\ ^v. ^^^rrnf^ *>. ..>^ Digitized by the Internet Arciiive in 2007 witii funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.arcliive.org/details/culturerestraintOOblacricli Culture and Restraint CVLTVRE AND RESTRAINT HVGH BLACK Author of FRIENDSHIP FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY NEW YORK . CHICAGO . TORONTO Copyright, 1901, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY (October) GENERAL TO MY MOTHER WHO BY HER SILENT SERVICE SHOWED HER CHILDREN THE BEAUTY OF SACRIFICE Thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece. — Zechariah ix. 13. CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION 9 I ZION AGAINST GREECE — THE PROBLEM STATED . 1 3 II THE ESTHETIC IDEAL — CULTURE 38 III DEFECTS OF THE AESTHETIC IDEAL 66 IV CULTURE AS RELIGION 92 V THE PERFECT MAN • * * • 121 VI THE ASCETIC IDEAL — RESTRAINT 147 VII ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF ASCETICISM I76 7 8 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT VIII PAGE FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 206 IX THE MEDIEVAL CONCEPTION OF SAINTHOOD . . 236 X THE PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 265 XI THE TEACHING OF JESUS ON ASCETICISM . . . 294 XII THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 32 1 INTRODUCTION THE problem suggested by the opposing ideals of culture and self-denial is no academic one, but in some form or other is a very real and practical difficulty, which demands some solution from every one. Should a man obey his nature or thwart it, seek self-limitation or self-expan- sion? In some moods it appears to us as if the best attitude, as it is certainly the easiest way to peace, is to accept simply what seem the surface facts of our nature, and give up the long passion of the saints after the unattainable. Yet in other moods we recognise that life gains in dignity and solemn grandeur, when a man realises even once that for him in the ultimate issue there are in all the world only God and his own soul. We no sooner take up one of the positions than doubts pervade the mind as to its sufficiency. If we say that the secret of life is just to accept our nature, and seek its harmonious unfolding, immediately the question arises, whether self-culture is not only a subtle form of self-indulgence. If again we make re- nunciation the infallible method, we cannot keep out the question, whether it is not moral cowardice, that we refuse to live the larger life and to wield the wider power which culture seems to offer. The counsels of the great teachers also are varied and conflicting on this problem. Some say with as- surance that " self-love is not so vile a sin as self-neg- 9 10 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT lecting," and that no human capacity was given to be renounced ; others declare passionately, " Thou must go without, go without — that is the everlasting song which every hour all our life through hoarsely sings to us." Even if we do not trouble much about the general statement of the problem, and are not con- cerned about a plan of life that shall commend itself to reason and to conscience, we do not escape the many practical difficulties in many things on the border-line about which there is often no clear guidance, such as amusements, and our attitude towards certain kinds of art and literature. Needless to say, the two voices represent the prob- lem of all religion, namely, how faith stands to the world, with its ordinary life, and ties, and business, and pleasures. The problem varies with the ages with their different tone and quality, and varies even with each separate soul with its special temperament and environment, but it is an everpresent problem. If we are to follow Christ and do His will, what does that mean as to our relation to the common pursuits and human connections? Must we in any sense cut adrift from them, and even renounce the natural bonds which unite us to the general social organism of our day ? Is renunciation the keynote of the faith, and the ac- credited method of entering into the fullest Christian life? The problem comes to every earnest mind in some form or other; and nothing represents such a difficulty to young people as this, when they first re- spond to the claims of religion over their lives. What are they to give up of the many fascinating pleasures of the world ? What are they to deny themselves, and why? If renunciation is the very root of the faith, is INTRODUCTION ii not the giving up of everything the better part? The Christian life is often presented to them in the great devotional classics as demanding the curbing of every instinct and the sacrifice of every natural joy. The thought cannot but arise, if the way of the cross is the way to life, the more complete the sacrifice, the better. Should not the ideal then be, whether we can realise it or not, rigorous mortification, even complete with- drawal from the entanglements of the world? On the other hand, is not the very existence of powers and capacities a tacit argument for their de- velopment? Can self-denial be an adequate ideal, in face of the overwhelming natural instincts which de- mand satisfaction? Both sides seem to represent facts of human nature and of history, and claim to be considered in any com- plete plan of life. This book is an attempt to do jus- tice to both, and to find a great reconciling thought which may combine both, while at the same time it saves them from the inevitable failure which awaits them when each is taken by itself. Culture and Restraint ZION AGAINST GREECE— THE PROBLEM STATED TWO opposing methods present themselves to us as the secret of life, which may be indi- cated by the words, self-expression and self- repression ; or the method of Culture and the method of Restraint. They are usually set against each other in irreconcilable opposition, making a clear line of cleavage inflexibly dividing history and life : on one side the method of the world which appeals instinct- ively to man, the full-blooded gospel of the natural joy of Hfe; on the other side the method of religion, with its pale and bloodless creed, with the essence of its doc- trine popularly summed up in the rule, that the whole duty of man is to find out what he does not like and do that. The one is the life of nature, a broad and beaten path which invites the feet, where the self is enriched by all the manifold experiences of the way; the other is the selfless life, and its eternal symbol is a cross. The watchword of the one is perfection through joy; of the other, perfection through suffering. The contrast can be elaborated and extended in many ways — and exaggerated, for that is what it usually means; 13 14 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT but we cannot leave it in this hopeless antinomy. Such clean-cut divisions are usually artificial, and as a mat- ter of fact we find on both sides facts of human nature and of experience, which are assuredly facts, and can- not be left to stand in isolation. There must be some point of reconciliation, some higher unity, which com- bines them both. There is indeed a line of cleavage which divides men, but it is one of spirit, and not of method. The failure of each of the methods by itself shows that there must be some solution, or at least that the contrast has been wrongly stated. This latter is certainly part of the explanation; and we can easily see the strong temptation to exaggerate one of the sides at the expense of the other. A nar- row and partial view of truth always leads to error in the statement of even the one side; and much more is this the case when we are dealing, not with theories of truth, but with life itself, where the difficulty is in- creased by the disturbing elements of temperament, inclination, passion, and all the moral temptations which menace life. Thus, it is natural to meet from the side of culture the temptation to make the desire for self-expression the most unblushing selfishness, and to meet from the side of religion the temptation to enthrone a morbid form of self-repression as the ideal, and to trample on the legitimate claims of the other. In either case we suffer from a partial view of the facts of human nature, as when we find culture travers- ing all the lower reaches of man's powers, and refusing even to consider the higher sphere of the spiritual; or when we find religion depreciating things which are the very glory of the race, in the strange thought of honouring God by denying some of God's gifts to men. ZION AGAINST GREECE 15 We must be willing to suffer the fate of all mediators, who see the truth on both sides, and who refuse to become partisans. The two extremes appeal most readily to men, and so there is seen in human history the strange rhythmical tendency, which makes an epoch alternate with its opposite, a time of reforming zeal succeeded by a period when the fire seems burned out, license following restriction, and w^ versa. The instinct which seeks self-expression is innate in us, and no theory, economic or religious, can de- stroy the individualism of man. " I am I " is the first equation of all knowledge; for it is the statement of self-consciousness. It is often asserted that progress is towards similarity and social equality, and it is true in a sense that progress will mean something like equality of opportunity; but it is far nearer the truth to say that progress is towards divergence. The higher the life, the greater is the complexity of function, and this is the case with society as well as the single organism. Even equality of opportunity in education only develops individuality, and creates dif- ference. Many amiable attempts have been made to eliminate the Ego from man by external means, but they could only succeed by eliminating man himself. Be- ing such persons as we are, with this craving for self- expression and self-satisfaction, it is to be expected that at all times there should be a philosophy which teaches the duty of satisfying the instinct. This phil- osophy has sometimes been stated in very unworthy forms, in morals an Epicureanism which easily became the grossest self-indulgence, in economics a scramble of competition, every man for himself and the devil 1 6 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT take the hindmost. The besetting danger of all efforts after self-expression lies on the surface. Self-love is a root-principle of human nature, but when it is seen degraded and running riot in animaHsm, a protest be- comes inevitable. But the philosophy, which takes ac- count of the natural demand of our being for self-satis- faction, can be set forth in high and refined forms. Culture is an attempt to do this from a high stand- point. It declares that the purpose of life is that we should come into the full realisation of our powers; and this is to be achieved, not by limitation, but by ex- pansion, by obeying our nature fearlessly. It carries with it the sacred duty to develop all the faculties, to train the mind, to attempt to reach a complete and well- balanced state of existence, to become all that it is possible for each individual to become. It is the duty of a man, not only to enrich his nature through all the experiences and from all the sources possible, but to use these as opportunities to unfold himself without fear and without doubt. Emerson, who was an idealist in every fibre of his mind, and could have no sympathy with any form of moral laxity, preaches this creed with intense earnestness. In some of his essays, notably the one on Self-Reliance, he asserts the right and duty of the individual to live his own life to the best advantage. " Trust thyself," he is ever saying ; " no law can be sacred to me except that of my own nature." He pro- tests against conforming to any custom, or tradition, or prejudice, that would hinder full self-realisation. He protests even against the idea that a man must be con- sistent with himself, in so far as anything in the past would be a restraint on present self-expression. ** Speak what you think now in hard words, and to- ZION AGAINST GREECE 17 morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to- day." This demand for self-expression seems to justify itself by its success, and by its necessity for greatness in any branch of activity. " Be yourself " is the first lesson of every teacher of every art, and the last lesson also. The mere imitative artist, without distinctive creative power, who only repeats past forms and types, is a cumberer of the ground. Art is vital, not mechan- ical, a putting forth of the inner life, not an exercise of technique. Art demands from her disciples that they should be original in the true sense, that they have made their own the truth they utter in whatever form, so that it come forth formed by their mind and per- sonality, coloured by the red blood from their own heart. The teaching of culture in the great art of living is similar, — Be yourself; express yourself; be- come what you may be ; reach out to your possibilities ; live the fullest, richest life you may. Over against this there is the other method, which claims more distinctively to be the religious method, that of self-repression. It sees that selfishness is the bitter root of life, and that the efforts of man after self-expression have often ended in a revel where all evil passions have been awakened, and that men have K failed utterly in reaching even happiness by their eager search for it. So it makes sacrifice the secret of life. Not the masterful men, but the meek, inherit the earth. It carries the war into the enemy's territory, and asserts that even for a rich vital culture the gate to self-knowl- edge is self-distrust. The sanctuary of truth is only entered by worshippers. For success in work there 1 8 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT must be genuine self-repression ; a man must lose him- self in his work, or his very shadow will prevent him from reaching the highest. Self-conscious work, es- pecially in art, is bad work. To be his true self, a man must suppress himself ; to be a perfect instrument of high thought, to be in vital correspondence even with nature, there must be suppression of impulses and sensibilities, which only dim the mirror through which truth reflects itself to us. All these considerations make it natural that, when the world's philosophy of satisfying self has failed, the other extreme should be tried. It glorifies self-denial, and points resolutely to a strait gate and a narrow way, and does not hesitate to denounce as self-indulgence the aim of culture, to perfect the nature by the varied channels v/hich the wbrld affords. Only in sacrifice is life perfected. It speaks of restraint, denying one- self, and giving up, cutting off a right hand, and pluck- ing out a right eye. In the passion of sacrifice it seems to make the ideal an emasculated life, anaemic, impoverishing the nature, cutting off the sources of joy, reducing the scope of the powers, and narrowing down the whole horizon. It is the way of the cross, and to the eye of culture it looks like madness, ever meddling with the free play of human instincts, ever silencing the voice of nature, leaving a poor mutilated life. Not " Be yourself " is the watchword, but Give up, go without, renounce the natural, put a check upon the normal and spontaneous outflow of vital energies, tame and subdue the high heart of man. The two theories are vaguely called by the names of Hellenism and Hebraism, as suggesting the two ZION AGAINST GREECE 19 gr eat streams of influence, which have made modern Europe what it is. The names are not quite appro- priate, though we can see how it came about that they should have such a significance. The words, which have suggested the title of this chapter, are taken from the Prophecies of Zechariah, and seem to imply that the particular section of the book in which they occur must in all probability be dated near the closing era of Old Testament religion. In the early prophecies, Greece is hardly ever mentioned, and only as one of the far-away heathen countries at the ends of the earth from Israel; for of course at that time Greece did not really exist for the Jews, and never came into contact with them. The peoples, which then loomed large in the horizon, were Egypt, and the Asiatic Empires of Assyria and Babylon, and latterly Persia. These each in turn represented the scourge of God for poor Israel, the hammer that broke them, or the anvil on which they were broken. With none of these great world-empires could Israel cope, and all that she could ever hope for was to be let alone, and be left to work out her own higher destiny. The struggle for Israel was not that of war, but a struggle to preserve her own peculiar treasure. Each external conflict, through which the Jews came, was only part of a deeper problem, representing a sorer internal con- flict, to keep from being lowered down religiously to the level of paganism around them. In the decay of the Persian Empire the opportunity came for Greece, which brought her into contact with Israel. Alexander the Great began his wonderful con- quests in Asia, beginning with Syria, when he took Damascus, Tyre, and Gaza ; then conquered Egypt and 20 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT founded Alexandria; and then overthrew the great Persian Empire, and ultimately carried his arms to In- dia. Everywhere he was irresistible, and swept huge armies out of his path, overturning the crumbling Oriental empires. It boded no good for Israel, so far as national hopes went. To the prophet the mighty Greek conquest meant only the old story of danger and menace to Jerusalem, with which past records were full. We have said that the great danger, which ever threat- ened the true Israel, was the danger to religion. For- eign rites and worship and faith, a lower type of re- ligion, and a lower level of life, were ever being forced on the people from without, and easily found allies to support them from within. The danger to religion be- came greater when, as was the case with Persia and Greece, a very attractive and dominating civilisation was added to the military ascendancy. Especially was this so with Greece, which then stood for culture, and all that makes for knowledge, and beauty in art and poetry, and grace in life. Alexander's great conquests were not merely military. He established Greek col- onies and Greek kingdoms all over Asia, and extended the Greek language and civilisation. All this repre- sented a force subtler, and more insidious, and more difficult to combat, than mere brute force of arms. The Jewish people were in spite of themselves drawn into contact with the great influences, which sprang from Greece, and which were changing the world. Alex- ander's dream was to found a universal empire, which would be held together by unity of language and civi- lisation. The great intellectual force, which Greece represented, was to weld the diverse nations of Asia into one. That is why he took such care to plant ZION AGAINST GREECE it Greek colonies everywhere. Wherever his armies passed, there followed the establishment of Greek cities, to saturate the whole East with Hellenic culture. It was a bold scheme, which showed Alexander to be a great statesman, as well as a great soldier; and the scheme was to a large extent successful, as is seen from the place which towns like Alexandria took in the future of the world. All over Asia Minor these Greek influences were especially powerful, and even in Pales- tine itself Greek ideas grew so strong, that there arose a fierce struggle among the pious and patriotic Jews against Hellenic culture. The network of Greek cities all around Israel exerted a constant influence to break down the exclusive religion of Israel, as well as the exclusive manners and customs. Out of this struggle arose the two parties among the Jews, so much heard of in the ministry of Jesus, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Sadducees, largely composed of the upper classes, affected not only the Greek language, but also the laxer religious views and practices of Greece. Hellenism was eating like an acid into the fabric of the old Jewish faith, and if allowed would have destroyed all essential distinc- tions between the religion of Israel and the paganism of Greece ; but the very attempts, both from without and from the Sadducees within, to accelerate the gradual infection of Greek culture, brought about a revival of Jewish feeling; and this revolt against the dominant Hellenism of the time was largely carried out by the Pharisees. In a true sense they were the legitimate successors of the reformers of the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. That work, which was then begun, of codifying and establishing Jewish law and making the 22 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT Jews religiously more exclusive than ever, was neces- sary and inevitable, and really meant the idea ot a Church within the nation. The Pharisees exaggerated it, and made the rules, which had been formed to pre- serve the faith, vexatious and in the long-run even harmful to true religion. Their ecclesiastical regula- tions swallowed up the plain precepts of the moral law ; but all the same the Pharisees were the saviours of the state, and were the patriots of the troublous time of the Maccabsean wars. They were narrow and bigoted, and were what we would call the obscurantist party oppos- ing the culture and light of Greece ; but the Sadducees, who were broader minded, and who were tinged v/ith Greek art and literature, and advocated the introduc- tion of Greek customs, were lax and irreligious, and had ceased to be true Jews without becoming even decent Greeks. To fall thus between two stools is always the special danger of the broad-minded party. It would have been a calamity beyond words, if Israel at this time had been wiped out as a force of religion : the time had not come when she could afford to cease to be ex- clusive. She had her contribution to make to the world, and had to be kept select after Ezra's somewhat ex- ternal fashion. She had to give to the world religion, which could take the culture of Greece, and afterwards the power of Rome, and elevate and inspire them. The Hellenising influences were needed to prepare the way for the coming of the great Reconciler, who would make religion life, and make life religious for both Jew and Greek ; and the fanaticism of the ultra- Jewish party, with its stern legalism and exclusive creed, was needed to guard the deposit, till the fulness of time had come. But the struggle was fierce, and at one time, ZION AGAINST GREECE 23 just before the rising under the Maccabees, it seemed as if the Hellenising party would carry everything before them, and sweep the old Jewish faith of the prophets, and martyrs, and saints, out of the land. Fiercer than any mere struggle of arms was the strug- gle of ideas, and the words of the prophet had a keener significance for the time to come than their first mean- ing. " Thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece." The part which these two small countries played in the history of the human soul was conditioned by their history, and even by the geography. Among the strongest antipathies of the Jews, amounting almost to terror, was that of the desert and of the sea.. Though originally a nomadic race, whose natural home was the desert, they had learned to dread it, as " the great and terrible wilderness." ^ Their long wan- dering in it, their privations and struggles before they were securely planted in Canaan, burned in on them hatred of the pathless, arid waste. Drought was the constant menace of Palestine, but in the desert drought was chronic : the desert could swallow up a river, as it swallows up Abana the river of Damascus, and still have its thirst unappeased. Israel dwelt always on the confines of the desert, in a land that seemed to be snatched from its greedy maw, and never could forget it. On the other side was the sea, but with a barren, forbidding coast. There are no creeks and inlets, no promontories or rivers or bays, that afford a natural harbour. A ledge of cliff runs along almost unbroken, with no place where a great port could be established, and it is nearly always a lee shore, as the prevailing winds are westerly. The sea to the Jews on that side *Deut. i. 19. 24 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT was the end, the unknown, and was accepted as the limit of their possible dominion to the west, — " As for your western border, ye shall have the great sea for a border." 1. The charm of the sea, its joyous fascina- tion, was unknown to the Jews. It was a limitation due to geography. How different this is from Greece, which has given its name to the rival power, which contests the do- minion of the heart and mind of man with the Hebrew. Greece is cut up into promontories, and peninsulas, and bays, and islands. The sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that o'erface the sea. And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps " Greece." ' The Greeks were born sailors, open on every side to the intercourse of foreign nations, susceptible to all varied influences, which helps to explain their light- ness and charm of character, their free, joyous views of life, their wide culture, which blossomed into art and literature. They represent the highest develop- ment of man through intercourse with men; while the Jew was shut in by the desert and the sea, to work out his destiny with God, to grapple with the prob- lems of the moral Hfe. So, from Greece came art and poetry to the world : from Israel came religion. When the time came, the sea would be the great means of com- munication, as the Greek language itself also was, for turning the world into the kingdom of God, but mean- while the sea was the great barrier to keep the treasure from being lost. When Greece by wisdom was failing Num. xxxiv. 6. ' Browning, Cleon. ZION AGAINST GREECE 25 to find out God, a few tribes forced out of the desert, and beaten back by the sea, were learning on the hills of Canaan the laws of God, which are the laws of life. Israel and Greece have stood for the two great forces that have moulded Western history, and still dominate modern life. They have usually been stated as opposite prmciples, waging endless warfare against each other: Hebraism representing the sterner view of Hfe as duty, righteousness, the demand of a higher law ; Hellenism representing as the ideal an easy, har- monious development of all the natural instincts and capacities of man. Before the age of historical criti- cism, St. Paul made the distinction, so specially em- phasised in our day, between the Hebrew spirit and the Gentile, particularly the Greek, spirit when he says that the Gentiles followed not after righteousness, but that Israel did follow after the law of righteousness.^ Whatever might be said about the Jews, it could not be said that levity and carelessness were their character- istics, or that they were indifferent to moral issues. There was a strenuous earnestness in the race, so that Hebraism has been aptly enough incorporated into our language to stand for the serious view of life as a discipline, the conception of true happiness lying along the line of duty, and self-control, and sacrifice. St. Paul, even when recording their failure, bore them witness that they had a zeal for God.^ History fully bears out St. Paul's contrast between the Jew and the Greek. The Jews did understand that God requireth righteousness as indispensable for life. The law flashed out its solemn warnings before their eyes. The necessity for righteous living, as an article of faith, * Rom. ix. 30, 31. *Ibid. x. 2. 26 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT was more truly theirs than any other people's. The sense of sin, the need of redemption, the lawlessness of human nature when it is not under subjection to the law of God, the necessity for restraint of even natural powers and impulses, are all postulates of the Bible. With the Gentiles it was not so. In Greece the highest form of pagan life was reached, and there life was designed on the plane of nature. There was a frank worldliness, the acceptance of the visible world, making the best of it in every sense, so that the art of living was carried to its furthest point. The cross, and the message of the cross, might be a stumbling- block to the Jews, with their glowing hopes of a Mes- sianic King ; but St. Paul knew well that to the Greeks the cross could only be foolishness,^ with their keen zest of life, their pride of knowledge, their love of the beautiful in nature, their whole conception of morality as the harmonious development of the powers existing in man. Greek life was run on a totally different level, where a portent like the cross was sadly out of place. Not self-sacrifice, but self-realisation was the highest word of Greek thought. Every natural impulse was justified, and had the sanction of religion, and even had a special deity assigned to it. The highest human aim came to be the cultivation of the natural, the beautiful, the graceful in the world and human life, the due bal- ance and harmony of all the powers and capacities of man, the fulfilment of the whole nature, the develop- ment of all sides of life. Pagan religion was nature- worship, the worship of what is, not the vision of the glory and holiness of God which drove the Jews to * I Cor. i. 23. ZION AGAINST GREECE 27 their knees. Sin therefore was not the transgression of a holy law, but merely the failure to make the most of life. The contrast can be worked out in detail in many lines, but it is evident how the two ideals differ, and how it is true that Zion must be against Greece. The one stood for Religion, and the beauty of holiness : the other for Culture, and the love of beauty. The one was sensitive to the moral purity of God, and therefore to the moral sanctions of life: the other was sensitive to aesthetic beauty, and therefore to the natural glory of life. Hebraism adored, and glorified God: Hel- lenism deified the world, and glorified man. So that, unless the morality of the Decalogue, with its re- straints and repression of the evil taint in human na- ture, and unless religion, as the prophets of Israel con- ceived it, were to be lost to the world, the conflict of the two opposing ideals could not be avoided. Hebraism therefore stands to us for moral discipline; Hellenism for the culture of the human, the sensitive love of the beautiful, and the joy of living. We are tempted to make this antithesis more abso- lute than it really is. In such a hard-drawn contrast there is omitted on the one side the higher morality of the Greek philosophers and poets, in spite of its mani- fest imperfections, and the more spiritual conception of the divine which they attained; and also there is omitted the practical reaction against the popular re- ligion and the popular moral standard, which was made by the followers of Pythagoras, a reaction which in- cluded strict asceticism of life, as well as mystical speculations. And on the other side the contrast is 28 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT stated, as if all the art, and literature, and intellectual advance were found only in Greece and not in Israel. It is true that the Jews never did show any proficiency in the plastic arts, a characteristic which they have shared with the Semitic race generally ; but the Jewish religion fostered arts like architecture, music, poetry; and their sacred literature in all its varied forms, nar- rative, prophetic, lyric, dramatic, judged even as litera- ture, is unrivalled for sublimity and for power over the mind and heart of man. There is omitted also the tremendous intellectual advance to the whole people, caused by the monotheistic creed of Israel. This is seen most markedly not only in the prophets' condem- nation of idolatry as moral evil, but in their derision and scornful laughter at it as grotesque ignorance. The intellectual superiority of their attitude is too pal- pable to be missed, as for example in Elijah's mockery of the frantic Baal worshippers, " Cry aloud ; for he is a god : either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is on a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth and must be awaked," ^ words which cut deeper with their keen edge of scorn, than the knives and lancets, with which they cut themselves. A striking proof of the mental superi- ority of Monotheism is the attitude of Judah in the exile, when the feeble nation, broken by the barbaric might of Babylon, having lost everything but her faith in the One God, held her head high in scornful pride, as she dwelt captive among idolaters. There is no more piercing satire in literature, than that of the prophet's description of the making of a god — the planting of an ash tree ; the felling it when grown ; the kindling of a fire with part of the wood to roast * Kings xviii. 27. ZION AGAINST GREECE 29 meat on, and with the rest of the wood making a god to grovel before ; the smith fashioning it with hammers, fainting with the fatigue of working it on the hot coals, the carpenter carefully measuring his part of the work with a rule, using compass and planes/ The idea of One God is on a level of thought, high as the heavens above the idea at the root of Polytheism ; for it gave unity to the world, and to man, as well as to God. A moral law, universal in its working, bind- ing for all, and binding even for God, is impossible in a system with many gods of varying temperament and conflicting principles, as everything would depend on the special character and tastes of the particular deity, whose influence was supposed to preponderate in any given time and locality. The basis for moral conduct is taken away, if it is even conceivable that a thing could be right in one place and wrong in another, right for one deity and wrong for another, right even for the same deity at one time and wrong at another, if he can be persuaded by gifts and prayers and sacrifices to make right wrong on any occasion and for any con- sideration. We know in the direction of human affairs that many masters end in confusion, and we can imagine the moral confusion introduced by the con- ception of Lords many and Gods many, who ruled over a distracted earth. Faith in one God was needed before consistency in the moral life of man was possible. The world is indebted to the Jews for the moral law, not merely the Ten Commandments, but the idea of law, the possibility of any commandments, based not on caprice or external authority, but on the eternal essence of things. *Isa. xliv. 9-20. 