws." 109 The capitu- laries of Charlemagne forbade it to the laity. In the Pseudo-Isidore a decretal of Leo the Great says, " that not only the clergy ought not to take interest, but the laity, too, ... to the end that all opportunity for sinning be removed." no In plain sight lies the conclusion that the council of Elvira, by reason of its impracticableness, was a better index to the inbred logic of the patristic view than more impor- tant and more prudent councils. The twofold constitution of the Church delivered her from the burden of consistency. A thing might be essential to the character of a monk or priest, yet not concern the layman. Salmasius, defending in- terest, is on the true mediaeval ground when he argues that the prohibition is as wise for the clergy as it is foolish for the laity. The leader should have a higher virtue than the common herd of soldiers. The monastic programme for social unity lived up vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 2 1/ to the patristic logic ; and in order to do it, first created, as nearly as possible, a vacuum for the ex- periment, into which no disturbing secular condition could penetrate. The conscience of the world was isolated and localized. It did not speak from within society. Still it did not speak from the clouds. While the City of God and the City of Man were so deeply parted that theory did not try to build a bridge between them, yet the City of God was not a mere vision, but an incorporated ideal, having for a body organized monasticism. It was therefore in a very real sense part and parcel of history; and safely housed the conclusions of absolute justice in relation to economic questions. Moreover it is necessary to remind ourselves that the situation was wholly unlike our own economic situation, say fifty years ago, when economic laws were treated as if they were independent of ethics. In the period we are studying conscience was not so much a deserter from economics as economics from conscience. The economic aspect of the ethi- cal problems was below the horizon. The Church monopolized the spiritual interests of the race, being herself monasticized. The city celestial and the city terrestrial were separate. Conscience and reason were not able to see the economic side of things. Not lack of moral intensity, but the non- existence of certain problems and the political and industrial conditions that could create them, is the reason why the ideals of absolute justice, as the monks viewed them, kept close within the monastery walls. Let it once happen however that the two cities be- 2l8 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. come in a measure unified ; that the State assumes again the character of an agent for clear moral ends ; that the idea of God becomes immanent; mother words that a serious attempt is made to moralize human life as it is lived under the conditions of time and space, so that the best men and women are summoned out of the monastery to build the family and plant right- eousness in the earth, then these doctrines born of the union between the idealizing forces of antiquity may lay one hand on the plough and the other on the sword. The rhyme of John Ball and his men, " When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the Gentleman ? " is a pretty plain hint that the mon- astery cannot permanently confine its own ideals. The attempt of Luther's peasants to translate reli- gious liberty into political and economic liberty is another. But this is not the quarter to look to, if we would rightly gauge the influence of the Fathers and the monks upon modern problems. We cannot accept their specific opinions unless we discount them heav- ily. The spiritual continuity of the world is not to be traced through specific opinions. How idle, how worse than idle, would be an attempt to explain Plato's power over the Christian world by his body of opinions on the worth of the barbarians, the com- munity of wives, cosmology, and other matters. The continuity of our intellectual history is to be found only in those central and organizing conceptions that are the heart of great systems. Now the view of the world which the monks worked out had for its heart the belief that the common man was of infinite worth. Their main reason for denouncing the world vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 219 was not hatred of the world itself, but an exalted val- uation of the soul. The secular life of their period appeared to be irreconcilable with the true interests of the man within every man. So they went aside from the secular in order to find the eternal. They were pessimists regarding civil society. They were impassioned optimists re- garding the ideal possibilities of the common man. In centuries when war was at every man's door, nay, almost beside his pillow; when a Spanish knight slept, his wife beside him, in the same room with his horse ; when industrialism had no space to breathe, save in a few small towns, the monk held up be- fore the eyes of Europe the dogma that the essen- tial humanity in every man was so full of meaning that all existing social forms put together could not provide the wherewithal of self-expression. The monk's opinions about specific questions such as luxury and interest radiated from this centre. The world shrivelled into nothing before the universal individual. Society was too mean and small for him. Only God was great enough to contain him. A new valuation of the average man had entered universal history. This self-same valuation is the source whence the social question to-day draws its spiritual, that is to say, its permanent, sap. Herewith came into European ethic a new category. Of the three terms that are now common stock, Virtue, Duty, the Highest Good, the Greeks had only two, the first and the third. This is in keeping with their character as the artists and philosophers of antiquity. They looked straight and long at the act- uality of things. Their subject was the world as a 220 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. completed world, as complete as a finished statue. Their point of view was static, not dynamic. The categories, Supreme Good and Virtue, belong to this situation ; for the Supreme Good is the eternal, im- mutable nature of things, and Virtue is that in man which enables him to contemplate it. The Supreme Good is the inner order of things. Virtue is in essence the rational capacity within man through which he and that inner order are in covenant. Its pith is the ability to distinguish between the real and the apparent goods, to separate the permanent values of life from the passing ones. Of course the idea of Duty is in- volved. But because the fundamental life, the life of God, is statically conceived, whether as pure being or pure reason, the contemplative life in man gets the priority, and the idea of Duty is not made explicit. The Stoics approached it. For them the practical was a full nine-tenths of conduct. They kept near the common people. Their view of things had to make its fortune in a world that had lost the definite frontiers characteristic of experience in the classic period. The category of Virtue, along with Su- preme Good, was enough when the State was small and men found themselves in a field of well-settled relationships. But now the fences were down and the rivers were up. Heterogeneous masses of men jostled each other within one political household. Humanity stretched out beyond the traditional boundaries. The City of the Universe, foreboding the City of God, took the place of the City-State. A vast bulk of life called for consideration. The moral sense moved about in a world half-realized. Obliga- tions vague yet authoritative touched the conscience. vi GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 221 The doctrine of Duty was the answer to them. In the light of the term "Virtue" a man looks into himself to find wherein he is or may become of a piece with the essential being of the universe. But the concep- tion of Duty sums up a man's relations to the uni- verse and to society as a part of it under the head of obligation, and bids the man look upon them as a debt. The Supreme Good is no fixed quantity of ultimate being. It is an infinite force. And man's relations with it must be constantly widening. The Stoic only began the doctrine of Duty. It won its full rights in Christian ethic. A new view of things had appeared. Cosmology was no longer the main interest. History took its place. The object upon which the mind directs itself was not a universe fin- ished, and like the Parthenon standing still to be contemplated with peace. It was, rather, an histori- cal process, a body of events made up by deeds of men and deeds of God, and moving towards a supreme event called in the Old Testament the day of the Lord, and in the New, the Second Coming of Christ, by which the historical process is to be rounded off. God was not thought of as pure being or the abyss of being. He is a self-directed will, a living and loving personality, going forth into self- revelation, and girding men with an all-including relationship. The possibilities of character and con- duct overshadowed the actuality. What the best man is, bears no proportion to what he ought to be. Man's will was thus besieged by the infinite. The Kingdom of God besets him with an opportunity that unceas- ingly widens, a responsibility that ceaselessly deepens. The doctrine of Virtue, taken by itself, belongs to 222 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP, vi an organism of ideas for which the existent is the main thing. The doctrine of Duty belongs to one for which the ought-to-be has broad margins beyond the is. So the new category in ethics comes into the mind with the new definition of man, the univer- sal individual potential in all men and realized in none. If there is a pearl of great price hidden within the nature of the lowliest, if its price is so great that nothing short of the full being and beauty of God can come level to it in the market of spiritual wares, then it is plain that the relation which binds the man at the top to the man at the bottom hath an infinite quality in it. The obligation of deepening sympathy and appreciation is authoritative. The ethical movement of our day shows how sig- nificant was this change in the line of approach to the social idea. Wundt says that the essence of morality is devotion to humanity ; that morality with- out it is pharisaism. 111 Now the idea of Duty is the coefficient to this idea of humanity. A man owes an indefinite, a practically infinite debt to his neighbor. His duty means that he is under bonds to create in himself a steadily growing capacity for wider and deeper relationships. These two things the infinite or ideal worth of every man, and the sense of Duty that comes from the recognition of it together lay the ethical foun- dation of Democracy. A democratic society exists quite as much to make new rights as to insure the old rights. Within it no privilege should be allowed to gain a foothold, unless it looks to the widening of the area of privilege. The fittest to survive in this field is he who is efficient in creating his peers. VII THE six chapters preceding have dealt with the establishment of Christianity in Europe in relation to that new definition of man which has given to our social theories a unit of measure, and so has helped to bring about the great problem of our day. The aim of this chapter is to review the period from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries, that is, from the complete establishment of Christianity to its dis- establishment. I venture to place the former event in the eleventh century rather than earlier, because it was not until then that the new view of things showed its overmastering grip on the will by equipping the papacy with the moral force that enabled it to suc- cessfully take the field against the Empire. The eighteenth century is the other terminus because the mediaeval view was then unseated ; and reason, jump- ing the life to come, set about the work of building a house on the earth. In the seven centuries lying between, we may note certain phenomena which sug- gest that we have the true clue to the pedigree of the reformer's conscience. The period is so broad that the attempt to deal with even one of its main aspects within such brief limits may seem like a wanton offence against the laws of sober historical study. Yet no disrespect to 223 224 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. the scenery of a country attaches to a view of it from an express train, if nothing more is claimed than an ability to distinguish between a landscape resting on granite, and another resting on limestone. Irrever- ence no more belongs to a short statement about a great subject, than reverence belongs to a long state- ment about a short subject. All depends on the motive, and upon the care with which one suggests a discount upon his own conclusions. The period offers the same advantages for the study of the history of conscience that Greece has provided for the study of the history of reason. The Greek mind was so masterful that even when it bor- rowed it was original. By means of its own genius it was intellectually isolated, and gives us our single example of a thoroughly logical development. The mediaeval period, also, was isolated, not, indeed, by means of intellectual masterhood, but by grace of position. The Church had been solidly grounded by the fusion of the Biblical and the Graeco-Roman views. Her authority in spiritual matters was as much of a certainty as two times two make four. She was the keeper and dispenser of the clarifying thoughts of man no less than of the saving thoughts of God. The barbarians whom she christened and catechised had no native acquirements that could, for one minute, withstand the pressure of antiquity exerted through her. Moreover, until the Arabian culture, with the complete text of Aristotle in its hands, entered Europe in the thirteenth century, the Church had no suspicion that between the Bibli- cal and the Graeco-Roman elements in her consti- tution there could ever be a serious conflict. The vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 225 working consciousness of the Occident was com- pletely unified. The one pope was the confessor of both kings and people. The Latin was the one language in church and university. A single view of the world and of man's place in it dominated man, showing its power over the will by causing the crusades, while it pro- claimed its conquest of the eye by building the cathedrals. People took their faith for granted as they took the sky. Dante set Aquinas to music. Here then we have a field every way happy for a preliminary study of the way in which the establish- ment influenced the development of conscience. It is a necessary preface to the study that we should once for all clear our minds concerning the significance of individuality. The danger besetting every great movement of feeling is the obliteration of distinctions. Feeling as such is a contagion rather than a conviction, taking possession of the popular mind not by the slow steps of proof, but by leaps and rushes. Schleiermacher defined religion in terms of feeling, apart from the logical process. And all great bulks of intense feeling have in their make-up an essentially religious element. The wave of emotion that passed through Greece when the Persians were beaten carried religion with it, even in cases where the Gods were not mentioned. The thrill that ran through England when the Armada was defeated was religious in its nature. Lincoln's Gettysburg address, without the name of God in it, is religious to the core. Movements of feeling, although they may not have an organized propaganda, extend themselves very much after the method of religion. Q 226 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. The rapid change in the sentiment of England touching individualism is a case in point. Hardly more than a generation ago, it was the social creed of the country. And now Herbert Spencer is almost like the owl that is in the desert or the sparrow that sitteth alone upon the house-top. Tocqueville said that the French Revolution bore itself after the man- ner of religious revolutions. 