30 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT The result of this moral advance was an infinite in- tellectual advance also, which brought reason and order into the world. There could be nothing but mental confusion, so long as the universe was supposed to be governed haphazard and by piecemeal, here the domain of one deity, there of another. Consistent thought about nature, or human history, was impos- sible; and so we find the great thinkers of Greece striving to express the idea of unity. While not re- nouncing polytheism, they sought to introduce order; some by conceiving of a God who was above the other gods as a sort of ultimate appeal ; others by imagining a dread impersonal power like Fate, which even all the gods had to obey; others denying that the gods inter- fered with the world at all. Science in its modern sense had its birth in Monotheism. The idea of the uniformity of nature, which is the first principle of science, was impossible till the human mind swept aside the intellectual confusion of Polytheism, and through the conception of law saw the world to be consistent, with unbroken continuity. Jewish religion is the cradle of science. This intellectual superiority, which was not confined to an isolated thinker, as might be the case in Greece, but which belonged to the nation, needs to be taken into account in all the con- trasts, which are drawn between Hellenism and He- braism. For all the reasons stated above it is seen that these contrasts are usually overdrawn as history; and this particular contrast, which we are specially considering in what may be called their various theories of life, has also been exaggerated, and is only borne out by special ZION AGAINST GREECE 31 definitions of the two terms to suit the particular thesis ; but there is enough truth in the opposition to make it worth stating. The contrast is exaggerated, as if they were irreconcilable opposites, as if there could be no higher unity which could combine the two. As a matter of fact they must be combined for a complete solution of the difficulty they undoubtedly represent; for they are both facts of human life. Still the con- trast is a true one so far as it goes, and represents a division among men, which lasts to this day. There are the two types of mind, to whom one or other of the alternatives makes its insistent appeal. The two forces seem to play shuttlecock right through history, divid- ing epochs and men. They are seen rather as ten- dencies, than as deliberate theories, formulated com- pletely and logically carried out; but even as theories they are ever to be found, and seem fated to stand apart, though we do see them sometimes fused together in more or less measure in a great man like Dante or Spenser or Milton, or even in a great epoch like the Elizabethan, the fruit of the twin forces of the Re- naissance and the Reformation. But almost always one of the theories appeals more strongly to each of the two families of minds, and men seem to fall naturally into one of the two great parties. We find it in litera- ture and art, as well as in theology and practical life. The one speaks in the name of religion and asserts that the highest life is reached through sacrifice, and therefore advocates stern self-repression as the true method. It appeals to the heroic vein, throws con- tempt on all things of earth, and deliberately refuses them for the sake of the deeper life of the soul. It glows with unearthly beauty in its divine passion of 32 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT renunciation. It bases its verdict on the experience that all forms of worldliness, however refined and cultured, end in disillusionment and despair, and can never satisfy the deep heart of man. The doom of death is on them, open, as they are like other earthly treasures, to the bite of the moth and the waste of the rust ; so that even the perfecting of one's own existence by the ordinary means of culture, though it may be free from all gross evil, is a barren task, unworthy of our exclusive regard. Everything must be sacrificed to the soul. The way to save the life is to lose it, to give it up, to throw it away in the devotion of a great aim. Men thrill, as they have ever done, to the high passion of the counsel. It has made saints, and mar- tyrs, missionaries, and philanthropists. It is indeed at the root of all religion, that a man should not count his life dear, and should sit loosely to all worldly pos- sessions, and when the call comes should be willing to give up all that the world counts most precious. The story of Buddha, with its voluntary renunciation, driven by the sting of soul and by divine pity for suf- fering men, has false views of God and of human life, but it has a heart of truth in it, and the instinct of the race pronounces its majesty. On the other side, calmly waiting for its opportunity, is the opposite method, which speaks not of self-re- pression, but of self-expression. It bases itself quietly on the natural instincts and needs of man, and makes as its ideal the healthful outgoing of all the activities of human nature. These suggest and determine the life man was meant to live, so let him live that life fearlessly, unfolding him- self as best he can. The soul is larger, it declares, than ZION AGAINST GREECE 33 the ascetic would allow, and has room for all the world of beauty, and thought, and art, and knowledge, which man has been conquering for himself through the cen- turies. The ascetic method, if carried out logically, would make life colourless, and would result in the loss of individuality, and therefore in the loss of the highest capacity of service. Besides, it is an impos- sible ideal for all men, for if rigidly pursued it would bring society to an end, and the race itself to an end. The natural ideal, says this calm voice — calm because it knows what weight of facts is on its side — is a fully developed and all-round health of the whole individual. It has support not only from the nature of man, but from the teaching of religion, which points to perfection as its end ; so that culture can be even made a religious duty, and it has certainly often been elevated into a re- ligious cult. The strength of its religious appeal is felt in the question. Are we not called on to make the best of God's gifts to us in nature, as well as in providence? It cannot be that having eyes we should refuse to see, and having ears we should refuse to hear, and having brains we should refuse to think, and hav- ing capacities of work and joy we should refuse to exercise them. And so the two tendencies, which we can call He- braism and Hellenism if we will, oppose each other and make their clamant appeal to us all. The con- troversy is perennial, though its forms change. The problems which divided men into Cavalier and Puritan have lost their point to us to-day but the distinction made th-en finds copious illustration in every stage of human history, and the same swing of the pendulum from the Commonwealth to the Restoration can be 34 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT paralleled again and again, though not perhaps in such dramatic completeness. There must be some solution of the seeming antithesis; for wherever one side has full sway, unhindered by the other, it only prepares for a strong reaction. This is so conspicuous in his- tory, and is such a regular phenomenon, that it seems as natural as the systole and diastole of a rhythmically pulsating vessel, like the heart. Florence, when dominated by the preaching of Savonarola, became transformed; high-born ladies threw aside their jewels and finery; men turned from evil ways into sobriety and godliness of life; all the forms of devoted piety were observed, the churches were crowded with all classes of the people from nobles to peasants, dishonest tradesmen under the awakening of conscience restored ill-gotten gains; the Carnival, which before had been an occasion for un- bridled passions, wild revelry, drunkenness, and de- bauchery, became almost like a fast instead of a ca- rousal; the famous burning of the "Vanities" took place, when men gave up to the flames all books and pictures calculated to have an evil influence, all carnival masks and costumes, and things associated with the old orgies ; the very children were turned into instruments of the good work, going through the streets in proces- sion, singing hymns, and collecting money for the poor — and then the tide turned, and, when Savonarola was in the crisis of his struggle with the pope, almost the whole city rose against him ; a mob attacked his con- vent of San Marco; and the great Friar went to his martyrdom, with the sorer martyrdom of his heart at the thought that all his work was overturned. In the individual life also it is common to find a ZION AGAINST GREECE 35 similar revolt from the strictness of early training, and from a crabbed, narrow faith. Just when life seems completely confined by a cast-iron system of repression, there comes a revulsion of man's intellect to freedom, which too often degenerates into license. The Renaissance was, among other things, a re- action against asceticism; as the Reformation was also in a more religious sphere, the recoil of the heart from a system that crushed healthy instincts. A theory, which made duty consist in uprooting the innate powers, must provoke reaction ; and sooner or later the instinct of beauty, which is native to man, will find outlet. The Renaissance was the swing of the pendulum long held back, and its very excesses were due to the previous excess. If men rushed from the old dis- cipline and rigid regime to the other extreme of license, it was the expected result at the breaking of the bonds which formerly held them; just as th-e license of the Restoration in England, after the iron hand of the Commonwealth was removed, is explained in the same way. At the Renaissance the new delight in nature, in art, in all the beauty and charm of the world, burst the bands of the old theory of life. Interest in the rediscovered classical literature, the revival of learning, all the varied culture of Humanism, came with the en- largement of mind, which saw the world and life to be larger in their many-sided interests than the mediaeval Church had allowed. In the ferment of the time, paint- ing, architecture, literature opened up new worlds, and with these manifestations there appeared also a new love of natural beauty. Petrarch's description of the Valley of Vaucluse would have been impossible in Italy before his time. Sometimes the revival degen- 36 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT erated into naturalism in its gross forms, when men threw aside all restraints, and the excess brought its own revenge to the destruction of art itself; but Hu- manism, as it appeared in history, was an inevitable reaction from asceticism, and illustrated once more the old lesson that the nature of man cannot be thwarted and distorted with impunity. These then are the two opposing elements, plainly traced in broad lines in history, both of them facts of human nature clamorously appealing for recogni- tion, but it is not easy to do justice to both sides, either in a philosophical theory which will give each its proper place, or as a practical solution for the re- spective difficulties each side creates in our own daily lives. It is easier to take sides, to call Savonarola a fanatic monk, who tried to plunge the Renaissance back into the gloom of the Middle Ages ; or to exag- gerate the grotesque side of Puritanism, as Butler does in Hudibras, and Scott does with the Scotch Covenan- ters, underlining the scrupulosity of the precision, and the passion of the fanatic: as on the other hand it is easier to assume that every cavalier was a roystering swaggerer ; or to mock at the pretension of all forms of culture, as if to sweeten the surface of life were the same as to save it ; or to sneer at all attempted revivals of Hellenism in our own time, with their aesthetic crazes and endless affectations. It is useful enough that the faults and failures of both sides should be pointed out ; but mutual recriminations, which end there, do not help much towards a solution. The first principle of any attempted irenicon between the two forces, represented by Zion and Greece, is that it must include both, as ZION AGAINST GREECE 37 can be proved from the undoubted dangers which beset each of the two tendencies when left to itself. Culture is tempted to be blind to the tragic facts of human nature, and to smother the soul in external forms and objects. This carries with it also the con- stant danger of moral relaxation; for if all that is in man only needs unrestrained development, life can be made, as it has often on these lines been made, a dance of devils. Even if this moral catastrophe be avoided, culture, separated from the serious temper of religion, grows shallow, if not base, in its tendency. With all possible grace and charm a literature, which has lost touch with strength and seriousness, dwindles into frivolity or grossness. The opposite danger on the side of religion is a morbid introspection, which dwarfs life and leads to atrophy of the natural powers. All wilful mutilation of life, all refusal of the wide and spacious inheritance to which we have been bom as men, is tacit unbelief. It throws the whole providence of God into confusion, to make nature a satanic contrivance, as if it were outside of the divine government. The ideal thus must include both elements, each being needed to save the other from the defects of its quality. If the Greek spirit is needed to broaden the life of a people, the He- brew spirit is needed to deepen it, and indeed to give it the solid foundation on which alone beauty can be permanently built. II THE ESTHETIC IDEAL — CULTURE IT may seem like pronouncing on the futility of cul- ture at the very start to associate it with the very word aesthetic, as giving a dog a bad name is a preparation for hanging it. It is, however, with no controversial intention we use the word, but partly because the name need not be relegated to an unworthy use, and partly because of the difficulty of finding a better word. ^Esthetic, from its derivation, means perception, or what is perceptible by the senses, but it is narrowed further to apply to the science of beauty and * to matters of taste. In its best sense it means the love of poetry and art and all works of imagination, de- manding a cultivated mind to appreciate the shades of beauty in these subjects ; and, while culture may claim a wider sphere, still it chiefly works by means that may be called aesthetic, seeking to ripen, and sweeten, and enlarge our appreciation of the best things in the world and human life. In its worst sense the word has an unfortunate suggestion of affectation and pose, implying a superfine and exaggerated devotion to petty details on the surface of art, and a supercilious con- tempt for the practical affairs of the world. The word culture itself does not escape this diffi- culty of having various meanings. It too has been debased to mean the same sort of affectation and ped- antry, as if it stood for the multifarious scraps of in- 38 THE ^ESTHETIC IDEAL — CULTURE 39 formation about literature and art, which are accepted as passwords by the select cliques. Addington Sy- monds ^ complained that a reviewer of one of his books sneered at him for travelling around Europe with a portmanteau full of culture on his back, and this set him to reflect that his reviewer must have had a differ- ent conception of culture from himself, and must have imagined it to consist of certain select views about art and pieces of literary information, which could be hawked about the country as a pedlar takes his pack. This is a common enough view, for which some apostles of culture, who rave periodically about some obscure picture or some newly discovered book, are responsible, a view which has become so ingrained in the public mind that it is difficult to speak seriously of culture and the aims of culture at all. But in spite of the deterioration of the word in popular usage, the thing it stands for is too important and vital to be dismissed with a sneer. In addition also to this varied use of the word there is still another element of confusion in the fact that, besides its natural uses in the unmetaphorical sense, culture can mean either a process, as in the phrase the culture of the mind, that is, its training, or it can mean a product, the result of the process, as when we speak about a man of culture. In the first case it suggests the machinery of education, the appropriation of learn- ing, a system by means of which the understanding and the taste are cultivated ; and, as it is a common failing to exalt the means unduly, this is how the suggestion that it is something artificial has crept in. Professor Seeley* is so concerned about this that he thinks it a */n the Key of Blue, p. 195. * Natural Religion, Part ii. chap. ii. 40 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT misfortune that those who say * culture ' do not say instead * rehgion/ since culture does certainly convey the idea of being merely a direction given to the de- velopment of life, while religion is the principle of Ufe itself, and he is jealous for the honour and high place of culture. We shall see^ that this would be to de- nude religion of its hitherto recognised significance, and would be piling upon culture a weight of meaning its foundation could not bear, and would leave it, like a pyramid, standing on its apex. It must be content with its honourable position as a force that gives a very effective direction to life, and is a very valuable instrument of religion. In this chapter, in which we speak of its great value and the truth that is in it as an ideal, we will see how it moves to some extent con- currently with religion, reserving to a future chapter any consideration of its weakness, and the causes of its failure when taken by itself. Culture begins with accepting the Christian ideal,, which aims at perfection of life, and thus, with all its incompleteness, it is in some form necessary to every man who has ideals at all. It emphasises the duty, which a man owes to himself to be what it is in him to become, the duty to use all means to attain a full de- velopment of all his powers. It includes, therefore, the careful cultivation of every capacity, the ripening of the nature by the slow processes of growth, the effort after self-realisation, which produces artists in every sphere of creative energy. It is the conscious training, in which a man makes use of every educa- tional means within his reach, feeding his inner life by every vital force in history and experience, and so ad- * Vide below, chap. iv. " Culture as Religion." THE ^ESTHETIC IDEAL — CULTURE 41 justing himself to his environment that he shall absorb the best products of the life of his time, thus making his personality rich and deep. Starting from this high ground it is not enough to wave it aside with a ref- erence to the lowest types of the cult, the terrible prigs it has fostered, the superior persons who speak mellifluously of sweetness and light, and who look with contempt on the Philistines; or to the aesthetic coteries, who worship the bizarre and the uncommon, who rave about the ethical value of blue china and white plates of Nantgarw, and hold strong opinions about Botticelli, or somebody else, according to the prevailing fashion; the elect people who have the only true views about wallpaper and Oriental rugs. It would be easy to refer to the crowd, which sham culture has let loose *' to rave, recite, and madden round the land." That would be the poor device of the controversalist, who takes the weak exaggera- tions of those he marks out as opponents and trans- fixes them with his easy scorn. In cheap sneers at culture we forget that every great man has set it before himself in some form or other, and that it is no broad and flowery path on which a man can gaily walk, but a narrow one through a strait gate. We forget that it was not a light task, for example, which Goethe presented to himself, when he made it his aim in life to develop his every capacity, till he died, after a long life of strenuous mental activity, with the words on his Hps, " More light." What has made Goethe the representa- tive man of culture was that he resolutely set aside all extraneous interests, and calmly gave himself to his engrossing idea; that he was, as Mr. Hamilton 42 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT Mabk puts it in one of his cultured and suggestive essays, " a man who discovered in youth that life ought not to be a succession of happenings, a matter of outward fortunes, but a cumulative inward growth and a cumulative power of productivity." ^ We forget also the moral qualities involved in the tremendous course of study, which a man like Gibbon set before himself as preparation for the writing of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is a long and arduous task to master even a branch of literature; for it requires not only almost sleepless toil to over- take the immense field, but also asks for imaginative reconstruction of the historical conditions, and^ sympathetic insight into the character and tempera- ment and situation of the various authors, before their place in the republic of letters can be deter- mined. And most of all we forget that, whatever follies may be committed in its name, culture as an ideal means a vision of unrealised perfection, and a steadfast pursuit of it, demanding intelligent grasp of the laws of growth, and resolute self-mastery, and unflinching effort. It comes even with a religious force to a man, who^ feels the sacredness of life, and realises his obligation to make the most of life in the best sense. Most of the failures of life are due to want of a real aim; we pursue our course so much by drifting rather than by sailing. Men are so concerned about living, that they lose sight of life. The act of living, the means of living, the details of living, absorb us almost ex- clusively, and we rarely try to co-ordinate all our scattered activities into a large consistent plan. Of ^Essays on Nature, p. 15. THE ^ESTHETIC IDEAL —CULTURE 43 course we have petty practical plans, such as to make a position in our profession, to make money in our business, or to get pleasure in our life, but as likely as not we have just drifted into these plans also. With all our activity in living, the great judgment of life goes against us by default. As far as the indi- vidual is concerned, the net gain of life must be a gain in character; we are judged^ even by men in the long-run, not by what we get, but by what we become: the fruits of life are seen, not in what we have, but in what we grow to. If this be so, we need a large plan with some more pretensions to philo- sophical completeness than the small partial aims we set before us. It must take into account the whole life, every part of our being, every power and faculty, Man has a duty to himself, to attain and preserve the integrity of his whole being. Jfe fc as c crtaitr g ift capacities, tastes ; and the very p^???J^oi tlie§^,4B!lii plies oblicfation to mak'c the best of them, so far as li-est liiis is the demand of both culture and religion, however t heir various methods may seem to differ* If culture is, as it has so often l)een defined, the study of perfection, then it gives itself over to the religious ideaU The narrowness of some forms of religion, with their one-sided development, is responsi- ble for protests in the name of culture, which should have the result of bringing back religion into line with its whole duty. There is a legitimate self-love, not mereb preservaS on ot 551f, Wlildl w e Ul'^ ^^^^ ,, }^ ^ ^^^ Q^ Q^^ nature, DuTlni^ cot Tgideratjg|^ fo^^^^jp^ ^Y^"^ good._ TTTeTfflSI^Te^^nises the rights of selfhood, aSTeven makes these rights the standard of duty to 44 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT others, — " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." This necessary self-love is taken for granted, as with a shafp'"stroke of logic the human instinct is tumeT into a divine duty. Personality is the fact of life. Christ's teaching, even His teaching on sacrifice, is based on the sacredness of the individual life. The inalienable rights of personality got a new and commanding sanction from the whole trend of His teaching. In a sense He enunciated the doctrine of individuality with a force so new, that He may be said to have discovered to man the single soul. He placed the worth of a life against that of the whole world. Each soul was called out in splendid isolation to enter into relationship with God separately; each was endowed with sacred rights, and had a priceless value put on it. He liberated the energies, and en- riched the capacities, bringing a reinforcement of the natural powers. The promise of the faith was ever life, and life more abundantly. It was a new doctrine of personality, which gave a slave the dignity of a free spiritual being, though in the eyes of the law he was a chattel. " Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free " ^ was the watchword of the days to come, sounding in the ears of the early believers as a battle-cry, summoning them to assert their rights as living souls. Of course, duty to self must be distinguished from selfishness, which is the abuse of this inherent self- regard. True self-love is not desire for the pleasure of s elf, but for the highest good of self. It is here, it may be said in passing, that there is room for sacrifice, which is left out in all selfish schemes of *Gal. V. I. THE ESTHETIC IDEAL — CULTURE 45 culture; for a man's highest good may be to give up something which his lower self desires and craves. To leave out of account the moral discipline of life, the supremacy of the conscience, the imperious claims of service, the calls to self-sacrifice that come to every man, is to mutilate life, a^ surely as the ascetic does in his rage for renunciation for its own sake.. Still, even if it be found that complete renunciation is the ultimate demand of conscience as asceticism claims, if the test of life be not getting, but giving up, it will still remain true that the more a man's per- sonality is strengthened and enriched, the more precious is his contribution. True humility indeed implies self-respect: to give yourself up worthily you must feel yourself worthy to give* The rights of self- hood interpreted truly means duties, and chiefly the duty of self-realisation, which sums up all the others* The ground of the duty is the recognition of how much can be done by sustained education, how much the varied forces and rich influences of the world can effect when allowed to play freely on a receptive nature J the recognition that, as Edmund Burke de- clared, Tt» the prerogative of man to be in a great degree a creature of his own making,** According to the contents and spirit of our scheme of culture, so will be the strength of the moral claim it makes on us, and the depth of its moral basis as an adequate plan of life. Without moral sanctions, it could have no permanent elements for a human ideal. Self-preservation as a mere instinct would work au- tomatically, and we could not speak of it as a moral duty. Duty comes in when we enlarge and deepen the idea of self. If by it we mean more than just keeping 46 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT existence going, if we mean the preserving of all that makes us men, the maintaining of all that it is in our nature to be, then moral obligation enters into it, and gives it a new and added value. Culture aims at a complete full-orbed existence, not cramped and one- sided through exclusive regard of a section of life. If then no other and higher moral obligation conflicts with it, we must admit the duty to seek the fulfilment of all the human possibilities which lie in us, the duty to attain and preserve utter health of nature and the complete integrity of our whole being^ and to let growth reach its maturity in us.^ This is the demand of culture, and in this it surely joins hands with religion, which asserts that man should be integer vitcB seel eris que pur us. We must accept the truth of the words, which Browning makes part of Bishop Blougram's Apology, whatever we may say to the rest of that Laodicean's philosophy, " My business is not to make myself, But make the absolute best of what God made." The first step in such a comprehensive scheme is self-knowledge, and this too is the religious method. Culture is possible, and is a duty, because we are able to look in on ourselves, able to compare the present with the past, to find out what our tastes, and temperament, and capacities, and weaknesses are. In consequence of this, we are able also to forecast to some extent what we can ba. and can thus formu- late an ideal towards which we can grow.. Without a resolute attempt at self-knowledge, all efforts at culture will be largely misdirected. This self-knowl- edge means, not only the recognition of the general THE ^ESTHETIC IDEAL — CULTURE 47 possibilities of human nature, but th-e more exact appreciation of personal qualities, and so will show how the best may be made of these^. A false esti- mate of self may lead a man to attempt what is beyond his powers, vainly straining after distinction of work, when in a humbler sphere he might have achieved much. In every sphere of art and knowledge, as well as in practical business, how often we jfind men wasting their energies, and spending powers that in the right lines would produce great results for themselves and the world. Or what is worse, may fritter away their years without a thought beyond the mere externals of life, never conscious of the possibilities of their own nature, hardly aware that a whole world of beauty and joy and wisdom and truth lies open for them, if they will but enter it. Many doors remain shut that would unfold almost to the touch, if we but realised that we too had the right to go in, if we took a larger and braver conception of our birthright as men. Jake the simplest of the senseS| for example^^ sight. As a rule we just take it for granted, and leave it to artists as men of special capacity, or to men of science whose business it is, to use their eyes with trained judgment, and to educate their gift of sight. Observation, whether artistic or scientifics needs an intellectual effort, and the mass of men go through the world with their eyes shut, because they do not realise that they in their measure can cultivate the gift. We will not look long enough to notice form and colour, and as a result of neglect both nature and art are to a large extent sealed books to us. Indeed it may be said that of all the recognised instruments of culture the one which is most often 4S CULTURE AND RESTRAINT overlooked is the faculty of observation. There are many more men who read than think, and there are more still who think than observe ; for it is much easier both to read, and to think after a fashion, than to observe. Observation in this sense is something different from the sense of sight. It implies atten- tion, keenness of perception, and power of associa- tion to identify and classify. In the course of a country walk one man will see nothing, and remember nothing, but the obtrusive objects of the landscape, hedges, and fields, and farmhouses; another will have noted endless varieties of flower, and weed, and bird, and insect; or found full delight in some patch of colour, the graceful swaying of a branch, the tracery of a cloud; or will have had thoughts suggested, and remembered, that made his walk a mental refresh- ment. Just as in the region of sound, during the same walk, one man with uncultured ear hears nothing or only an indistinguishable blur, while another hears all sorts of tones and half-tones and harmonies and melo- dies, and even when sound itself seems dead, as on rare occasions happens, he hears what Keats calls " A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that silence heaves." ^ Observation is a trained faculty, a disciplined mind using the gate of the eye, and it is astonishingly rare in any maturity of power. Even in the natural sciences, which are based on observation, men usually find it easier to theorise, and speculate, and make hypotheses, than to observe patiently and accurately. So rare is it that, when * Early Poems. — " I stood tip-toe upon a little hill." THE ^ESTHETIC IDEAL — CULTURE 49 a man observes the simple facts around him and records lovingly and faithfully the actual things he sees day by day, he creates a masterpiece, as Gilbert White did in The Natural History of Selborne. In his preface he declares that he will be quite satisfied, if by his book he induces any readers to pay a more ready attention to the wonders of creation too frequently overlooked as common occurrences, or if he should have lent a helping hand towards the enlargement of the boundaries of historical and topographical knowl- edge, or if he had thrown some light on ancient customs and manners ; but he did more than all that, as he has often given eyes to the blind, and ears to the deaf, the next time they took a country walk after knowing White of Selborne. The kind of culture which is required for scientific work, is diiferent from the usual meaning put into the phrase *' culture of the eye." By it we mean a trained capacity to see beauty, and to intelligently appreciate it. It is an aesthetic thing rather than a scientific, but it is the same faculty nevertheless, trained in a different line. It also needs attention, keen perception, and power of association. For instance, before a painter can paint colour he must be able to see colour, able to recognise it where duller eyes miss it, see that a bare grey rock is not grey at all, but with shades of purple, it may be, and tones of blue and red. Of course this trained eye, even when joined to a trained hand, will not make an artist. For that, there is needed also the creative imagina- tion, the soul to combine forms of beauty and body forth an image, for the production of which the eye and the hand are only the instruments. Still this 50 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT culture of the eye at least makes it possible for us to enjoy beauty whether of nature or art, and will unlock the sealed books. This example we have taken of the faculty of sight is only an illustration of the training which culture would apply all along the line of man's powers, bringing them into self-consciousness, and so creating duty regarding them. Anything which will make men take an intelligent view of their powers, and which will give them a larger and deeper conception of the opportunities of life, is to be wel- comed as an ally of religion, the greatest obstacle to which is just that men will not think, will not consider, and only live lightly on the surface of things, never awed with mystery, or inspired with worshipful won- der. Nothing truly human lies outside the Christian sphere. If it puts the first emphasis on duty, on morality, on righteous living, that is because it must put first things first, as the necessary foundation for all else. Only on a firm moral basis can a harmoniously compacted life, such as culture aims at, be built ; only on such a stable basis can there be the equipoise of human powers, which the aesthetic ideal seeks to reach. That ideal is therefore not essentially opposed to re- ligion ; rather it is bound to fail, if it is divorced from religion. It is because the word culture has been degraded to mean a dilettante interest in art, and a taste for the " precious " style in literature, that we find it difficult to give it this high place. But the word itself does not refer to the graces and accomplish- ments of good taste, nor even the acquisition of knowl- edge. It meaais the constant and careful tillage, THE .ESTHETIC IDEAL — CULTURE 51 needed to give the fit environment for something to grow, and that something is man himself, with his complete powers and faculties* In its full breadth of meaning, it seeks to raise all human capabilities to the highest potency by conscious education^ to enable a man to come to his true self. It aims at training all sides of a man's nature to make him as perfect, as finished a human being as possible. If so^ then religion c laims it as an instrument for its great work. It is true that the word~m~coffim5n speechlFusually confined to the intellectual sphere, and perhaps it 1 should be limited to this, to avoid the confusion of / thought due to the double meaning; but even in this/ limited sense of seeking to train the mind by known edge and to increase susceptibility to beauty, its value\ is great ; and to this value we will now try briefly to \ do justice. First of all, the aesthetic ideal, in even its narrow sense, has been useful as a necessary protest against any form of asceticism, which' willfully limits or muti- lates human life. By bringing into prominence a side of ethics often overlooked, and by refusing to allow the legitimate claims of man's nature to be ruthlessly set aside, it has proved a valuable corrective of error in morals, even when it disclaims to have anything to do with morality. Sacrifice or self-denial must always have a place in a true life, but it is never to be sought for its own sake, as if there were any merit in the mere form of denial. This has ever been a besetting temptation of religion, to put a magical value on ascetic practices, and to conclude that the simple secret of attaining spiritual heights was to renounce 52 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT the natural, and to trample on one side of human nature. This rival ideal will be more fully treated hereafter, but culture does useful work in pointing with unwavering insistence to spheres of activity that demand scope, and to instincts whose very existence is a prophecy of fulfilment. Nature has stamped her work with the indelible mark of beauty, and it is dis- ease, not health, when a man refuses to respond to it, and smothers his heart lest it leap up, with Words- worth, when he beholds a rainbow in the sky. This response to nature is the birth of art, which is at its highest pure praise, the expression of man's joy in the beauty of creation. There is a Mysticism (the sworn foe of culture) which dallies with the ascetic creed, and which degrades the material in the supposed interests of the spiritual. The mystic Tauler, we are told, used to draw his cap over his eyes when in the country, that the violets might not withdraw him from his inward communion. That is the weak- ness of his school, a mistake with him, an affectation in the weaker men who followed the great mystics. A higher and healthier mysticism would be that which would see God in the violets, and have de- lighted in them, and have made them an occasion for adoration and praise. The absorbed, abstracted look, under the drawn cap to avoid the violets, may be but the evidence of a subtler un faith, the un faith which would empty the world of God. The aesthetic ideal is also useful to-day as entering a caveat to all socialistic schemes, which would ne- glect to provide full scope for the individual Culture, even as a pseudo-gospel, has value as a protest against all materialistic ideals, socialist or otherwise, which THE ^ESTHETIC IDEAL —CULTURE 53 seem to think that man can live by bread alone. What- ever its shortcomings, it believes with all its soul that life is more than meat. It points to spheres as essen- tial to the true well-being of man as the state of out- ward prosperity, to which the grumbling Israelites looked back with regret, — " then had we plenty of victuals, and were we well." ^ It lays emphasis on the higher reaches of man's life, and judges a civilisa- tion by larger tests than ordinary commercial ones. It looks to the quality of a nation's life, as well as to the evidences that most appeal to the eye, and if it perhaps exaggerates the worth of literature, and music, and art, it helps to redress the balance, which weighs heavily on the other side. Its teaching is a variant of the great word, that the life of a man consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth, a lesson which men have at all periods needed, but which has seldom been so necessary as in our day, when the first of all problems is, how to protect the higher Ufe of man against secularity. Our age is so severely and intensely practical that many have little patience with anything which is not suffused with the same spirit. This has been due partly to the rapid advance of natural science, which has dazzled us by the wonder- ful discoveries which enable us to use material forces. The keenest and finest brains have been directed to scientific investigations, and science takes the place in the estimation of mien which formerly philosophy held. Then, along with the advance of science, and as a consequence of it, there has been as great an advance of industry in the application of the forces of nature, *Jer. xliv. 17. 54 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT till machinery is sometimes more important in modem conditions of manufacture than the labour which directs it. A material invention for saving labour is of much more moment, than any amount of abstract thought. Everything has its market value — even a quality of brain can be classified, according to the wages it can demand. Naturally enough^, in the opin- ion of the mass, the active energetic life takes prece- dence over the contemplative life, and the temptation is a very real one to look upon everything, which cannot be rated in the money market, as mere idleness. In some business circles, for a boy to wish to be an artist is to blast his character with a lasting disgrace, and a father would not dream of encouraging his son to become a minister, or enter into a life of study, and would be alarmed and shocked to know that he wrote poetry, though he might forgive him if he could write popular novels and make plenty of money by it. This false and vulgar standard of judging life plays endless mischief ; it even ruins our industry, and is responsible for the ugliness and poor quality of so njuch pro- duction. The artistic spirit is killed in the sordid at- mosphere, which appraises everything by its price. There are many virtues in the eager, practical, utili- tarian spirit of our age, and it carries much hope in its bosom for an ultimate social condition juster than any hitherto reached, but this need not blind us to the dangers and faults of our type of life. However we are taught the lesson, it is well to learn that the world will not be saved by machinery and electrical appli- ances, that these may be developed to an undreamt of degree and yet leave man essentially where he is, lower indeed in the scale of life instead of higher. THE ESTHETIC IDEAL— CULTURE 55 The end of civilisation is not money but men, and there is a higher standard by which to judge things than the standard of utiHty, since in Victor Hugo's pregnant phrase the beautiful is as useful as the useful. In a slightly different sphere also, the aesthetic ideal even in its narrowest sense is a protest against scientific narrowness. It points to a world of thought and beauty beyond facts of observation, and will not be hampered by the limits of scientific evidence, which science sometimes dogmatically lays down. Art and science may think they have had more than once a just cause of quarrel with religion, but often they have a fiercer quarrel with each other. Science may nar- row the boundaries of Hfe unduly, by insisting on everything being submitted to the one invariable test. Goethe saw this, when he said that the constant use of the microscope interferes with the normal use of the eye, by which he suggests an explanation of the failure of so many scientists as philosophers. It is easy to become absorbed in details and forget unity, to be so concerned with analysis that there is no room for the idea of synthesis. In addition to the parts there is the whole, and the whole is more than a sum- mation of the parts. Culture demands room for the intuitional as well as the rational faculty, room for imagination and poetry, and is a witness to the unseen and eternal ; for it affirms a soul of beauty and truth behind and within all material appearance. It follows from this that certain advantages accrue to the individual, who opens his mind to the aesthetic ideal; though it is only possible to touch lightly on the more palpable of these advantages. It saves 56 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT him from vulgar standards; for in the personal life of men culture dares to criticise success. It shows its disciples that there are larger things in the world than getting on, and more worthy things to worship than the great goddess of prosperity. Its eyes are open to the defects of the quality, which the world acclaims and loads with honour and wealth. In the man of culture, as in the saint on another level of things, we find an abstraction from common-place ways, a point of view 'vhich somehow puts things in a different perspective than the usual one. They look at events without being absorbed in the mere mass. They come to the ordinary affairs of life as from a high platform of thought, from a serener air, and put them in their right place of precedence, and by their very manner we are able to see the smallness of the small and the greatness of the great. - To them truth even on the scaffold is still truth, and wrong even on the throne is still wrong, however many voices shout the contrary. • They classify according to a finer scale of judgment, and it is good to be reminded of the true proportion of things. Such men of ripe nature and poised mind may be practically wrong, so far as their verdict on an outward event seems to go, but they are aesthetically right, and at least we are forced to acknowledge the loftiness of their standard. We need some of this calm self-command, which will keep us from being rushed off our feet by the brute force of outside opinion or feeling or passion. A cognate benefit is that culture saves from provin- cialism and narrowness of interest, to which we are so prone. It suggests catholic ideas, and gives to every subject a touch of the universal, which will at THE ^ESTHETIC IDEAL — CULTURE 57 least often preserve us from dogmatism. The attitud- of self-culture; for the latter at least aims at a posi- tive end, while the former spends its strength on a merely negative method. We have admitted that there is truth in both, and that a place must be found for both in our plan of a true life ; but, though asceticism may be the nobler fault arising from a passionate long- ing for purity, the other ideal is the more complete. This can be seen from the fact that even ascetic prac- tises can only be justified as methods chosen to reach a truer culture. Indeed culture, if it is to be more than an easy acceptance of the natural, must to some extent make use of restraint to achieve its end. Sacrifice is essential for a well-balanced character and life. The scholar must make some sacrifice of bodily health, or at least of bodily pleasure, if only to give him time to study. It is recognised to be justifiable to give up pleasure of sense in the interests of intellectual good, 2o8 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT to " scorn delights and live laborious days," that truth may be reached. It can be even seen to be noble and right to make some sacrifice and mental culture for a larger spiritual good. Sacrifice there must always be, since nothing can be got without it; and the ideal of culture would be a dead-letter without the upward striving. When the lower in any sphere is given up for the higher, we commend the sacrifice, and feel that it is amply justified. But while culture, rightly viewed, is forced to ad- mit a place for sacrifice, it only throws out into clearer relief the subordinate position of sacrifice as purely a means. Sacrifice, which looks upon the restraint as a good thing in itself, and which is not undertaken ex- plicitly for some other end, is the barrenest and the most dangerous object man can set before him. It is dishonouring both to man and to God ; to man, because it means the useless impoverishment of life; to God, because it implies that the mere suffering of body, or the denial of reason, can in themselves please Him. Yet this is the besetting temptation, which asceticism has never been able to avoid. To elevate self-denial into an end in itself, opens the door to many evils of creed and of life, and degrades religion; and yet to so elevate self-denial into an end, either wholly or partially, is the position of the ascetic ideal. The method insisted on, as can be seen from any book of ascetic devotion, is, Deny yourself every satisfaction, deny the eyes delight in seeing, the tongue the pleasure of speech, the palate what it likes, the ears the music of man and the song of birds, the body all ease and comfort ; and the more complete this denial is, the more FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 209 meritorious is the exercise, and the more pleasing the sacrifice is to God. The very half truth in it makes its inherent false- ness the more dangerous. A religious man must deny himself many things of ear and eye and tongue. He must often renounce pleasure ; and all this is true, even to men who have no religious ideal, but who, like the self-contained culturists, have any high purpose at all. We do not need to be told the duty and obligation of self-denial by any anchorite of old, or by the weak de- votionalists of to-day, who echo faintly the anchorites' creed without the courage to follow their practice. It comes to every earnest man, and certainly it comes with forceful insistence to every sincere Christian soul, who knows that he must bend to a cross if he would follow his Master. He knows he must give up if he would be true to himself, as well as true to Him. But even where self-mortification may seem to be most necessary, it must never be for its own sake. Sacrifice can have no justification whatever, and must be cursed with futility, except as it is undertaken for a higher purpose. Self-denial is always a relative thing, either relative to some good of self, or relative to some good of others. In the first case, when it is in some legiti- mate self-interest, it is designed to minister to some form of culture, some clearer mental enlightenment, or some deeper moral discipline, or some richer spirit- ual blessing — which means that it is for the sake of man's own best life, for a more attractive development, for a higher culture. Christ's teaching, even in the passages which seem most an encouragement to asceti- cism, is that it is better to pluck out an eye or cut off 210 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT a hand than to allow the whole body to perish, that it is therefore for the sake of the larger and higher life. And if any form of self-culture taken by itself fails, as we have shown it does fail, how much more must the ascetic ideal fail, since it is only a means towards a means ! Following on the initial mistake, which elevates what at the best can only be a means into an end in itself, it omits elements from the moral ideal, which are neces- sary to keep it sane and sweet, such as the place of pleasure. Men have instinctively felt that happiness must somehow be associated with whatever is looked on as the great end of human life ; since so many things in the world are capable of giving pleasure, and even the necessary purposes of nature hold out bribes of pleasure, or at least of freedom from pain. It is, for example, for the maintenance of life that food should be taken, and nature manages to secure her purpose by making it on the whole a pleasure to eat. In vari* ous ways pleasure is put before us as a sort of lure to lead us to do certain things, so that it seems natural for man to consider among other things how a certain course will affect his happiness. And though men early discovered that to make pleasure the aim of life was a sure way to deprive it of all true joy, still they have never given up the innate assurance that happiness must at least be included in man's chief end. It throws the whole providence of God into utter confusion to imagine that happiness in itself is evil, and that moral good implies its eradication. It was the early faith of Israel that righteousness inevitably produced prosperity, that there was complete correspondence between the moral life and the outward FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 211 government of the world. They looked with assurance to see the wicked wither away, and to see the good man send his roots deep like a tree and spread his branches wide. They expected a happy prosperous life for the man who kept the divine law, and walked in the way of the commandments. One of the keenest problems of the Bible was how to reconcile this seeming axiom of faith with the facts of experience. It is the problem of the Book of Job, and of some of the finest Psalms,^ arising from the evident knowledge that often the good man suffers and the evil man prospers. They could not believe that this apparent contradiction could be real; for, if the world is governed in a moral way, it was to be expected that good would invariably be re- warded and evil be punished. The first intuitive faith that the keeping of the law brought earthly happiness looked too much on the sur- face ; and through the sore struggle to account for the discrepancies men of faith were driven inward, and religion became more spiritual. Yet men have never given up the belief that in some way there is an essential connection between the two. It is an instinct of the heart that happiness and goodness go together, that they must, if God be reasonable, and certainly must if He be righteous. It is a commonplace of religious faith that righteousness and blessedness are in- separably united; and indeed all morality, and all law. and all thinking, are based on it. It demoralises both life and religion to believe that God does not desire the happiness of His creatures, just as surely as it de- moralises life and religion to imagine that He has no higher aim for them than that they should be happy. *£. g. Psalms xxxvii., xlix, Ixxiii. 212 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT It was a wise, as well as a scriptural, answer which was given to the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism as to man's chief end, " Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever." It is not without reason that spiritual life and blessed- ness are always in some form joined together; for goodness and happiness were not meant to be divided. To separate happiness from the moral ideal, or to make happiness itself the ideal, each result in fearful mistake. It does not come within our scope to show the fallacy of the latter of these alternatives, though it is evident that to make happiness the end cuts away the foundation from morality; for it changes law into arbitrary choice according to personal inclination. In practice it leads to Epicureanism, however refined the form may be. We can see what havoc it must make of all the noblest and highest qualities in man, if we say that there is nothing better than happiness, even though we safeguard that by trying to show how much better and more lasting the higher pleasures are than the lower ones. As a matter of experience also it is found that the pursuit of pleasure is doomed to dis- appointment, and can never escape from what Carlyle calls that inexorable all-encircling ocean moan of ennui. '' If you could mount to the stars, and do yacht voyages under the belts of Jupiter, or stalk deer on the ring of Saturn, it would still begirdle you." ^ But if it is true that to make happiness the end leads to failure, it is equally true that to leave out happiness from the moral ideal is also failure, and to an earnest man it must mean asceticism. Asceticism looks upon pleasure even in things innocent as sin, and rightly so, ^Latter-Day Pamphlets \^ Jesuitism]. FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 213 if it is not part of the moral ideal for a man. Logically, this would result in the termination of all human so- ciety, and indeed of human life itself. Asceticism, which set itself to uproot and exterminate certain natural impulses, could not help looking on pleasure as a lure to trap the unwary soul, and on beauty as a temptation of the devil. How the thought works out we see from Augustine, whom we quote, because with his keen and bold in- tellect he unbares the essential principle of ascetic dis- trust of pleasure as such. In his Confessions he dis- cusses the temptations which come to him, in spite of having cut himself off from the world and given him- self wholly to God; and among them he tells us his difficulties concerning music. He is half inclined to condemn it in its use in the Church services, because of the pleasure it gives him. " Sometimes I wish. the whole melody of sweet music, to which the Psalms of David are generally set, to be banished from my ears, ay, and from those of the Church itself." ^ He blames himself for letting the melody please him, and is sus- picious of the emotions created by the music. He calls it a gratification of the flesh, that he should find more satisfaction in the divine words when they are sung with a sweet and accomplished voice, than in the ordi- nary reading of the words themselves. He knows it to be sin, that he should have any such enjoyment. He rather approves of the plan of Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who partly avoided the difficulty by a compromise, and made the reader of the Psalm intone with so slight an inflection of voice that it was more like recitation than chanting. Augustine is only kept * Confessions^ Bk, x. chap, xxxiii. 214 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT from condemning Church music altogether, by the memory of how it affected him before he was a Chris- tian, and how it moved him towards religion. His faltering conclusion is, " Thus I hesitate between the danger of mere enjoyment, and my experience of their wholesomeness ; and I am more drawn, though not now declaring an irrevocable opinion, to approve of the custom of chanting in Church, that so by the de- light of the ears the weaker minds may rise to the feeling of devotion. Yet when it befalls me to be more moved with the singing than with the words sung, I confess that I sin grievously, and then I would prefer not to hear the chanter." His dilemma is created by the fact that the music is useful in impressing others to enter religion; otherwise he would condemn it, as far as he is concerned. It is the same with pleasant odours,^ though these do not trouble him much, as they do not represent any great attraction ; but pleasant sights are a greater difficulty than even the musical temptation, since they are more constant. The eyes love fair and varied forms, and bright and pleasing colours, and the light all through the day suffuses everything, charming him with its varied play, even when he is not thinking of it. He resists these seductions of the eyes, though he confesses that often he is ensnared ; for " that cor- poreal light, of which I speak, seasoneth the life of this world for her blind lovers with an enticing and dan- gerous sweetness." ^ And of course the numberless things made by various arts and crafts, if made more beautiful than is necessary, exceeding moderate use * Confessions, Bk. x. chap, xxxii. * Ibid., chap. xxxv. FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IPEAL 215 and all pious meaning, only add to the enticements of the eyes — to say nothing of pictures and statuary. Augustine, with his strong and spiritual mind did have a glimmering of the great truth that those beau- tiful things, which are conveyed through men's souls to the hands of artificers, come from the Beauty which is above our souls ; but his deep-rooted asceticism could not let him rest there in that noble thought, and his last word is that his steps are entangled with these beauties, and he appeals to God to pluck him out. The same deadly temptation lurks in the curiosity, or appetite for knowing, which he classes as " lust of the eyes," since the eyes are chief among the senses as sources of knowledge. This curiosity, which we to-day would honour as the mother of science, is to him full of snares and perils, and it is his joy that he has cut much of it away, and driven it from his heart. He is glad to think that he does not now care to know the transits of the stars, and has ceased to desire the sights of the theatre; but he is not quite easy in conscience, since, though he would not go to a circus to see a dog course a hare, yet if by chance he saw it happen in a field, he is not certain but that the sport would divert his mind from some great subject of thought, and he would sin in the inclina- tion of his mind. Naturally, his difficulty is most of all with the pleasures of the palate. He must eat if he would live; and if he eat he cannot avoid feeling the satis- faction of taste. It is no question with him of gluttony or drunkenness, which would be impossible to him, and which of course he would condemn, as every moralist must, on grounds of excess. He is troubled 2i6 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT by the fact that there should be any pleasure at all in such a thing as eating. He wants to eat only for the necessary care of body, for health's sake, that he may do his work ; and he finds his very fasting a snare ; for after fasting, while he is passing from the dis- comfort of emptiness to the content of satisfaction, he is only adding to the pleasure of eating. '' And though health be the cause of eating and drinking, yet a dan- gerous enjoyment waiteth thereon like a lackey, and oftentimes endeavours to precede it, so as to be the real cause of what I say I do, or wish to do, only for health's sake." ^ God has taught him, he asserts, that he should set himself to take food only as physic, but there is this terrible difficulty of holding the reins of the throat, which would be a simple matter, if he could only hold them so tight as to dispense with food altogether. We have illustrated this point at such length from Augustine, because he is so frank in his statement of the difficulties of the ascetic theory, and so cour- ageous in accepting the consequences which the theory involves. We see here the fatal introspection, which ever goes hand in hand with asceticism, and which induces a morbid and unnatural life. Instead of assist- ing in the task of quelling the senses, it only hinders, for it lays the stress in the wrong place. Instead of freeing the mind from the engrossments of sense, it only clogs it the more, enhancing the powers of the senses. Persistent suppression of our impulses and sensibilities creates a condition of disease. The child, who is ever held down by a system of repression, loses the natural buoyancy of mind, and becomes * Confessions, Bk. x. chap. xxxi. FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 217 morbid, living under a leaden sky. This pathetic sight is common enough in child life, due sometimes even to over-education through the folly of guardians, who do not realise that happy play is part of a child's education and who do not see that the loss of a joyful childhood can be made up by no subsequent advantages, even if their system did give these advantages. The method of repression in moral discipline, so vividly illustrated by Augustine, often also shows its failure by the terrible reactions which occur. Men like Augustine are saved from such by their passionate love of God, and by their absorbing work, and by their intellectual activity; but many are the instances of moral relapse in the stories of the desert saints, and of those whose asceticism was even more logical than Augustine's. The very temptations which drove men to adopt extreme measures for their extirpation, seem to be strengthened by the treatment. Nature revenges herself for the acts of violence done against her. The natural inclinations, which cannot be com- pletely suppressed, are often driven into mean, and sometimes into evil, channels. The attempt to turn the current of Nature back on herself only dams up the waters, to break out somewhere else and devastate the life. The terrible stories of awful fights with devils, and the deadly assaults of the old passions, in the life of St. Anthony and others, illustrate the truth that their method, instead of reducing temptation, only creates it. If Anthony had lived an active life in some worthy work, many of his temptations would never have troubled him at all. Idle self-meditation makes a man brood on his evil thoughts, and chains his mind to them. It was the recognition of this, which 21 8 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT is the reason why in all the rules of the great monastic orders labour was enforced. We also clearly see that a theory like Augustine's, which looks on the ordinary pleasures and enjoyments of life as in themselves sinful, would mean self-mur- der if carried to its logical issue. To make pleasure essentially antagonistic to the moral ideal brings life to a standstill. And on the same ground we should as surely starve the mind, or the soul, as the body. Life is not made any easier for us by a general doctrine of self-denial; for the question arises, How far? Where are we to draw the line, if we are to draw any line ? Must we only deny our senses what they seem to crave as legitimate satisfaction? If pleasure is a fatal objection, can it logically be limited to the pleasure of sense? Must we not also deny the pleasures of thought to our mind, our intellectual faculties? for sm is as common there as in the body, and is far more subtle. Must we even go further (and if not, why not?), and deny ourselves the very highest things in our nature — affection, conscience, sympathy, the pleasures which undoubtedly result, say from the exercise of benevolence? The right view of this question of pleasure is the Biblical view, that there is a true and legitimate de- sire for happiness, provided that if we zvill the end we also will the true means. We need to recognise that happiness is inseparable from character; that is, we must not desire to be happy, without deserving to be happy. " Morality is properly not the doctrine how we should make ourselves happy, but how we should become worthy of happiness. It is only when religion is added that there also comes in the hope of FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 219 participating some day in happiness, in proportion as we have endeavoured to be not unworthy of it." ^ Re- ligion thus gives its seal to the natural craving for happiness, and at the same time saves it from the dangers which give excuse for the ascetic distrust of it. Religion points to ethical happiness, the pleasure which flows from moral effort, as distinguished from mere animal enjoyment. Such ethical happiness, in- finitely higher as it is than physical pleasure, must not be made the end of life. We are not to seek the highest life for the sake of happiness. Nothing will so quickly kill true religion as to embrace it for the sake of re- ward; virtue for any kind of loaves and fishes is not virtue made perfect, but only prudential calcula- tion. Morality needs to be free, spontaneous, not blind obedience to a rule on the one side, nor, on the other side, a choice of alternatives based on which is likely to pay best, but willing submission to the dictates of the highest. This is the great truth, which gives grounds for the ascetic distrust of pleasure in itself. At the same time, virtue alone can bring true and permanent joy. It is an assured truth, as Mill asserts, that the higher pleasures are more satisfying and more enduring than lower ones. Every one able to judge will admit that intellectual and artistic pleas- ures are of finer quality than any physical enjoyment ; and this is equally true of spiritual blessedness. Therein is a joy of the Lord which is the strength of life; a perfect satisfaction of heart, of which the worldling \v cannot even dream ; a fountain of peace and joy, which ) the broken cisterns of earth cannot give to the thirsty i lips that seek them. The Bible is full of Beatitudes, * Kant, Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason, p. 271. 220 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT asserting that, while no true self-surrender can be made for happiness, yet self -surrender does open the j door to happiness; and that therefore we cannot \ separate joy from the Christial ideal. . The ascetic mis- take in this region is an artificial division of human life, which excludes happiness on what is deemed the lower levels as inherently sinful. Christ's teaching, on the contrary, is that if we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, if we submit to the law of holiness and the law of love, all the other things are added, and take their rightful place. Even the things that the Gentiles seek come, without wasting the life in the vain pursuit of them — *' He giveth it His beloved in sleep." ^ He does not shut the door of the world's beauty and truth on us. He does not condemn as evil the aims which are so common among men, the desire for happiness, the desire for knowl- edge, the love of beauty and art. He simply says they are not first. He says, Seek the highest, and in seeking the highest every true function of life will be performed and every true instinct satisfied. If we seek the highest all else worth having is ours ; if we seek after God, God's world will not fail u§. The truth of the ascetic position on this question is that happiness, either as an ideal for self, or even for others, is not the true foundation of ethics. A man must be willing to do without happiness, must put duty first at all costs, must sometimes choose self- sacrifice so complete that there seems no room for earthly happiness in it. Yet happiness is a principle which cannot be omitted, without perverting our whole view of life, and leading to the false and strained mor- *Ps. cxxvii. 2 (R. v., margin). FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 221 bidness we have noticed from Augustine's great book. Nflnatural impulse is inherently wrong. It may be out ' of place, inappropriate in time, diseased in its formS, uncontrolled and lawless in its activities ; and for these reasons it needs to be held in the grip of a consecrated will, and it makes demands for self-denial and complete control; but in itself it is not essentially sinful. To hold this is a virtual denial of the divine providence of the world. This is one of the causes of the failure of the ascetic ideal. It is such an attitude, expressed or latent, which has given cause for the reproach that the world should be impoverished, by Christian thought and effort being so much relegated to another sphere than the practical. The reproach has grounds in history from all forms of withdrawal from the world, and all methods of repression used to reach holiness. We must take the side of men of the world in their protest against such an interpretation of the demands of religion, though perhaps for different reasons than theirs. Religion does not look on the things on the earth as sinful in themselves, even when it points away from them to things above. St. Paul often states his position in such words as " All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient (profitable) ; all things are lawful unto me, but I will not be brought under the power of any." ^ This is the Christian attitude, which will not be brought under the power of any, which, in the interests of the soul, will even shrink from no necessary self-denial. While it asserts that the only worthy end for man is one above sense, and sees that a life concerned only with things on the earth is futile, even though it may not * I Cor. vi. 12. Cf. I Cor. x. 23. :nt\ 'W\\ Via I 222 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT be sinful in a gross way ; it nevertheless refuses to look upon the work of God's hands as evil. If on the one hand the worldliness, which seeks to fill the deep heart of man with things of sense, which never reaches out hands of desire towards the unseen and eternal, is a tragic failure; so on the other hand the other-world- liness, which flees from the duties and ties of earth, which slips off from the burden of being a man, is no less a failure, though it be in the supposed interests of sanctity. Another mistake in the ascetic conception of the moral ideal is the thought that abstinence is neces- sarily a higher virtue than temperance. Abstinence^ even from things recognised to be lawful, will often be a man's duty, because of weakness in himself, or because of some higher duty towards others. There will always be room for a self-denial, which men of the world would call quixotic and unnecessary. Com'^ plete abstinence is certainly a safer way to pursue in things that are doubtful, either because there happens' to be a great deal of evil associated with the particular] things good in themselves, or for example's sake, toj save the young or the weak from temptation. But it is a mistaken idea of virtue to rank the mere absti- nence above a temperate and controlled use of the material. The mere escape from temptation cannot be compared with the virile mastery of the conditions of life. Such an escape may be only a sign of moral feebleness, and of incapacity to keep a true balance amid the difficulties of the world. The temptations involved in the possession of earthly property can no doubt be avoided by giving it away, like St. Anthony; FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 223 but even the deepest of the temptations may remain if the desire is retained; and it will always be a nobler thing to use property wisely and graciously as a stew- ard of the grace of God, than to bundle over the bur- den to another. It is in the battle that soldiers are best made, and through struggle that strength is got, and by the stress and strain of life that character is built. Character, like the oak, hardens its fibre in the storm. There may be moral cowardice in what looks like beautiful self-renunciation, the cowardice which is afraid of life and its stem conditions. Milton's noble words are applicable here : " I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and un- breathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adver- sary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary." ^ He thinks the poet Spenser a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas; for he makes his true knight Guion, rep- resenting Temperance, pass unscathed through all the temptations which assail temperance, the cave of Mammon and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain.^ The evasion of natural responsibilities is not vic- tory; and it will ever remain a higher task to bring the complete round of human experience into the obedience of Christ. To refuse the ties of marriage and those that link us to our fellows, to refuse the obligations of the common business of the world, is * Milton, Areopagitica. 'Faerie Queen, Bk. 11. canto 7. 224 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT indeed to find a certain kind of safety; but it is at the expense of the moral discipline, which these are calculated to afford. We are acted on persistently by the forces of our day, and are held fast in the meshes of the social net, mixed up in our complex civilisation, with the spirit of the world ceaselessly playing on us ; but these are precisely the conditions that create character, and that test of what stuff we are made. If we were not so sensitive to our environment, if we were not so easily affected by the tone and colour of our spiritual surroundings, life would not, it is true, be such a perilous venture for us; but the venture must be made, if character is to be developed and strength- ened. Clement, who had in many respects by far the sanest and the most truly spiritual mind of all the early Fathers, appreciated the value of ordinary life as the true sphere of Christian activity. He opposed the tendency of his time to magnify celibacy, and pointed to married life as not only the normal life, which it of course must be, but even the more honour- able. " The genuine Christian has the Apostles for his example ; and in truth it is not in the solitary life one shows himself a man; but the victory is his, who as a husband and father of a family, withstands all the temptations that assail him in providing for wife and children, servants and substance, without allowing himself to be turned from the love of God. The man with no family escapes many temptations; but as he has none save himself to care for, he is of less worth than the man who has more to disturb him, it is true, in the work of his own salvation, but accomplishes more m social life, and in truth presents in his own FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 225 case a miniature of providence itself." ^ It is true that there are cases and times, when a man, who has given no hostages to fortune, who is unhampered by such ties as marriage, may be able to do a special piece of work, may volunteer more easily for any forlorn hope, undistracted by the cares and embarrassments in- volved in all human relationships; and such a time was the early centuries, when the Christian faith some- times called for the completest sacrifice; but these arc cases of practical expediency, and not of ascetic principle. The deepest idea at the root of asceticism is, as we have seen, the radically false conception of human nature, as a soul degraded by being imprisoned in sinful matter. The attitude is, as Origen put it bluntly, that all the evil which reigns in the body is due to the five senses. 2 From this position it is natural to try to limit the connection even if it cannot be altogether severed. In practice asceticism confines sin to one or two sensuous acts, and strenuously proceeds to uproot the impulses which produce these acts. It has its origin in facts, the fact of sin, and the duty of self- control; but it takes a materialistic conception of both of these facts. It sees that sin is the ruin of man, but it looks on sin as not essentially a spiritual evil. It sees the need of self-control, but it seeks this by external means, by methods of repression. The ^ Vide Neander's Church History, vol. i. section 3, p. 383 (T. and T. Clark). " Omne vitium quod re gnat in cor pore ex quinque sensibus pendet. 