112 The social movement in our own time contains much implicit religion, and is likely to get more rather than less. But religion tends rapidly to dogma, and dogma is apt to be impatient of distinctions. Truth is handled in the lump, and some serious dangers ensue. We must not let the enthusiasm of humanity blind us to the supreme, the canonic value, of the principle of in- dividuality. The right and duty to be individual is the ideal element within our social unrest. The constant migration and mixing of peoples, resulting in the break-up of inherited constitutions and customs ; the consequent inability to stand still for a moment in the old ways ; the enormous exploitation of the earth ; the heaping-up of the means to pleasure ; the wide- spread desire for wealth ; the animal craving for a full share in the spoils ; the momentous increase of the speculative fever, all these elements have a hand in the disturbances of our time. If now this were the whole story, the tempestuous social agita- tion would without fail come to an end some day, when the shattered nerves of society cried out for rest at any price, in a new rule by the strongest, in a gigantic trust called " imperialism." But there's an ideal principle behind the agitation and hidden within vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 227 its most vulgar forms, the principle of individuality. Whatever is highest in our life and thought is here at stake. To strengthen and deepen the sense of self-masterhood is the main end of all our idealizing forces. In this quarter our philosophy makes or loses its fortune. The history of philosophy has two creative periods, the Greek and the modern. The Greek gave philosophy to the world with one hand, and with the other the ideal of a free citizen who helps to make the laws he obeys. The two things belong together. The man who is his own master must have a view of his own. There can be no thorough and permanent philosophy in company with a despotism. The gov- ernment of society must be vested in men who have the right to make up their own minds, else a rea- soned view of the universe is impossible. Philosophy goes with the individual. The story of modern phi- losophy is equally strong in evidence. Descartes was above all things his own man. The fundamental rule he laid down for himself was to look into himself. He disowned books, in large measure, making it his boast that he was self-taught. It is true that as an indi- vidual Descartes was only half made up. He did not dare differ from the Church. He took his dogma in block just as tradition floated it down to him out of the past. But as a thinker, he typified the truth that philosophy has its whole estate pledged to the princi- ple of individuality. Our science also finds here its sole right to exist. It made its appearance when the house built for the mind by mediaeval dogma began to let in the weather. It is the work of the individual reason, asserting its 228 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. right to see the universe through its own eyes. Its future depends on the sense of individuality. The mind, independent of external authority, possessing like Darwin just one dogma, the duty of loyalty to itself and reverent patience toward its object, is the whole of science. Science is not an accumulation of facts, no matter how vast and imposing; but an attitude, the attitude of the individual mind taking itself and the world in time and space with equal seriousness. Let the sense of individuality once lose its hold, by reason of a strain wrongly applied or too long continued, and we should have in the place of science another dynasty of ghosts. Again the historic spirit is the spirit and the method of the individual. History is never written until the individual has found himself. In India it has not been written at all, because the individual, the moment he broke away from the tyranny of caste, forsook the earth ; that is to say, gave up the one sure foothold for the principle of individuality and took wing into mysticism. History was written by the prophets of Israel because they believed that one man with God makes a majority. Herodotus and Thucydides wrote histories because they were mature Greeks. Customs colliding with customs had made custom as such an impossible guide of life. One narrow polity had drawn the sword upon another, to slay and be slain. The individual lost his old belongings. For a while he fell into sophistry. Then, recovering him- self, he looked back over the road his people had travelled. He sought for a continuous meaning in the deeds of mankind and so wrote the first objec- tive history. vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 229 What we call the historical spirit is simply the spirit of self-reliant and reverent individuality. The Reformation and the Renaissance made a violent breach between consciousness and its immediate past. The eighteenth century widened the breach into a gulf. Tradition lost all its value as a dogmatic authority. The individual, for a time rioting in liberty, soon came to himself ; and looking fearlessly and patiently back, sought to see things just as they had happened. Being an individual, he reverenced the individuality of the past. Ranke, in the preface to his Universal History, finely says that the historical spirit is a new kind of piety. That is just it. The present, no longer living on the authority of the past, but looking into its own heart and thinking, derives from rever- ence for its own individuality the law which is to govern the student. The master-light of his labor is the desire to give to the past the right to tell its story in its own tongue. The State, too, lives on the principle of individual- ity. In case the Church and the State have never been separated, as in China to-day, this need not be so. But when once the distinction has been clearly seen, it becomes inevitable. The State cannot per- manently dominate the imagination of men through direct appeal to motives that are primarily religious, in the common use of the word. If it is to retain that mastery over the imagination which redeems the pressure put on the will from the appearance of tyranny, and which alone endows the State with the power to tax its subjects to the uttermost, and even to train them in the master-art of dying gladly for Father- land, it must be in fact or in promise a free State 230 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. basing its claim to authority on its ability to ceaselessly widen the area over which men govern themselves. Without going further, the sum of the matter is : that all the idealizing forces of our time, which touch to the quick the problem of man's life upon the earth, have a common stake. The article of faith they stand or fall by is the sovereign worth of indi- viduality. Only so far as the social movement is in partnership with them, does it have the power of permanent appeal. So far as it is a battle for the mastery of the means to pleasure and comfort and even a certain amount of culture, and so far as it is this alone, it is another chapter in the war of the kites against the crows. This long preamble is justified if it be kept in mind that the subject is the creation of the reformer's con- science ; for the history of conscience is the history of the individual. The word goes back to the Stoics. They had this in common with the Epicureans and rSceptics; namely, that the desire to know, the / master-passion of the Greek mind in its best days, Njiad given away to the desire to find peace. They differed however in that they kept their place in the State, and always appeal to the common feeling and the common interest. Hence while they emphasized individuality, they did not isolate it in the life of clubs, but kept it fairly close to the social order of things. From this resulted their doctrine of conscience. A man is responsible to God or Nature for the right handling of his own life, outer and inner. Since how- ever he nowhere finds himself outside the political and social framework, this responsibility for himself includes a responsibility for his neighbors. Because vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 231 he is an individual, it is his duty to build up within himself, behind the world of eye and ear, a world whose values are vested in the unseen ; and because he is not an atom but one organ within a vast body, it is his duty to see to it that the same unseen world is built up within his neighbor. Conscience means "knowing along with." The man of conscience is a man in whom the fair unities of the child-life have died. He is two men in one. An eternal element in him rises up and confronts the temporal, a higher nature declares war upon the lower. The seventh chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans is the record of an impassioned conscience. The man of conscience has two worlds, alongside each other; and one of them asserts the right of absolute domain. And outside him as well as inside him are two worlds, lying side by side. If the man of conscience lived on Robinson Crusoe's island he might become a quietist unless, like St. Anthony, he established ethical communication with the birds and fishes. As a matter or fact, he is in society. He sees a higher humanity rising up, confronting a lower humanity, and claiming the same sovereignty that his higher self asserts over his lower self. There's a gulf between the ought-to-be and is. He must undertake to bridge it, or deny himself. The pith of conscience is the obligation, pressing upon him from some authoritative source, to become an in- dividual, seeing the best through his own eyes and lov- ing it for its own sake. Now, just because the highest good is open to none but individuals, it is his bounden duty to create and nurture individuality in others. D'Argenson, in his Considerations on the Govern- 232 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. ment of France (1739), wrote: "Two things are principally desirable for the welfare of the State ; first, that all citizens shall be equal each to the other ; second, that each man shall be the child of his own deeds." The doctrine of conscience takes the second head of this proposition in the most absolute sense. Each man should be self-made and self-mastered as regards his character. If this holds for a single man, it holds for all. Law is not law unless it be universal. Hence, the man of conscience must of necessity be a reformer and represent the aggressive attitudes of the ought-to-be towards the is. Therefore, to the end that there should be a vigor- ous and stubborn social conscience, there must be a deep-rooted sense of individuality. We have seen that the conquest of the mind of the Mediterranean world by the Biblical idea of God and man resulted in an emphasis upon individuality that was altogether a new thing. Individuality is taken to be the very marrow of the universe. Nothing is real except the soul, and the soul is an eternal individual. The stars may break from their courses and fight with one another, the visible universe go to wreck, but the soul cannot perish. Human individuality is the pith of all reality outside God, and the pledge of its per- fection is nothing short of the being that is inside God. In the second place, there must be a broad margin of possibility beyond the actual. We have seen how the Biblical view gave this margin. The Supreme Good is in essence a creative ethical force. The treasures of the unseen world are used for the cam- paign in this, and they have but begun to be spent. vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 233 The divine personality is an infinite fund of possibili- ties. Man's account with Nature is never closed. It is in this thought of the creative novelties in God's management of history that the Church's doctrine of the supernatural started. However deeply we may disagree over the logical connection between the two, it should not be difficult for us to agree about the bearings of the two taken together upon man's con- ception of humanity. Let the doctrine of grace in its antagonism to and triumph over matter and Nature be as unscientific as you will, yet it did this much : for fifteen hundred years it kept steadily before the mind of Europe the belief that the possible stored up in God for man vastly exceeds the actual, and must get the better of it, somehow, somewhere. Since then the existence and strength of the re- former's conscience depends on these two things, the depth of root belonging to the sense of individ- uality and the breadth of the margin belonging to the potential, there are two points to be noted in the inner history of the period from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries. First, the theory of individual- ity by itself. Second, the aesthetic of that theory - meaning thereby the poetry of mediaeval eschatology. Afterwards we are to recall the beginnings of modern political theory. The definition of man that was shaped in the monastery cannot be put to the test until the individual escapes from the monastery and goes into politics. The full power of the con- science that was created by Christianity will display itself when the soul realizes the rights of its neighbors as they are found in time and space. The central event of the age that saw the establishment of Chris- 234 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. tianity in the Occident was the death of the State. The central event of our own time is the growth of the State as a moral and spiritual agent. Between these two events the period now before us stretches out. Its significance for social theory is discovered when the State comes once more on the stage of the higher life. The celestialized individual, defended by the mon- astery walls, adopted the platform of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Certain things in the monastic con- stitution may blind us to its real bearing upon our subject. For example, the vow of absolute obedience, in which the logic of monasticism issued, may seem to be the total undoing of self-masterhood. Again, the vow of poverty, since it cuts up citizenhood by the roots, may seem to take away the sole ground on which liberty may find footing. But these things, and others like them, are an in- dispensable part of the total view, which is the thorough definition of the individual in terms of the other world. To the end that this definition might be driven home, the relationships that make up life in terms of the visible order had to be denied. Let us distinguish between the intention of monasticism on the one side and its ways and means on the other. Thus, the vow of obedience was imposed because, without it, the monastic society could not have main- tained itself. The monks elected their own head at least, that was the ideal and then put themselves under military discipline in relation to him. Domin- ion was conceived as it was at Rome in the best days of the Republic. The citizens elected the Consul or the Tribune. But upon the officers, once elected, the vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 235 mantle of the authority of the whole body politic at once descended. Dominion was not distributed. There was no division of powers. So with the monks ; a kind of martial law in spiritual things was held to be necessary, to insure the continuance of the ideal life and to guarantee the success of the monastic programme for social unity. Consequently the vow of obedience was a part of freedom itself. The monks bound themselves by it in order that the ideal society the society which carried men back to the perfect state of Nature before the Fall might not perish from the earth. The ways and means employed to compass this end however out of the question they may be for the reason and con- science of our own day should not be allowed to hide from us the plain intention. With this distinction clearly drawn, there is little difficulty in seeing that the monastic platform pro- claimed liberty as an inherent element of man. Within the monastic brotherhood there could be no slaves. To become a monk meant to become abso- lutely free. In the later days of the Empire and in the time of Charles the Great and his successors con- siderable legislation was directed against the entrance of slaves and serfs into the monasteries. It was based however on political and economic grounds. Within the monastery, where the purely religious valuation of things held good, there was no objection whatsoever to the entrance of serf or slave. The Roman jurists had said that liberty was the natalia, Nature's gift to man at his birth. The monasteries, stretching from end to end of Europe, realized the principle over the tract of life within their walls. In 236 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. after times, when they were endowed with great landed estates instead of supporting themselves by their own labors, they held serfs in large numbers. But this was no part of the monastic ideal, and was gainsaid by the monastic practice touching all real members of the order ; for all of them, no matter what their birth, were free. In the light of the eter- nal humanity all the differences between man and man, which the outside world made so much of, faded away. Equality too was an essential part of the monastic scheme. In the fourth century Basil's mother and sisters were moved to renounce the world. They made a kind of impromptu nunnery ; for in their day and region the ascetic ideal had not achieved clear methods and fixed rules. Their behavior is all the more significant, because the undrilled impulses that herald a great movement often disclose more plainly its inherent meaning, in relation to the old habits from which it calls men away, than its developed and constitutional forms. Now Basil's mother and sis- ters, who were well born and rich, lived on terms of complete equality with their women servants who voluntarily joined their colony, sharing the same tasks and eating at the same table. 113 Having taken their religion seriously for the first time in their lives as they believed they thought it absurd to per- petuate distinctions that owed all their meaning to the life they had abandoned. Montalembert, having this and many similar phe- nomena in mind, said : " It is above all to the monas- tic condition that the fine expression of De Maistre about the priesthood applies * It was neither above vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 237 the last man of the state nor beneath the first/ " m Allowing for De Maistre's rhetoric and not attempt- ing any comparison between the man inside the mon- astery and the secular grandees outside, the saying is true. So far as all within the order went, there was no distinction between low-born and high-born. In the sphere of the absolute all were on a level. Lactantius, in whom perhaps the Roman feeling about natural law was more clearly precipitated than in any other of the Fathers, was a radical in his theory of equality. " God who has made men has willed that they should all be equal." He asserts that the decay of the Empire was due to inequality ; for "without equality there is no fatherland." 115 Cyril said "equality is the spring of law." The severest condemnation of luxury was grounded by all the Fathers and all the monks on the inequality from which it was born and to which it gave birth. Avarice also was vehemently de- nounced as the mother of inequality. 116 Augus- tine, contrasting the terrestrial city with the city celestial, said: "Pride in its perversity apes God. It abhors equality with other men under Him ; but instead of His rule, it seeks to impose a rule of its own upon its equals." 117 Eusebius, writing a de- fence of Christianity, in effect adopts the maxim of Ulpian " All men are equal." Chrysostom wrote : " The human law can recognize the difference which it has instituted ; but all this is nothing in the eyes of the common Lord." 118 Again, ." How can a man boast of being the son of a prince, or of being descended from a noble family ? " 119 Quotations to the same effect, from all over the field, could be almost shovelled together. 