226 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT false diagnosis vitiates the method of cure. It con- fuses sin with sense, attributes evil to the animal desires, and naturally proceeds to reduce the connec- tion with sense. It fails, however, to evict sin, because it does not go to the source. It does not follow that sin is made less, even when sense is weakened, and when sensuous temptation is immensely limited. The old roue has not become virtuous because his passions are burned out. He ceases to commit some of the sins that formerly held him in thrall, but the cessation is merely because his senses have weakened in their relish for those particular sins, not because he is a stronger moral being. Similarly, it might be possible by all manner of self-inflicted austerities to so subject the flesh that a special temptation might even cease, without the process representing any moral advance. As a matter of fact, however, we do not escape temp- tation, by cutting connection with the sordidness and grossness of ordinary life. This was the experience of all, that temptation was not shut out by convent bars. Nilus, himself a monk, said of another monk, who to escape inward temptation fled from his cell, and ran about from one place to another, " He will change his place, but not the anguish of his heart. He will rather nourish and increase his temptations." The initial thought, that" flesh is the seat of sin, can be easily seen to be a fallacy. It cannot be so, since for one thing there are clearly many sins, which are not prompted by the animal nature at all, so that, even if the flesh were beaten into subjection on these points, the great battle against sin could hardly be said to be begun. There would still stand all of the mind, and the imagination, and subtler spiritual sins, entrench- FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 227 ing themselves in the citadel of life. Pride, envy, hatred, for instance, are not touched by the material methods of ascetic treatment. We have to go deeper for the true diagnosis of sin, and deeper also for the true cure. It is like trying to deal with a conflagra- tion by putting out the sparks, without touching the fire, the source of the sparks. Sin is not a physical thing, and its cure cannot be effected by physical means. It is the doom of asceticism that it sets itself to an impossible task. It is chiefly a failure in method therefore. By using only repression and restraint, it withdraws at- tention from the true seat of sin, which is the human heart, and transfers it to what is really external to the life. To have as weapons only negative prohibitions, is to fight a losing battle. The ascetic method is but another form of extemalism, which is the curse of religion. Though it seems to begin in contempt for the external side of life, as a matter of fact its fun- damental mistake is that it exaggerates the external. It sets too much stress on mere surroundings ; for true life is possible anywhere, and evil is not confined to particular spots. Temptations, therefore, are not killed by creating a desert, and calling it peace. Hu- mility may be found on the steps of a throne, and spiritual pride can kill the soul of a solitary desert saint, or the hermit on a pillar. It follows that the means employed are futile, being purely negative, an outside method of attacking the problem. It is false to make virtue consist in the mere denial of gratifica- tions which our nature craves; and it is, to say the least, a calamity to look upon religion as a sort of moral police saying, " You must not do this." Virtue, 228 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT it is true, will always have a negative side; religion will always seem self-denial; but that is not the essence of either virtue or religion. The mere thwart- ing of desire in ourselves, or in others, may mean not a single inch of advance in true virtue or true religion. We might multiply restrictions a thousandfold, and be as far off from the desired goal as ever. The external method of defence is futile, for it can never cover all the ground. What boots it at one gate to make defence, And at another to let in the foe, Effeminately vanquished ? ^ We can see how true this is in other spheres of life, as well as in religion. The ideal of the state is not despotic rule, with men blindly bending to au- thority, with coercive laws beating back individual action at all points ; but a free state, where citizens grow up in political liberty amid free institutions. So also, the ideal of education is not dogmatic teach- ing, which treats a child as fit only to be hedged round by restrictions, and his mind to be cut and shaped to pattern. It is rather the drawing out of the innate capacity, giving each pupil freedom to grow. Both in the state and in education, however perfect they may be, there will be restraint, restrictive laws in the one case, and rules and regulations in the other, which repress wrong tendencies ; but these are not the end either of the state or of education, but are merely makeshifts to produce the ultimate freedom. * Milton, Samson Agonistes. FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 229 •Failure dogs the heels of every negative method in all regions of life, but its failure is nowhere so signal as in religion. William Blake said in his usual style of striking paradox, " Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be never so holy." ^ This is the extreme opposite of the position of the ascetic ideal, the statement of the gospel of culture in bold, defiant outline. The truth of it is that the worth of a life is not a negative, but ever a positive, value. Life cannot reach completion by any system of " Thou shalt not," however extended. Life cannot be guided by any system of detailed commandment at all. The area of life is too large to be covered by rules; for there would continually arise something, which could not be included in any commandment. Every ascetic system of thought and practice fails, just because of the external way of approaching the problem, confin- ing life within straight lines, imprisoning it in rules. Because of this, the failure is more marked when the experiment is tried on a large scale. It may often seem to succeed with the individual, because with the individual it is usually self-chosen, and therefore carries a certain moral dynamic ; but, when applied to public affairs, its failure is instant and sure. Puritan- ism in England, in spite of its great qualities, and its magnificent services to the community, failed for the selfsame reason, because it was too much a mere negation, not only in its protests against the common * Proverbs of Hell — Appendix to Marriage of Heaven and Hell. 230 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT enjoyments of men, but because of its aloofness from many essential interests, and its isolation from hu- man history. It revolted men, who were keenly sus- ceptible to beauty, and to the charm and grace of life. It looked with contempt, or with fear, on all natural inclinations, and on the love of the beautiful — or at least gave men the impression that it did. Its attitude was too extreme and uncompromising. It had cour- age and stern opposition to evil ; it hated the levity and frivolity of so many classes at the time, and hated the sins and scandals of both Church and State, which indeed produced Puritanism; but its essential failure v/as due to the external means it employed. When morality is made to consist in rigid adherence to laws and customs, it ceases to be true morality, and when the strong hand is removed, life bounds back with all the greater recoil. Morality must be a living spring of action, self-engendered and free, or it will decay. This is well illustrated by the history of all Sump- tuary Laws, which different States used to pass in a panic at the luxury and licence of life. In Rome, when wealth increased, laws were passed regulating the cost of entertainments, and the number of guests one could invite, but never with any success for the reformation of morals. In England there were many such laws down to the time of the Reformation, regu- lating the number of courses that were permitted at dinner according to rank and degree, and the kind of dresses people were allowed to wear, also accord- ing to rank. The Scottish Parliament did the same for the dress of ladies, quaintly stating that it was for the sake of " the puir gentlemen their husbands and fathers." If restraint in dress, and deportment, and FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 231 manner of living, come naturally from principle, then it is well; but if repression in these things is only forced on people from without, it is neither good political economy, nor good morality. Unless by way of setting a standard, and so gradually creating a pub- lic conscience on such subjects, repressive laws really effect nothing. Besides, it is always a practical failure, human nature being what it is. Montaigne's criticism of Sumptuary Laws on this score is a valid one. " The way by which our laws attempt to regulate idle and vain expenses in meat and clothes seems to be quite contrary to the end designed. The true way would be to beget in men a contempt for silks and gold, as vain, frivolous, and useless; whereas we augment to them the honours, and enhance the value of such things, which surely is a very improper way to create a disgust. For to enact that none but princes shall eat turbot, shall wear velvet or gold lace, and to inter- dict these things to the people, what is it but to bring them into a greater esteem, and to set every one more agog to eat and wear them ? " ^ It is useless to begin at the circumference of life. The mistake of all forms of asceticism, both per- sonal and social, is partly, therefore, a mistake as to where the denial is needed. Sin is much more than bodily excess; it is not a property of matter, but a condition of soul. Worldliness is not a thing of local- ity, and purity is not a negative virtue. A man may be in the world and yet not of it; a man may be out of the world and yet of it. akin in spirit, held in its toils. Sin is to be met and overcome at its source, in the thought of the mind, in the imagination of the ^Essays, chap, xxxiv., " Of Sumptuary Laws." 232 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT heart; and this is to be accompHshed not by external curbing, but by a new principle of life. Opposed to externalism of morals, the Christian method demands a renewing of will, producing spontaneous moral em- ancipation. Instead of mere negative prohibitions, it points as the true secret to the purifying of the inner life, raising it into a higher sphere, where the lower temptations can get no foothold. Instead of the nega- tions it presents a positive; instead of rules and pre- cepts of abstinence it offers a vital principle, which will work itself out in all the details of life, and carry its inspiring force to every region, sanctifying every part, and leaving none as common and unclean. This principle of life expresses itself in the ordinary rela- tions, in the social duties of the family and the state. The Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice even finds its true sphere there, and not in useless asceticism. Beginning at the centre, the whole circle will be per- vaded with good, right to the circumference. " Walk in the spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh," ^ is St. Paul's alternative to the fruitless efforts after external holiness. He did call upon his converts as part of the ethical implication of their faith to mortify their members which are on the earth, ^ a word which was often read, or misread, as an argument for various kinds of world-denial and renunciation; but it is no general system of artificial discipline which he commends to them, and no glorification of the desert as a school for saints. He goes on to describe what he means, giving instances of the kind of self- discipline required. It is not a statement that ordinary life is evil, and that all the relations and environment *Gal. A. i6. "Col. iii. 5- FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 233 in which we are placed in the world are evil; it is a call to resist whatever in a man's life is opposed to the Christian faith. He specifies some of the things in those who have been taken out of paganism, which need mortification, *' fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, covetousness." Repression, renunciation, there must always be. A man must have his nature under the curb, and must master his soul. Every life knows best where the struggle must be. To one it may be the torment of some passion, which needs con- stant restraint ; to another it may be temper, or pride, or a tongue hard to be controlled ; the besetting sin of another may be sloth, or sluggishness of nature. It» is there, at the point of least resistance, the true self-j denial must be applied. But the method which the Apostle gives as the true way to mortify the evil d«-, sires, is to set the affections on hig'her things.^ J Growth, not restraint by itself, is the true method; not by crushing the lower, but by quickening the higher. The extinction of evil by a process of evic- tion is a failure, because even if it were possible there is no security against the seven worse devils taking up abode in the swept, and garnished, but empty loom. The spiritual is attained, not by unnaturally crushing the natural, but by disentangling the natural from what is evil in it, and rising above it, so that the higher becomes the natural. The way to overcome is not by a policy of repression, negativing every impulse as it arises, denying every craving, rooting out every desire. Even as strategy there is a better way, by turning the enemy's flank. It is vain to try to kill evil thought, by striving to empty the mind of » Col. iii. 2. 234 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT all thought: it is at least a more hopeful method, by fostering every thought of good, by filling the mind with whatsoever things ajre lovely, and true, and good, and pure. It is not the curb we need so much as the guiding rein. Even as a policy we know some- thing of the expulsive power of a new affection, in Dr. Chalmers's great phrase. A noble attachment will give a man power to repress the base, as no mere coercive means will do. The higher motives, if we would only believe it in dealing with other men as well as with ourselves, are always the strongest. Esprit de corps will do more for a regiment than the lash. A high sense of honour will save a man from disgrace, as no fear of punishment can. Christ's method in all His teaching was not restriction and negation. He often showed the futility of cleansing the outside of the cup and the platter, and denounced all the external methods of seeking holiness. Inward- ness is the word which best describes His method. He again and again pointed to the heart of man, as the source of sin, and the sphere of holiness, and the field of struggle ; for out of it are the issues of hfe. In the next two chapters other indications will be given of the inherent weakness of the ascetic ideal, notably that it creates an artificial distinction in the ethical standard, making two grades with two rules of morality. But its failure is already sufficiently made evident for the reasons given above — first that it raises into an end what can only be justified as a means; secondly, that it leaves out an essential ele- ment of the moral ideal, happiness, and is therefore led to look upon pain as in itself good; further, that FAILURE OF THE ASCETIC IDEAL 235 it makes abstinence a higher virtue than temperance, and the evasion of natural responsibiHties more worthy than the mastery of the temptations involved in them ; and lastly, that it is on that account a mistake in method, spending its force on external and repressive rules. The conclusion we have so far arrived at is that of the two ideals, that of culture is essentially higher than that of restraint, in spite of the elements of nobility in the latter ; since culture is at least a positive end, and can be made to include restraint, indeed must to some extent use it as a means to reach its full fruition. IX A MEDIAEVAL CONCEPTION OF SAINTHOOD A FURTHER evidence of the harmful legacy from the ascetic ideal is to be found in the Church idea of a saint, and all that sprang from it, both of a false standard of holiness, and of errors of creed and worship. The primary idea of the word saint means pure, clean, ceremonially or morally consecrated to God. In the Old Testament it is applied to Israel as a people, as " Let thy priests be clothed with righteousness, and let thy saints shout for joy." ^ In the New Testament it is applied to the whole Christian Church, to the members of the Christian com- munity generally. It is assumed of all who profess the Christian name that they are consecrated to God, and are sanctified by the Holy Spirit. It sets a standard for the Church, anticipating the ultimate result, as it were. The Church is counted holy, and at the same time called to be holy; consecrated, and by that summoned to the consecrated life. We cannot over-estimate what this meant to the early Church as a motive for her members to realise their exalted ideal. In the New Testament the word Saints is never used exclusively of certain select people, a sort of election within the election, a few eminent superior Christians who have outshone their fellows in attainments and sanctity. It always expresses the commonalty of the faith, and is * Psalm cxxxii. 9. 336 MEDIAEVAL SAINTHOOD 237 applied, as St. Paul often does, to the whole Chris- tian community. The very title contained a moral dynamic, fit to give all members of the Church pause, and to make them inquire whether they were living up to their name, whether it was an accurate definition and description of them. It made holiness an essen- tial note of the true Church, a characteristic by which it is to be tested and known. A synonym for the Church which has even been accepted as a fair defi- nition is " the Saints," emphasising holiness as a req- uisite. The righteousness of Christ's disciples must exceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, who made religion itself consist of righteousness.^ The work of Christ was to present His people holy, and unblamable, and unreprovable.^ The name by which God is known is the Holy One, and His people are the holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly call- ing.* It follows that mistaken ideas of what holiness is will mean mistaken ideas of what constitutes sainthood. Very soon in the history of the Church a process set in, which despoiled the word of its meaning, and also robbed the thought of its power. It came to mean the exceptional in many ways; and so tests of sainthood were introduced, which in many periods excluded all believers whose lives, sometimes for con- science's sake and because of the claims of duty, could not be run on the lines of approved sainthood. The Church conception of a saint became limited and de- fined to a class, and was exclusively referred to a select few. A saint came to mean one who was emi- nent for the Christian qualities, for holiness of life, and 'Matt V. 20. *Col. i. 22. *Heb. iii. i. 238 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT steadfastness to the faith. There was even a further degradation of the idea and the word, when it was narrowed still more to mean one who was officially recognised and canonised by the Church. Ecclesiastical usage early restricted it to those exceptional in their virtues, who displayed the Christian quaHties in a heroic degree. This limitation of the word is not confined to the Roman Catholic Church, as there is a common use of it among Protestants, which has the same effect. By saint is often meant a certain peculiar type of faith and character — pietists, mystics, and men who show a weak aloofness from the great interests of the world, and from the great fight of faith with the world. Thus it is sometimes used with a sort of sneer in it, as if it invariably implied weakness of some kind, the unpractical feckless man, too good for the world; and even sometimes the word connotes hy- pocrisy. It is a terrible abasement of a noble word, and is caused by a similar process, which produced its degradation in the early centuries. The root of both the Roman Catholic and the modem abuse of the word is an unspiritual idea of holiness, and there- fore an unspiritual idea of the method of attaining holiness. In both it is assumed to be best attained by withdrawal, either complete or partial, from the world. The method, of course, finds its completest form in the medisevalism of the Roman Church ; but many of the modern pietist conceptions of a saint are coloured by the same idea, and only differ from the other by not being carried out to their logical conclusion. The origin of the defined and limited class of saints in the early Church was very natural. It was natural MEDliEVAL SAINTHOOD 239 for the Church to look back to the Apostles of Jesus, who had known Him in the flesh, as belonging to a special and privileged class, with special claims to be called saints. Then, in the hard times of persecution when the Church had to go through the fire, it was natural that all who suffered death for Christ's sake should be admired and venerated. They had sealed their faith with their blood. As a matter of course, all who suffered as martyrs were put on the list of saints. The first hagiology was a martyrology ; this was so especially the case that the word martyrology is still used in ecclesiastic language for the list of the saints, though in later times many were canonised who had not died as martyrs. The same was true of the Confessors, who, though they were not actu- ally put to death, suffered torture and imprisonment, and refused to deny their faith. Ordinary flesh and blood admired such heroic adherence to Christ, and men assumed that these noble sufferers must be of a stronger fibre, with a greatness of faith which lifted them out of the common ranks. The very humility of the Church made ordinary believers set up as better than themselves others, who were thus eminent in their piety, more remarkable in the steadfastness of their testimony, and more useful in their servicec. In the primitive Church it was customary to make much of the memory of their martyrs, the holy dead who would not deny their Lord. They kept the anni- versaries of their death, and took communion on these days. Each Church had its own martyrs and con- fessors, the men who had worshipped with them and had departed in the odour of sanctity, and these were lovingly remembered. It was merely a grateful com- 240 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT memoration, and was of practical use as an incitement to emulate the example of pious and holy men. Eusebius quotes in his History of the Church an in- teresting letter from the Church of Smyrna, which shows the natural veneration for a martyr, and also re- veals that they were well aware of the danger of Saint-worship, by the way they guard themselves in explaining in what sense they display respect and veneration to the relics. The letter gives an account of the martyrdom of their bishop, St. Polycarp, and then goes on *' Our subtle enemy, the devil, did his utmost that we should not take away the body, as many of us wished to do. It was suggested that we should desert our crucified Master and begin to worship Polycarp. Fools ! who knew not that we can never desert Christ, who died for the salvation of all men, nor worship any other. Him we adore as the Son of God; but we show respect to the martyrs, as His disciples and followers. The centurion, therefore, caused the body to be burned; we then gathered his bones, more precious than pearls, and more tried than gold, and buried them. In this place, God willing, we will meet and celebrate with joy and gladness the birthday of this martyr, as well in memory of those who have been crowned before, as by his example to prepare and strengthen others for the combat." ^ We see from this most interesting letter how natural it was that a Church should hold festival on a martyr's birthday, which was counted the day of his martyrdom, as being the day he entered into fulness of life; and how natural it was also that the relics should be lov- ingly preserved and treasured, even put in their most * Baring-Gould, Lives of the Saints, vol. i., Intro, p. xii. MEDIiEVAL SAINTHOOD 241 sacred place, under the altar, as became the common practice in the Church. It is to be expected that their fellow-believers should hold in deep affection the mortal remains of a heroic brother. In course of time what was a natural and beautiful instinct became de- graded. From this human root grew all the abuses which are associated with saint-worship — ^the super- stition, the miracle-mongering, the fetish of saints' bones and relics, which has made the very word saint an offence in the ears of many. The good custom cor- rupted the Church. It is not necessary to trace the steps of the descent, down to the belief in the magical efficacy of touching some sacred relic. The eminent Christians, who were sainted, were at first held up for the exhortation of all the people, that their good example might fire them with emulation of their zeal and faithfulness; and the step from that to the worship of the Saints was not difficult to take in these days, when the hardest thing for the Church to combat was the pagan tastes and superstitions of a great mass of the population. We see the good of it, and the danger, in a remark of St. Augustine : " The Christian people celebrate the memory of the martyrs with religious solemnity both to excite to imitation, and that they may become fel- lows in their merits and be assisted by their prayers." The catalogue of those who had claims to sainthood grew larger as the years passed, and it was impossible even to read all the names on the days set apart, when the Church thanked God for the Martyrs and Saints, who had witnessed a good confession. So, gradually the whole year was mapped out, and the saints were named on their special days. To begin with, each 242 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT Church of a district made its own saints, and com- memorated its own blessed dead, those whom they knew to be eminent for sanctity. Each bishop had the power to canonise a local saint or martyr, but in the twelfth century these local lists were closed, and the Pope claimed the sole right of creating saints in this ecclesiastical sense. According to the laws of canoni- sation, which hold good in the Roman Church to-day, there must be, in addition to heroic virtue, evidence of the saint having performed miracles in confirmation of his sanctity. But worse even, if possible, than all the abuses which crept into the Church through saint-worship is the degradation of the word Saint itself. It began by the removal of the idea of sainthood from the ordinary lives of ordinary Christians. It was taken away as an ideal for all, and ultimately was made the mark of a special and artificial type of goodness. What we have already seen of the origin of the ecclesiastical saint explains how this came about. We saw how naturally the Martyrology set the standard. The Martyrs were canonised, because of their suffering unto death for the name of the Lord. Suffering came to be the badge of the saint; and so when the days of martyrdom passed, other kinds of suffering took the place of martyrdom as tests of sainthood. When the Christian faith was recognised by the Empire, so that persecution ceased and the opportunities of martyrdom were reduced, the idea became prevalent that there was no longer scope in the world for the full exercise of Christian virtue in a heroic degree. The confessors who had suffered were held in higher esteem than MEDIAEVAL SAINTHOOD 243 ever; and the standard then set up was transferred to the self-inflicted austerities of those who sought to display exceptional virtue Men martyred themselves, and the ideal Christian Hfe came to be a life of as- ceticism, however empty of moral significance these ascetic practices happened to be. Fasting, maceration, physical self-mortification, voluntary privation, be- came the marks of a saint. The anchorites were con- sidered by the people more holy than the coenobite monks who resided in monasteries, because they car- ried the principle of renunciation furthest. If renunci- ation is in itself good, and even represents the highest life, then of course the solitary ascetics, who renounced not only the world but the society of their fellows, have reached a higher point of perfection. We find all kinds of artificial self-torture among these, as if they competed with each other in dis- covering new kinds of cruelty against their own per- sons. Many of the Saints, whose names have been included in the great catalogue, have little about the record of their lives that is really noble and beauti- ful and Christlike. Some of the Lives of the Saints are but pitiful, and even disgusting, reading. It is true that in a profligate time, when the world seemed drowned in luxury, the spectacle of men, willingly inflicting the most terrible severity on themselves, may have done good by creating a startling sense of contrast. Any good, however, that might have ac- crued from such was a thousandfold counterbalanced by the immense evil produced in the Church by the thought that the supposed holiness, which gives a man a title to be a saint, has little to do with ordinary life. Nothing could make up for the loss which came 244 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT through the true ideal of the Christian Ufe being ob- scured. Among the hermits of Egypt there was dis- played a remarkable ingenuity in the different forms of austerity, and in the kinds of penance they imposed on themselves sometimes for very trivial faults, all being the fruit of the notion that suffering in itself was good. St. Macarius of Alexandria, so called to distinguish him from another St. Macarius of Egypt, was one day '^tung by a gnat in his cell, and he killed it. Then, regretting that he had allowed himself to be irritated by an insect, and that he had lost an opportunity of enduring mortification calmly, he went to the marshes of Scete and stayed there six months suffering terribly from the insects, as if they had known he had killed a brother gnat. When he returned he was so dis- figured by their bites that he was only recognised by his voice. When a younger disciple once asked leave to drink a little water because of the parching thirst, the old hermit, under whose care and tuition he had put himself, told him to be satisfied with resting for a little in the shade, and to encourage him said that for twenty years he had never once eaten, or drunk, or slept, as much as nature demanded. St. Anthony at one period went to the tombs, and leaving instructions with an acquaintance to bring bread at intervals of many days, he entered one of the tombs, and shutting the door upon himself remained there alone. Some of the austerities were grotesque in the ex- treme, though, if we grant the assumption that a saint is to be made through self-inflicted suffering, we can- not wonder at eccentric forms of pain being sought after. Among the Celtic Saints barbarities were com- MEDIAEVAL SAINTHOOD 245 mon : one would stand naked in ice-cold water until he recited the psalter ; another would sleep among corpses and suspend himself on the points of sickles placed under his armpits; another would keep a stone in his mouth throughout Lent. Endless instances could be given of how the whole conception of sainthood became degraded. One of the first disciples of An- thony was Paul the Simple, who came at the age of sixty as a candidate to adopt the mc«iastic life. An- thony, to test his qualifications, and thinking him too old to begin, tried to disgust him by the severity of the discipline. He set Paul to pray outside his door, and told him not to desist till he was released. He prayed on through the blazing sun, and through the night, as rigid as one of the date-palms of the desert. He then brought him into his cave, and gave him some platting work to do, and when it was done re- buked him for doing it badly, and bade him undo it all again. Anthony then brought bread and called the famished candidate to supper, but as grace before meat, he recited twelve Psalms and twelve prayers to try his patience, and then took away the bread, say- ing that looking on it would suffice for supper. As Paul did not murmur at even this new version of a Barmecide feast, we are told that Anthony saw that he was qualified to be a monk.^ This conception of the saintly life as implying self-mortification is not confined to the first early hermits; it has persisted throughout the centuries, though in the finest and noblest of the canonical saints it has been modified by never being chosen as a good in itself. But right through the Roman Calendar it ^ Lives of the Saints, vol. iii. p. 114. 146 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT is always considered a great feature of sainthood, that men and women should have shown their con- tempt for the world by the practice of austerities. In every country and every age there are saints who have been canonised seemingly for no other reason than that they have emulated the pains of the early confessors. The Blessed Marianna of Quito in Peru, who lived in the seventeenth century but was only beatified in 1850 by Pius IX., seems to have bought her title to sainthood by mortification. She used to sleep in a coffin or on a cross, and on Fridays she hung for two hours on a cross, suspended to it by her hair and by ropes. Another saint of the same period in Peru, St. Rose of Lima, set herself to imitate St. Catherine of Siena, fasted like her, wrapped chains round her body, had a crown of thorns which she placed daily on her head, and had it struck so as to wound her forehead. This whole conception which colours the story of so many saints is due to a false and mischievous view of the meaning and value of pain. It is an inevitable temptation of asceticism, that it can hardly fail to put value on suffering for its own sake. Some- times there is lurking at the bottom of it the thought of its being an expiation, and sometimes that it is a purifying process ; but these are much higher and less dangerous than the useless self-sacrifice, which looks upon pain as in itself a good. It sets a false standard, which vitiates true morality, though we recognise the element of truth in it. There is a heart of good in things evil; and it is not difficult to see how penance grew to such lengths in the Church. Christians early learned the deep spiritual value of trial, and from MEDIEVAL SAINTHOOD 247 experience they could testify that good did come out of seeming evil. All the sad experiences of life, which come as fresh food for suffering, become also occa- sions for triumph, ever more fruitful of renewed strength, and hope, and peace. They learned to glory in tribulations, knowing, as they daily discovered, that tribulation worketh patience, and patience experi- ence, and experience hope, and hope maketh not ashamed, because the love of God was shed abroad in their hearts. From this root of truth came the false doctrine of penance, that men should make trials for themselves, which is always a dangerous experiment, and can hardly escape the temptation to value the form of discipline for its own sake. The doctrine of the cross is sometimes stated as if there were in itself a purifying quality in pain, and even as if God took pleasure in our agony, and asked for mutilation of body or mind as the necessary way of pleasing Him. It is not merely that this leads to mere sentimental ism in many, who speak of renunci- ation when there is no real sacrifice underlying it. We just need to think of the amount of spurious mysticism, the unreal sentiment in much devotional phraseology about self-crucifixion, to realise the temp- tation on this side. But worse than that even is the thought of God as a sort of Moloch, who takes de- light in seeing our children pass through the fire. It is a pagan thought, that mere suffering is pleas- ing to God, and is blessed to the soul. The prophet denounces the idea that God requires of men burnt- offerings, or such a sacrifice as their first-bom for their transgression ; and points them to a free and joyous life of justice, and kindness, and a humble 248 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT walk with God. There are tragic and terrible aspects of Hfe, that seem sometimes almost to justify the ex- tremest attitude of asceticism ; but life as God gave it is a good thing with its own joy and beauty. Chris- tianity has often been called a religion of sacrifice and sorrow, of blood and tears ; and it is profoundly true ; but it is not true in the sense sometimes meant. Christ never looked upon pain as a good thing, as is so often done by sentimental devotionaHsm. To Him it was an evil thing to be banished, one of the bane- ful brood of sin, with which He waged warfare. He never took upon Himself any needless pain ; He manu- factured no forms of self-denial, and chose no artificial deprivations. He was no martyr by mistake. Men have sometimes expatiated on the physical pains of the crucifixion, and have attempted to estimate the spiritual pains that broke the Saviour's heart; and have in it all lost sight of the real point of emphasis, that the self-emptying, the sacrifice, the cross, are all to be interpreted by love. And many who have sincerely desired to follow Jesus, have done so by various forms of self-inflicted penance, seeking to imitate Him in an external way ; whereas it might be possible to have the imitation carried to such complete detail as to include the very cross itself, and yet there be no meaning, no sacrifice in it, and the whole result a ghastly failure. There is no merit in pain in itself, and no moral value in suffering, and no virtue in the cross in itself. Pain is often, it is true, a " hound of heaven " to a good man, driving him to spiritual ends; but an evil man has his share of pain, and remains evil. Spiritu- ally, it all depends on the way it is accepted and used. MEDIEVAL SAINTHOOD 249 *' It is good for me that I have been afflicted," said the Psalmist, " that I might learn Thy statutes. Before I was afflicted I went astray ; but now I have kept Thy word ; " ^ but often affliction only degrades and hardens. Pain is nothing in itself. Mere tribulation, unsancti- fied to the soul that suffers, is not a blessing but a curse. The furnace without this result only con- sumes the heart, bums away the life into charred dust. A man may go through the fire unpurified, and taste the chastisement of life without the love in it, and be made only more hard and rebellious by every stroke on the anvil. There is no failure of life so terrible as this, to have the pain without the lesson, the sorrow without the softening; and yet it is common enough. And if this is true of the inevitable affliction which comes to all without seeking it, it is also true that the pain of any voluntary self-denial in itself has no magical merit.. It may indeed have a moral value, in being a test of the constancy of soul which occasioned the denial. It may be a proof of the higher love, and may at least show that it is more than an emotion. Still, it must be insisted that mere idle self-denial is of no value. It is very important that we should have a con- sistent attitude towards pain, and perhaps here as elsewhere the rule in medio tutissimus is a good one. There may be a weak dread of pain, which leads to all forms of moral cowardice, and which would make physical comfort the chief end of life; but, on the other hand, to look upon pain as anything but an evil is to set a false standard for self, and to give an opening for cruelty towards others. It was a similar * Psalm cxix., verses 67 and 71. 250 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT m(X)d to this last, which inspired the opposition to the use of chloroform, which Sir James Simpson had to encounter; some objectors holding that pain was of God's appointing, and that it was a species of presump- tion to seek to mitigate it. In the literature of the canonical saints this endurance of bodily pain is en- larged on, till the chief mark of sainthood came to be suffering, and human life was put out of perspective. In the ordinary conduct of life there are plenty oppor- tunities for endurance, and patience, and true self- denial; and these fine qualities are always found in every noble life. Courage in the face of danger, resig- nation before calamity, endurance in the path of duty in spite of any suffering that may be involved — these will always command the admiration of men ; but empty suffering, with no necessity to explain it, or no high end to dignify it, is without moral contents. The mere giving up, with no purpose and no large reason, is useless. That is to look upon self-denial as a fetish, as if God could be pleased by pain ; and this is at the bottom of so much mistake in the history of the Church, and of so much false devotion to-day. It is a wrong conception of God, to think His favour depends on the infliction of some sort of painful deprivation on self; as if even He could be bribed by self-torture. It must never be forgotten that all our Lord's pains came to Him in His ministry, in His service, in the path of duty ; and they were all inspired, and glorified, by love. This is why Christianity is a religion of joy, as well as of sorrow; because it is a religion of love. From one point of view the life of Jesus was an easy, simple, natural, joyous, instinctive life; and MEDIEVAL SAINTHOOD 251 yet from another it was a stern, strenuous, and even a stricken life. He, who was pre-eminently the Man of joy, who at the last spoke of giving His joy to the disciples, was also the Man of sorrows ; and the source of His joy and of His sorrow was the same. They are both the fruit of love. The joy of love is a fact, and so also is the sorrow of love. It is profoundly true that The mark of rank in nature Is capacity for pain. That is because it is capacity for love. Vicarious suf- fering is a fact of life, and cannot be expelled from life, till love is expelled. We cannot care greatly for the highest interests of another, without bearing his infirmities, and taking on his sicknesses, nay, even bowing to the burden of his sins. To see how true and how universal this vicarious suffering is, we need only look around — the shepherd and his lost sheep, the tender picture Jesus drew of how the shepherd thinks not of those safe in the fold but of the one strayed silly sheep, and goes out into the wil- derness to find it: a mother and her cripple child, the gentlest-tended, the best beloved of all the family, as she takes the very infirmities on her heart: a father and his prodigal son, with a keener sorrow and an- guish of soul than even he can suffer in the far country though he perish with hunger. The hunger, which can be appeased with the husks the swine did eat, is noth- ing to the heart -hunger at home. Love's sorrows are as true as its joys; and yet the love transmutes the sorrow into something passing rich and strange, as with the Master Himself, of whom we read that He 2S2 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT for the joy set before Him endured the cross and de- spised the shame. Sacrifice is of the very essence of love, but without love there is no sacrifice. All pains and self-denials are barren and dangerous self-de- ceptions, if they are not prompted, and inspired, and imposed by love. Only love's own royal hand can make the thorns into a crown. It is false therefore to say that a life is to be measured by loss or by pain : it can only be measured by love. That at least is how it will be measured and judged one day. A further and even more serious evil, affecting not the individual merely, but the whole conception of the Christian life, was created by the degradation of the word saint, as solely the privilege of the ascetic. The strange division of the Christian life into two grades began, which exists to this day in the Roman Catholic Church, that there are two classes of believers with two standards of morality. The foundation of the error is the belief that at bottom the Christian faith is a world-renouncing creed, and that those, who would perfectly fulfil the word of Christ, must give up the Vv^orld in the ascetic sense. This practically narrowed itself down ultimately to a question of the celibate or the married life. The theory is that there is a loftier stage of Christian life, possible only to those who live unmarried and as far as possible apart from the world. The monastic life was called the angelic life.^ The words " religion " and " religious " are always used by mediaeval writers in the sense of one who has em- braced the monastic life, as can be seen from such MEDIAEVAL SAINTHOOD 253 beautiful books as the Fioretti of St. Francis, or the Imitaiio Christi, where asceticism is touched with a sweet and gentle tenderness, that makes them perenni- ally attractive. The ** religious " are always those who have left the business of the world to seek holiness in seclusion. This is still the ecclesiastical use of the word, as for example in the common phrase " to enter religion," meaning to take the vow of some monastic order, or the equally common phrase '* his name in religion is ." A " religious " in the Roman Catholic sense always means a monk, or friar, or nun. The influence of Greek thought, as seen in the Alexandrian theology, helped to create the distinc- tion we are noticing. That theology, which laid so much stress on knowledge,^ tended in itself to make two ranks of Christians, with two different standards of virtue — the Christian sage and the simple believer. The one could enter into the mysteries of the faith, could read the symbolism in nature, and the allegory in history and in religious interpretation, of which that school was so fond; the other had to accept results, and receive the teaching, and live by simple faith. These two tendencies, one ascetic and the other intellectual, were combined in this way, that the Christian sage was recognised as the man who gave himself up to the life of contemplation, and cut himself off from the entanglements of the earthly relations. The superior virtue of the sage was evi- denced by his contempt of the ordinary comforts of life. But as this superiority was impossible for all believers, since, if followed by all, it would bring the » yv&6ii, if Beta 6o- tation of pride is seen in the conclusiveness and al- most contempt for Christians of the lower order, inci- dent on the division of two grades of which we are speaking. We can see from a casual remark of New- man's how the theory of two classes arises, and even becomes inevitable, as soon as the ascetic position is accepted even in a modified degree. In a sermon on Lent he discusses the temptation of reaction into self- indulgence, that follows immediately after a pro- longed fast, and he adds : '* This grievous consequence is said actually to happen in some foreign countries, in the case of the multitude, who never will have a deep and consistent devotion while the world lasts." * It is strange to find the ascetic ideal leading to a similar contemptuous exclusiveness, which we noted as a temptation of the aesthetic ideal, which makes self- culture the end of life. * Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. vi. scr. 3. 26o CULTURE AND RESTRAINT Disastrous also was the effect on ordinary Christian life, on the men at the lower level as well as those on the higher. The two classes were set against each other, and this division of the Christian life turned the Church, from being the whole body of believers with equal rights and duties, into an ecclesiastical aristocracy, and worship became a service performed by the priest for the laity. Practically it meant a blow at Christian morality, for it lowered the tone of secular society, not merely by the loss of so many earnest men who might have kept the world pure, but most of all by making it understood that ordinary believers were not expected to come up to the high ideal. Men who did not take the vows might be selfish, and proud, and worldly, and yet be Chris- tians, on a lower plane, it is true, but still accepted by the Church in spite of their sins. The practical result meant discouragement of all who were admit- tedly on the lowel level, who mixed in the world, and married, and did the usual business of life. When the life of seclusion was exalted above the common life of Christians, the effect was as we might expect. Much was not asked from the common believer, and gradually the ordinary business of life lost its place as the recognised sphere of the Christian calling. This tendency, even at an early time, is casually illustrated by Clement of Alexandria who tells us that when he sought to influence public morals he was met by the ex- cuse, " We cannot all be philosophers and ascetics. We are ignorant people, and cannot read the Holy Scrip- tures ; why should we be subjected to such rigorous de- mands ? " ^ It was a very natural retort. When the * Clemens, Padag. i. 3, MEDIAEVAL SAINTHOOD 261 dignity of the ordinary Christian calling is lost sight of, the standard of piety in th€ lower positions is bound to suffer. The distinction into two classes gives also an excuse to worldly men to ride off on the plea that they had no call to the life of seclusion, and were only ordinary people living in the midst of the world, and therefore could not be expected to display the heroic virtue natural enough among the perfect. The true ideal of the Christian life has been obscured by the error that the holiness, which gives a man a title to be a saint, has nothing to do with common life. But holiness is not a negative thing, a state of being free from con- tamination, avoiding the stains of the world; it is a state of being and becoming, a progressive mastery over Hfe and the conditions of life, a growth into spiritual power; and to this all are called, to live in God through all the vicissitudes of lot, amid all the work and relationships of the world, inspired with the spirit of faith, and prayer, and communion. It is the nobler task, and the harder. The moral and spirit- ual demands made on us are concerned with our actual lives in the world. If to flee from duty and the hard sphere where it is not easy to be true to our highest ideal, if to escape from the seductions of the world to some convenient desert, is the condition of saint- hood, then we are not all called to be saints. The world could not get its business done if we were all saints of that type. Besides, that is often the path of cowardice. In the complexity of modem life, with persistent claims on all sides, with clamant demands on time and thought, with its many unsolved problems, the simplest a62 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT way out of all difficulties is to throw it up. The easiest way to unloose the knot is to cut the cord. The desert is always easier than Corinth; the hermit's cell than the market-place ; the cloister than the hearth ; but the saints of Corinth, of the market-place, and of the hearth, may be most to the mind of Jesus. There is another Martyrology than the canonical one, which will have many nameless saints consecrating their lives to service, the sweet, humble souls who are the salt of the earth and save it from corruption, the loving hearts that are the light of the world. We need to get the word and the idea of sainthood back to its New Testament usage and to realise that it is not a far-away ideal to which only a few exceptional men can aspire, but a task to which all are summoned. We must avoid all distinctions, which would create a religious aristocracy in the great commonwealth of the faith; for there are other and similar ways of perverting the Christian ideal for all, as well as the Roman Catholic one. We may create distinctions by laying emphasis on the mere intellectual appre- hension of the truth, between the cultured who have entered into the mysteries, and the simple believer; or we may create distinctions even in the name of evangelical religion. The term '* higher holiness," for example, which is common in certain quarters, is a most unfortunate one, though we must sympathise with every attempt to raise the level of aspiration and attainment. The danger is a spiritual exclusive- ness, which may be only another form of Pharisaism, as well as leading the ordinary Christian to imagine that he has no call to realise to the full the Christian MEDIiEVAL SAINTHOOD 263 ideal. It is the common task to adjust all the duties and relations of life to the love of God, which makes its imperious claim on the human heart; and this task is not the exceptional but the common lot of all. By dismissing the mediaeval notion of sainthood, with its division of ethics, we will get back the moral dynamic it contains. It is a true principle of morals that men will become what they are trusted to be, and will do what is expected of them, will approximate not only their own ideal but even the ideal which others set up for them. This is seen in the education of children, where the system of distrust is always a failure. A child brought up by that method will almost infallibly give good cause for the distrust. He is driven to it, to justify the mean and poor opinion in which he is held. In all our dealing with our fellows this is a prin- ciple which can be counted on for much, that they will be what is laid on their sense of honour to be. The normal conscience rises to the demands made on it, and easily falls to the limit of the standard expected from it. When St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he called them saints, though his epistles reveal sins which would have made a less stout heart despair of them. " The Church of God in Corinth," to which the Apostle writes, was what Bengel calls a great and joyful paradox. When we think of the evil reputation which the city had among the cities of the ancient world as a place notorious for its debauchery, the very name of Corinth being a byword for loathsome sin, we get some idea of the strange combination of the two names which make Bengel call it a paradox. But the circumstances which made it a great and joyful paradox made the Apostle all the more anxious to lift up the standard of 264 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT holy living, and to keep it up, and induced him to lay stress on the high calling. In his very designation of them as " sanctified and called to be saints " ^ he points to the character they are expected to display. He reminds them, by a sort of glorious anticipation, of their dignity, that they may stand fast in their present attainment, and may even rise higher. The process is stated as a completion, the work is stated as an act, but there is no contradiction in the com- bination of ideas. It just means that they are conse- crated, and so are called to the consecrated life. * I Cor. i. 2. X THE PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL UFE THOUGH it is a constant danger of asceticism to become an end in itself, y^t it begins usu- ally as a recognised means of attaining some coveted spiritual result, not merely saving the life from evil, but also moving it to a higher good. This hope, which underlies ascetic practices, is based on the experience, that physical treatment does affect the whole spiritual condition. It is found as a matter of fact that men can induce certain states of mind, and even seem to enter into divine mysteries, by habits and exercises that begin with the body. This is a region of great difficulty, where exaggeration is fa- tally possible, but where under-statement of the facts is also very common. It is not easy to thread our way in a sphere like this, which is so subtle and so delicate; but no consideration of the ascetic ideal can be complete without taking into account the facts, which indeed give it its perennial vitality. The phys- ical treatment of the spiritual life has ever been a subject of fascination to men, and endless have been the experiments they have tried. All ascetic practices, which are genuinely religious, are accepted as the ap- proved method of reaching a fuller spiritual commun- ion, and of attaining a religious exaltation, thought to be otherwise impossible. The truth at the bottom of 265 266 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT them all is the admittedly close connection of our bodily acts with the state of the mind and even of the soul. There is here an interesting illustration of the strange manner in which human thought goes in cir- cles, so that what at first seem utter extremes meet. All such physical treatment of the soul is a tacit ac- knowledgment of the unity of man's being, and yet many of the ascetic practices go rather on the principle that a true man is a disembodied spirit having as far as possible shuffled off the mortal coil. Self -mortifica- tion attempts to feed the soul by starving all bodily instincts and crushing out all natural impulses. Thus as we have said extremes meet, because a fundamental error of all ascetic systems is the subdivision of a hu- man being into parts, as if body can be regarded as something apart from mind and soul, and as if soul can only be perfected when the body is utterly renounced ; and yet the very attempts are an evidence of the truth of the oneness of man's nature ; for they start with the fact that the two are so closely united that the soul can be helped or hindered by the body. The great fact, which makes the ascetic ideal in any degree reasonable, is that the different parts of the being of man are relative to each other. The animal part cannot be iso- lated from the rest of his nature. This can be most clearly seen by remembering that the body is indeed the medium of all knowledge. Through the senses we derive the impressions, intellectual and spiritual, which are our highest possessions ; and these impressions are coloured by the medium through which they pass. Man is a unity; not a duality as is so often imagined in ascetic thought (flesh and spirit joined together in' a loathsome union, like a living prisoner chained to a PHYSICAL TREATiMENT OF SOUL 267 dead corpse) ; nor a triad (body and mind and soul, each dwelling apart with a life of its own). We can make distinctions in our nature for convenience of speech, but they must be confessedly inexact. Man is one and indivisible ; the life that he lives in the flesh is the life that he lives in the soul. We can classify in a broad way, but we cannot tell even where mind or soul begin. The connection between body and mind is a com- monplace of thought with us, but it is not yet a com- monplace of practice. In the training and education of children, for example, how difficult it is to steer a straight course between the two extremes that are possible here. We constantly find a swing of the pen- dulum in prevailing notions of education held by people. At one time physical culture is put first, and is almost exclusively attended to, till we are afflicted with the idolatry of mascularity ; then we find a period when the worse error gets hold which considers only mental training, and looks upon it as a great thing if by hot-house methods child-prodigies can be produced. Yet true education must aim at co-ordinate develop- ment in this matter, as Montaigne says wisely, " I would have the disposition of his limbs formed at the same time as his mind; for it is not a soul, it is not a body, we are training up, but a man, and we ought not to divide him." As a matter of fact, neither in education nor in life, can we divide human nature into parts without inevitable loss and error. The relation of mind to body is a very close one, in which each affects the other for good or evil. We are more depend- ent on physical conditions for our happiness, and even for our goodness, than we perhaps like to admit. 268 CULTURE AND RESTRAIN! It is astonishing how our view of life takes its colour from the state of health. Physicians know that, if they could cure the sick soul in many cases, they would get at the secret of the sick body ; and ministers know that, if sometimes they could produce conditions and environment of health, they could bring many a man to a different way of thinking. In a vague fashion we recognise these facts, but as a rule we are in the dark about the mystery of the interpenetrating influ- ence of body on mind, and the reflex action of mind on body. There is a great future for mental therapeu- tics, when it gets free from the charlatan and the quack. We know in general terms, as a maxim of both morals and of medicine, that " Faults in the life breed errors in the brain. And these reciprocally those again; The mind and conduct mutually imprint And stamp their image in each other's mint." It may seem, as it has often done to some hypersensi- tive minds, a degradation that the higher nature should be so dependent on the lower, and that intellectual and even moral qualities should gain or lose tone accord- ing to the state of the health. Whether it is a degrada- tion or not, it is wise to accept facts, and this close connection of body and mind is a solemn fact. Looked at properly it contains no degrading ideas, but rather suggests the sacredness of all the laws of our nature. It makes health a duty, and every wilful disobedience to the laws of health becomes a crime; for it not only punishes the body where the sin took place, but affects the whole man. We are learning the truth of this in education, and we see that man PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 269 needs to be a good animal, before the best of anything else is possible. The keenest brain needs a foundation of physical health to do its best work. Jowett, the late Master of Balliol, said that one of the causes of failure at the University of some promising stu- dents was neglect of health, either through the care- lessness of ignorance or through moral evil. Many a man learns, after it is too late, that he is not fit for the prolonged mental efforts he might have been but for early folly. Sir Walter Scott speaks in his Journal of how he suffered from fluttering of the heart, and of the dispir- iting effect it had on him, though he knew that it was nothing organic but was merely nervous. He says that in youth this complaint used to throw him into in- voluntary passions of causeless tears. He manfully set himself to drive it away by exercise, though he wishes he had been a mechanic. He was a man of healthy nature in every sense, but he too had his times of de- pression. At the time he made the entry in his Journal, he had been overworked and overstrained, and con- fesses he had not taken exercise for four or five days. He asks, as many brain-workers have often done, whether it is the body brings it on the mind or the mind on the body, though he accepts it as part of the price he had to pay for other things. " As to body and mind, I fancy I might as well enquire whether the fiddle or the fiddlestick makes the tune." * It is folly to shut our eyes to the fact that man is subject to the organic laws, which govern all life. Every brain- worker has to learn something of the physical limits, under which he must work. Nature does not repeal '^ Journal, entry March 14th, 1826. 270 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT her punishments easily, and when we reaHse that we often have to pay not in mere physical uneasiness, but in intellectual deprivation, we should feel the responsi- bility. When the harmony of life is out of tune it is often found, as Scott found in that particular case, that it is the fiddle that is out of order and not the fiddlestick, the body and not the mind. From such a point of view wilful neglect of health is criminal, dif- fering only in degree from suicide. Loss of time, loss of work, languid performance of duty, result from ill-health. Our accountants can give us the average number of days lost per year to the community by illness, but who can calculate how much of that is self-caused, or is produced through self-neglect? On the whole it is a good thing that the tide has turned in education and that we have ceased to think that it pays to over-educate children and undermine their constitution by undue stimulation of brain. The brain is a sensitive organ, the capacity of which is affected in many ways. Perfect sanity of judgment, penetra- tion of mind, good sense, acute discrimination, reason- ableness, are all more likely to be found in a state of health than in a state of debility. But this relation of the body seems to go deeper still into life; for we find the effect of bodily condi- tion in the springs of moral thinking and acting as well as of purely mental states. Functional derange- ments tend to become organic, and organic disease preys not on the body merely, but disturbs the brain, affects the will, and prevents a man from being fully master of his own designs. Irritated nerves are re- sponsible for some abnormal moral conditions as well as for some morbid states of mind. Cheerfulness is PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 271 often a matter not of superior virtue but of healthy digestion. The sins of temper, which mean pain to others, as well as to the man himself, are often the result of physical prostration or unstrung nerves. The jaundiced eye sees everything in its own hue. Much of Carlyle's philosophy and many of his judgments had their roots in his dyspepsia. There is a close con- nection of the laws of health with the laws of morality. A truly healthy man, with cleanness of blood and clear brain and healthy tastes, will keep free from some evils almost by instinct; and on the other hand the moral standpoint given by religion reacts to create healthy conditions for the brain and the other bodily functions. This is along the line of the many facts which are being accepted to-day, as to the reflex influence of the mind on the body. States of feeling can create physical conditions; cerebral excitement, as every doctor knows, affects bodily functions. Anger can burst a blood-vessel ; fear can paralyse the nerve cen- tres; grief can make a young man old in a night; care paints her image on the face and bows the shoul- ders in a pathetic stoop. The resources of the mind brought to bear on the body can sometimes banish disease in a manner which is almost uncanny. Further, health is contagious as well as disease. Half of the secret of the success of some of our great doctors lies in the moral qualities, the courage, faith, brightness, hopefulness, which seem to be stored in their health- ful temper and nature. The mind, by appealing to faith and hope in others, is able also to influence their very bodies; and this old truth is what enables many quackeries of the faith-healing sects to live at all. 272 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT Now the calm acceptance of such facts is the right poHcy for us. The lesson of this close interaction of mind and body is that we should put the whole treat- ment of the body on a moral basis. De Quincey closes the section dealing with Health of his treatise on Casuistry with some strong words, which have added weight from his own mistakes in dealing with himself, " Casuistry justly and without infringing any truth of Christianity urges the care of health as the basis of all moral action, because, in fact, of all per- fectly voluntary action. Every impulse of bad health jars or untunes some string in the fine harp of hu- man volition; and, because a man cannot be a moral being but in the proportion of his free agency, there- fore it is clear that no man can be in a high sense moral, except in so far as through health he com- mands his bodily powers, and is not commanded by them." ^ Of course we know the limitations of any such statement, which looks as if we could put a good digestion in place of a good conscience. A man of perfect physique may have no mind at all to speak of, and be utterly crass in his moral sentiments. What it means is that, other things being equal, a man in good health will do better work, and be more trustworthy in his thoughts and judgments, than if he suffered from ill-health. It has also to be remem- bered that many a time pain of body has taught the deepest lessons, and that such pain has even been a school of saints, in which they have learned patience and faith and charity, and have hushed their souls into peace before God. Many a sweet and pure character ^Collected Works, vol. viii. p. 355. PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 273 has been formed through severe bodily discipline. They have made the very rod a staff to comfort and support them. This does not, however, justify any wilful neglect, or wicked and foolish action against the laws of health. Suffering may have, as in countless cases it has had, beneficent results, deepening the very soul, and enriching the life ; but it all depends on how it comes and how it is received. Instead of refining, it may only brutalise, and coarsen still more the fibre. If the weakness of body is the result of excess and sin, if the lassitude has been self-sought and the pain self-inflicted, even though it does ultimately bring wisdom, it is a joyless wisdom, the sort of wisdom which comes, when the heart is eaten out, when life has lost its beauty and grace, and the world which should have been the scene of purity of thought and grace of speech and nobility of deed, has become a place of mourning and ashes. One true moral, therefore, which we should draw from the close connection of body with mind and spirit, is that the body should be treated sacredly, as an in- tegral part of human nature. Every act of intemper- ance of whatever sort, every sin against the physical constitution, every wilful neglect of the laws of health and moral life, is injuring the self in ways too delicate to estimate, and is dimming the radiance of the soul. Sin writes its terrible retribution on the very nerve and tissue. On this subject we find men among the prophets, who do not always accept every Christian position. Herbert Spencer writes with prophetic ear- nestness, " Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality. Men's habitual words and acts imply the idea that they are at liberty to treat 274 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT their bodies as they please. Disorders entailed by dis- obedience to Nature's dictates they regard simply as grievances; not as effects of a conduct more or less flagitious. Though the evil consequences inflicted on their dependents, and on future generations, are often as great as those caused by crime; yet they do not think themselves in any degree criminal. It is true that in the case of drunkenness the viciousness of a bodily transgression is recognised; but none appear to infer that if this bodily transgression is vicious so too is every bodily transgression. The fact is that all breaches of the laws of health are physical sins." ^ Just because we do not place life on a physical basis this should appeal to us; we are all the more bound to accept it because life has a moral basis. Mental vigour and spiritual insight are not got through despising the physical side of life. We have been led to state one of the true conclu- sions which should follow from the fact of the con- nection of body with the higher life, before dealing with the mistakes which have arisen in this region. The ascetic mistake starts from the fact that the soul is unmistakably sensitive to the body, and that all the spiritual experiences are bound up with the phys- ical life. Self-control, in bodily acts such as eating and drinking, does without doubt affect more than the body; it disposes towards a state of mind and a moral habit, which are essential to spiritual progress. Further, a resolute disciplined habit of separation from the distractions of earth gives the suitable sphere for the holy meditation, by means of which the soul grows 'Herbert Spencer, Education (Pop. Ed.), p. 171. PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 27 s deep and strong. Self-control of some kind, and some form of solitude, seem necessary instruments of de- votional culture. These, then, are the facts which all religious experience warrants; and the natural temptation arises to exaggerate these methods, and to work upon the soul according to prescribed forms to attain spiritual exaltation. If a man is ambitious of penetrating into the innermost secrets of the celestial light, it is natural to assume that he can at least go far, if he is willing to shake off every clog, and will shrink from no extreme of self-denial. Separation and mortification, as complete as possible, come to be ac- cepted as the approved and infallible methods of reach- ing the heavenly vision and entering into spiritual communion. It becomes easy to believe that any un- common experience is an evidence of success; and thus we find men, who are eager for personal illumi- nation, confusing the most grotesque experiences with spiritual blessedness. They do not *' try the spirits whether they are of God." ^ The story of human error in this region is not a pleasant one to read, though we recognise the facts which have given such error currency. Delusions, visions, ecstatic states, mystical hallucinations, have deceived men into imagining that these are tests of spirituality: and often they are found divorced from all moral law. A great deal of the self-denial and the discipline insisted on in ascetic devotion, is un- real, and much easier than the fruits of the Spirit in humility, and meekness, and love; as forms of outward penance are always easier to the mass of men than real inward discipline. By means of exer- * I John iv. I. 276 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT cises, a man can put himself into a state of dream, rising sometimes to ecstasy; but it may only be a surface discipline, without true training of mind, and will, and imagination, and heart. When we put the stress on the mere seeing of visions or some emotional exaltation, then what best produce such are looked upon as the highest religious instruments. We know, for instance, that the hypnotic state can be induced by fixed staring, but we know that mesmerism has in itself no religious significance. Hypnotists also induce trance by suggestion, by superimposing their will on the patient's will; and this can be done by a man on himself, where he is so to speak, both the patient and the operator. If a man resigns his mind to credulity, he can produce almost any state of mind he desires, with consequences both on bodily condition on the one side, and on what seems like spiritual condition on the other; and so we find the same type of mind producing in one a weak hypochondria, and in another a mystic exaltation that seems to raise him above physical conditions altogether. A mistaken notion of what is the true character of spirituality is at the bottom of many of the grotesque practices which we see appearing and reappearing in history, all based on the physical treatment of the soul. The penitential discipline of the mediaeval Church gave ground for the extravagances ; for that discipline undoubtedly seemed to effect what was claimed for it. Practices like self-laceration, and the systematic weakening of the body by prolonged fasts and watchings, by severe scourgings, by wearing sackcloth, chains, girdles with pricks to wound the flesh, and such like, had as their impelling cause the PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 277 desire to produce a state which was held to give abun- dant entrance into divine mysteries. It was not the mere desire for notoriety which gave rise to the flagellants, who lashed themselves into an ecstatic fury ; for since the Church sanctioned such things as an authorised method of discipline, it was naturally assumed that the more complete the discipline the more perfect would be the results. In Church history we find paroxysms of flagellation, such as the great recrudescence seen during the period of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which spread over a great part of Europe, till it had to be put down by the Church. Some of the flagellants developed hereti- cal views, renounced the sacraments of the Church as useless to those who accepted complete mortification, for whom the one and only sacrament needed was that of the bloody baptism of the scourge. The discipline of the lash was revived by the Jesuits, and received ecclesiastical sanction. Similarly, sects have arisen constantly, and have kept ground for a time, the chief item of whose creed seems to be some form of dancing ; from the Euchites of the fifth century, called also Messalians or Chorentes from their mystic dances, down to the Shakers, who have been popularly so called from the quivering motion of their body in their solemn religious dances or processions. The author has seen Moors dancing and cutting themselves, till they fell down in a sort of madness, to the great ad- miration of the spectators, who looked on them as peculiarly holy men. The history of ecclesiastical fasts also cannot be complete without taking into account the facts, which seem to authorise the physical treat- ment of the spiritual life. Many of the symptoms can 278 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT be explained on pathological grounds, the connection between nervous affections and ecstatic visions, the exaltation of feeling rising to enthusiasm and issuing in fantastic visionary ideas of bliss. The ground- work of truth is that the treatment of the body does determine to some extent both mental and spiritual results, so that it is a natural step to invent artificial discipline to hasten these results. Thus, apart from the gross, unregulated practices which we have noticed, all systems of ascetic devotion make much of the mechanics of prayer, and methods of solitude, and preparation of soul by fasting and such like. This is a difficult region, where hard and fast lines cannot be drawn. It is impossible to take a clear attitude of condemnation since method of some sort seems necessary here as in other spheres of cul- ture. Protestantism has suffered much by often rcr nouncing method altogether; and it must be admitted that we have among us too little devotional culture, and have paid too little attention to the development of the contemplative life generally. Something, how- ever, is to be said for this distrust of method, when we think of the errors committed in its name, and of the tendency to subordinate real spiritual fruits to mechanical forms, resulting in spurious spirituality. A noteworthy instance of a consistent treatment of the body is found in the exercises prescribed by Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. In order to see the danger of the system inaugurated, we do not need to believe with Carlyle that Jesuitism is in its spirit only " an apotheosis of falsity, a kind of subtle quintessence and deadly virus of lying," and the result of Ignatius' black militia on Europe merely an " abomi- PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 279 nable mud-deluge," though Carlyle had historic reason for some of his indignation; nor need we look upon Ignatius himself as a scandalous mortal, a man full of prurient elements from the first, '* A bad man, I think; not good by nature; and by destiny swollen into a very Ahriman of badness." ^ He was a sincere, and from his own point of view a devout man, ear- nestly desirous of furthering religion in himself and throughout th^e world. His Spiritual Exercises, full as they are of false religious conceptions, are also full of a passionate desire to discipline his soul, and to make it a channel of divine grace. They were begun for his own spiritual benefit, and were afterwards given to train the order he established. The great thought of the book is method, using rigidly and per- sistently the prescribed mechanics of devotion. Not only the subjects of meditation, and the special virtues and graces desired, but also the times, and postures, 3jid the details of manner are all regulated. The exercitant is told how he is to stand, and when to shut his eyes, and for how long, during his contem- plation. At one time he is to stand for the space of a Pater noster one or two paces from the place in which he is about to meditate, and make an act of reverence or humiliation; at another he is to vary his posture during the contemplation, at one time kneeling, at another prostrate on the earth, or stretched on the ground with face upward, now seated, now standing. Then having finished the exercise, he is to examine for the space of a quarter of an hour how he has succeeded in the contemplation. Again, he is to deprive himself of all light, shutting the shutters and "Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets — {Jesuitism^. 