238 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Augustine, expressing what was in the mind of the whole Church, described the laws of the State as so many breaches in the ideal constitution, caused by the entrance of sin. He added, of course, that the divine will would tolerate this badly mixed condition of things until the Judgment Day ; 12 and thus a revolutionary assessment of society was bound over to keep the peace. None the less, much ground was yielded to it. A compromise was made. The revo- lution was permitted in the monasteries ; yea, it was more than permitted ; it was affirmed to be the thing that was perfectly to God's liking. The world outside, while claiming the right to be saved through inconsistency, was not allowed for one minute to flatter itself that reason and conscience were its allies. In truth the outside world, the layman's world, did not dream of setting up any such claims. It was aware of its rational and ethical inconsequence. It built its hopes of salvation on its neighborhood to the men of thorough reason and conscience, the monks. Without their prayers the lay world would lie in darkness. From the heart of the monastic life rose the prayers that pierced the clouds and came even before the throne of the Almighty. The saints whose lives made up the inner petals of Dante's rose had been brought up within the monastery ; so that the worship of the saints was the worship of the revolutionary ideal as it took flesh in the men who were the masters of the world's religious imagination and feeling. Evidently, the compromise, by which the world of business and pleasure bought the right to continue in its ways without being excom- vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 239 municated by reason and conscience, made great concessions. The monastic view of things promised to keep within its own pale, and not intrude upon the estate of the other party to the contract. Was it possible to carry such a bargain out ? The monastery was the city of God. Its address in time and space was as definite as Venice or Antwerp. The saint was the man after God's heart; and the worldling believed that only in partnership with him is salvation possible. The grave was the boundary between the fair land beyond where all men are equal, and the unhappy country on this side whose life is ruled and domi- neered by inequality. But what an insecure frontier ! The outside world had no guarantee against inva- sion. Right is absolute or it is nothing. If there is a categorical imperative, it must sooner or later claim universal dominion. " Geographical morality " is an impossibility. Reason and Conscience, as the monastic programme conceive them, were not disem- bodied spirits. The monasteries, planted all over Europe, were their bodies. How was it possible for the layman's world to safeguard itself ? How prevent the monastic belief on such a question as the relation between the traditional estimate of property and rank on the one side and man's eternal individuality on the other from breaking bounds and intruding upon political opinion ? When a man turned monk, he dropped his old name. This signified that he gave up all claims to worldly distinctions, and that the highest earthly title was vanity. His new name proclaimed his belief that, having now come into the presence of the highest, he 240 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. found himself on a level with every man in the order. The Epicureans had a fine saying, that one friend is the stage on which another friend acts his part. Within the monastery the soul of the lowest born might be, often was, the stage upon which the high- est born lived his best life. The disowning of one name and the taking of another stood for the passing away of the old order of things. The difference between man and man, between the classes and the masses, disappears. All men are brothers. There is one level of humanity. So here we have the revolutionary platform - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity carried out wholly in purpose, and very largely in practice. The monastery was outside the political, social order. Still it was upon the earth, within stone's throw. Calvin lived long by Lake Geneva. There is no evidence that he ever truly saw it. Yet a day shall come when Lake Geneva will insist upon being seen. Two times two must always make four, however long men may put off their debts to mental arithmetic. There's no such thing as dead force. The pressure exerted by the snow on the mountain top is as little static, as truly kinetic, as the power of the avalanche. Only the di- rection of the pressure changes. To deny or belittle the vast, though largely potential, significance of the monastic epoch, from 300 A.D. to 1300, for the poli- tics and sociology of Europe, would be to belittle or deny the reality of force. The Church's treatment of slavery is at once a puzzle and demonstration. On the one hand a vast deal was done to emphasize the spiritual worth of the slave. In everything that touched the Church's inner vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 241 life, he was treated always as a person, never as a thing. His marriage was regarded from the beginning as binding and sacramental, and in the twelfth century Pope Adrian ruled that the consent of the master was not necessary to its validity. In the list of the Martyrs, the roll-call of heroes, the slaves are well represented. The slave could enter the priesthood. He must indeed be first emancipated, but that was required not because slavery made him any the less a man, but because, without emancipation, the mas- ter, by asserting legal rights over one priest, would lower the dignity of the entire priesthood, and im- peril the Church's sovereignty. Against all the hide- ous cruelties attaching to Roman slavery, the Church set her face like a flint. Then again the fine fashion of emancipating slaves, brought into vogue by the Stoics, undoubtedly became much stronger under Christianity, so that cases of wholesale emancipation were by no means rare. Yet when all is said for the Church that can be fairly said, it remains true that her attention was never directed to emancipation as a real issue. This is illustrated by the history of the interpretation of St. Paul's words : " Wast thou in the state of servi- tude when thou becamest a Christian ? Let not that occupy thy thought," etc. (i Cor. vii. 21). A few commentators explained it in the natural and literal sense. 121 But the great majority took it the other way. Thus Chrysostom; "the apostle means to point out that a man gets nothing by being made free. The slave is a free man when he is freed from passions and the diseases of the mind." In later times, the passage was almost universally interpreted, 242 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. so far as I know, in the so-called moral and mystical sense. Its literal meaning was taken away in order not to disturb existing social conditions. Why did not the Church live up to her own concep- tion of personality ? Why did she not go upon a clear policy of emancipation ? There are some ques- tions that betray their impertinence the moment they are asked, and this is one of them. Plato, in effect, defined unrighteousness as the attempting to do two things at once. The definition is as true for the race as for the individual. Specialization is as necessary in universal history as in the training of the single mind. The Lord of history would seem to approve of Plato in this matter. Israel, Hellas, Rome, had distinct functions in the world's economy. Why not the monastic and imperial Church ? If it is a very real kind of unrighteousness to attempt two things at a time, is it not a piece of intellectual unrighteous- ness to ask the question with which this paragraph opened ? If there is anything that lies in plain sight on the page of history, this conclusion does : that the establishment of Christianity in the Occident, with the body of ideas that went into it, was indispensable to the being and development of our modern life; that without it the definition of the individual could not have been made. No great idea ever appeared in all its bearings as soon as it was born. It is only in myth that an infant Hercules, in the eighth month of his life, strangles the serpents. The permanent principle in the education of the race is evolution. Were a great conception to strike at first with full force, the guillotine would become a symbol of the educational process ; because vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 243 every conception that was really great would straight- way cut the cord between the present and the past. The Church of the period we are studying is to be judged by her conception of man and by what some day must issue from it ; not condemned, because all the issues hidden in it did not come more speedily into the light. The priesthood of the mediaeval Church manifested the democratic quality in the monastic definition of the individual. Protestants have often called that priesthood a " caste." But this is very far from being correct. Had the Church failed in her resistance to the feudalization of the clergy, something like a real caste might have developed. But as it is, the likeness is confined to details, while the unlikeness is fundamental. A caste, in common with an aristocracy, makes much, almost everything, of genealogy. But to the mediaeval ideal of the priesthood genealogy was a matter of absolute indifference. So far as the interests of Democracy go, the mediaeval priesthood was far more advanced than the levitical system of the Old Testament, since therein also a clear line of descent was the essential element in the right to administer holy things. At bottom, the mediaeval priesthood was absolutely anti-aristocratic. The door into it stood wide open to all sorts and conditions of men. More than once the peasant's son reached the papal chair. The democratic force that came into society with Western Christianity cannot be more- plainly seen than by contrasting the Feudal Aristocracy with the Sacred Tribes the Patricians at Rome. Here, as everywhere in the primitive tribal view, the religious 244 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. principle and the aristocratic principle went hand in hand. Although we may think it a long journey from Pharaoh to Agamemnon, still Agamemnon has in him an element of the Pharaoh, in that he is a Zeus-descended King. But in the Middle Ages, the aristocratic feeling and the religious feeling, while in practice they sometimes ran together, had always distinct channels to flow in. The religious principle and the aristocratic principle are separated on a large scale. The soul had nothing to do with questions of descent. The priest had nothing to do with a pedi- gree. The mediaeval priesthood was the complete negation, in terms of transcendence, of the aristocratic view of the world. Another illustration of the power stored up in the new definition of the individual is found in the Puritan movement. We need not be at pains to discriminate between the elements of Puritanism that are directly due to the influence of the rediscovered Bible and those which it inherits from the mother Church of the Middle Ages. For our subject they are inseparable. Nobody nowadays thinks it is possible for one generation to take a broad jump over the thirty generations forerunning it and come down on the clear ground of Biblical truth. All our belief in evolution would have to be given up before we could think so. Therefore no material harm is done to the facts if we say that the universal individ- ual, who had shut himself up in the monastery in order to find himself, took a long step towards the social and political order of things, when Puritanism took the field on the Continent and in England. The sociologic significance of Puritanism is found vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 245 in its undoing of the dual constitution which was the central feature in the working plan of the mediaeval Church. There had been two codes of ethic. One was thorough-going and consistent, the ethic of perfection, the law of saints. The other, half-way and halting, was for the mass of the laity. But now there was to be a single code for the priest and people. The word "saint" went forth from monas- tic bounds and claimed everything that was human. There had been in effect two Churches: the inner monastic Church and the outer lay Church. But Puritanism insisted upon a single Church. The distinction between the Church of the clergy that governs, and the Church of the laity that obeys, disappeared. Its place was taken by the distinction between the Church invisible and the Church ap- parent. In the light of the eternal, nothing can be good for one man that is not law for all men. Thus the definition of the individual broke from its monas- tic cover. The idea of God was still in a large measure trans- cendent. We must be careful however how we use the word. The idea of God in Puritanism was indeed transcendent in relation to the beauty and joy of Nature. At the same time it became profoundly immanent in its relation to the inner life of the common man. The vast imperial institution called the Church no longer mediated between him and the source of all spiritual or permanent values. His own hands now touched the eternal, and not another's for him. The idea of God came forth in unveiled majesty to wed itself to the idea of the individual. 246 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. This is the social significance of the predestinarian view of the world. In the mind of Augustine the predestinarian plan of things lay alongside the insti- tutional view. The two were not conciliated. Each was master by turns. Calvin gave the sceptre to the predestinarian view so that it proceeded to organize all truth along its own line. The absolute sover- eignty of God and the absolute individuality of man were the two poles of the system. What are called the theological horrors of the system do not concern us one way or the other. The historian of the social idea is interested solely by the bearing of the system upon the principle of individuality. Here then is the main point. The dogma of the divine sovereignty fell fiercely upon all the institutions and traditions of the mediaeval Church, reducing them almost to dust. The individual came out from behind them and filled the eye. Moreover the doctrine concerning the divine sov- ereignty, and the doctrine concerning the absolute human individual that went with it, came to close quarters with the existing State. Puritanism agreed with monasticism, that the one thing that has worth in the universe is the soul. But the soul is independent of monasticism. Its fortune is in the hands of the divine choice. That choice owes nothing to circum- stance. It is a free creative act on God's part, calling men unto perfection, and insuring for them the eternal goods without causing any change of place. The absolute human individual, carrying all true values within himself, does not need to stir a step from his position in society. There is a single Church. No grades of sainthood are tolerated. Out- vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 247 side the pale of the elect all is darkness. Inside all is light, the light of common dependence upon God and complete equality in the divine choice. So the standard of an absolute value quits fighting at long range and comes to close quarters with secular society. Wherever it strikes the aristocratic tradi- tions of the State, it cuts sheer through them. The spirit of Cromwell's Ironsides is abroad. The undoing of the dual constitution of the Church drew after it a wide extension of the sense of sin. In the mediaeval programme of conduct it was possi- ble for the happy, joyous life of the natural man to go on in one part of the field, while the sense of sin was specialized and localized in the other. But the Puritans insisted upon carrying the sense of sin over the whole field. What the consequences for aesthetics were, everybody knows. American Puritanism was greatly aided in working out its logic by the raw con- tinent it settled on. The wilderness however did but provide an open field for the inner principle to deploy upon. Puritanism made a thorough-going breach between the life of Nature and the life of grace. It monasticized the secular. Art had about the same footing that poetry found in the New England Primer. The political effects of this universalized sin- consciousness, and of the overpowering emphasis on the sovereignty of God with which it went along, are written large on the page of history. The career of the Independents, their programme for a reformed Parliament with its steps toward radical Democracy, above all the deliberate execution of the King, showed that institutions of the largest pedigree would shrivel 248 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. up in the heat of the people's right, when once people's right had been identified with God's right. There can be no value above the infinite. New England tells the same story. The saints, the elect, owing nothing to merit, owing all to the sovereign grace of God, stand on a level with the highest. The doctrine of universal sinfulness, once outside the monastery, and the doctrine of the divine decrees, once outside the inconsistencies of the Augustinian system, became levelling forces of vast power. Finally the Reformation after taking the new unit of social theory, the universal individual, out of the monastery, and setting his face toward the secular life, armed him with the open Bible. It is the glory of the Bible that it can be rightly read only in the open air. This is due to the fact that it was for the most part thought out and lived in the open air. Not scholars and not mystics, but statesmen and missionaries wrote it. Thence comes its freedom from the isolating and specializing tendencies of cult- ure. Thence the marvellous absence of the leviti- cal and sacerdotal conception of religion from the prophetical parts of the Old Testament and from the whole of the New. The Bible is the book of the common man in religion. When the Ten Tables were published at Rome, it signified that law was to be thenceforward the property of all, no longer the privilege of a few. So the opening of the Bible to the laity signified that the highest things were hence- forward to be the unfettered prerogative of the com- mon mind. The common man was brought close to the sacred text. Between him and the holiest, no med- itator was any longer needed. The deepest mysteries vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 249 of God come out of their hiding-place and beckon to him. Never before had such a thing been done anywhere in history except in the first period of Christianity. The sacred books of India were the monopoly of the Brahmins. Even in Buddhism the monopolistic ele- ment was not cut up by the root ; the common man could indeed come to the highest things ; but he had to become an ascetic, a specialist in spiritual things, in order to do it. The Jewish Church, building the doctrine of the Old Testament Canon through her scholars, made those scholars the masters of scriptural interpretation. They also were specialists, and to them belonged the power of the keys. But Protes- tantism put the Bible in the common layman's hand. What else can this mean than that the common man's spiritual capacity is now put at the highest figure ? It was declared to be a part of salvation to believe that the Bible must not be kept from him. He was thereby brought within the pale of the supreme good. His mind was dogmatically declared to be level to the highest things. And he did not need to become a specialist. He need not go apart from the social and political order. He stood fast in his old tracks. The Bible came to him and bade him throw open his whole life to it. The Bible is the book of a spiritual Democracy. To entrust the average layman with it was a potent sign of the coming Democracy in politics. The common school was necessitated by the common Bible. They are connected historically. They are bound