28o CULTURE AND RESTRAINT doors, during the time he is m the room. He is to learn to restrain his eyes while speaking to people, only looking at them when receiving or dismissing them. These exercises are to be accompanied with penance, which is divided into interior and exterior penance, the former consisting in grieving for sin, and resolving not to commit sin, the latter, which is the fruit of the interior, consists in chastisement for sins committed, and this is inflicted chiefly in three ways. First, in regard to food, not in cutting off what is superfluous, which is not penance but temperance, but in retrench- ing what is suitable, " and the more we retrench the greater and better is the penance, provided only the person be not injured and no notable weakness ensue." ^ The second is in regard to sleep, and here again it is not leaving off what is superfluous, but in leaving off conveniences, and the more this is done the better the penance — with the same proviso as before that no injury is done. The third manner is to chastise the flesh by causing it sensible pain, which is to be inflicted by wearing a hair-cloth, cords, or iron chains next the skin, by disciplining or bruising the body, and by other kinds of austerities. Pain, not sickness, is to be the result aimed at, pain sensible to the flesh that will not penetrate to the bone; and so the instrument prescribed as most convenient is a lash of small cords, that will cause pain exteriorly without injuring the health. The rules for regulating food are along the same lines. Pious contemplation about the lives of the saints is prescribed while taking food, to take the mind away, that there be less delight and sensible pleasure in the act of eating. Here again sickness ^Spiritual Exercises — First Week: Additions. PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 281 is to be avoided, but the more a man can give up the oftener he will " experience interior lights, and consolations, and divine inspirations." ^ Ignatius thought he found these consolations and inspirations through such methods; and we have seen in what sense it was true that a certain exaltation of emotion can be produced, which is easily mistaken for a spiritual state. This is confirmed by some of the methods ^ of prayer, which Ignatius orders. In one method the exercitant is to keep his eyes shut or fixed on one spot, say the word Pater, and dwell on the consider- ation of this word so long as he finds meanings, comparisons, relish, and consolation in thoughts about this word ; and he is to act in the same way in regard to each word of the Lord's Prayer or other prayer. This method is to be continued for one hour. Another method is the rhythmical, which consists in saying one word of the Lord's Prayer at each breath or respi- ration, so that . only one word is said between each breath, and in the length of time between each breath attention is to be paid to the signification of the word. We need say nothing as to how such a system con- flicts with the teaching of Jesus, who condemned all " vain repetition as the heathen do." We can see how such a methodised system of devotion makes a suit- able beginning for novices who seek to enter the order of the Jesuits, which drills its members into obedience, and passive acceptance of commands, and the com- plete giving up of the individual will. We are, how- ever, not concerned with the achievements and de- * Spiritual Exercises — Third Week. •Fourth Week: Three Methods of Prayer. 282 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT merits of the Jesuit system, but with the physical treatment of the spiritual life so plainly set forth in the Spiritual Exercises. There is a business-like utilisation of the mechanics of devotion to produce the best spiritual results, with an equal business-like care that the line be not overstepped, which would injure health, and injure the capacity of serving the order and the Qiurch. The system has succeeded in creating a drilled religious militia, with an unquestioning obedi- ence, and a complete discipline, such as no secular army in the world has ever equalled or approached; but history has never given the Jesuit system credit for pure spiritual results, which can be compared to their practical success. The truth is that the interior lights and consolations and inspirations, which such devotional exercises produce, cannot be called spiritual at all. They are mostly sensuous emotions, physical in their character, as they are physical in their origin. They are of the same class as the hypnotic trance got in a similar way, by fixing the eyes on one spot, and by resigning the will. When religion is chiefly valued according to the emotions raised, more and more stress comes to be laid on the forms which produce emotion, and religion itself is bound to degenerate. The spiritual life is inseparably related to character, and all spiritual truth must be tested by conscience and by moral law. Only by moral sympathy can we truly enter into the mind of Christ; and methods, which are artificially imposed to reach a supposed sanctification, can hardly escape from being divorced from moral reverence and moral obedience. The danger of all physical treatment of the spiritual life is extemalism and formalism. PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 283 It will simplify our discussion if we narrow it down to one particular item of all ascetic practice, that of fasting, which has a recognised place in all systems as an instrument of spiritual culture. The sur- face temptation which it carries is of course the empty doing of it as a duty of religion, culminating in an ostentation like that of the Pharisees in their acts of fasting. They had reduced it to a system, and had made it a distinct religious duty, quite apart from the spiritual results it was supposed to accomplish. Our Lord in condemning it enforced the necessity of sin- cerity and reality above all things in religion, and taught that all forms, fasting included, must be judged by the purity and simplicity of intention. He points to the danger and temptations of such mechanical exer- cises. All bodily discipline, all kinds of abstinence, can have value only as means, and when this is for- gotten they become a degradation. The idolatry of forms is the constant temptation of the human heart, and our Lord prescribed no forms as in themselves sacred. Men have practised self-denial, fasting, and all sorts of renunciation, in order to overcome their besetting temptations and sins; and these very ab- stinences, however helpful and seemingly necessary, may become a subtler temptation. For one thing, when religion is reduced to mechanical rule, men soon covet the appearance, which is cheaply got; and arti- ficial adherence to the rule is the inevitable result. This was the condemnation of the Pharisees, that they made a parade of their strict exercises ; and that, laying stress on outward performance instead of humility of heart, which fasting was meant to symbolise and to encourage, they made it an occasion of ostentation. 284 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT Besides, all forms like fasting create temptations, if they are raised to the level of religious duty. This was the protest against the ascetic rules of monasti- cism, made by such different men as Luther and Eras- mus. The point of Erasmus' constant contention, in many of his Colloqiiies ^ and elsewhere, is that it is wrong to lay down such forms as Christian duty which a man or woman neglects at peril. He often speaks with indignation of the formalism, to which all ascetic acts had arrived in his time, including the monastic vow. It led some who had no call to such a life to attempt it, with disastrous moral results, and it hurt many a gentle conscience. In the same line also Luther calls the founders of the religious orders troublers of men's consciences. Luther indeed, who spoke from experience as Erasmus did, strongly con- demned the solitary life as a religious method, while he admitted the measure of truth it contained. The great point insisted on by both is that these things should not be elevated into rules of religion. *' It is a perilous thing for a man to be alone," writes Luther. " Wherefore they that ordained that cursed monkish and solitary life gave occasion to many thousands to despair. If a man should separate himself from the company of others for a day or two to be occupied in prayer (as we read of Christ that He sometimes went aside alone into the Mount, and by night contin- ued in prayer), there were no danger therein. But when they constrained men continually to live a soli- tary life it was a device of the devil himself; for when a man is tempted and is alone he is not able to raise ^E. g. Familiar Colloquies — ["The Penitent Virgin "]. PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 285 himself up, no not in the least temptation that can be " ^ Ascetic methods are condemned by Erasmus and Lu- ther, because they are imposed as sacred rules of duty, whereas th-ey can have no religious significance, except as they are the natural expression of an inward motive. They both also assert that they produce new tempta- tions, apart altogether from the possibility of violent reaction, by which nature reasserts herself, and apart from the spiritual danger of pride when a man does succeed in silencing nature. The physical treatment of the soul, which men take up so lightly, must be a deli- cate task, requiring wisdom, and individual treatment, and cannot be comprehended in general rules to be applied indiscriminately. If we are in the dark about the relation of mind to body, much more are we in the dark as to how any persistent bodily action will affect each individual soul. All who have ever tried, even in a modified degree, any of the prescribed methods of repressions in the hope that they offered an infallible instrument of spiritual culture, cannot but confess that it was like ignorant blundering fingers tampering with delicate mechanism whose working was mysterious. Newman admits that fasting, for example, does not lessen temp- tations but creates them. He confesses it may make a man irritable, and ill-tempered, or may produce a feebleness which deprives him of his wonted com- mand over his bodily acts, feelings, and expressions. " Thus it may make him seem, for instance, to be out of temper when he is not ; I mean because his tongue, his lips, nay, his brain, are not in his pK>wer. He does * On Galatians, p. 324. 286 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT not use the words he wishes to use, nor the accent and tone. . . . Again, weakness of body may deprive him of self-command in other ways; perhaps he can- not help smiling or laughing, when he ought to be serious, which is evidently a most distressing and humbling trial ; or when wrong thoughts present them- selves, his mind cannot throw them off, any more than if it were some dead thing and not spirit. Or again, weakness of body often hinders him from fixing his mind on his prayers, instead of making him pray more fervently; or again, weakness of body is often attended with languor and listlessness, and strongly tempts a man to sloth. Yet I have not mentioned the most distressing of the effects which may follow from even the moderate exercise of this great Chris- tian duty. It is undeniably a means of temptation, and I say so lest persons should be surprised and de- spond when they find it so." ^ It is an instance of the peculiar twist in Newman's mind that he should see this, and yet not see the implication of it. All he has said, besides the more distressing effects he tells us he has left unsaid, did not make him question whether it is such a clear Christian duty as he assumes. If it exposes men to thoughts from which they turn with abhorrence and terror, as he confesses it does, then instead of subduing the flesh, which is claimed for it, on the contrary it gives the flesh power. No value as a penitential exercise can make up for such dangers. It will always remain far more of a Christian duty to avoid being irritable and ill-tempered, than to gain some expected sanctity at the risk of wounding others with tongue or act. Surely with such supposed in- * Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. vi. serm. i. PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 287 struments of piety the test must be rigorously applied, " By their fruits ye shall know them." In addition, it must be remembered that men are not all made in one cast-iron mould, and that therefore such abstinences have different effects on different persons. It follows that the same formal act will be various in its results. To apply it as a fixed rule of duty is to apply it blindly, like a doctor prescribing- medicine by rule of thumb, in the pious hope that something may chance to do good. It is a principle of the modern practice of medicine not to treat the disease so much as the individual patient; and in the subtler region of the soul it is far more difficult to say how any general rule of conduct will affect it. The physical treatment of the spiritual life, working as it does with narrow approved methods, does not take into account the differences in the material on which it operates. It would be all very well if the aim were to produce uniformity of discipline, as in the Jesuit order, where each responds to superior will as an automaton; but in the varied many-sided sphere of a rich and full Christian life, methods which are applied mechanically are an offence and a hindrance. The above criticism applies of course only to fast- ing as a formal and universal rule, as if it were in itself a Christian duty. It may well be useful to some, and there will always be occasions when it should come natural to all. If it helps a man to real self- government, it justifies itself. If it makes him more gentle and loving instead of irritable, more prayerful instead of less, if it gives him more control of his whole nature, and if it expresses real sincere repent- ance and desire for holiness, it justifies itself. But if 288 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT it, or any other method of formal reHgion, exposes a man to sin, to pride, to sloth, then it comes under the same condemnation as the forms of fasting which the Pharisees practised. The true view, and the scriptural, is Luther's sane judgment, " We do not reject fasting and other good exercises as damnable things ; but we teach that by these exercises we do not obtain remis- sion of sins," ^ That is to say, he will not allow a magical efficacy to a form, and will not let a method of personal discipline be elevated into a Christian duty. We must always distinguish between any form and the spiritual reality it is meant to embody. The com- mon mediaeval proverb, Cucullus non facit monachum ^ (the cowl does not make the monk), shows that it was quite well understood by spiritually-minded men that the mere withdrawal from the world might not mean any real change of heart. Many passages in the Imi- tatio Christi, for example, recognise this, such as, " The wearing of the religious habit, and the shaving of the crown, profit but little ; but change of majuners, and perfect mortification of passions, make a true religious ^ man." * Only as we realize that there is no merit in any form in itself, will we be saved from the many temptations of formalism,, and be able to use a form for our own best life. It might be good for some to fast who do not, to practise some con- tempt for the material side of life, which to-day * Com. on Galatians, ii. 3, ad. loc. * Shakespeare makes the clown translate the proverb as " I wear not motley in my brain." — Twelfth Night, i. 5 ' Note " religious " has its usual reference to the monastic life. *Bk. I. chap. xvii. PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 289 threatens to engulf the soul. If we condemn any rigid rules like fasting, it should not be because of the greater laxity of our own lives, but because we have a higher and more spiritual standard, and be- cause our ideal is that religion should be the guiding spirit and paramount power in every region, of life, in the civil and social relations as well as what are called the more distinctively religious. It has always been common for frivolity and worldliness to condemn all forms of seriousness and zeal, just because these are a rebuke of selfish pursuit of pleasure and of soft complacent living. Puritanism and every kindred seri- ousness are sneered at, not for thte things in which they contradict the spirit of the Christian faith, but for the things which in them are essentially Christian. The easy worldly temper objects to the earnest and zealous interpretation of religious duty. Rather, we would admit the profound truth and universal obli- gation of self-denial, which lias so often been clothed in ungainly forms, but which makes its imperious demand on us still if we would be true men ; only, all forms of self-denial must be alive with spiritual mo- tive and not dead mechanical rules ; and, if duty seems to prescribe them, they must be accepted not as them- selves parts of Christian duty, but as means to the great Christian ends of love and holiness and service. The physical treatment of the spiritual life by pre- scribed mechanical rules really puts t!he cart before the horse; for what is wanted rather is the spiritual treatment of the physical life, consecrating every power and activity by a sacred motive, putting all life on a moral basis. From this point of view our treat- 290 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT ment of the body will be regulated by the acknowl- edgment that it is an integral part of human nature, partaking of the fortunes of the life, sharing in its failures and successes, and contributing to both. It is the instrument of the soul, carrying out its behests; and at the same time it gives the points of contact through which the soul becomes rich or poor, noble or base. The body therefore demands care and discipline, the wise and strong guidance of mind, and heart, and spirit. It is only when the spiritual rules and directs that there can be permanent harmony, and the body become the servant and instrument of the higher. In this case also the treatment of the body becomes an outward symbol of the inward condition. Of all God's works which do this world adorn, There is no one more fair and excellent Than is man's body, both for power and form, While it is kept in sober government; But none than it more foul and indecent, Distemper'd through misrule and passions base; It grows a monster, and incontinent ^ Doth lose his dignity and native grace. ' This solemn sense of duty to the physical side of life is certainly part of the great lesson of the close connection of body and mind. The true attitude towards the body will be one neither of contempt, nor of weak pandering to its impulses. Something of self-reverence is implied in all adequate self-control. The great difficulty in any wholesale condemnation of the physical treatment of the spiritual life is that ^ Immediately. •Spenser, F(ierie Queen, Bk. ii. Canto 9. PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 291 we undoubtedly need method and the careful cultiva- tion of habit. It is easy enough to condemn the idola- try of form, into which men have been led, by concen- trating attention on the mechanics of prayer and the regulation methods; but all masters of the devo- tional life insist on the necessity of creating the oppor- tunities, and giving the soul the suitable environment for growth in grace. Devotional culture is as much the result of effort as mental culture. We recognise the cultured mind when brought into contact with it. It has fed itself with the food of thought, with wide and accurate reading, with careful study. We feel it has breadth and sweep, with nothing narrow in its judgmients. So we recognise the cultured soul, with the aroma of devotion and a peace that rebukes the fret and fever of the day — with holy eyes like the eyes of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, with rebellious heart curbed and brought into submission. All culture is the fruit of discipline; and this highest culture comes from the discipline of heart and will, through giving the soul the necessary occasions. If there is to be any depth of religious life at all, there must be a certain separateness, making the opportunities for the holy duty of " recollection," providing times for prayer and meditation, which make a man calm at the heart, and therefore strong for all the needs of living. The cultivation of the contemplative life is a valu- able feature in the purpose which inspired so much ascetic practice. In the emphasis which it laid on meditation there is no keen opposition to the rival ideal of culture, which also in a different way makes much of a similar aloofness, and insists on the value of soli- tude in producing a rich and deep life. Cowley says, 292 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT " To be a philosopher is but to retire from the world, or rather to retire from the world as it is man's, into the world as it is God's " ; and something of that inner retirement seems necessary, at once for the calm poise of nature and easeful mastery of work in the great artist, as well as for the repose of soul in the saint. In our busy practical life the temptation is to be engrossed in outside activities, with no time for the meditation by which the soul gathers itself at the centre, and withdraws from all distracting sights and sounds. Even in religious work it is common to find men with many admirable qualities, active, zealous, eager in all good causes, but with a shallow spiritual life behind, with little sweetness and winsomeness of char- acter, and little of the devotional spirit, and little of the attractive grace, which comes from shutting the door to be in secret with the Father, who seeth in secret. There is grim irony in Swedenborg's vision of the hell where everybody is completely busy in making everybody else virtuous. At the same time this separated life is not a matter of mere formal times of prayer and physical separation from the world. It is rather a cloister in the heart, a spiritual separateness, which brings a new motive able to cover all the tasks and duties of life which the faith imposes. Its essence is a self-surrender to the will of God, Hfting the whole life up to a new level, where the common domestic and social relations and the ordinary work of the world are consecrated. The ultimate test of the contemplative life is its effect on the active life; and the ultimate test of devotion is devotedness. We need method and form in religion as in all other spheres of life, but it is one of the great PHYSICAL TREATMENT OF SOUL 293 ethical revelations of our Lord that character is formed not by method, but by the open vision of Gk>d. The recognition of this alone will save method from its besetting- temptations, which we have been considering in this chapter. XI THE TEACHING OF JESUS ON ASCETICISM IN the gradual evolution of the mediaeval concep- tion of a saint, and in the growth of the ascetic ideal generally, it was assumed that renunciation of the world in the monastic sense was enjoined in the Bible, and was distinctly taught by Christ. The Church, however, even when it has held this most strongly, has not been quite consistent. The practical necessities of social life, and the stubborn facts of human nature, have compelled a modification of the position. For instance, it has always allowed and sanctictfied marriage for the majority of Christian peo- ple. By the perfect it might be considered an inferior condition of the religious life, but it was held legiti- mate for the general mass of believers. Indeed it has to be remembered that it was the Christian faith after all, which ennobled the whole family relation, and first put marriage on its true and high platform. A very peculiar illustration of the inconsistency, induced by the two different streams of tendency, is aflforded by the place which marriage ultimately received. In the mediaeval Church marriage was declared a sacra- ment, and yet the priest was deprived of this sacra- ment. The celibate life was supposed to be higher than the married life, and yet the latter had the addi- tional sacrament with the extra grace which a sacra- ment implied. It may have been because such needed 294 JESUS AND ASCETICISM 295 grace more, but there was an instinct in the Church of the true place of marriage, which thus found satis- faction in spite of the illogical position. Though from the middle of the third century onwards the ascetic tendency grew ever more strong, yet the Church did not make it a general rule, and got out of the dilemma, as we have seen, by the theory of two distinct moral codes — one representing a higher vocation, the other a more relaxed standard for weaker "brethren. Thus Tertullian, writing about second marriages, and vehe- mently denouncing them, speaks of two rules; one which tolerates what it cannot prevent, the other a state more in the line of God's preference. The seeming inconsistency of having two moral rules was got over by asserting that our Lord meant such items of the ascetic creed as renouncing property and abstaining from marriage, not as commands, but as counsels; so that those who do not practise these abstinences are not to be blamed, and all are not com- pelled to adopt them, because all are not capable of them. It was a counsel of perfection set for those able to receive it. Monasticism was declared to be " de jure divino, non praecipiente sed consulente." This is an impossible position, since Jesus in His teaching cer- tainly sanctioned no division of moral rule, and what He called perfection was to be pursued by all His fol- lowers without exception ; but it was a compromise which to some extent conserved the rights of ordinary Christians. And as a matter of fact the Christian life in the iirst centuries did not spend itself in barren asceti- cism, but brought new vigour into all the ordinary channels and occupations of the world's work. Chris- 296 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT tians pursued the ordinary avocations, entered into trade and the secular professions, accepted every inno- cent calHng, and only carried into these a new spirit of honesty, and diligence, and unselfishness. There are many indications that their example of integrity in their business life, and of purity in their home life, did more for the spread of the faith than any reasoned pleadings. Tertullian, who became almost fanatically ascetic, makes a point of this in replying to the charge that Christians were a useless sort of people to the world at large. ** How can this possibly be," he asks, " since we mix with you as men, have the same food and clothing, and the same necessaries of life as your- selves ? We are no Brahmins, or Indian gymnoso- phists, who live in woods, or recluses in exile from other men. We know the gratitude we owe to God, our Lord the Creator of all, and we reject nothing He has given for man's use. We are indeed temperate in our enjoyment, lest we transgress by excess, or abuse His favours. Therefore we come to your forum, your baths, inns, workshops, markets, and enter into all other kinds of intercourse. We pursue with you navi- gation, war, commerce, we share in your arts and pub- lic works, and contribute to the service of the public." ^ It is essential to remember this practical inconsistency, which kept excessive asceticism a very small feature of the early Church, or our picture of these days will get hopelessly out of perspective. Still, with the steady growth of the tendency, it came to be a prevalent as- sumption that renunciation was indeed the very heart of Christ's teaching, and that the highest life to which He calls men is ascetic in character. * Tertullian, Apology, chap. xlii. JESUS AND ASCETICISM zgy This underlying conception of the Christian creed is by no means obsolete, but is tacitly maintained both by friends and by foes of the Christian faith. It was of course so understood by the whole mediaeval Church, and issued in the great monastic system, and is indelibly imbedded in the Church Calendar of the Saints. The Roman Catholic position is still that the life of renunciation and withdrawal from the world is the perfect religious life. All the varied forms of asceticism found in Church history owe their origin to this fundamental conception, that they were in sym- .pathy with the teaching of Jesus. All the mediaeval writers take for granted that, if Christ's will is to be perfectly performed, m^ must accept an ascetic creed. The Imitatio Christi, one of the sweetest and sanest of mediaeval books, has this as a presupposition. '' Flee from the throng of the world into the wilderness as much as thou canst : for the talk of worldly affairs is a great hindrance, although spoken with sincere inten- tion " ^ — and of course this advice is given to men who are already monks, as if the mere embracing of the monastic life were not a sufficient withdrawal. " Oh how strict and self-renouncing a life led those holy Fathers in the wilderness! . . . They renounced all riches, dignities, honours, friends, and kinsfolk; they desired to have nothing which appertained to the world; they scarcely took things necessary for the sustenance of life; they grieved to serve their bodies even in necessity." ^ A Kempis quotes their example of rigourous abstinence to rebuke the lukewarmness and negligence of monks of his own time, and to show what perfect following of Jesus must mean. A similar *Bk. I. chap. X. *Bk. i. chap, xviii. 298 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT presupposition is seen in many Protestant quarters, though not carried to the same logical conclusion as by the Roman Catholic Church. Usually it is stated as a vague sentimentalism, making much of renunciation as the doctrine of the cross, without any real sacrifice in it. We find in modern devotional books and in relig- ious poetry, as well as in all forms of pietism and mys- ticism, the underlying idea that in its ultimate issue the Christian faith asks for renunciation of the world, and that men attain to perfection in the proportion in which they give up the world. The thought makes many religious men uneasy, and has certainly increased for them the difficulties of leading the Christian life in the world. The notion that complete following of Jesus means abstention from the practical business and the ordinary activities of society has made many a conscience of believers morbid and strained. It tends to self-deception if Christians believe they should not find enjoyment from the common sources of human joy, and should as far as possible be free from the complications of active interest in the world of affairs, when as a matter of fact they cannot avoid the ordinary pleasures of life. Many who are sincere in their endeavour after the Christian life, cannot reconcile this faith with the inevitable necessity of mixing with the world. They have an uncomfortable assurance that they do get enjoyment from recreation of body, and from success in business, and from the pleasures of imagination, and from the ties of affection ; while at the bottom of their minds is the thought that religion at its highest and purest demands the renunciation of these. They cannot see their way out of the difficulty ; for they do JESUS AND ASCETICISM 299 not feel themselves called to sever their lives com- pletely from their ordinary environment; and yet they have a suspicion that to be a perfect Christian they should make a clean sweep of all participation in the world's pleasures. This creates a furtive and strained conscience, so that they are never quite at home in either world. They accuse themselves of self-indulgence, though they believe they have a sin- cere interest in religion. They do love God, and hon- estly desire to do His will; but they are tormented as to what it means, when they are told that they must not love the world, nor the things that are in the world. This uneasy conscience is to be directly at- tributed to the perhaps unexpressed idea of which we speak. In a previous chapter we have already referred to the common literary comparison of Christ with Apollo or some other of the Greek gods; and at the same time a comparison between the typical Christian life and the typical pagan life; the latter as simple and natural and joyous, a sort of victorious possession of the world; the former as unearthly, renouncing joy, and creeping out of the great experiences of life. Such comparisons always assume the ascetic character of Christ's life and teaching. Shorthouse, in his very popular book, John Inglesant, draws this contrast: " They were standing before the Apollo in the Belvi- dere gardens. Inglesant took from beneath his vest a crucifix in ivory, exquisitely carved, and held it beside the statue of the god. The one the noblest product of buoyant life, the proudest perfection of harmonious form, purified from all the dross of hu- manity, the head worthy of the god of day and of 300 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT the lyre, of healing and of help ; the other worn, and emaciated, helpless, dying, apparently without power, forgotten by the world." ^ Elsewhere he calls Christ " the Divine Ascetic who trod the winepress of the wrath of God." It must be evident to all how prev- alent the thought is that Christ, by His example and teaching, inculcated the principles of asceticism. A modem advocate of a modified monasticism in the Church of England ^ says boldly, that if any dis- passionate person could read for the first time our Lord's Sermon on the Mount, he would come to no other conclusion than that the life of the ascetic is distinctly ordained by Christ. Of course early defend- ers of monasticism insisted also that it not only received the sanction of our Lord's teaching, but that His own life was framed according to the well-known three rules of the monastic orders, Chastity, Poverty, Obedience. The same opinion as to the essence of the Christian faith is freely expressed by enemies as well as by friends. What some have thought the glory of the faith, namely that it produces men who make complete sacrifice of all earthly joy, is made by others an accu- sation in the count against Christianity. They accept to the full the thought that Christ's religion is at bot- tom ascetic; and then they turn the acknowledgment against it. Renan declares that Jesus boldly preached war against nature, and total severance from ties of blood, and asked from His disciples a complete detach- ment from the earth, arid the practice of absolute pov- erty ; and that His . requirements undoubtedly meant * John Inglesant, chap. xxv. ■Rev. F. C. Woodhouse, Monasticism, p. 6. JESUS AND ASCETICISM 301 the despising of the healthy limits of man's nature. He speaks of the harsh and gloomy feeling of distaste for the world, and of excessive self-abnegation, which characterises Christian perfection. He points to the danger, which threatened the future of this exalted morality. " By detaching man from earth, the ties of life were severed. The Christian would be praised for being a bad son, or a bad patriot, if it was for Christ that he resisted his father, or fought against his coun- try. The ancient city, the parent republic, or the law common to all, were thus placed in hostility with the Kingdom of God." The further consequence of course followed that the ideal of Jesus was impossible, as few could even attempt to realise the Utopia He pointed to. Renan declares that common sense revolts against the conclusion of asceticism, that perfection should be placed outside the ordinary conditions of society ; but his whole argument is to show, not the folly of the monastic ideal, but the failure of this part of Christ's teaching.^ It was natural for Renan, who was trained to be a monk, and who broke away from the position of his youth, to think that the monastic life was the ideal Christian life, for this was the presuppo- sition of his whole early education. The same acceptance of the thought that the Chris- tian creed is ascetic has often been made by others to show the ethical flaws in Christianity, to show that its system of morals *is impracticable, and cannot be ad- justed to ordinary human Hfe. The attempt is to prove Christianity to be unnatural ; for the plain man with ordinary healthy instincts feels that a religion, which demands the extirpation of natural impulses, * Vide argument of chap. xix. of Vie de Jesus. 302 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT can be no religion for him. He feels sure, without being able to give reasons, that his capacities were not given him to be crushed, and the world was not created to be renounced. He feels that the ordinary blessings of life are good in themselves, and that there- fore the religion, which has nothing to say to them, puts itself outside his practical interests. Similarly, the acceptance of the ascetic ideal as Christian has been made by socialists, who denounce the unworldliness of the faith, and assert that it mili- tates against the introduction of the new social and industrial conditions which they seek to promote. This is a common objection made by the party of reform, and by all who are keenly interested in ma- terial and secular progress, though they have no sym- pathy with theoretic socialism. The objection states that religion puts the emphasis on the future Hfe, and in the interests of the soul condemns worldly conditions; and so it impedes material progress, since it makes men willing to endure injustice, instead of rising up in wrath to put an end to it. And while this applies to the general temper of the Christian faith, it applies with thousandfold weight to the complete ascetic position, which is assumed to be the logical con- clusion of the faith. Civilisation, which is taken to be synonymous with temporal welfare, is advanced, we are told, not through the passive virtues like resigna- tion, which religion magnifies, but through compe- tition, through the desire for acquisition, through dis- content with the present, finding outlet in remedial measures. Religious faith robs the present of its full power by looking forward to a visionary future. It despises the ordinary life with its pleasures and occu- JESUS AND ASCETICISM 303 pations, and depreciates the active sphere in which men must live, since it makes spiritual contemplation the ideal. It does not love this world, and therefore does not make the best of it. Take a very typical quotation along this line of objection from W. R. Greg's The Creed of Christendom: " It is only those who feel a deep interest in, and affection for, this world, who will work resolutely for its amelioration: those whose affections are transferred to heaven acqui- esce easily in the miseries of earth, give them up as hopeless, as befitting, as ordained, and console them- selves with the idea of the amends, which are one day to be theirs. If we had looked on this earth as our only scene, it is doubtful if we should have tolerated its more monstrous anomalies and more curable evils. But it is easier to look to a future paradise, than to strive to make one on earth ; and the depreciating and hollow language of preachers has played into the hands both of the insincerity and the indolence of man- kind." 1 It might be answered to this particular charge that it is not so as a matter of fact, that, though we might perhaps expect those who looked to the future, and who lived in the power of an endless life, to be careless about temporal things, and think it not worth while even remedying glaring abuses ; still, as a matter of fact, the world's best benefactors, the men who have lived, and have been willing to die, for the good of their fellows, who have spent themselves in toil for every noble end, the men who have ever given the impulse to all reform, have been just the men who have believed in God, and been inspired by Christ's passion * The Creed of Christendom, p. 250. 304 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT for humanity, and have agonised for the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. It must be confessed, however, that sometimes the charge has received plausibility from the conduct of some, who have in the name of religion washed their hands of the temporal concerns of the great mass of men ; and of course in a completely consistent asceticism the charge would be absolutely valid. In substantiating the claim that the Bible taught an ascetic creed, the advocates of monasticism were somewhat hard put to it to find support from the Bible, and were often driven to interpret passages in a fanciful manner. The Old Testament on the face of it did not give much help, though it was declared that Elijah and Elisha were monks. There is a healthy naturalism in the Old Testament, which can hardly be missed even by a casual reader. It never looks on man as a soul degraded by being covered with a body; so the false contempt for the body has no place in Jewish thought. The traditional Jewish view made marriage both a duty and a privilege; and children are called the heritage of the Lord> The most characteristic feature of the early religion of Israel is a bright, joyous cheerfulness ; and, though the tone grew deeper and more sombre, it never could be called ascetic. It is true that we find such symptoms as the Nazarite vow to abstain from wine, and also the similar rule of the Rechabites, but these seem to owe their origin to a protest in favour of the simple life of older times ; and certainly they are not representa- tive of the g^eat stream of the national life, any more * Psalm cxxvii. 3. JESUS AND ASCETICISM 305 than the Essenes in the New Testament times were. In the second part of the Decalogue, which deals with the relations of man to man, the fundamental con- ditions of social life are frankly accepted. The mo- rality of the Old Testament indeed is founded on the basis of the family, one of the finest flowers of which is the honour to be shown to parents,^ All through the law and the prophets it is assumed that a true relation to Jehovah will evidence itself in moral integ- rity towards men, showing itself in honesty, and jus- tice, and truth, and scrupulous regard for the rights of others. Man indeed, by virtue of the spiritual prin- ciple with which he has been endowed, stands above the level of nature, clothed with a special dignity. The earth is given him to cultivate and make his own, and he is to multiply and possess it.^ Family life is looked on as the natural foundation for the moral and spir- itual wellbeing of the race made in God's image, as is implied in the account of man's creation : '' So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him, male and female created He them." Apart then from isolated texts, which seem to be wholly or partially ascetic in their character, the above is unmistakably the great general trend of Old Testa- ment religion. The repudiation of marriage is spe- cially opposed to genuine Jewish ideas, which find ex- pression not only in the Bible, but in the later Tal- mudic literature, as many references in the Mishna^ testify. * Fifth Commandment. ' Gen. i. 28. ' For example, " No one must withdraw from the duty of having children, unless he has children already, according to the school of Shammai two sons, according to that of Hillel at least a son and a daughter." — Jebamoth vi. 6. 3o6 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT The situation seems somewhat altered when we come to the New Testament, and it looks as if a good case could be made out on the other side. On the first blush it seems as if Christ meant His religion to be in its essence an ascetic one. Passages can be collated to appear as if He demanded from His disciples the extreme of renunciation. If a man is to win the Kingdom of God, he must be prepared to give up everything else, like the man who sold all his posses- sions to purchase the field in which was the treasure he had found.^ The renunciation is stated in all its absoluteness as a separation from his very nearest and dearest. " If any man come to Me and hate not his father and mother, and wife and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple," ^ which certainly does look like a warrant for all the extravagances of anchorites who interpreted it by fleeing from the world altogether. In the great decision there are to be no half measures, no partial renunciation, but complete detachment from the lower loves : " Whosoever he be of you that for- saketh not all that he hath, he cannot be My disciple." ^ The advice to the rich young ruler, " If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come and follow Me," * seems to prohibit all the worldly business which produces wealth ; since, if abso- lute poverty is a condition for discipleship, then it is folly to make wealth merely in order to strip oneself of it later on. That would be a dangerous tampering with evil. And what can look more like the setting * Matt. xiii. 44. ' Luke xiv. 26. 'Luke xiv. 33. '•Matt. xix. 21. JESUS AND ASCETICISM 307 up as an ideal the mutilation of all natural desires than the saying, " If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee; and if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee : for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell " ? ^ The very heart of His teaching is displayed in the profound saying, " Whosoever shall save his life shall lose it; and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it." « A hasty conclusion from such single passages would be to put them out of relation to the general teaching, and often also out of relation to the particular occa- sion which suggested each saying. Some of them were for an individual case, as with the rich young ruler, where the advice is the special cure from the diagnosis of his spiritual state. It was the reading in Church of this advice to the young ruler which in- duced St. Anthony, the father of Christian monasti- cism, to begin his career of strict asceticism. The words " If thou wilt be perfect, give all to the poor," stung him, and when he left the Church he gave away all his ancestral possessions and distributed all his money, with the exception of a small sum, which he kept for his sister. The next time he went to Church the word read was " Take no thought for the morrow," and so he then disposed of what he had retained for his sister, being ambitious for her also to be perfect. It may be noted in passing the inconsistency involved in making this a rule; for if the actual possession of property is an absolute hindrance to the spiritual life, ' Matt. V. 29, 30. ' Matt. xvi. 2$, 3o8 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT then to give it away is to benefit oneself by only adding a terrible temptation to somebody else. There is a cer- tain inevitable selfishness in the extreme ascetic posi- tion, similar to the selfishness in the opposite extreme of self-culture, both making the highest end a perfec- tion for self. A word which was made much of by the early ascetics was " Take heed to thyself," bring- ing often all the vices of morbid introspection and self-absorption. We constantly read of single phrases and texts being the instrument in driving men to become monks, as St. John the Calybite, who when a mere boy read in the Gospels, "He that loveth father and mother more than Me is not worthy of Me," and immediately ran away from home, and entered the Sleepless order of monks, so called be- cause they took turn at divine service day and night so that prayer and praise might ceaselessly ascend. This common practice of singling out special phrases suggests a further consideration in under- standing our Lord's teaching, namely, that our in- terpretation must take into account the form and method He constantly adopted. There was an im- pressive pregnancy in His manner of teaching, which seems to have been chosen by a deliberate principle, which Wendt ^ calls the principle of aiming at the greatest clearness in the briefest compass. He de- pended sometimes on startling antitheses, or sudden appeals, to gain entrance into men's minds. He often put His judgments and instructions in crisp, pointed sentences, which made them specially memorable. He selected cases of illustration, which brought out in the most vivid relief the deep religious truth He wished * Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, vol. i. p. 130. JESUS AND ASCETICISM 309 to inculcate. He did not weaken the force of the principle by needless details, or explanations, or modi- fications, which would apply in different circum- stances. It was not a system of precepts to be rigidly followed according to the letter, but a system of prin- ciples by which His disciples were thrown back upon conscience. He refused on many occasions to give the definite advice asked of Him. He spoke in parables, that men might be forced to make their own interpreta- tion, and face up to their own moral decisions. He would not, for example, adjudicate on the claims of wealth when a question of inheritance was earnestly asked.^ If He had, it might have been true for that instance and not for any other; so in reply He stated a principle about wealth which is true for all time. So, in all these passages of an ascetic colour which we have quoted, the deep eternal principle, which Jesus undoubtedly meant to enforce, is the imperious claim of the Kingdom of God over men, a claim so unique that a man must allow nothing to stand in the way, either of his entrance into the Kingdom, or of his duty towards it afterwards. But it is evident from His teaching that our Lord never contemplated that the possession of worldly goods, or intercourse with earthly relatives, or ordinary social life, were in themselves irreconcilable with the highest life as citizens of the Kingdom. It is the profoundest of religious truths that a man must give the complete and loyal devotion of his heart to the highest spiritual ends of the Kingdom of God, so that the solemn word will always remain true, " He that loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me." * Luke xii. 13. 310 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT But to see how foolish it is to assume that such a saying must necessarily mean the rupture of the ordi- nary parental ties, we need only think of some other scenes from the life of Jesus, such as that one where He displayed the most righteous scorn at the Pharisaic quibble which made it possible for a man to neglect an aged father or mother.^ Times may come when a man has to choose between obeying a higher law, and displeasing an earthly parent, as such times came to all the early Christians, whether they had been Jews or pagans. They had to break off from the past, and had to risk the domestic and social ruptures, which all such adherence to new truths involves. This alone is enough to explain the tone of urgency, and almost stem warning, with which Jesus spoke of the inevitable conflict between His faith and the prevailing tradi- tions and prejudices and established beliefs. He knew that He was sending fire on the earth, and was intro- ducing what would bring division and not j>eace in a surface sense.^ He knew that the faith must produce cleavage even in the closest relations of life, dividing father from son and mother from daughter; and in such conditions it was a true judgment which de- clared that no one was qualified to be a disciple of His, who was not prepared for the sacrifices that were bound to come. A correct estimate then of these hard sayings about renunciation must not only consider the eternal spiritual principle which under- lies them, but must also take into account the fact that they were spoken with reference to a period when severe conflict between the new and the old was inevitable. * Mark vii. lo flF. * Luke xii. 49-53. JESUS AND ASCETICISM 311 That he did not ask for the dissolution of the ordinary relations of life as necessary for disciple- ship, is evident from the view He took of marriage as absolute, ennobling, and consecrating it as a divine ordinance, " What therefore God hath joined together let not man put asunder." ^ The truth is, that in coming to a decision as to our Lord's position regarding this great problem, we must take the whole tenor of His teaching, and the spirit of His whole life, if we would not misunderstand Him. When we do this, we find that the ascetic position is a complete travesty of His gospel and of His own manner of living. He showed no stoical contempt for the necessaries of life, and did not take up an attitude of defiance of nature. He did not say with the Stoics that men should make them- selves independent of bodily needs — He simply and naturally accepted the fact of these needs, saying ten- derly, even in a counsel against over-anxiety, " your Heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of them " ^ while, on the other hand. His teaching was utterly opposed to anything like Epicureanism, which made these an end. He did not depreciate the body. His whole life was full of loving ministrations to the physical well-being of others, healing the sick, going about doing good. Apart from His teaching we need also to consider His example; for Jesus taught by what He was, and what he did, as well as by what He said. He did not live as an ascetic Himself. He Himself tells us that He was reproached that He was unlike John the Baptist in this, and was called " a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber," ^ because He did not practise the * Mark x. 9. ' Matt. vi. 2,2. * Matt. xi. ig. 312 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT austerities which John had made familiar. Nothing could be more illuminating on Christ's life in this re- spect than that criticism, which He accepts as marking Him off in the popular mind from John. He knew that He was misunderstood, and that He laid Himself open to grave objections, by refusing to lay stress on the outward rules, which the Pharisees and the dis- ciples of the Baptist thought so important. To Him the heart of John's teaching was his call to repent- ance, his proclamation of the advent of the Kingdom of Heaven, — the camel's hair raiment and the leathern girdle, and the food of locusts and wild honey were only accidentals though they affected the popular im- agination so much. Both the Pharisees, and the people generally, understood John, whether they were influenced or not. They understood the type of piety for which he was so eminent; but they stumbled at the carelessness for such external forms which Jesus displayed. They could not reconcile the high demands of holiness which He preached, with the sweet and sunny and natural life He lived. The description of the current impression which His life created, as op- posed to the ascetic character of John's life, is a fair description of our Lord's whole career viewed from the outside. The records are full of His social inter- course with all sorts of people, rich and poor, saint and sinner. He accepted invitations to feasts; went to a marriage; sat down to dinner with hospitable Phari- sees; was a frequent visitor at the house of Martha and Mary at Bethany. He had the instinctive human longing for companionship, which made Him desire to have some of the disciples with Him at the great JESUS AND ASCETICISM 313 crises of His life. No one can read the gospels with an unprejudiced eye, without feeling how preposter- ous is the ascetic contention that it is based on the re- quirements of the Christian life. " To an ordinary layman the life of an anchorite might appear in the highest degree opposed to that of the Teacher, who began His mission at a marriage feast." ^ Further, He did not impose on His disciples ascetic rules. We learn, for example, that the disciples did not fast, which was a recognised religious duty of the time — indeed they were taken to task for the neglect by the disciples of John the Baptist, who show by the form of their question their surprise that Jesus should allow such laxity. " Then came the disciples of John saying, Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but Thy disciples fast not ? " ^ In His reply Jesus defends His disciples, though without blaming John's disciples for fasting. " Jesus said unto them. Can the children of the bridechamber mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the day will come when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast." The principle of the answer is that men may fitly fast, when the outward form is in keeping with a real and natural feeling, in some sad season of their life, or some solemn crisis; but He would not encourage any formal, forced, or unnatural rite, out of harmony with the simplicity and joy in which His disciples lived. To create wilful mourning would have been foolish and sinful. It is remarkable, considering the high place as a rule of religion which fasting afterwards took in the * Lecky, Eur op. Morals, 11. p. iii. * Matt. ix. 14. 314 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT Church, that there are only two passages ^ in the gospels which indicate our Lord's attitude towards fasting: the passage above quoted, in which He ex- plains to John's disciples why His own disciples did not fast ; and the passage in the Sermon on the Mount, where He condemns the ostentation with which the Pharisees fasted, *' When ye fast, be not, as the hypo- crites, of a sad countenance; for they disfigure their faces, that they miay appear unto men to fast. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face; that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret." ^ The very refer- ences show how little such things bulked in His view of religion. He did not prescribe forms of fasting or set times, because to Him such forms were an offence, unless they corresponded with the inner state of mind and heart. Nor did He condemn fasting al- together as essentially wrong, but rather implied that there would be occasions when it would be natural. He ever laid the emphasis on the spiritual condition, not on any external forms whatever. A similar situ- ation to the complaint about neglect of fasting occur- red in the matter of ritual ablutions. The Pharisees complained, ' Why walk not Thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with un- washen hands? '^ The answer is an attack on the *The reference in Matt. xvii. 21 (Mark ix. 29), tcai vTjdTEia (" and fasting") is an addition of later mss., due to the grow- insr ascetic spirit in the Church. This is the case also with the references in Acts x. 30 and i Cor. vii. 5. ' Matt. vi. 16. ^ Mark vii. 5, and also Luke xi. 37, where the charge is brought against Jesus Himself by a Pharisee who was His host at dinner. JESUS AND ASCETICISM 315 external forms of purification and sanctity in such favour with the Pharisees, a condemnation of the ex- ternal method of attacking the problem of sin, which indeed is the mistake of all kinds of asceticism. Jesus not only did not impose ascetic rules on His disciples, but also He did not ask all men who believed on Him to forsake their ordinary work and follow Him, as He asked the inner circle of disciples to do. The special calling of the disciples was a practical necessity for the doing of the work He designed. Jesus asked others to remain in their place in life, and bring their faith to bear on all the circum- stances of their lot. When the demoniac who had been cured prayed that he might be with Him, " Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee." ^ The disciples were called on to make sacrifices for the gospel's sake, but neither in their subsequent practice, nor in their teaching after the death of Christ, do we find anything to indicate that they imagined that their Master had intended an ascetic community. The Apostles did not inaugurate a system of re- nunciation of the world. Their epistles are full of counsel about the practical affairs and the common relations of daily life. The epistles assume the ordi- nary social conditions, and show the Christian faith in- spiring these with a new spirit. We gather that the Apostles sometimes took their wives with them on their missionary journeys ; for St. Paul claims the right to do so as well as the other Apostles.^ St. Paul's natural temperament was ascetic, and he was * Mark v. 19. * i Cor. ix. 5. 3i6 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT ready to practice self-denial even in things which he counted lawful ; but he refused to make such a rule of Christian ethics. More than once in his epistles, after proclaiming the Christian faith as a principle of life, he goes on to show it fulfilling itself in elevating and ennobling the social and domestic duties and relations, husband and wife, parent and child, master and serv- ant.^ He does not imagine these natural relations as evil, but looks upon the faith as transforming and purifying them, exhibiting its power on the common levels of life. We find his fullest and highest thought on the subject of marriage in the great passage in the Epistle to the Ephesians, where he compares it to the spiritual union of Christ and His Church.^ The re- lation of marriage is glorified by the comparison, and is declared to be a vital unity of which love is the nexus, a state in which neither party is complete with- out the other. Even in the later New Testament litera- ture there is no suggestion of ascetic rules, but rather the protest against them grows stronger as heresies came into prominence. Thus in the First Epistle to Timothy, forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, are classed with the " doctrines of devils." ^ The epistle gives no ground for the law of clerical celibacy, since deacons and bishops are to be husband of one wife, and to rule their household and children well.* One of the deepest principles of the teaching, and it is in line with the whole Biblical view, is that the world should be used, not abused, and that God has given His children richly all things to enjoy. "^ *Col. iii. and iv. 'Eph. v. 22-33. *i Tim. iv. 1-3. *Ibid. iii. 2-12. 'Ibid. vi. 17. JESUS AND ASCETICISM 317 Besides being opposed to our Lord's manner of life, asceticism is opposed to the very spirit of His gospel, which came as an Evangel, a message of joy and good tidings. It was the revelation of God as the Father, and, since men were called to enter into communion with God, it was also the revelation of the infinite worth of the human soul. It is this spiritual relation to God, which is the heart of Chris- tianity. It is not a religion of particular command- ments, and explicit statutes, requiring certain things to be done and other things to be avoided. It lifts men out of the region of rules into the region of principles. It is spiritual communion with God, and so is pure religion itself, the ultimate religion, beyond which the soul of man cannot go. The fortunes of religion therefore are not bound up in any form, eccle- siastical or practical, and Jesus attached no import- ance to any external rules in themselves. They were not so much-xjpposfid*. as transcended b v Him, and treated as matters of indifference. He did not ask His disciples to practise certain ascetic commandments, as if these would infallibly bring spiritual blessings. What He did ask was singleness of heart, a tranquil, simple faith in God, which would keep them calm in all circumstances, and set them free from the bondage of the world. The Christian faith does not believe that the ordi- nary blessings of life are evil, or are worthless ; rather it looks upon them as given by the gracious love of our Heavenly Father, who knoweth that we have need of them. Men must not lose their hearts to any of these earthly things, but because of the larger love which is opened up to them. They are to seek first 31 8 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT higher things, the Kingdom of God ; they are to live in humble sweet natural dependence on God, using the good gifts of His providence as not abusing them. All things, earthly goods, earthly relations, the earthly life itself, are to be consecrated to the great interests of the Kingdom. That the Christian life demands self- denial Jesus taught distinctly. If the will is to be sanctified and submitted to God, there must be strenu- ous self-control and sleepless discipline. He demanded from His disciples the willingness to renounce personal gratification, and if need be for the Gospel's sake give up everything, even life itself ; but that is not a general system of renunciation as a religious method, such as asceticism means. Christian sacrifice is not a self- inflicted thing to produce some spiritual good, as if perfection could be achieved by any external form. We have seen that there may be a formalism in the practice of ascetic rules, more deadly to the soul than any other formalism. Self-denial must always have a place in the Christian life, if need be to the cutting ofif a hand and plucking out an eye, though at the best that is to enter the Kingdom maimed; but to look upon mortification as in itself a virtue is a perversion of our Lord's Gospel. What He asks for is love, not the painful austerities which minister to spiritual pride. He asks men to accept God as their Father, and live humbly and sweetly in the light of that fact. He asks men to live in the same filial relation as He did, to come after Him in spirit, in spite of the ambitions and desires that war against the good, and in spite of the evil of the world. To come after Jesus needs prayer and care and discipline, as all who have bent to the King's Highway of the Holy Cross know; but most JESUS AND ASCETICISM 319 of all it needs, and this is the centre of His message, a heart at rest, a heart fixed on God in simple trust and humble love. "Nothing so completely reveals the consistent atti- tude of the New Testament toward this whole subject as the petition of the Intercessory Prayer, " I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil." * In face of full knowledge of the bitter hatred and cruel malice of men, and of their moral insensibility and passive opposition to spiritual things ; and in face of full knowledge of the subtler danger to true life in the numberless seductions and alluring temptations that clamber at the heart, the prayer accepts the situation as the proper environment of Christian life. It was first of all for the world's sake. The choice and train- ing of the Twelve meant only the small beginning of the Kingdom, the first reddening of the dawn, the faint flush along the eastern sky. To pray that the disciples should in any form be taken out of the world would be to give up the work at the start, to falsify the past, and to relinquish the future. It was also for the disciples' own sake; for discipline is just the process ordained for disciples, and character is no hot-house plant. There is a form of piety which has many at- tractions to the meditative contemplative temper, with- drawing itself from the rough work-a-day world, and spending itself in devotions. There is a sweetness of mind, and an attractive culture of spirit, to be got in retirement ; but that may not necessarily be a sign of a strong character. The ungenial surroundings, the untoward lot, the very temptations, may be the condi- *John xvii. 15. 320 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT tion of a man's sanctification. The ordinary relations of life, with their duties and responsibilities, with their trials and sorrows and joys, are the divinely ap- pointed environment to develop character, and to train disciples into robust vigour of life. It is easy to keep the hands clean by keeping them from work, and easy to have a kind of refinement of soul by shirking con- tact with the coarse outer world; but the secret of life can never be attained by moral cowardice, and never by the selfishness which would disentangle the life from the lives of other men. Jesus desired for His disciples the culture of character, which comes from the good fight of faith in the world. OF THE • OF XII THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION THE two opposing methods which we have been considering reflect the conflict in human na- ture, the facts that seem to contradict each other; and each of the methods ignores the other side, and is bHnd to what does not tell in favour of its particular theory. Self-culture is really based on a form of optimism, which gaily assumes that nothing more is wanted but the harmonious and joyous develop- ment of all the powers existing in man. It has infinite faith in natural education to draw out latent capacities of power and joy, and so to make life sweet and sane. Self-restraint as an exclusive method is essentially a form of pessimism, which has little faith in the nat- ural, and has no confidence that, even if the best means of culture be used, the result will be of much value. It is so impressed with the presence of evil in man and in the world, that the harmony is always turned into discord; and it sees no hope for ultimate good, except by heroic measures for the extirpation of the evil. Whatever be our special sympathy with either of these extremes, according to our particular mood of mind, we must accept the facts on which both are founded, if we are to approach anything like a full and true solution. We can accept what each asserts, without being bound to follow each in what they deny. We bow to the Hebraic preaching of the necessity for 321 322 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT moral discipline, and also to the Hellenic gospel of the love of the beautiful and the joy of living; but we need not assent, when Culture makes light of sin as if it did not exist except in some morbid imaginations, or when Restraint rejects the fairest flowers of natural joy and human genius. The facts which give force and weight to the aesthetic ideal are unimpeachable, and every fresh soul that enters the world instinctively expects its share of what seems its natural birthright of light and joy. No doleful pronouncement of " vanity of vanities " will convince the heart of youth that the world can be only a diabolic instrument to ensnare the soul and that the rich powers of mind and imagina- tion and heart are only to be discarded. If repression be the secret, then its task is unending; for it would need to be begun again with every new life, which comes endowed with the same keen zest for the mere act of living, and with the same deep instinct for self- expression. The ascetic ideal also takes firm stand on facts, and experience only increases their force, and adds to their number. No surface scheme of cul- ture, however garishly it paints the prospect, can for long cover over the ugly symptoms, and hide the evil taint in life. Nor can it even secure the happiness it promised, having no protection from the blows of misfortune, and no safeguard against the inevitable disillusionment. The pain and sorrow of life are facts to the believer and the unbeliever alike; and all that unbelief can do, at its best or at its worst, is to rob the facts of their redemptive purpose, and empty them of any intelligible or moral meaning. Whether we have any prospect of reconciling them THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 323 or not, our first duty is to admit the deep-seated antagonisms of human life, to accept the conflict in man's nature, the combined glory and penury of his life. To be true to all the facts, we must see amid the nobility and achievements traces of the sordid and base; and also see a soul of good in men and things evil. This is the Christian position, the simple acceptance of both sides, looking with clear eyes on the whole situation. On the one hand it rejects the rose-coloured optimism, which is wilfully blind to the tragic facts, and which sees in history and experience nothing but easy steps of progress towards perfection ; and on the other hand it rejects the bland denial of pessimism, which means despair of good, and in the final issue means unfaith in the divine element of the world and human life. It sees sin in man, but its last word is not sin but redemption. The world is full of menace to good, a place of trial and discipline, but it is God's world, with beauty, and truth, and joy. To see how completely the antagonisms of life are accepted, we need only think how the heart of the Christian faith can be expressed by the word Reconciliation. Its very purpose was to reconcile, and bring together, all that stood in unnatural opposition through sin. Its work is to reconcile man to God, and man to man, and all the diverse unrelated parts of man's nature with each other in a centre of unity. All the discord is changed to harmony by reconciling man to God; for with that all other reconcilements come. The deepest thought of Christ's teaching and life is simple confi- dence in God, as seen both in the world and in human life, recognising Him in nature and in man. This consciousness of the divine takes precedence of all 324 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT else, and becomes the great inspiring motive, driving the Hfe to noble ends, and at the same time putting everything into its rightful place in the large scheme. A faith like this rises above any seeming contradic- tion between elements, such as the contradiction be- tween reason and faith, or between culture and re- straint as opposing ideals. It solves the problem, not by denying one side, but by carrying both sides up to a higher point, where the practical contradictions are merged in a principle of life. There can be no true victory, except by a real reconcilement, by showing the place of both in the plan of life — never by a policy of extermination on either side, either by culture affect- ing to ignore the moral appeal of sacrifice, or by re- straint ruthlessly trampling on the legitimate claims of the other. It must be by a reach forward and upward to a larger ideal. /Historically this was so; for Christianity reconciled Hebraism and Hellenism by a form of knowledge and of ethics that was made accessible to all classes and races, leaving the old battlefield behind. The struggle in Palestine, which was referred to in our first chap- ter, between the sons of Zion and the sons of Greece, seemed doomed to end in the complete triumph of Hellenism, which could only have been a barren vic- tory. When the champions of Jewish religion were the Pharisees, with their hide-bound formalism and eccle- siastical pedantry, no other result, however, was to be expected; for all that they could hope to do was to preserve a little section of the world in some shady corner outside of the great stream of civilisation. It seemed a lost battle for Israel, till the hopes of the true Israel revived in Christ. His religion conquered THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 325 the world, indeed saved it from despair and death, and gave it new youth and new Hfe. The gospel of culture, which was all that Greece had to offer, could only at the best gild the outside of life, could only direct taste, and adorn the cup and platter: it could not redeem the world from sin, and chain the beast in man, and deliver both Greeks and barbarians from a reprobate mind. Hellenism had to go down before the higher ideal of Zion, but it was not the form it took from the hands of the Pharisees that accomplished the victory; but from One who was neither son of Zion nor son of Greece, but both — because Son of Man. It was no narrow, sectional, parochial Zionism which overthrew the might of Rome and the grace of Greece. It was the gospel of the eternal love of God, wide as the needs of man, for Jew, and Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond, and free. It begins in the deeps of human nature, dealing with the heart of hearts, cleansing from sin, recon- ciling man to God, and then setting him to live the reconciled life. It is not a scheme of culture, nor a system of philosophy; but religion, founding itself on moral sanctions, fulfilling the law and the prophets, enforcing the obligations of duty, bending the neck to a yoke, even pointing to the glory of a cross; all because it brought man into a new relation to God, which made any moral demands easy and any com- mandments light. And its end is not the curtail- ment of life but its enlargement, so that there is room for the development of every gift of brain, and heart, and soul; for it takes the whole man, afford- ing each gift a higher platform from which to work, elevating and inspiring them with a new and larger 326 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT ideal. At its historic introduction we see it enriching Hfe to men, bringing the broadening of opportunities, and the expansion of powers. It Hfted forward the hfe of man with a great impulse, giving even to the most degraded undreamt of possibilities, making a slave a free spiritual being, leading him out in spite of his serfdom into a large place. It ennobled life to souls in the narrowest surroundings. It changed the face of the world, revived the outworn pagan hfe, making all things new. It is so still even in our Christian age. The narrow lot of man is broadened whenever he comes into the filial relation to God, and there is always in it the pyotency of continual expansion. It introduces a new motive power which changes the current of life, and offers a new outlook which changes the standpoint of life. This enlargement of life through faith is a fact of experience, which all who have bent to the strait gate know. First of all it comes as an enlarge- ment in the life of thought. Reconciliation with God should mean sympathy with, and therefore insight into, all His works. Just as monotheism, the revelation of the One God, meant for the world an almost infinite intellectual advance beyond the conceptions of lords many and gods many of Paganism, so the further revelation of the character and nature of God means an almost infinite intellectual advance to the mind that will fearlessly and consistently accept it, as Kepler said of his astronomical studies, " I think the thoughts of God after Him." Faith enlarges the horizon of Hfe, leads out of narrow contracted views of the universe to the acceptance of all truth. All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are open to the believing mind ; THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 327 for they are all broken lights of God in whose light alone we see light. " The invisible things of Him, since the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made." ^ But the horizon of life is broadened chiefly by means of the enlargement of heart. It is not merely the gain in a truer and higher standpoint, and is more than an intellectual conception unifying the whole universe by the thought of the One God, the eternal immutable will which combines all phenomena, and all laws, and all groups of laws. The enlargement of life to the individual comes rather as an emotional force than an intellectual. The consciousness of God changes the world to a man. We lie at the outer porches of the pool of life, a great multitude of impo- tent folk, blind, halt, withered, waiting for the mov- ing of the waters ; and to know the love of God is like the entrance of the Good Physician with His word of power, " Rise and walk." The Christian faith touches the heart with love, and so gives the life a new buoy- ancy. The world ceases to be the scene of petty deeds and trivial events, and becomes a wide theatre of action, in which man plays his part before high heaven. Everything takes meaning and purpose from the great motive : duty is ennobled by the new spirit in which it is faced. The things done may be the same small ordinary details of living, but they are glorified by being done for love. That is why throughout the ages it has ever been possible, nay easy, for men, if need be, to suffer for the sake of Jesus. In the midst of out- ward loss, with the cutting off of earthly joys, with the shutting up of worldly prospects, with the narrowing Romans i. 20. 