together in logic. When the layman was given the freedom of God's City, it became of vital importance to so 250 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. equip him that he might understand for himself the saving thoughts of God. And what force can keep the man, who has the right of suffrage in God's things, from claiming the suffrage in man's affairs ? I have so far discussed the theory of individuality as it appears in the more notable phenomena of the period under review. I now pass to the influence exerted by the Christian doctrine about the Last Things upon the imagination of Europe, the aesthetic of individuality. In order to appreciate the impor- tance of this matter, we must call to mind the differ- ence between the practical man and the philosopher. The philosopher looks to the nature of things. The practical man looks to the upshot. The philosopher is, on the whole, quite as much interested in the process as in the issue. The practical man has no eyes save for the issue. And there are many varieties of the practical man. The broker, to whom the ideal is synonymous with the unreal, is one. The impas- sioned reformer, to whom nothing but the ideal is real, is another. Then there is the statesman and the prophet. All of these men, however widely they may differ in other things, are at one in emphasizing the end, in looking eagerly for the result. And there can be no question that, taking all varieties of the practical man together, they stand towards the phi- losopher easily, as one thousand to one. Plato found few philosophers in his time. They have not been common at any time since. Even poetry is on the practical, rather than the philosophical side, for, as Coleridge says, the antithe- sis to poetry is not prose, but science. Science deals with what is. Poetry, being an impassioned contem- vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 251 plation of the best that is hidden in things, carries this into the light of an ought-to-be. The poet, then, is practical, in the large sense of the word. He deals mostly with the working will. His own art is a tri- umphant manifestation of will, since it consists in giving form to matter. Consequently, the proportion of the practical to the philosophical goes still higher. If we could reduce the total experience of our race to units of consciousness, it would be found that an overwhelmingly large part of them would be on the side of the working creative will in humanity. Hence it is essential to the history of the social question that we should pay close attention to the influence exerted by Christian eschatology. Eschatology provides the religious feeling with its poetry, opening to it a land where it may flow un- vexed towards its outlet in the finished plan of God. I shall touch but one aspect of it here, the mediaeval doctrine of hell, because it bears so directly upon the principle of individuality. Hell is conscience in colors. The immense part played by the doctrine is a reflec- tion of the vast emphasis laid by Christianity on the individual's responsibility for himself. The point in it, which is most offensive to moderns, is the assertion that the sinner deserves an everlasting punishment ; albeit his life on earth is a mere handful of years, he does commit, in the act of sinning against God, an infinite sin, and consequently merits an infinite pun- ishment. This self-same dogma 'is most significant as a hint of what is going on in the development of individuality. That belief in an infinite punishment of a deed done on earth is the night-side of the medi- aeval belief in the infinite worth and capacity of the 252 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. soul. The possibility of committing an infinite sin is the negative aspect of man's capacity for an infi- nite good. So the dogma of everlasting penalty was an inference from the conviction that every man's heart contains something above all price. The whole of Nature is subdued to the spiritual interests of men. The noble picture in the Apocalypse the woman who is dressed in the sun and stands with her feet on the moon, and has a diadem of twelve stars on her head is the abiding symbol of this sovereignty of human interest in the universe. The centre of human inter- est was the keeping of the conscience. The picture of hell was one side of an impressionist's expression of the eternal value that dwells in the common man. Eschatology also provided a platform for the work- ing will. Here it took on the form of an aesthetic for the reforming conscience. The visions of Hilde- garde in the twelfth century were the monastic assessment of the social order in terms of an uncom- promising ideal : Nature trembles at the touch of God's holy will. Savonarola's vision of the whale, on whose back is a city that shudders with forebod- ings of destruction, whenever the monster shakes himself, represented the awful gulf between what conscience demands for men and what society actu- ally gives. The visions of the Abbot Joachim, who had a profound influence upon the Franciscans, were in the same vein. The whole frame of existing so- ciety becomes as a thin curtain, moving at every breath of the divine judgment. The Dies Ires and hymns of its class showed that this eschatology was not a dream of hermits, but penetrated deep down into the popular conscience. vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 253 The belief in the earnestness of God, another name for the divine righteousness, the intense con- viction of His ultimate victory over the world, gave birth to these visions and hymns. They draw their food from the Bible. Israel first presented to the mind the thought of a moral goal for history a thought foreign to heathendom. 122 Renan says : " Israel has so dearly loved justice that, not finding the world just, she condemned it to destruction." 123 The New Testament, through the connection between the Second Coming of Christ and His actual life on earth, enables the Old Testament belief to strike its root deeper into history. God will have either a per- fect world or no world at all. Conscience will not give quarter to the half -good : it will not put up with the might-be-worse policy. Hell yawns beneath a society that is not absolutely in earnest with its own betterment. There are many things in the period before us which amply prove that the genius of mediaevalism knew how to work with its hands, and did not exhaust its passion in brave dreams. The institution of the Sabbath, inherited from Judaism, was like a fortress planted amongst the working days to maintain the overlordship of God. The Sabbath stood for the idea that man belonged to God, and that the lowliest man should be a man of leisure on that day, owing his time to nobody but God. The council of Wessex (691 or 692 A.D.) legislated that if a slave was forced by his master to work on the Sabbath, he was to become free. The slave is God's man on that day; and God warns the mighty not to trespass on His domain. 254 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. With this goes the idea of divine dominion. Every religion, in a greater or less degree, has vested the title to the earth in its gods ; the genesis and history of tithes and of all similar phenomena is here in evi- dence. But the religion that was working its way into the modern mind, through the mediaeval Church, possessed two advantages over other religions : first, that its idea of God was an intolerant monotheism ; second, that the Church, being separated from the State, was in a large measure free from entangling alliances with all those traditions touching property which root in the soil. The ideas about divine do- minion had therefore a clear space wherein to unfold their tendency. The idealizing forces of society, being distinct from and even outside the State, spoke with freedom and decision. Conscience, being in a measure outside government, looked upon its faults with eyes un- clouded by interest. Hildebrand, Puritan and Pope, who " carried in himself the conscience of the Middle Ages," 124 wrote: "Who does not know that the authority of the kings and nobles of the State comes from the fact that being ignorant of God and given over to a pride and lust that know no bounds, they have, through the help of the prince of evil, set up a claim to lord it over their equals, that is to say man- kind, by insolence, robberies, perfidy, murders, in a word nearly every sort of baseness?" 125 Quinet observes concerning this letter: "There you have, word for word, the expressions which the Third Estate made use of in its first glow, in 1789, and which the men of the Mountain made use of later as they marched to assault the absolute monarchy. The vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 255 terms so strikingly resemble each other that one would say they had passed literally from the bulls of the eleventh century into the soul of the Convention. It is certain, in effect, that while wishing to shatter lay society by means of the spiritual society, Gregory VII. gave to the world the first revolutionary shock." That last sentence may be slightly exaggerated. But there is no exaggeration in saying that he dreamed of a civil law built upon the absolute moral law of the Bible. He drove home the idea of do- minion. The earth belongs to God. The authority of the mighty worldlings who exalt themselves above their equals has no root in His nature, derives no authority from His will. That such thought is not an individual hypothesis, peculiar to a man who had a genius for reform, but is rather part of a great vein of thought, one other instance is enough to prove. Wy cliff e was far away from Hildebrand in his esti- mate of the Church's sovereignty, for he taught that the papacy should be stripped of the temporal power, and the State be supreme within its province. But his underlying thoughts, like Hildebrand's, have a mighty Augustinian bias. He makes the State sover- eign ; but the price paid is that the ideal of an abso- lute justice is admitted into political debate. The sovereignty of God comes close to human authority in all its forms. All dominion is founded on grace. And while it is not clear what Wycliffe would have done with this doctrine when he came to his appli- cations, the main color of his thought is quite clear. His politics were not practical, but intensely theologi- cal. The conception of God as being in Himself the absolute right, and as standing towards the world in 256 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. the relation of sole owner and over-lord, threw a dis- tinct shadow upon the title-deeds of existing society. Has it not become clear that, so far as theory goes, nothing but a thin curtain separated the existing State from the ideal of an absolute and uncompromis- ing justice? If we look back to the beginning of the Mediterranean world, we shall see that the ideas which are one day to mount the throne in sociology have made great headway. At the outset, the power of secular tradition was supported by interest and religion alike. Now it has lost a very large part of its religious significance and its spiritual right. The monastic conscience looks at it askance. Having considered the theory of individuality and its aesthetic, we are now to notice the signs that her- alded the reassertion by the State of its spiritual dig- nity. This political new birth was foreboded when the Church was urged to strip herself of the temporal power. From the end of the twelfth century this demand grew steadily stronger. Joachim of Fiore, Dante, Langland, and many others saw in the tem- poral power of the papacy the mortal foe of Church reform. The long struggle between the papacy and the Empire led to the restatement of the ancient doctrine of the State, free from its infusion of reli- gion. Marsilius of Padua, at one time head of the University of Paris, formulated early in the four- teenth century a theory concerning political functions strikingly like Aristotle's. Macchiavelli rendered the world the great service that clear thinking always renders, even when it undertakes to sanctify brutal- ity. His conception of the State as positive from top to bottom, as wholly human in its scope and ten- vn GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 257 dency, and as wholly sovereign within its field so that the Church must keep her hands off, precipi- tated speculation. Henceforward the independence and power of the nation was to be and end in itself. Hooker gives us the plainest evidence upon this point. His opponents, being High-Church Presby- terians, occupied without knowing it the mediaeval ground, and so denied the right of the State to touch the affairs of the Church. Hooker, in reply to them, invests the principle of nationality with a spiritual meaning. It is most significant that he takes for his text Aristotle's words : " The State came into being in order that men might exist, but its end is that men may live nobly." " A gross error it is to think that regal power ought to serve for the good of the body and not of the soul ; as if God had ordained kings for no other end and purpose but only to fat up men like hogs and to see that they have their mast." And "the parliament is a court not so merely tem- poral as if it might meddle with nothing but only leather and wool." 126 Plainly, the time for the papal comparison of the State to the moon and the Church to the sun is gone by. The State is not a sub-lessee from the Church, but holds direct from God and the sunshine. With the twofold movement called on its religious side the Reformation, on its secular side the Renais- sance, the connection between the present and the immediate past was broken. This breach with the past was a radically new thing. Because of it the les- son that Freeman labored to teach, the unity of his- tory, became an indispensable lesson. But for the vast majority of mankind the belief in the unity of 258 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. history has always been instinctive, something they had no need to learn, so much a matter of course that it was never even thought of. In a normal state of things the stream of consciousness flows out of the past into the present without a ripple. Greece was the only land where in antiquity the possibility of a clean break between the present and the past, between an individual and his traditions, was sug- gested. The suggestion however came to no serious results. To the last, the solidarity between present and past, between an individual and his traditions, was asserted in terms of both reason and religion. The Reformation and the Renaissance demanded that the individual should break with his traditions. They made the demand, the one in the name of reli- gion, the other in the name of reason. The immedi- ate past had to lose its authority. A remote past the Apostolic Age, or the Classic Age was exalted as the sole authority. To overleap the intervening centuries, to carry out the programme, " Back to the Bible," and "Back to Greece and Rome," it was necessary that the individual should become his own man in a sense new to history. He broke away from institutions. He trampled upon traditions. His centre was in himself. When this liberated individual was well on in his career, he entrenched himself upon two positions. The one was in politics, namely, the theory of the Social Contract already spoken of at length. The other, in religion, was Deism. Hereby the individual made himself his own authority in all sacred things. Dogmas were few in number and exceedingly port- able. The infallible Church became a church of vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 259 one, and Tom Paine was its mouthpiece when he said, "My mind is my church." The sum of the whole matter is that the individual, fashioned by the combined influences of the Graeco- Roman Empire and the Bible, drilled in the Monas- tery, called forth from the Monastery by a revival of religion and culture on the one hand and by the growing power of the State on the other, stood free in the open field of history. The abstract, universal individual confronted the individual who is rooted in, in many cases bound to, the soil. The individual idealized, the storehouse of rights and at the same time the asylum of authority, stood face to face with the real individual the individual who is exalted or suppressed, as the case may be, by the accumulated capital of privilege and place. The two came to- gether with full shock. The idealized individual canonized himself by his doctrine of Nature. " As early as the beginning of the fourteenth century," says Sir Henry Maine, "the current language concerning the birth-state of man, though visibly intended to be identical with that of Ulpian and his contemporaries, has assumed an al- together different form and meaning. The preamble to the celebrated ordinance of King Louis Hutin, enfranchising the serfs of the royal domains, would have sounded strangely to Roman ears. ' Whereas, according to natural law, everybody ought to be made free.' This is the enunciation not of a legal rule but of a political dogma. Where the Roman juris- consult had written cequi sunt, meaning exactly what he said, the modern civilian (in the days before the French Revolution) wrote ' all men are equal ' in the 260 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. sense of 'all men ought to be equal.'" 127 That "ought" of the fourteenth century was a prophecy. Its fulfilment was the eighteenth century's doctrine of Nature. Nature was the right of the universal individual writ large, the high ground of vantage, whence he charged down triumphantly upon political and social valuations and assessments. The crusades had demonstrated that a great ideal- izing force had entered Europe. When we take into account their characteristics and their long continu- ance, they are seen to be unique. The wars of early Mohammedanism, it may be, are nearest to them. But the preaching that stirred and braced the Mohammedan soldier frankly mingled plunder and piety ; and had, besides, the aid of a heaven that was pictured in grossly sensuous colors. From such things Peter the Hermit and St. Bernard were altogether free. A great bulk of selfish motives of various sorts no doubt went a crusading. The capt- ure of Constantinople is conclusive evidence. Yet the main motive, the motive that started the wars and for the most part sustained them, was idealistic. Say what you will about superstition, yet, after all is said, the way Europe lavished men and measure to rescue a sepulchre proved that the Western nations had a splendid capacity for devotion to an idea. It is evident that idealizing forces were being stored up in consciousness, ready to give ethical form to the raw material which the world presents. To sum up, the story of the reformer's conscience is as follows : The establishment of Christianity gave to men the thought of a moral goal for history. Europe acquired a strong dogmatic equipment, which vii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 261 drove out all thought of fate, leaving no place in the universe for any permanent force that was not in eager sympathy with man's well-being. The princi- ple of individuality was registered and insured in terms of the eternal. The doctrine of freedom, involving the maximum of personal and social respon- sibility and activity, was guaranteed by the concep- tion of God the fundamental life as creative will. The world was viewed as plastic material for the will to handle. The potential loomed large and threatening before the actual. The thought of the divine judgment not only fixed an objective point towards which society should be guided by God, but prescribed a duty which society must fulfil. Here are all the elements that go to the making of con- science. It needs but the return of the State to the stage of the higher life, and then the long labor of humanity in the Occident shall see its harvest. When the State becomes strong, the imperial Church loses her temporal power. When the State takes upon itself the education of its people, thus asserting its moral dignity, the Church loses her monopoly of the ideal interests, so that her spiritual authority is impaired. But an institution never exercises its full influence until it is decaying. While the visible forms of the Church dominated the world, the world bowed in fear ; yet by its sub- jection it bought safety. For the condition upon which the imperial dominion of the Church rested was the transcendent view of the universe, con- science being in the monastery. When the mediaeval Church was dethroned, the concordat between con- science and the State was annulled. Now that the 262 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. VH monastic Church had lost credit, and the monasteries were either weakened or destroyed, the desire for absolute justice, which found rest in them, was driven forth to seek a new home. It invaded the State. It insinuated itself into the body politic. The passion for a perfect law is abroad. God's trumpet sounds no longer from the clouds, but in the city of men. Ideal Commonwealths, like Moore's and Campanella's, are draughted. The reformer's conscience claims the right to audit the books of society. VIII WE have seen how the higher forces of the Medi- terranean world went into partnership to create a definition of man that should take in the downmost man. The definition, when achieved, became the mightiest force society ever organized in the cam- paign against caste; but it could not take the field forthwith. The long opposition between a great heathen Empire and the Catholic Church made it impossible for the State to appear to Christians as it appeared to Aristotle ; it could not acquire any first- hand spiritual meaning. Afterwards the fall of the Empire permitted the Church to monopolize the work of educating those idealizing faculties that build up for man his house eternal. The State, such as it was for many centuries, could not have satisfied the needs of the times unless it had been intensely military and aristocratic. On the political side, then, the new defi- nition of the individual a definition including noth- ing that was not common stock found no entry. Moreover the definition itself did not seek admittance into the political order. The bent of theology, the bias of imagination, the make of the will that was fixed in its love of holiness, were all against it. The saving necessities of history bade the definition keep within the bounds of the monastery and the monas- 263 264 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. ticized clerical life. There, however, its authority was undisputed. The dogma that all men were equal before God, that is to say in relation to the ideal in- terests of the race, took entire possession of conscious- ness. It so worked itself into the best blood of Europe, that reason and conscience took it as they took the sky as a matter of course. A concordat was agreed on between the lay world and the monastic world. The latter specialized saint- hood, localized conscience, and claimed absolute domin- ion in its own sphere. The former gladly recognized this imperial authority, paid tithes, went to confession, pinned its hope of salvation to the monastic scheme ; and all the while went about the pioneer work of mak- ing a government as if the idealizing definition of man belonged to another country. Yet it lay in the nature of things that this concordat could not hold forever. We have seen at the very heart of the Mid- dle Ages a clear prophecy embodied in the greatest of the popes that some day the lay world shall be cross-questioned by reason and conscience. On the edge of the Middle Ages another sign caught our eye. Wat Tyler's song " When Adam delved " seemed to demand that the monastic estimate of aristocracy should be translated into politics and in words of one syllable for the peasant to read. It is due to no chance connection of words that Wat Tyler's doggerel has the same ring as the " Rights of Man." Tom Paine says: "Through all the vo- cabulary of Adam there is not such an animal as a duke or a count." 128 The war-cry of the English peasant in the fourteenth century and the political dogma of the eighteenth-century man are identical in viii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 265 the quality of their thought. In the field of govern- ment a so-called king may reign without ruling. It is impossible in the field of ideas. A conception that reigns must also rule. The new definition of man sat on the throne of European reason and conscience for fifteen hundred years. That it should make from time to time onslaughts upon the political order of things, and that eventually it should strike it with all the force of a great conviction, was inevitable. Again, we saw that the period between the break- up of the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century teemed with things indicative of the fact that the other world and this world were drawing near each other. The open Bible in the common tongue pro- claimed the undoing of the hierarchy. The dogma of the predestinarian theology took the sovereignty of God with full seriousness, running His decrees from end to end of human life, and making no halt either before the monastic institutions of the Church or the feudal institutions of the State. Puritanism threw open to the monastic conscience a free career in the every-day world. Deism equipped the laity with a few portable dogmas, and made every man his own theologian. The distinction between the two worlds was no longer entrenched and fortified within an imperial Church. Both worlds were now at close quarters within the horizon of the layman. Being his own authority, responsible for his own dogmas, and formulating his own bulls, he could no longer put his ideals in the hands of a monastic guardian. They must fight it out within his own conscience. The eighteenth century brought this movement to a head. It was the glacial epoch in the history of 266 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. dogmatic theology. Reason was all in all. Noth- ing could pass muster that did not appeal to every- day experience in time and space. Tradition was cashiered, the past ceased to be venerated ; so that the centre of spiritual gravity fell within the present. Science was beginning to fascinate the common mind. Franklin's kite drove out the lives of the saints. The visible world was becoming immensely attractive. A new field was being thrown open to the imagination. The earth was beginning to successfully compete with the angels. The State was in the saddle. Poli- tics were altogether positive. The suppression of the Jesuits showed to how low a pass the mediaeval view of the universe had come. When Voltaire said, " Let us cultivate our garden," he gave the signature of the period. So the world was one, and the one world was this world. Consciousness was single. The will was undivided. Here at last is a field upon which the new definition of the individual may de- ploy its forces. Lewes, in his introduction to Comte's Philosophy of the sciences, writes : " It is one of our noble human instincts that we cannot feel within us the glory and the power of a real conviction without earnestly striv- ing to make that conviction pass into other minds." 129 That is finely said, and its truth is the text for this chapter. The new definition of man, containing a new conception of human rights and duties, had been shaped through the aid of a theology largely transcendent. The very theology without which it could not have been made and afterward driven into experience, barred against it the door into secular sociology. From our present point of view the vni GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 267 history of the social question we may say that the means to the end for a long time kept the end con- cealed. Not until the theology lost its hold, could the social aim of the whole development come plainly into view. Voltaire was the typical eighteenth-century man. Morley says about him that by his visit to England " he had become alive to the central truth of the social destination of all art and all knowledge." 13 This has a broader scope than Morley gives it. He is commenting on Condorcet's assertion, that the exam- ple of England showed Voltaire that truth is not made to remain a secret in the hands of a few philosophers. Condorcet's words suggest the historical bearings of the thought. What is in question is the undoing of the distinction between esoteric and exoteric truth, truth as it is for the few and truth as it is for the many. It is the fundamental law of our intellectual life that whatever is really in the mind must go forth into speech. Without speech no clear reason. This law has always held sway. But the area over which it has ruled has greatly differed from age to age. In the most ancient societies whatever truth men ac- counted vital, they kept under lock and key. Hence truth was indeed outspoken, as it is her nature to be. But it was not for the mass of men that the word was winged. As far as they were concerned the word was dead. The tribal church made its religion a pri- vate estate behind high walls. The caste system made it an unpardonable sin to tell the sacred myste- ries to men outside the caste. Even Greek philosophy shared the ancient prejudice, drawing a very broad distinction between the mass of people and the school. 268 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP, Monastical Christianity, while it was altogether catho- lic in its treatment of individuals, gave a partial recog- nition to the distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric ; for it was content to let secular society build itself on half-truths, so long as the pure truth con- cerning the spiritual and social constitution of human- ity held perfect sway inside monastic bounds. The eighteenth century put an end to this partition of truth. Truth is single and belongs equally to all. The truth about the rightful constitution of humanity must either deny itself, or speak a language under- stood by the people. It is noteworthy that Voltaire learned this lesson in England. There was the first free State. The life of the nation had come within the pale of things that are sacred by their own right. Protestantism had made the capacity of the common man for the highest mysteries an every-day principle. The Crown controlled the Church. At the same time the Crown represented a self-governing people. Hence the Crown's control of matters ecclesiastical stood for the declaration that the laity were now come of age in the Kingdom of God. Henceforth the mediaeval way of expressing the distinction between those who rule in the Church and those whose pri- mary duty is to obey is to pass out of use. Speaking in the lump, this means that a Democracy like the free communities of Greece and Rome but on a vastly broader foundation is the order of the day. Now the fundamental law for such a Democracy is that the highest truth shall be published in terms of common consciousness. The last great step in the history of public opinion has been taken. By public opinion, we mean the opinion that governs and viii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 269 guides the State, the opinion that has the right of suffrage, the opinion that is acknowledged to be a rightful source of criticism upon the old constitution and of change in the direction of a better one. It was the work of the eighteenth century to proclaim that every man in the State was the seat of this au- thoritative opinion. To this point came the belief in the social destination of all art and all science. For the first time in the world's history it is said out loud and from the housetops that every man, no matter what his birth and fortune, is by divine right a part of the governing body. And it is said with the ut- most confidence. Every other view is turned out of doors by the men who accept this. The doctrine of the sovereignty of the people now makes its maiden speech from the throne. It had been long preparing. We hear it whispered in the thirteenth century, during the contest between the friars and the secular clergy. 131 Scholasticism, using Aristotle's Politics as a text-book, raised it to the level of a theory. Thus Aquinas, discussing the ground of political obligation, says that only the reason of the multitude, in a prince representing the multitude, can make a law that actually binds because it ought to bind. 132 Furthermore, even as the friars, seeking to establish the right of a man to choose a con- fessor who served him better than the parish priest, appealed to popular authority ; so did the defenders of the Empire against the Papacy appeal. For ex- ample, Marsilius of Padua says : All citizens should join in making the laws. 133 In his theory the conjoint influence of Roman law and the Christian conception of the soul is fully apparent. The Jesuits, seeking 2/0 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. a support in places where the royal authority was against them, openly occupied the ground of popular sovereignty. In one form or another the same doc- trine appeared in Hooker, Hobbes, Spinoza, Grotius, and Locke. It entered the field of practical politics through the English Independents. Plainly, it was implicit in European thought. The readiness with which it found voice in so many thinkers, scattered over a broad field of time and thinking under such widely differing conditions, puts that beyond doubt. Voltaire went to England to learn his lesson. He returned to France to teach it. France was the chosen ground for the publication of the new defini- tion of the individual. A long process had prepared her for that work. The central feature of the first period in modern history was the development of the absolute monarchy. In France alone did the logic of the development find a full expression. In Spain religion was so strong and pervasive that the State as an end in itself did not have a free field. In Germany the Empire was not able to make head against the feudal establishments. In England the alliance of nobles and people set up a barrier which the Crown could not leap over. But in France the monarchy became absolute, an end in itself. The ground was cleared of aristocratic freeholds. Noth- ing could withstand the tendency to centralization. The feudal system was cut off level with the ground ; and France was unified to a pitch far above any con- temporaneous State. Two things resulted. In the first place provincial politics could play no part. We Americans often find fault with the existence of sectional interests. vra GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 271 Yet it is the stubbornness of these self-same sectional interests that makes political theory a practical sci- ence, a liberal rule of thumb. When such interests are either wanting altogether or have no local au- thority to entrench themselves in, imperial politics necessarily result. The eye is bred up to sweeping horizons. The mind is impatient of the local, and is slow to pay respect to provincial objections. When a railroad was being planned in Russia back in the sixties, the engineers and capitalists mapped out a somewhat devious course, making generous conces- sions both to natural difficulties and to the interests of existing cities and towns. But the Czar, we are told, drew a straight line on the map and said : Let it go there! This illustrates the imperial habit of mind in political theory. In the second place, the Crown being all in all, and the whole kingdom being mobilized at its nod, there grew up in France a prodigious confidence in the efficiency of any and every law that emanated from the centre. The working will of the State took its own authority most seriously. It was not drilled at all in the give-and-take school of compromise. The self -directing power of society embodied in the King looked upon itself as unrestricted. The geographical expression of this over-bearing power of the govern- ment was the position of the capital. Paris had acquired a vast preponderance over the provinces. " In 1789 it was already France itself." m Local lib- erties had been killed at the root. Arthur Young said that outside the capital inertia and silence reigned. But in Paris itself there was an intensity of feeling and life that no city of Europe could match. 272 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Every minute produced a political pamphlet. 135 The thought and life of the State was all at the centre. Necessarily the law-making power had a prodigious opinion of its own ability to mould society by decrees. The sum total of results was that political theory of a sweepingly logical type had free play. There was no sanctification of inconsequence to be found here, no glorification of the rule of thumb, no canoniz- ation of compromise, no freedom " broadening slowly down." France was at the same time the most liter- ary nation of Europe. And the literary class, after the middle of the eighteenth century, became the leaders in political thinking. Since political liberty had long since died out, and since these literary theo- rists had lived far away from practical affairs, they had a supreme confidence in their own speculations. 