328 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT of life all round, there has ever been to His followers an enlargement of life, a deepening and broadening of the true sources of life, and even a joyous exultant sense of victory through Him that loved them. And the enlargement of life which thus comes is not a temporary thing, like the high- water mark made by a river in a time of flood. It remains a permanent possession to the soul. It is not a mere emotion, which uplifts the heart in a spasm of feeling, and then de- flates it when the feeling passes. It registers itself on the whole life ; for it carries with it a moral and spirit- ual enlargement, as well as an intellectual and emo- tional. It means an increasing power to be and to do, a true expansion of life as well as of the mind and heart. The Christian faith is ever a state of becom- ing; the goal is the perfectness of God, and every advance in the scale of being is a stage towards that high end. Christ gives a man power to become, open- ing up new possibilities of thought and feeling and action. The psychology of it is just the introduction of a new motive of love in the heart, which carries the life forward with a rich sense of freedom. We have already seen in our consideration of the failure of the ascetic method of dealing with sin, that the Christian attitude is life in the spirit, not futile battling against physical conditions. If a man lets love reign in the heart it will give power in the life, lifting it to higher levels of moral dignity, with victory over sin, and mastery of weakness, and a simple strong ful- filment of duty even when there seems little pleasure in it; for instead of pleasure there comes joy, filling the channel with a full flow " brimming and bright and large." THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 329 In all Christ's teaching on self-denial it must never be forgotten that it always meant to Him some larger good. Self-repression was always a stage to a truer self-expression; any giving up of self would result in the true finding of self. Thus, some common state- ments of the method of Christ are so onesided as to make them caricatures of His method ; for they leave out of account the great positive end. The end is not ^_ a broken, wounded life, but fulness of life, true life for the first time, so large and full that it can be called even here eternal life. It is not the process which is to be judged, but the object achieved. To say that religion means shrinkage and the attenuation of life, is to consider a few peddling details, and to be blind to the result. The result is not ebb, but flow. The work of religion must be judged like all work, by the product not by the process; and this at least is true, whether it be in accordance with the actual facts or no, that Jesus set forth as the fruit of His faith not the decrease of powers but their development, not atrophy but growth, and that He aimed not at the contraction of life but its extension. We are easily deceived about this, because we look so much on the externals. We see religion making a man give up this and that, cur- tailing here and there, sometimes we see even what looks like cutting oflF a right hand and plucking out a right eye; and we are inclined to think that rehgion means the weakening and impoverish- ing of life. But faith can dispense with much of the outward, just because it enriches the inward. Even when it seems to mean restraint on the surface, it deepens the real life, and brings the joy of expansion. When it appears as the absolute loss of life as men 330 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT count loss, its express purpose is the gaining of life. To be open on the side of God, responsive to spiritual in- fluences, is to have unclosed a larger and ever larger world of thought, and feeling, and aspiration. " What was a speck expands into a star." Restraint, in Christ's thought, is always a stage to a truer culture, a completer saving of the life. He asks for obedience, and when we obey we discover that in obeying Him we are obeying the law of our own life: He asks for service, and when we serve we learn that His service is perfect freedom : He asks us to lose our life, and lo, in losing it we find it. Part of the message in the great Christian thought of dying to live is that a man through the death of his narrow selfish life enters into the larger life of love and service of others. This is one of the deep reconciling ideas, which combine the antithesis between culture and restraint, and explain many of our difficul- ties. We have seen how the ideal of self-culture failed often, because it led to selfishness and a dis- regard of social duty. If self-realisation be pursued for its own sake, we cannot wonder that we should often find as the result, a narrow exclusiveness, and sometimes an inhuman egotism. We have to admit the force of the same criticism passed on the ascetic ideal when looked on as an end. One of the causes of its failure is due to ignoring the duty of service, which is really a distinctively Christian method of dying to self. This social side of life represents a task of religion, just as surely as the duty of personal THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 331 sanctity. Indeed in their deepest roots they are both connected, so that the one is impossible without the other. To dream of keeping self unspotted, after having wilfully cut off relations with other men, shows a lamentable mistake as to what true holiness really is. Men do not exist as single entities, each separate in the inviolable sanctity of personality; they exist in society, dependent on each other, bound together for weal or woe. Civilisation is a social thing, and is only possible tlirough society. Any return to na- ture, either in the name of religion or in the name of philosophy, as French writers before the Revolution preached, means putting the clock back to the begin- ning again. To break down human society to its original atoms would lead to anarchy; and the whole toilsome journey would need to be made over again. Man has grown to his present intellectual and moral stature through the social relations; so that to re- nounce them would not only make an end of further progress, but would also lose for us all past gains. Voltaire said wittily about Rousseau's doctrine that he preached the return to nature so eloquently that he almost persuaded men to go on all fours. The witty remark cuts deeper even than Voltaire meant; for any return to nature in the sense of cutting the cord of society would indeed be a descent to the animal state. Any voluntary withdrawal from the social bond is, at once a wrong to a man's own best life, and is a social offence. It does not surprise us to find in read- ing the Lives of the Saints that many of the most devoted of anchorites lost the highest attributes of manhood, as we see even from books that are carefully 312 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT edited to show people the sanctity attained by them. It does not surprise us also to find that monasticism easily beat out of the ground all forms of anchorite life, though monasticism after all was a compromise, and the other was the only true logical position. Still monasticism was able to endure, while the other dwindled, simply because it included to some extent the task of service to the world, in addition to the task of personal holiness. Withdrawal from the world in any form, whether for the exclusive culture of self or for ascetic disci- pline, runs counter to the instincts implanted in us, that we need society, that only through contact with our fellows can we reach our best life. To be cut off from sympathy with ordiriary life, from common fel- low-feeling, is a loss which nothing can compensate, not the finest culture of mind, and not even beatific vision. Men have tried all sorts of modified ways of reducing the social contact, and thus escaping defile- ment. Take, for example, the gift of speech. We know well the necessity for restraint here; for we know the evil of a wayward tongue, and we know that speech represents temptation like every other gift. Men have been so conscious of the countless ways in which language may be abused that they have some- times thought the way out of the difficulty was to give up speech altogether. St. Bruno, the founder of the great Chartreuse Monastery, made silence one of the rules of the order. According to this rule the tongue was only to be used in the service of God, not in ordinary conversation with men, the purpose being to avoid much of the sin of the world. How false the conception which underHes this is we can see, even THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 333 if it were a successful method of reaching holiness, which it is not. Speech is the medium of all knowl- edge, all social education, all civilisation, all that lifts man above the beasts. The inherent falseness of asceticism is seen here, as if Grod could be glorified by wilful refusal to use a gift with which he has endowed man. It implies a breakdown of the very principles of human society ; and even if such methods were suc- cessful in keeping a man unspotted from the world, it would be by sacrificing the whole for the good of a part. It would be the selfish seeking of personal good by throwing overboard humanity. To recommend self-sacrifice on selfish grounds is to take away any moral value an act of virtue has, and would be at the best prudential morality. Sacrifice is ennobled by love, and is degraded when love is absent. Self-denial when reduced to a system may become a subtle form of self-assertion, as truly as self-culture can be. A life may be full of asceticism without any true sacrifice in it; for if love be absent from sacrifice, though a man give his body to be burned it profiteth him nothing. A religious method, which is anti-social in its tendency, leads to a reductio ad absurdum; for no method can be truly religiously successful, which lands its followers in a selfish way of living. It shuts the eyes to social duty, and cer- tainly gives ground for the sneer that religion is only another form of selfishness. If love be the bond of perfectness, that implies social privilege and social duty; for only through others can love be truly de- veloped. It cannot live in a vacuum, without objects on whom affection and service are expended. The higher parts of our nature remain starved and stunted, 334 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT if we refuse the social burdens and ties, whether for a self-absorbing scheme of culture or for a method of purity. '' Entangle not thy heart with any creature," ^ says A Kempis, but it is part of the divine education of life that we should be so entangled. The sweetest and noblest qualities of human nature, sympathy, charity, patience, friendship, love, are alone developed through the ties that bind us to our fellows, in the family, the Church, the state. This spiritual culture in the higher graces is at- tained, it is true, often through self-denial, but it is self-denial in the midst of the relationships of daily Hfe; not by inventing artificial discipline, but by ac- cepting the ordinary occasions of life with their duties and responsibilities. This may seem a slow method, rather than the flashy one of cutting the knot alto- gether, but it is the only sure method, the only way a true and strong character can be built up. Emerson says with insight, " There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities and spends on essentials; that goes rusty and educates the boy; that sells the horse but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms at the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again." ^ If our hearts and lives were not entangled with others, we could never rise to the heights of our nature. It is true that our social environment implies temptation and danger, but that ^ Imitatio Christi, Bk. ii. chap. viii. Conduct of Life, chap. iv. THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 335 is inseparable from moral life, and only thus is the education of the heart made possible. Even from the point of view of personal happiness, this is reached not by selfishness, but by the develop- ment of sympathy and love. Disinterested work for others, the cultivation of the unselfish side of life, will enlarge a man's horizon, and lift him out of personal cares, and save him from the pain of morbid intro- spection. This culture of heart, which is after all cul- ture of character, is of more importance than intellec- tual development. It is also an ideal for all in a fuller way than culture of intellect can ever be. To comparatively few come opportunities for complete in- tellectual training, but all can practise unselfishness, the quiet fulfilment of duty, generous thought, and gentle deed. The instincts of pity, and help, and charitable emotion, find their scope in the common relationships and the social duties of life. The oppor- tunities for true self-denial come in the ordinary con- duct of life; and true sacrifice is all in the line of duty. It comes to a man when he must adhere to truth, when he must choose the higher and give up the lower at the call of conscience, when he must deny himself in order that larger interests than any personal ones may be served. The most powerful force in developing individual character comes from serving an ideal outside of self, not from seeking a harmonious growth of virtues and graces. This criticism applies to both of the ideals we have been considering, but more especially to the one which claims to be the distinctively religious one. A man cannot be said to be holy, though he has kept himself unspotted from evil, if with it all he lives a hard 336 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT and loveless life, and if he has passed by the world's work and duties and interests; for holiness is not a negative state, but means attainment, character, in- creasing likeness to God whose nature is Love. The Christian salvation is social as well as individual: it could not really be the one without the other also. Our Lord's purpose was to found a kingdom of souls working out to social ends, a kingdom of men and women living in loving relation to each other through their loving relation to God. The Christian faith in God carries with it as an inevitable consequence the service of man. The training of the twelve, to which Jesus gave most of His public ministry, was not an end in itself, but a means to a greater end. The Kingdom of Heaven was like leaven put into meal till the whole should be leavened. Pure religion and un- defiled is designed, not only to preserve good men from contamination, but also to save the world. When the ideal of religion does not include the active practical life, it means an immense loss to the world, as has often been proved in the history of the Church. The number of hermits and coenobites of Egypt in the fourth century seems incredible. They covered the desert in thousands, mostly living in monasteries, though many of them as solitaries. It was irreparable loss to the world, as it has been down the Christian ages since, of so many of the best citi- zens, men and women who were in earnest, who really desired to serve God, and whose standard was high above that of the world they left. Some of the wisest of the Fathers saw this danger of loss to the Church and the world, and strove to show that all gifts of the Spirit were given to be used on behalf of others. THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 337 The gathering of ascetics under monastic orders was indeed a piece of early Church statesmanship, that they might be brought under discipHne, and be utiHsed for service. Chrysostom, himself a monk, and who was profoundly impressed by the ascetic ideal, con- demned those who lived in solitude without a sense of responsibility for others, condemned Christians who take possession of the mountains instead of taking possession of human life. "How shall we conquer the enemy," he asks, " when some have no care for virtue, and those who are interested for it, retreat to a distance from the order of battle ? " ^ The withdrawal of sincere Christian life from actual contact with the world is an irreparable loss to the world. When the finest spirits live only for their own improvement, whether that be of mental or of spiritual powers, in- stead of employing their gifts for the common good, the result cannot but be fatal to everybody. The recognition of this by the leaders of the Church made them encourage monasticism as the Christian ideal rather than any form of hermit life. The thought of service was never quite lost sight of, though it was often in danger of sinking to a very secondary posi- tion. When Gregory of Nazianzen and Basil were young men studying at Athens, they decided to aban- don the great worldly prospects which lay before them, and yet they felt the extreme form of withdrawal to be only a disguised sort of selfishness, and so they chose the compromise which included the opportunity of service. Gregory speaks of two ascetic disciplines, that of the solitary or hermit, and that of the secular, the first thinking only of some personal good, the other * 6th Homily on ist Ep. to Cor, 338 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT the larger good of others. The monastic Hfe to some extent combined both, offered seclusion and retirement, and yet did not exclude the sweet ministry of love which is so essentially Christian. I saw when men lived in the fretful world, They vantaged other men, but risked the while The calmness and the pureness of their hearts. They who retired held an uprighter port, And raised their eyes with quiet strength towards heaven. Yet served self only, unfraternally. And so, 'twixt these and those, I struck my path, To meditate with the free solitary. Yet to live secular, and serve mankind.^ This purpose of service was in the minds of many who chose this life, withdrawing from the engross- ments of the world, in order to be of greater service to the world. Even though we may condemn the particular his- toric form it took in the monastic system, yet we must remember that the same two notes found in Gregory's decision must be combined for the highest kind of social service. The qualifications for the best use- fulness are detachment and sympathy, an aloofness of spirit, if not of life, along with sensitiveness to the needs and sorrows and sins of men. It is only the man, whose own personality has been enriched, who has any real contribution to make to the wealth of the world. Capacity for service ultimately depends on the fruitfulness of the self. This is the distinct place for all kinds of culture, not as an end in itself, but as means to the wider end of service. Social betterment in any true sense, as more than the mere rearrange- * Newmap, Historical Sketches, vol. ii. p. 57. THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION / . 339 ment of external conditions, can only come from m- dividual character and intellect. The production of that is a primary duty, even for the sake of others. A man's contribution to society will mean all the riches and resources of his nature, his heritage of race, and personal capacity, and education. Social good will be advanced, not by impoverishing the self, but by letting it grow to its full stature, by doing the work best fitted for the special talents, and by giving them the highest education possible. Everything, of course, will depend on the aim and spirit of the culture. There are dangers, some of which we have seen in discussing the Defects of the Esthetic Ideal,^ but these dangers must be faced, and they can safely be faced with tliis religious thought of the consecration of gifts; for the religious ideal of service will save a richly endowed personality from his besetting temptation of the selfish use of his powers. The artistic temptation, to look upon life as aflFording material for art, will be dispelled by the larger and deeper thought of serving men, rather than of using them even in that refined sense. The same is true of the spiritual detachment, which the ascetic ideal embodied so fully. All the outlets of human activity are meant to be laid hold of by Chris- tian men, and made sacred by sanctified use. No seem- ing victory over indwelling sin can make up for the terrible waste of power for good, which might make the desert of life blossom like the rose; and any such victory, unrelated to the actual conditions of life, is more apparent than real. True self-control is to be got in the midst of the struggle : it is not mutilation of natural desires, but the subordination of each desire to ^Ante, chap. iii. 340 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT the good of the whole man, and ultimately also to man as a social unit. It is the task of life to acquire the wisdom which can do this well, which can live in the world, doing the duty of the world, accepting all the responsibilities and temptations of the situation, and yet untainted by the evil of the world. The King- dom of God is the great Christian end. Service is the Master's last word for the instruction of His disciples. They are to go unto all the world ; and the command is not only extensive in its sweep but also intensive in its working. The sphere of the Christian activity i . the whole range of human life, bringing love to the world's woes, and love also to the world's work. A loveless saint thus becomes a contradiction in terms. We have here another illustration of the way ex- tremes meet ; for we find both of the ideals leading men to shut themselves off from the sordidness of the world in some form of isolation, the one for the de- velopment of mental gifts, the other for spiritual con- templation, both neglecting the practical call to con- secrate all gifts to service. Complete self-culture and complete holiness are alike impossible without rocial service; for the atrophy of the highest parts of our nature results from any selfish plan of life. Any scheme of self-culture, or any scheme of self-denial, is no true end for man, and are at best means cowards a higher end. Self-denial can often be justified as being for the sake of a higher self -culture, and can always be justified when inspired by love. In the ultimate issue self-culture also can only be so justified. Culture is but the polishing and sharpening of an in- strument to make it serve for the best work. Exten- sion of knowledge, refinement of feeling, education of THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 341 taste, and all the noble results of culture, may minister to a subtle selfishness, but they may legitimately be sought that we may be qualified for the better service of life. Certainly culture, which would be Christian, must come under that law, which is the law of the Christian life. Love and holiness are the two strands, and without love holiness cannot be, since love is the fulfilling of the law. The Christian heart must serve, must bend to duty and all gentle ministry. There may be an aloofness of soul, the unspotted mind, the ex- alted life, combined with humble service of men — nay, there must be both of these elements, found in such perfect harmony in our Lord Himself. Words- worth, in his great sonnet on Milton, expressed this combination of a noble life — Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart: Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life's common way, In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart The lowliest duties on herself did lay. How true it is, that love must test all life, is seen even in the narrower sphere of the subject-matter of art itself, and the spirit in which it must be produced. Great art is not done for beauty's sake alone, but for the sake of humanity. It is not art for art's sake, as is the common cant of some art circles, not even art for truth's sake, as Browning amended the phrase, but art for love's sake. If the artist forgets to think of how it affects human life, if he withdraws himself in spirit from the vulgar throng, if he loves beauty for itself, if he puts away from him the opportunity 342 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT of serving mankind, if he has no desire to give strength or consolation or dignity to life, he ends in losing beauty itself; for beauty cannot survive when love is dead. Thus we see tliat the empire over men in art is given to the man who knows love, and in- terprets it, and illustrates it. It is an unfathomable subject, one that cannot be exhausted. It may be the common love of a mother to her helpless child, which is all that many Madonnas ever suggest, and yet which makes them great art still. The empire over men in life also is given to those who know love, who move us by their cenderness, and sympathy, and gracious ministry. When art loses its touch with life, no mere technical excellence, no mere skill with colours or with words, will save it from emptiness and failure; and when religion loses its touch with the needs and duties of Hfe, no interior lights, and sweet consola- tions, and ecstatic visions, will save it from degradation. Culture for its own sake, and sacrifice for its own sake, are neither a sufficient end, but they each find scope, ai)d are made reasonable, by the great Christian thought of service, which reconciles so many difficul- ties which meet us in this whole region. With such a dominating motive as service there will be room for all types of personality, and for all individual capaci- ties however divergent. We will see the need for self- restraint, discipline, and the sterner qualities, supposed to be associated only with Puritanism; and, on the other hand, if we recognise that the end of all our training of our powers is for service, we will not limit the thought of service, as narrow Puritanism so often did. We will know that it takes all sorts of men to THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 343 make a world; and if they be true men serving the commonweal according to capacity, it does not matter much where and how they serve, or in what depart- ment of work. There are many and various kinds of service; and their rank is settled, not according to the type of work, but according to the spirit in which it is done. This principle of service does not mean that all must become professional or amateur philan- thropists, but it does mean some form of consecration of g^fts. The artist and poet serve by creating their works of beauty or of inspiring song, and to ask them to leave the sphere for which they are specially en- dowed, in order to work in a city slum, would be folly. The world can much easier do without some of the practical energy, which indeed it never lacks, than it can do without the vision of the prophet, and the imagination of the poet, and the beautiful creation of the artist — all the intellectual and spiritual thought with which thinkers and seers feed the true life of their fellows. Much of the best labour, wrought out of the brain and heart of a man, has no direct reference to the welfare of men, but we cannot measure its in- direct value in kindling thought, and deepening feel- ing, and awakening aspiration. It is not dull uniform- ity in what is called charitable work that is needed, but spiritual consecration that will make all work sacred because inspired with a noble motive. The primal duties and gentle charities that bless men will not be omitted, for such a conception of serv- ice will give the tender touch upon all life, the loving pity of men. The true moral of the brevity of time is not the one Pater draws of gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch by the stir- 344 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT ring of the senses, to experience a thrill from strange dyes or strange colours or curious odours. Because life is short, the highest course open to the children of men is not to grasp at any exquisite passion, nor even to seek some personal gain of culture — there is a better part mentioned by Amiel, whose mind had an even finer culture than Pater's : " Life is short, and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us." It is at least a nobler view, and will save life from ever sinking to the depths into which the other some- times plunges it. Difficulties there will always be in reconciling in detail the duty of culture with the equally imperative duty of self-restraint. It is not possible to extricate matters in our complicated life, and draw a hard and fast line. It is difficult to say how far a man, who wants to keep his garment unspotted, should go in the matter of intercourse with the great mass of things which seem to lie on the border-line. So much in the world is in itself morally neutral, and can become good or evil according to the way it is treated. When the choice is between what is evil though alluring, and what is good though difficult, it is easy to know at least how the decision should go; but all the practical diffi- culties are not so easily disposed of. When the choice lies between the two courses which are both good, such as when duty to self seems to conflict with duty to others, the problem is harder. For example, a man may see a chance of doing the kind of work he likes best, if he will only cut himself off from certain irk- THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 345 some domestic obligations. Is he to choose that which will give himself greatest pain without considering what will bring the greatest amount of good? Or is he to say, according to the common philosophy of culture, that the theory which requires of him the sacrifice of the larger experience into which he might enter has no real claim on him? It is not possible in a general statement to give a solution for all cases, apart from the particular cir- cumstances of each special problem; but in concrete cases the ordinary conscience of man finds little diffi- culty in pronouncing judgment. It would condemn Goethe for his treatment of the different women with whom he successively fell in love, but for none of whom he would take any risk of reducing his oppor- tunities for calm self-development. It would condemn Romney for his conduct to his wife.^ He came to London, leaving behind at Kendal his wife and two children, one son, and a baby daughter who died, meaning to send for them when he had secured a posi- tion. Fame and fortune came to him, and he gave himself with intense devotion to his art, and became the most fashionable portrait-painter of his day. For thirty-five years he lived in London, but never sent for his wife. He had been told that marriage spoilt an artist, and there would also be in his mind the shame of presenting his country wife to Lady Hamil- ton whom he painted so often, and other grand people. In his old age, when helpless and desolate, he returned to her, and she forgave him, and nursed him till he died. There is a standard of judgment, with which * Vide Tennyson's Romney's Remorse, 346 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT the heart of man agrees, which will confirm Edward Fitz-Gerald's verdict, that this quiet act of hers is worth all the pictures Romney ever painted.^ Every serious man must decide for himself in all the doubtful cases which emerge in life when culture and restraint seem to conflict. No one can take from another the responsibility of settling the numerous problems, for instance, about amusements, about com- pliance with custom, about certain forms of art and literature. It is a safe general principle which dele- gates decision to an enlightened conscience : " Happy is he that condemneth not himself in the things which he alloweth." This too must be added, that for true judgments, as for useful influence, we need not so much a scrupulous as a tender conscience, that thinks, neither of selfish satisfaction, nor of frigid rectitude of conduct and satisfied inward approval, but chiefly of loving service. We must not l^t ourselves be de- ceived by specious questions of casuistry, which only obscure the issues. The love of God in Christ unifies life for us, and shows us the way out of difficulties as they arise, if we are loyal to conscience. As love increases and faith deepens, a man comes to see God everywhere, in the world which is made beautiful and sacred by His presence, in all human love which is a reflection of the divine. Perfect moral health is a state in which self-consciousness is forgotten, and a man desires simply to do God's will. When a heart is motived by the love of God, and a life is inspired by the consciousness of God's presence, the necessary re- ^ Fitz-Geraldi*6 Letters, p. 102, and vide James Smetham's Letters, p. loi. THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 347 straint becomes easy. The surrender of self to the will of God makes all necessary self-denial not worthy to be mentioned. In the interests of this great self- surrender some may need to practise a self-sacrifice that will look like the mutilation of life, but that is only appearance. The obligation will always rest on a Christian to give up all that is contrary to the mind of Christ, but when the heart is filled with love of good it finds no pleasure in evil. It does not mean any narrow deprivation of anything truly human ; for the Christian life is inclusive, subduing all spheres that belong to man. The Christian religion is the progressive grasp of the whole contents of human life, taking possession of every department of thought and activity, con- quering and assimilating all forms of human develop- ment. Historically, it took the philosophy of Greece, and absorbed it, and gave it a new lease of power because it put it on a permanent basis. It took the imperialism of Rome, and directed it into a new sphere, when Roman power was crumbling away. It took the humanism of the Renaissance, and gave art a new birth. It took the political and intellectual free- dom of the Reformation, and made them religious. It is taking the science, and politics, and social move- ments of to-day, and will direct them to large and noble ends. It solved the problems of the old world, and will solve our problems, because nothing human is alien to it. It is a principle of life, and has its undying power in the present realisation of God in the world. Its task is to make the secular life of man sacred, and to transform the natural into the spiritual. It gives added worth to all human things, asserting that there 348 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT is nothing common or unclean in the life of man that . cannot be adorned with a new splendour. This is why the ascetic conception of life is radically false. Allowing for a useful side in occasional protest, the normal Christian life is not that of the anchorite in the desert, or the devotee in his cell. The normal life is that of citizens of a Kingdom of Heaven, working out to positive results. The religious spirit must ex- press itself in the actual world, in creating institutions which shall make for righteousness. Its ideal is that the so-called secular pursuits should be done in a re- ligious spirit. For a full character and a perfectly rounded life there are needed both of the elements in the two rival methods we have been considering. The stem temper, which takes self-discipline as a serious task of life, may blossom into beauty, with an eye for all that is fair, and true, and good. The ideal of manhood includes both, as Wordsworth portrays the perfected result of Duty- Flowers laugh before thee in their beds, And fragrance in thy footing treads. e think of the harmonious life of Christ, the com- plete balance and poise of His character, the unrivalled combination of qualities, wisdom and simplicity, strength and tenderness, the perfect adjustment of life to the divine will, the simple assurance of God, the wonderful symmetry of life, genial and winsome in spite of sorrow, with instinctive joy in all true love- liness, taking delight in the birds, and the flowers, and little children, though the shadow of the cross lay athwart His path. There have in their measure been many followers of His, who have found in Him the secret of possessing their souls without cutting them- ^iw^ THE CHRISTIAN SOLUTION 349 selves off from anything that is pure and good, com- bining a certain spiritual aloofness with many-sided touch of the whole round of common life. In Christ there is room for the fullest self-expression — nay, for the first time He makes that completely possible, be- cause He saves it from corrupt forms which would bring decay and death. Secure at the heart, held by love to Him at the centre, the life can swing round a wide radius. He subdues us to Himself the Highest, and sets us to the task of total perfection for self and for the whole world. There never was such a scheme of culture set before men as that to which He pointed : " Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." ^ He preserves the Hellenic spirit from degradation and from selfishness, by bringing to it faith in God as a motive, and service of man as a task. He saves the Hebraic spirit from formalism, and the futile following after an external law of right- eousness which ever misses the mark, by giving the law a new spirit, the spirit of faith, and love, and perfect freedom. Through Him the Gentiles, who followed not after righteousness, have attained to it. In Him alone could Israel, which did follow after the law of right- eousness, find that for which she sought — the way to the Father. In Him, too, all our particular difficulties in the region we have been discussing, which is that of the whole relation of the Christian to the world, will be practically solved, if we can say with St. Paul, even in echo : " 1 live, and yet not I, but Christ liveth in me ; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Him- self for me." ^ It is religion man needs, not culture in itself. So »Matt. V. 48. 'Gal. ii. 20. 350 CULTURE AND RESTRAINT the birthplace of modem civilisation is not Athens, but Calvary. The *' pale Galilean " has conquered against all the full-bl(X)ded gospels of the natural joy of life, but conquered in the grandest way of con- quest, not by the extermination of the opponent, but by changing the enemy into a friend. When the sons of Greece are not against but for the sons of Zion; when all ideals of culture find their inspiration and nourishment in the divine ideals of Jesus, and take their place in the great loving world-purpose of the world's Saviour ; when thought, and art and literature, and knowledge, and life are brought into subjection to the obedience of Christ, that is the true victory. Thou hast conquered, O Galilean! ^^W^Qy 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 19 Oct*C4HK ^^«*t^n . * «^--!P« - 6Mar'65U 1 REC'D LD 1 FEB 2 1 "65 -4 PM 1 APR3 4lW-'^-^i ^ m rfro. era, T!-i?2'j iT LD 2IA-40m-ll,'63 (E16028l0)476B UiUTetsity of California General Library Berkeley /%^^\ .^^'^^ ^%