136 Here was a place made to order for that abstract definition of the universal individual which was created by the establishment of Christianity in Europe. We must however be on guard against our own racial conceit. The Anglo-Saxon egotism in matters pertaining to government is nearly enough to justify any people not Anglo-Saxon in going to war with us. It is easy for us to conclude that France was France and nothing more ; so that her turning loose of the universal individual to work his will on institutions was characteristic enough, but not widely representa- tive. The truth is on the other side. Hobbes showed to the England of his day what an English- man could do with the tools of a fearless political logic, when circumstances gave him a strong push in that direction. The constitution draughted by Locke for Carolina revealed another great Englishman's vm GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 273 capacity for abstraction. Burke, speaking of Dr. Price's Sermon, the sermon that gave the text for his " Reflections on the Revolution in France, " said: "It is a strain which I believe has not been heard in this kingdom since the year 1648, when a predecessor of Dr. Price, the Rev. Hugh Peters, made the vault of the king's own chapel at St. James' ring with the honor and privilege of the saints who, with the high praises of God in their mouths and a two-edged sword in their hands, were to execute judgment on the heathen and punishments upon the people ; to bind their kings with chains and their nobles with fetters of iron." 137 Burke at that time of his life had as keen a scent for a politi- cal heretic as any man needed to have. He was wholly right in emphasizing the kinship between the "French" ideas and the radicals of the Puritan Revolution. Although the idea of God counted for everything in one case and for nothing in the other, the unit of thought was the same, the individual man defined in terms of the eternal, and those divine or " natural " rights which cut up all the pre- rogatives of human precedent by the root. No American needs to be reminded that the " French " ideas exercised a vast power in our coun- try, although, in the main, they were not "French" at all, but of home growth. The Declaration of Inde- pendence, the Bills of Rights in all our State Con- stitutions, the conception of " reserved rights " which is the political background to every one of them, and many another thing, prove that the appetite for universalistic theory in politics was more serious than a Parisian fashion. France was truly represent- 2/4 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. ative of a tendency fixed deep in European experi- ence. The conception of public law in its relation to the common individual's rights, which there broke forth into constitution making, was not a local epi- demic, but a deep-seated symptom of universal history. 138 The mental characteristic of the eighteenth century was clearness. Lanciani, speaking of the " shame- ful restoration " of churches that took place in Rome during that century, says: "The system followed was everywhere uniform. The columns of the nave were walled up and concealed in thick pilasters of whitewashed masonry ; the windows were en- larged out of all proportion so that floods of light might enter and illuminate every remote, peaceful recess of the sacred place." 139 This was typical. Nothing was to be held rational that was not entirely intelligible. Nothing may be half-said. There are no shades. All must be simple. The supreme authority was common sense. Nothing must be left to run wild outside definition. As in architecture, so in landscape gardening. Nature delights in neat- ness and precision to such an extent that she nearly arrives at curl-papers. Everything was brought to the bar of utility. If this had meant that nothing is worth while unless its results can be quickly reaped in time and space, it would have been a wretched substitute for the medi- aeval view of the world. If we had to choose be- tween the doctrine that push-pin is as good as poetry, on the one side, and the working mediaeval notion of heaven and hell on the other, I do not think that in the end we should find any difficulty in deciding. vni GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 275 True, the latter is utilitarian as well as the former, although it is other-worldly utilitarianism. Still, in the long run celestial utility would turn out larger men than utility of the terrestrial sort. The distance we have travelled from the brute is measured by our capacity to deliberately give up the present for the future. Here, too, lies the superiority of the civilized man over the savage. So that if nothing more were at stake than the choice between two kinds of utili- tarianism, it would be wiser to choose the mediaeval view with its whole load of superstitions. No cause can go far that does not appeal to the imagination, for in no other way can we train the will. The saint who never washed her hands for twenty-five years is a much larger contribution to civilization than push- pin, because dirt does not destroy the faculty of dreaming. But much more was at stake than such a choice. The matter in debate, although the first contestants were not aware of it, was the modern form of Aris- totle's ideal of the State. The nation's right to be- come in some real way trustee and steward for the spiritual interests and treasures of the race was the real point in issue. The doctrine of utility was an awkward and lumbering form of expression. Circumstances however made it a very natural form. The feeling was that the attention of the best men and women had been too long exhausted upon the next life, while the affairs of this life were left to people of second-rate goodness and intensity. A new kind of master-passion is called for, a passion for public improvements, for the common betterment. To make two blades of grass grow where one grew before, to see to it that 2/6 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. " there is more food for all men and better food for every man," to multiply opportunities for self-devel- opment and bring them within the reach of all men, that is the broad meaning of the doctrine of utility. A superb social enthusiasm lurks within the argu- ments for bringing all existing institutions to the test of present use. The secret of authority was forced to come out of its hiding-place. The programme of utility, consid- ered not as it was first expressed but in its permanent bearings, was of one piece with the dogma of popular sovereignty. The debate between the law that is of divine authority in politics, and the law that is of human authority, has ended with a triumph for the latter. Society has acquired the right to audit the accounts of its rulers. It was the work of Greece and Rome to bring to the light an ideal of law as made by men and for men. The eighteenth century dog- matized on that point. No law shall touch the people's business that is not prepared to render a full account of itself. Authority shall no longer take refuge in mystery. True law is common property. Imagination now changes its objective point. Its function always is to clothe the deep and permanent desires of humanity with a body of faith, and to give them the color of imperious reality by assigning them a land of their own to dwell in, where nothing with- stands their sway. Thus did Plato cause the saving unities of reason to dwell in the heaven of the ideas. The establishment of Christianity in Europe gave to the spiritual imagination that form of the imagina- tion which bodies forth the longings of men for a good that is both eternal and universal such author- vin GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 277 ity and pervading power as it nowhere else in history approached. But at the same time it was trained to look up and away from the visible order of things. When the mediaeval view of the world broke down in the eighteenth century, imagination for a while was at a loss. There seemed at first to be no material for the idealizing faculty to go to work upon. It amuses us to-day to find that Voltaire and Volney would fain have persuaded the fancy of Europe to settle in China. The men who cried, " Cease to admire those ancients," that is, Greeks, Romans, Hebrews, wished their contemporaries to turn out their longings to graze in the pastures of the Middle Kingdom. Yet, even with those who preached the gospel according to Pekin, this was more of a by-play than a main interest. China was a fair field because it was far away ; and some object there must be for imagination to glorify, now that the other world had lost vogue. After the by-play was over, imagination soon found its true bearings. It came to rest upon the future of human society. With the idea of God for the most part left out, the Messianic idea took the field; not the expectation of a personal Christ, but the prophecy of an infinite betterment for the men whom the sun shines on. " Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive ; But to be young was very heaven. Oh, times ! In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute took at once The attraction of a country in romance." The visible Church temporarily lost her significance. Theology went overboard as surplusage. The dogma of the unknowable had not yet come on the 2/8 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. scene to bring in by the back door the sense of the mysterious, and to press upon the mind the need of bridling the conclusions of common sense. The apparatus of infallibility had been discarded, but the habit remained in full strength. The lay world stood up to speak, wholly self-confident, persuaded that it knew its own mind well and had reason and con- science on the side of what it wanted. The story to be told is a new version of the drama of the soul, the soul that had been sounding the depths of hell in every man and scaling the heights of his heaven. The mediaeval doctrine of heaven had proclaimed the capacity of the commonest man for an infinite happiness, the eternal vision of the perfect. This capacity for happiness did not carry with it any right to happiness so long as the soul faced towards God, its maker and monarch. But the moment it faced towards men the capacity drew after it the right. The soul, the priceless something in every man, is, so far as its relation to all social forms and terrestrial politics is concerned, endowed with an absolute right to an infinite happiness. Sacraments, the priesthood, the monasteries, the open Bible, and the universal priesthood of Protestantism found their sole reason for existence in the work of authenticating that right by putting the entire being and authority of God at its back. This fundamental right of every man to happiness held wrapped up in itself a searching criticism of government. So long as imagination took wing into another world, the criticism did not need to unfold itself. But when men began to translate the brave dreams of old into the language of utility, the revolu- vni GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 279 tionary power of this programme of happiness be- came apparent. An eulogy delivered on Quesnay contains these words : " Man considered in his state of isolation, anterior to all society, has a right to the things that concern his happiness. . . . This right is given to all ; it extends itself to all ; it would seem thereby to become an ideal right." 140 Our own Dec- laration of Independence is in this self-same key with its " life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." In this conception of happiness as the birthright of men there were three elements. First, the indi- vidual as such was made intrinsically superior to all forms of government. There is no longer the shadow of a notion that the individual exists for the sake of the State. The individual is not a means but an end. The State, stripped of the divine mysterious- ness that once encompassed kings, is thought of as ministering to his well-being. Second, the individual is universal. He has the same absolute quality in his ideal sovereignty over happiness that the soul had in its claim upon heaven. Indeed, this indi- vidual is the soul, fully aware however of the body and taking it seriously. The baron could not be any more a " soul " than the serf. There is no question of degrees when you touch the absolute. So there cannot be any talk of more or less about the individual. Each man is an individual. No man can be more. Thus society breaks up, under the hand of political theory, into a vast number of social units, each one of them holding in fee whatever is best for man. Third and mainly, the individual's relation to the things that pertain to his welfare is not a bare pos- sibility that may come to something somewhere and 2 So GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. some day. Nor is it simply an inner capacity which may, with a fair field and no favor, develop into a positive forth-putting ability and a resultant command over some portion of Nature's resources. The rela- tion is one of ideal or absolute right. Now right is the marrow of the State. The State derives its sta- bility from the reality or the illusion of justice. It has no power to permanently bind men's wills, to master their imagination, and to levy taxes upon their property except in so far as it is, or is thought to be, an institution of right, either human or divine or both. When therefore the right to happiness is granted to the universal individual in fee, the State is in effect put under the heaviest obligations obligations en- dorsed by its own being and purpose to assist the common man to find his right. It matters not what the method of the State's operation may be. That will differ from time to time. Under one set of cir- cumstances, in case population comes nowhere near pressing upon subsistence and Nature fairly riots in elbow-room, the function of the State shall be to let the individual alone, to have as little government as possible. Under a different set of circumstances its function shall be more positive, to come directly to the aid of the individual by one or another law designed to bring his happiness within his view and put it under his command. But however the method may change, the principle abides. The individual has an inherent right to happiness. It is the business of the State to guarantee the right. The idea of immortality, the idea that had been made the ABC of a man's knowledge about him- self, the conception that there is in every man some- vni GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 281 thing beyond all market price, has at last entered the province of law. Plainly the State must enlarge the area of rights in order to preserve itself. A new kind of idealism appears, an idealizing materialism. To find the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven in the mind of Helvetius is a surprise in- deed. One half of him is radical sensationalism, the other half is a free translation of the Messianic idea. The explanation of so amazing a union is that the moral genius of Occidental Christianity has broken away from its dogmatic system and is wandering afield, seeking a new home. " What shall the hon- est man do in my closet ? " one part of Helvetius might fairly say of the other. As soon make a Stradivarius out of a lath as make a prophet out of sensationalism. But when the old home is aban- doned, there must needs be some strange experiments in housekeeping before ideas betake themselves to the places consistency assigns them. And the exist- ence of such confusion is in itself a striking witness to the presence in Europe of a mighty idealizing force. The earth is to be the battle-field of the new ideal. In the eulogy upon Quesnay, already referred to, it is said: "The earth is the common source of all goods. To her applies the inscription on the statue of Isis : I am all that has been, all that is, and all that shall be ; and no one has yet lifted the veil that hides me": 141 allowing for rhetoric and for pagan coloring, this is in the same vein with Wordsworth's " Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where. But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us." 282 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Evidently the ideas that had commanded the spirits of humanity must cease to climb mountains in order to borrow wings from the angels, and must be con- tent, yea, glad to have nothing but hands. The social question could not be asked in the days of the Fathers, for then every vital question was straightway appealed to the other world. But now it must be asked. There is to be a new crusade. The holy land to be redeemed is under the feet of the peasant and day-laborer. Conscience must enter politics and conquer the earth. Optimism is in the air. The genius of the most dogmatic of all religions, the most aggressively hopeful of all religions, speaks through the mouths of radicals and revolutionists. Condorcet's Progrh de V Esprit Humaine has the look of being scien- tific and historical, a real review either of actual progress, or of progress in sight. The look is sin- cere. And yet, none the less, we are dealing with a creed, not mainly with science. We are listening to a chorus, and we recognize in that chorus the voice of the prophets of Israel, although they sing under another name. The science and history which Con- dorcet marshals in evidence are not so much solid facts as symbols. To the deep-hearted lover, who by the grace of his passion discovers perfection in the one he loves, every slightest suggestion of a virtue has an interior that looks out upon the infinite ; even as a bit of white cloud, on a day in summer when the northwest wind is blowing, claims the whole spread of the sky for its own. To Condorcet, the deep-hearted lover of humanity, the dogmatic believer in progress, every slightest achievement of vin GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 283 his time opens into the prospect of a social paradise. The idea of the Kingdom of God has passed into the blood of Europe. The new creed has the militant certitude of the old. " Outside the Church there is no salvation," the Church had taught men. And the democratic interpretation of society is intolerant of every other interpretation. Like all intensely dogmatic views of right and duty, it is unable to put up with the thought of limits and qualifications. While utility is the aim, it is utility as a goal, not as a method. The temper required of men who seek the goal is enthusiasm for humanity, absolute devotion to the welfare of society. Less than the whole heart is treason. Thus the search for utility is in effect a religion. This ideal of human perfectibility and happiness is the pith of the great word " Nature." The reformers of the eighteenth century believed they had found the elemental man. Like the " soul," he is an immutable quantity, taking no color deeper than the skin from differences of time and place and political constitu- tion. The elemental man is the one ethical reality, all else being mere millinery and fashion. And " Nature " is his claim on the Universe, written large. Like the Biblical idea of God, it shuts out Fate. Nowhere within its precincts is to be found any- thing that may not some day be capitalized for the benefit of the unprivileged. Where Fate begins, right ends. Fate is the denial of human rights in the universe; or, at best, the rights it tolerates are sleepy and inefficient. Fate is also the denial of duty. It disables the reformer's conscience; for 284 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. unless his imagination has free range over a given field, unless it invites his plough by promise of har- vest, his duty stops at its boundary. " Nature " means that all the resources of the visible world are thrown open to conscience. The world lies plastic under the hand of the ideal. Hence " Nature " involves the reformer's duty. His imagination has free range. The possible gathers in resistless force on the frontiers of the actual. The present social good loses its aspect of authoritative finality. The present has no dignity unless it contributes to a richer future. So conscience must needs take the field. Infinite possibilities draw after them infinite duties. The common man's opportunity is as broad as " Nature." The obligation of the political mission- ary has a corresponding scope. " Nature " provides both the authority for social change and the ways and means of change. Like the idea of God, it excludes the possibility of any fixed limit to the possibilities of betterment. Unlike it, however, it calls for a kind of betterment that shall be wrought out altogether in the open day of history. And so it comes about that the reformer's conscience, deriving its uncompromising intensity from a Christian ancestry, musters itself into the service of the elemental man. If we look back from Rousseau's Autobiography to Plutarch's men, we shall see how the centre of gravity has shifted. The Port-Royal Logic says of Montaigne, " He speaks of his vices in order that they may be known, not that they may be detested." 142 Whether this is altogether just or not, it is certain that Montaigne's interest in himself heralds the viii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 285 entrance into literature of a deepened sense of indi- viduality. Paulsen truly says about Rousseau that he loved his own sins because they fed his inter- est in himself. 143 The results of the establish- ment of Christianity are now in plain sight; for "the soul has become the seat of wonder." 144 Through eighteen centuries the inner life of the common man had been, by the consent of all Chris- tians, the central phenomenon in the universe. Con- sequently individuality as such has become the standard of value. To become an individual is the right of every man. Formerly eternity was his opportunity. There he worked out his right. But now time is his opportunity. It is his right to be- come an individual and to count for one. To help him to his right is the supreme obligation of society. And in order to insure sucess, humanity withdraws a large part of its capital from the keeping of the Church and invests it in the State. The popular doctrine of liberty has just this at heart. The man at the bottom, the "mudsill," is believed to have vast powers in him that have been hitherto unused. He has his fortune still to make, and it is affirmed that he could make it with little difficulty, if only institutions were to lend him a strong, helping hand. Universal suffrage necessarily becomes the ideal. Inasmuch as the principle of individuality is now the ruling idea, and because the new social creed affirms individuality to be the pre- rogative of every man, the right to the suffrage becomes an inherent right : it may not be denied without injustice. A society that refuses to provide the lowest man with the opportunity for self-develop- 286 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. ment and turns him into a thing, a means to another's self-development, is "a compact with hell." Every man must count for one. Law has no sanctity, carries no authority above that of the fist or the club, unless it is from this belief that it draws its inspiration. One or another ground of expediency may be discovered, whereupon conservatism may take its stand and contend for the necessity of moving slowly. But by its own confession this conservatism is of a new kind. Divine right is not now the monop- oly of kings and aristocrats. All men have divine right, the right to be or become individual. The old conservatism denied this right. The new conserva- tism frankly concedes the right in theory, but urges caution in the application. Its standing-ground is expediency and expediency alone. The one sacred thing in society is the right to individuality ; and that entails the conclusion that no State has any claim upon human reverence, if its sole or even its main end is to insure existing rights. The modern free State exists in order that the area of highest privilege may be as broad as humanity, in order that all men may live nobly. Any other bottom for political theory is a false bottom. When the principle of individuality is set up as sovereign, the programme of universal education fol- lows at its heels. If the lowest classes possess great but unused powers, society must see to it that those powers come into play. The dogma of " Nature " publishes as a saving truth the conviction that the visible world is willing and eager to be capitalized to the end that humanity may be perfected. Nowhere is there to be found according to the eighteenth- vm GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 287 century optimism a stone in the stomach. There is nothing that can permanently resist translation into terms of social betterment. The theory of con- tract strips the past of its false sacredness, and para- lyzes the right arm of false privilege. The present is emancipated, enabled to take its own desires seriously. Imagination, glorifying the future, delivers experi- ments in social structure from their chief terror; society is no longer to be kept from taking risks, when men are assured that a great fortune lies some- where ahead. And the concept of evolution in the background, but with one foot lifted will soon bless the principle of progress in the name of the universe. This is the company in which the dogmatic belief in universal education finds itself. Seen in that light it is as intelligible and also as necessary as the unity of God. It is often said that the prime fault in the pre- Christian theory of education was that it subordinated the individual to the State. Beyond doubt there is a valuable truth in this, but it is imperfectly stated. In one way or another every society, that is really or- ganized and self-directed, must subordinate the indi- vidual to the interest of the State; because the ultimate law is the well-being of the whole, and in case of collision the interest of the individual must yield the right of way. A better expression of the truth is to say that the pre-Christian theory of educa- tion narrowed the area of cultivation.' In the first place, its frontiers were those of the inherited social structure, so that it was inherently aristocratic. In the second place, and as an inevitable consequence of 288 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. this first fault, the field of experience within the privi- leged individual was also narrowed ; for, in that he had no sacred relationship with large masses of men within his own State, to say nothing of the main bulk of the race outside his State, priceless portions of his own being must needs remain an undiscovered coun- try. It takes the whole race to explain a single man. In proportion as the horizon of social theory is pro- vincial, is the breadth and depth of individuality un- explored. When we say that the modern theory of education looks to the individual as an end in himself, does not suppress him for the sake of the State, what we mean is that the individual before our minds is the universal individual, the inner man of every man. And this leads us on to assert that the existing State and society, because they are far from being coter- minous with the field of individuality thus viewed, have no intrinsic sacredness, but derive their title to respect from the services they render to the universal man. Thus it is only in appearance that we find ourselves at the antipodes of the ancient theory. We do not in effect subordinate society to the indi- vidual. In reality the logical relation between the whole and the part is ever the same. It is the con- tent and scope of the whole and the depth and reach of the part that change. No sane theory of politics can recognize the individual as a naked individual. And no system of education that is truly ethical can teach self-culture for the sake of the self. If universal education taught that, it would be immoral. What is actually meant is that the democratic ideal, as a working social hypothesis, can hold its ground before viii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 289 reason and conscience only so long as we are con- vinced that a real citizen is hidden within every man ; and that, unless he is brought to the light, the State is just so far impoverished. Nowadays we have outgrown our calf love for uni- versal education, and some of us pick flaws in the theory. To do that is very easy, if we force the theory to bring its corn to market in the green ear, judging it wholly by its present results. But to spend time in such fault-finding is to forget what the enthu- siasm for the enlightenment of the people sprang from, and what it stands for. It was born of the belief that all the social structures of the past were narrow and incommodious ; and that law must broaden down until its rights are at every door. It stands for the conviction that permanent right is built upon capac- ity; that there is some capacity in every human being; and that steady, reverent attention can find it and bring it to the light. And it dogmatically affirms that any sort of culture that refuses to seek entrance into the common life is an unholy thing. If we wish to see how deep-set in history is the new definition of individual and how far-going is the advance from antiquity, I do not know a better way to set about it than to put alongside each other the two men of the eighteenth century who make epochs in sociology and philosophy Rousseau and Kant. In build and temperament no two men could be farther apart. The one was a man of the most highly colored feeling, the other a man of the most dispassioned rea- son. Rousseau appears as one born to be the prey of chance, with no steersman save the very winds that blew him now this way, now that. Kant, on the con- u 2QO GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. trary, was an almost perfect example of self-master- hood. Nothing in his life was left to chance. His habits were so methodical that, according to Heine, the good people of Konigsberg set their watches when he took his daily walk. Between two such men as Kant and Rousseau all is contrast. The more striking then is the outcome of the comparison between them, in case it turns out that the main motive of both is the new definition of the universal individual. Rousseau once wrote, "The man who reflects is an animal depraved." He drew the words from the depth of his own nature. Hume said, concerning him : " He has only felt during the whole course of his life, and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of." 146 The base of his being was an almost abnormal sensuousness. He was sunk in emotion. For the objective order of things he had short perception. The only world that was real to him was his inner world. He was not able to find himself in history. Philosophy he well-nigh hated. He excommunicated the analytic reason. So he brought into psychology an element it had lacked in the days of the Greeks, and ever after. He made feeling central and sov- ereign. Now it is characteristic of feeling that it creates its own world. It enters into no entangling alliances with facts. The fixed order of things lies as a help- less captive beneath its hand. To unchecked feeling " there is nothing beautiful, except what does not exist." 146 Rousseau says: "The impossibility of reaching to the real being plunged me into the land vin GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 29 1 of chimera; and seeing nothing that rose to the height of my delirium, I nourished it in an ideal world which my creative imagination had soon peo- pled with beings after my heart's desire. In my con- tinual ecstasies, I made myself drunk with torrents of the most delicious sentiments that ever entered the heart of man. Forgetting absolutely the whole human race, I invented for myself societies of perfect creatures." 147 Another main characteristic of feeling, when it is supreme and rules the understanding, is that it takes itself as infallible. The rubs and jars of the unyield- ing outer order of things are abhorrent to it. There- fore it makes an inner world where the necessity of compromise is unknown. And inasmuch as its very nature leads it to love immediateness of intuition, and to hate the slowfootedness and halfwayness of reflec- tion, it dominates its inner world with absolute certi- tude. Feeling can find but the scantiest grazing in the field of probabilities. A probability fused with feeling, and worked over a few times, becomes a cer- tainty. Hence the thinker who, like Rousseau, puts feeling on the throne, will possess the infallibility of the mediaeval Church, with the hot blood of imperi- ous sensation in it. Such a being was just the man to carry the mo- nastic definition of the individual to the full length of its principle. So far as theory goes, Rousseau at this point finds himself in the company of all the writers on Politics, between 1400 and 1800 A.D. He is with Marsilius, Bodin, Hooker, Spinoza, Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke. They all started with the same premises. Not one of them was able to make any GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. consistent use of Aristotle's idea, that sociability is as deep in man as individuality. The naked individual comes first on the stage in all their theories ; and then, under the theorist's eye, he proceeds to make clothes for himself, now after one fashion, and now after another, calling them society. Rousseau, therefore, was in this matter thoroughly representa- tive of what had been worked into the mind of Eu- rope. But every theorist before him had made qualifications and compromises ; for the virgin specu- lations of the closet married the working necessities of a world, whose chief business was to go on exist- ing. Rousseau, on the contrary, married the pure theory to his own impassioned feeling. The result was that the individual, conceived as absolute and final, stood out in history, for the first time, like a great dramatic creation, not an abstraction, but a person. Consequently in Rousseau the idea of the Social Contract, which had been so long in growth, reached its final stage. Schiller said that Rousseau converted Christians into human beings. The truth of the say- ing is that he converted the monastic soul into a citizen. The life of humanity in time and space was his field of operation. He frankly and fully accepted Hobbes' conception of the State as supreme over the Church. And the soul, becoming a citizen, yet con- tinuing to be what the monastic soul had been, the seat and source of all abiding values, goes to work upon the theory of the State with the idea of the Social Contract as its tool. The existing social con- stitution has no sacredness in the eyes of the soul- citizen. He thinks about it just as the monk thought. vin GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 293 But the mighty change is that his thought is not at long range. It speaks from the heart of lay society. All the differences between classes of men shrivel up in the heat of the absolute. All that the king and the aristocrat hold most dear, a large part even of what a wise lover of humanity might desire to have changed very slowly, disappears before this fierce logic. Rousseau holds it to be "indispensable to begin by making a clean surface and by throwing aside all the old materials." 148 Rousseau's theory was less a theory than a religion. It put the red blood of poetry into the authority of a dogma. And his religion exhausted itself in enthu- siasm for the common man. He "made the poor very proud." Whatever one may think of his per- sonal character, it cannot be denied that in a very real sense he was in spiritual communion with the prophets of Israel concerning this matter. For " Israel first gave form to the cry of the people, to the plaint of the poor." 149 The demand for an abso- lute justice, for an altogether ideal society, was made mainly, almost wholly, in the interest of the unprivi- leged. We all know Bruyere's terrible picture "of certain wild animals, male and female, scattered over the fields, black, livid, all burnt by the sun, bound to the earth, which they dig and work with unconquer- able pertinacity ; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they rise on their feet, they show a human face, and are in fact men." It was in the cause of these people that Rousseau dreamed his -impassioned day-dream of social perfection. Voltaire said of Montesquieu that humanity had lost its title-deeds, and he had recovered them. In a deeper sense that 294 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. might have been said about Rousseau. The Roman jurists had affirmed that man is born free. Their proposition has now travelled a long road. We saw how, in the thirteenth century, it was beginning to change its color and look towards a political programme. Through Rousseau it takes the field. " Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." 15 It is proclaimed that the masses of men have lost their title-deeds. Society is indicted for having se- questered them. " Natural Law " means an ideal code once possessed, afterwards lost. The rights of man have taken a long slumber. Now they awake, and the awakening is the Revolution. To turn from Rousseau to Kant is to change one's climate. Yet when we get to the bottom, we find that they are wholly at one in this, that they give, each in his own way, the signature of a new age. What Rousseau is to sociology, that is Kant to phi- losophy. But Kant is the more significant of the two by far, even after the difference of field has been allowed for. He said with truth concerning his own work that its effect was like the effect of the Coperni- can astronomy, a radical change in the total point of view. He completed the process which Socrates began, of shifting the centre of gravity in philosophic thought from the outer to the inner world. Philoso- phy had set out on her journey by making conscious- ness an incident in the cosmic process. Socrates undertook to study the life of humanity as if it were central in that world which is a world for us. His handiwork, however, was only half done. Nor did Plato and Aristotle complete it. The objective or outer life of the universe still kept, in large meas- vin GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 295 ure, the power of the keys. Through Kant the sub- jective or inner life acquired that power for the first time. Do we, though, need to call him into the witness- stand ? Have we not already done enough wander- ing ? We are not wandering. We are studying the make of modern consciousness in relation to the social question, and trying to understand how it has become what it is. Now, whether or no we believe in phi- losophy as a present need, we can surely all agree that philosophic thought, taken in bulk, is a most essential part of the past intellectual history of our race. Probably, too, we can all agree that it is the most significant part. Science is in the saddle now. But it was only yesterday that she got there ; while, time out of mind before yesterday, philosophy claimed to be the sovereign exercise of reason, and found very few to dispute the claim. We may therefore safely as- sume that the most vital changes in humanity's opin- ions about humanity have been best recorded there. Better than in Christian dogma, because philoso- phy has always been nearer the earth than dogma, and because it is a surer test of what has really passed into the blood of the laity and become part and parcel of permanent lay-consciousness. Better than the law, because the law necessarily keeps as close as it can to existing conditions ; and, content to gain an inch at a time, never indulges in what it con- siders the perilous rapture of prophecy. But phi- losophy, while it indicates, better than dogma can, what has actually entered the tissue of the lay mind, looks more to the open sea than the law dares, and so lets us deeper into the heart of a humanity that 296 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. is kept alive by its brave dreams. Therefore Kant, the supremely significant figure in philosophy since Aristotle, who, for us moderns, if we could longer give such a title to any single reason, might hope to wrest from the great Greek the proud title Dante gave him, - " the master of those who think," Kant is the man to whom we must go in order to find out how much of the higher work of Greece and Rome as it bore upon our question, and above all, how much of the Biblical view of the world, was accepted by modern reason in the eighteenth century as part and parcel of itself. Look back from Kant to Greek philosophy as a whole, and we become aware of a vast change. Speaking abstractly, it consists in the reversal of the relationship between Metaphysic and Ethic. The Greek reason built the latter upon the former, and the whole Christian world, so far as theory went, followed its example. Kant, on the contrary, built Metaphysic upon Ethic. Speaking more in the con- crete, the change is summed up by saying that the Greek reason made the ought-to-be a fringe of the is, while Kant made the ought-to-be the life-blood of the is. I would not be understood as making the distinction between the contemplative reason and the creative will so deep that it turns into a separation. Victor Hugo says truly that he who thinks wills : only the dreamer is a passive instrument. The will and the reason cannot be separated. Yet, when we compare Greek philosophy taken in bulk with the philosophy that must rise upon Kant's foundation, if the world is ever to have a philosophy again, we perceive a real antithesis. Greek philosophy took the total of being viii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 297 as a finished total. It was static. But modern phi- losophy, driven by the problem of knowledge to look within, is forced to look upon truth as just an infinite relationship. There is no possibility of knowing truth as a quantity. Truth for us is an infinite quality called " truthfulness." And we cannot be saved by attaining finished conceptions. In our most finished synthesis vastly more must forever be outside than in. We are saved only by trust in the worth-while of truthfulness. Our conceptions lose all claim to finality and become ideals which spur and inspire us. Knowledge, while it is in a measure an acquirement, is essentially a duty. The depth and scope of the new view of truth cannot for our subject be overstated. Kant was laboring in the cause of Democracy, and undoing the intellectualism which is forever trying to set up a club for culture as the main thing for an educated man. The Ethic which has an intellectualistic base is nec- essarily aristocratic in tendency. If the Best is some- thing that can be known only by pure reason, and if only the few can know it, then Plato's Republic must sooner or later be substituted for the American Con- stitution. But if philosophy must either cease to be or find an ethical basis, if the wisest man is able to preserve himself from a scepticism that would end by making him eat his own heart, solely through an act of trust, constantly renewed, in the worth-while of reason, then the philosopher belongs to a community, all of whose members are saved in the same way. He and the motorman have the same footing. A metaphysical foundation for Ethic went along with the limited free State of Greece. The ethical foundation of Metaphysic is the intellectual equiva- 298 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. lent of the universal free State which is the goal of modernity. Therefore it was not a freak on the part of univer- sal history that made Kant a contemporary of the French Revolution. Kant owed a great deal to Rousseau. He says about himself : "I am by incli- nation an investigator. I feel the whole thirst after knowledge. . . . There was a time when I thought that all this could make the honor of humanity, and I despised the multitude who have knowledge of nothing. Rousseau set me right. My imaginary advantage disappeared. I learn to honor men, and would feel myself far more useless than the common laborer, did I not believe that my work . . . would establish the Rights of Mankind." 151 Paulsen, commenting on these words, says with entire truth : " That the worth of man lies in Will, not in knowledge, as the aristo- cratic would-be culture fancies, is the central point around which the whole of Kant's philosophy turns." Philosophy's one aim is to see the world in the light of unity. The mind begins its career by a child-like trust in things as they strike the eye. Then appearances collide. Difficulty and wonder- ment and doubt result. Philosophy endeavors to gain a lasting unitary view of the universe by going below appearances to law. The lesson of Kant's philosophy is that no unitary view is possible, save on the basis of an ethic that levels all aristocratic differences, and makes the individualization of the common man the goal of history. No rational view of the universe is possible unless it rests upon Ethic. And there is no ultimate Ethic save the Ethic of Democracy. Kant and Rousseau, taken together, vni GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 299 seen in their radical difference of personality and method, and at the same time in their community of interest, conspire to show that the social question is henceforward a part of the very tissue of all idealistic thinking. The mind and the conscience, the whole treasure of modernity, is at stake in it. The thoughts of men are as constituent a part of the universe as the blessed sun himself, and just as little may fail of their effect. Destructive radicals, who would make their break with the Christian past clean and complete, may speak as they will about myth; but the deep stream of feeling, upon which the " myth " floated, cannot be destroyed by the most violent use of underground explosives. The bed of the stream may be somewhat altered, but the stream flows on. Science has weakened the belief in the freedom of the will. Many scientists, while hard at this work, with the same breath lump the vast bulk of Christian dogma under the title " illusion." But their two thoughts are impossible bed-fellows. The denial of freedom to the will draws after it the denial of the mind's ability to create something out of noth- ing. The " illusions " of Christianity are a most sub- stantial part of the marrow of history. The eighteenth century was the proving-ground of the great conceptions which had been slowly forming through two thousand years and more. The uni- versal individual taking the field in the full armor of theory gained for the moment a complete victory over the concrete or historical individual, and over all the institutions that housed him. The old things were thrown into the shade by the new. Bacon said, "We are the ancients." Chesterfield called Homer's 300 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP heroes " porters." Volney cried, " Cease to admire those ancients." The men of '89 undertook to cre- ate a new calendar. But the victory was short-lived. There came the reaction called Romanticism, the necessary protest against the revolutionary scorn for the old things ; for a while men loved the very dirt of the Middle Ages. Finally the torrent of reaction exhausted itself, and then the literary and philosophic consciousness of Europe, having learned from the eighteenth century the worth of the new without accepting its underestimate of the old, and having learned from Romanticism reverence for the past without idealizing its darkness and dirt, joined forces with the rising power of science to shift the centre of human feeling from the transcendent to the immanent view of life. To a careless eye it would appear as if we were back upon Greek ground. History however never repeats herself, and least of all in this affair. When consciousness, after so long an absence, returned to the immanent view of things, it came with full hands. The transcendent view had set up a strong protest against the ethical validity of the present social con- stitution. The protest is more or less absorbed and assimilated by the new conception. The result is a temperament vastly unlike the Greek, even where the two seem to stand side by side. The change shows itself in the first place in a different estimate of the individual in art. For example, classic art empha- sized the symmetrical and the harmonious, while modern art emphasizes the characteristic. 152 In the second place, while Greek consciousness had a horror of the infinite, modernity loves it. A good illustra- viii GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 301 tion might be found in the poetical history of the sea. Antiquity's aesthetic dislike of it may in part be ex- plained by the difference of race and by backwardness in the art of navigation. But the main element in the explanation is a temperamental change. To us the vast is dear for its own sake. The vague has no ter- rors. We rather advance into it with the joy of the lover and the eagerness of the explorer. Our Nature- Sense has a quality different from that of the ancients. Even in the experience of those who have altogether cast off the belief in immortality and for whom the visible world is the only world, the effects of the long rule of Christianity over the will and imagination of the Occident may be plainly seen. The unseen world, while it is denied, still persists in consciousness. Sovereign object of the heart's desires in the picked men and women of so many generations, it has given the mind a bent and bias that cannot easily be with- stood. The world that is unseen presses in upon the world we see with such weight and power that Nature loses much of her substantial character and becomes a symbol. Although the immortality of the soul be disbelieved in, nevertheless that which the dogma stands for, namely the hunger for an infinite good, the consuming thirst for an unstinted and "unanx- ious beauty " of holiness, the impassioned longing after a will that is all of one piece in its grasp of righteousness these emotional forces are behind and within the eye that looks on Nature. Sensation has in us a depth and reach which it c.ould not have in the ancients. It is pregnant with suggestions of the infinite. The wild rose cannot forget her kinship with the mystic rose of Dante. 302 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP. Modern consciousness, then, is alive at every point with the feeling of individuality and with the feeling of the infinite. The two are one. The man who is greatly individual must needs be an idealist of a great- hearted kind ; for in the degree that we are truly individual, truly makers and masters of ourselves, does our faith give to us in fee broad spaces of possibility in self-development outlying beyond our present character, and calling to the manly will in us, even as our rich prairies a generation ago called to the plough. To be downright individual is to have a sturdy conviction that the potential is vastly greater than the actual ; and this is the working con- ception of the infinite. The main source of what is most characteristic in our literature and music and art is identical with the main source of what is most prophetic in our political and social theory. It is that new definition of man which gave to the principle of individuality a root as deep as the bottom of things and an authority com- mensurate with the whole being of God. The soul has entered the State. The State has acquired some of the prerogatives of the Church, and is likely to ac- quire more ; for the career of the free State has barely begun. The creation of a united Germany, the birth of Italian unity, the rise of Japan, the vast expansion of lay education through the public school and the university, and many another feature of contemporary life, tell us with unmistakable emphasis that for an in- definite stretch of centuries in the future the concep- tion of the State is bound to gain steadily in spiritual significance, and in the power to command the spirit and imagination of our picked men and women. vin GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE 303 Some will think that the State has been stealing clothes from the Church. But it is rather the case that the Church herself is entering a new phase of her history. All the inherited dogmas of Christianity were shaped in a period when the State was either moribund or else possessed no first-hand spiritual significance. But now the State receives its title direct from God and the sunshine. The Church therefore is facing a new fact which has a central position in the spiritual order of things. Christianity is to triumph in the great debate now beginning, which we call comparative religion, by proving that the Christian view of the universe, as it is embodied in the person of Christ, is alone able to endow the principle of individuality with sovereign authority in history. The Church must put herself forward as the ally and interpreter of the free State. And the State? Every form of political and social organization lays a tax upon the will. And the weight of the tax varies with the breadth of the ideal enshrined within the organization. In an an- cient Oriental despotism taxes on property were heavy. But the tax on the will was light. The stuff of conscience was small in quantity because the reach of responsibility was short. In a Greek Democracy the tax on the will was far heavier. The State was not an external authority. On the contrary it was the citizen's larger self. So his responsibilities reached out and multiplied. He was obliged to find himself, and be at home, in a larger number of 'relationships. Modern or universalistic Democracy lays on the will the heaviest tax of all. The stuff of conscience is indefinitely great. The sincere believer in Democ- 304 GENESIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIENCE CHAP, vm racy must have a dogmatic conviction that the prin- ciple of individuality shall some time have the widest possible spread. His right to be an individual him- self puts him under the highest conceivable obligation to create individuality in others. He is a gentleman in the true democratic sense, just in the measure that he has the art of finding himself in an ever-growing number of persons of all sorts and conditions. He is not a political atom, such as the eighteenth century speculated on. Strip him of his connections with his fellows and he is nothing. He must be at home in relationships, and in a far greater number of them than the Greek conceived to be necessary. He must carry the campaign against caste into larger issues. He must face all that is disagreeable and problematic in Democracy, concealing nothing, blink- ing nothing away. And at the same time he must keep his will strong and tempered, so that its edge shall never turn. To meet all his social obligations heartily, to pay all his political debts joyously, never to throw a glance over his shoulder at the monastery this is a mighty day's work. From what source shall the social will of De- mocracy draw its food ? Within what view of the universe shall it get its breeding ? Just as the Chris- tianity of the future must look more and more to the needs of the free State, even so must the free State look more and more towards the Christian interpretation of life in man and in God, as the Bible bears witness to it. Here is to be the proving ground of the ideals that shall permanently sway mankind. This is the place where Church and State are to work out the problem of their relation to one another. NOTES WHEREVER POSSIBLE, REFERENCES TO THE FATHERS ARE TO THE TRANSLATIONS EDITED BY SCHAFF AND WAGE, OTHERWISE TO MIGNE. 1 Coulanges: Citd Antique (15 ed. p. 106). 2 Hearne : The Aryan Household, p. 475. 8 Sir Henry Maine : Early History of Institutions, p. 384. 4 Bagehot: Physics and Politics (Internat. Sc. Ser.), p. 21. 6 Bagehot : Physics and Politics, p. 27. 6 Polybius (ed. Tauchnitz), Proem. III. 4. 7 E. G. Melito: Eusebius, Praep. Ev. (ed. Teubner), I. 4. 4. 8 Guizot: Hist, of Civilization in Europe, ist Lee. 9 Hippolytus : Refutation of All Heresies, Bk. 7, c. 15. 10 Winwood Reade : Martyrdom of Man, p. 521. 11 Augustine : City of God, Bk. 4, c. 31. 12 Cicero : Pro Balbo, 13. 18 Lightfoot : Biblical Essays, p. 202. 14 Ulpian: Dig., Bk. I, tit. 17-32. 15 Ulpian: Dig., Bk. I, tit. 1-4. 18 Institutes of Justinian. Bk. i, tit. i. 17 Martineau : Types of Ethical Theory, I. 392. 18 Aristotle : Pol. I. I. 19 Siebeck: Religionsphil., S. 123. 20 Trendelenburg : Naturrecht (2* aufl.), S. 391. 21 J. H. Fichte: Ethik, I. S. 19. 22 Stopford Brooke : Theology in the English Poets. 28 Maine : Ancient Law (3d Am. ed.), p. 299. 24 Lactantius : Institutes, VI. 11. x 305 306 NOTES 26 Tertullian : De Virg., Vel. i. 26 Lactantius : Institutes, V. 14. 9. 27 Ambrose : The Duties of the Clergy, I. 29. 28 Pr