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 THE MORAL IDEAL.
 
 \V
 
 THE 
 
 Moral Ideal 
 
 a Ibietoric Stub^ 
 
 BY 
 
 JULIA WEDGWOOD 
 
 n^^cc. 
 
 tjfuv TrdvTwv xpVl^o.Tuyv nirpov ixv et-q fxd\i<XTa, Kal ttoXi) fidWov 
 
 ij TTov Tis, ws (paaLV, dvdpunros 
 
 Plato, l^ges 
 
 ScconU dEUition 
 
 LONDON 
 T R ij B N E R & CO., L U D G A T P: HILL 
 
 1889 
 [AH righls resftfed] 
 
 1 4 4 ;$ . .i
 
 'SaQantjne Jpresa 
 
 BALLANTYNE, HANSON AND CO. 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
 • • • 
 
 
 « • • •
 
 
 
 :0 
 
 p. 
 
 
 NOTE TO SECOND EDITION. 
 
 S^ The only change made In this edition is, that 
 
 ^ I have added one or two out of the many addi- 
 
 gj tional references I should have wished to give, 
 
 and that I have tried to make clearer one or 
 
 two passages which had either been thought 
 
 obscure or misunderstood.
 
 TO AN OLD FRIEND. 
 
 The following pages, little as they justify such 
 a description, represent the thoughts and endea- 
 vours of more than twenty years. When, after 
 so long an effort, we have reached a stage where 
 we are forced to recognize, with however little 
 satisfaction to ourselves, that something is con- 
 cluded which must stand as the goal of endeavour, 
 and take its chance as a chapter of achievement, 
 we look around for some sympathizing spectator 
 of our work, some criticism tinged with the desire 
 to approve. You will not wonder that at such 
 a moment I turn to an old friend ; you will recog- 
 nize it as natural that I should address words 
 meant for the public, in the first instance to you. 
 
 The title I have chosen, though I can find none 
 better, does not cover the ground I have sought 
 to explore. I should better have described my 
 aim had I called the book a History of Human 
 Aspiration ; but while such a title would have
 
 viii TO AN OLD FRIEND. 
 
 seemed an ironic introduction to any volume of 
 its size and informal character, the sketches which 
 follow cannot be called a History of anything. 
 To an ordinary reader, the mere list of headings 
 will suggest the debris of a gigantic scheme, with- 
 out a centre and without a scale, begun at inter- 
 vals here and there, and abandoned as often. 
 The review of human thought which, starting from 
 an attempt to follow the moral development of 
 the Aryan race in its early branches, lingers over 
 the utterance of an individual, or quits all limi- 
 tation of race and nation to describe the feel- 
 ings of an age and the speculations roused by 
 a dawning faith — such a review may well be 
 thought, in its neglect of all obvious method, to 
 embody the mere fancies of a dreamer. I am 
 not afraid that it will bear that aspect to you. In 
 the execution of my design you will certainly find 
 much failure and probably some blunders, while 
 you will look in vain for a suggestion or an idea 
 not already familiar to you ; but you will not be 
 offended by the apparent desultoriness of the 
 scheme. Where the space given to description 
 keeps a common measure with the period of 
 time described, there, we may be sure, but little 
 of the inner life is revealed to the reader. In
 
 TO AN OLD FRIEND. ix 
 
 the perspective of an individual memory, years 
 dwindle to a point, and moments expand to an 
 age. A true biography, were such a one pos- 
 sible, would measure its progress by some other 
 standard than the dates which mark advance 
 from the cradle to the tomb ; and the historian 
 can hardly more than the biographer afford to 
 forget that, as it has been finely said, " God 
 has so arranged the chronometry of our spirits 
 that there shall be thousands of silent moments 
 between the striking hours." The criticism that 
 the writer of a moral history follows no obvious 
 scale and respects no obvious limits is in fact a 
 recosfnition that he has is^nored all that would 
 shackle him in recording those throbs and pul- 
 sations which make up the true life of Man. 
 
 The true life of Man ! there you at least will 
 be with me. In asserting that the history of 
 aspiration is the clue to all history, I shall not 
 appear to you to make any extravagant claim 
 for the Unseen. You believe, even more firmly 
 than I do, that a partial and incomplete revelation 
 of what men have sought to be, tells us more of 
 their true nature, than does the most exhaustive 
 record possible of what they have accomplished. 
 "The word outlasts the deed," sa)'s a singer who
 
 X TO AN OLD FRIEND. 
 
 saw the greatest deeds of Greece. The member 
 of a less vocal race may expand that saying ; the 
 thought outlasts the word. Aspiration exceeds 
 utterance, as utterance exceeds achievement. The 
 endeavour to illustrate this truth for those who 
 believe it, to set beside the picture of human 
 action the susfQfestion of those feelings in which 
 it finds its spring — this is an aim in which I have 
 no doubt of your approval. As I lay down the 
 pen I find that conviction Enough for me ; and 
 although your sympathy perchance be given 
 rather to the worker than the work, I know that 
 if you can care for what I have written, sooner 
 or later one or two others will feel its meaning, 
 and enter into the vast consolation and hope 
 bound up in the thoughts I have striven to 
 follow, and the convictions which they have 
 strengthened, deepened, and purified.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY I 
 
 CHAPTER n. 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT .... 48 
 
 CHAPTER HI. 
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES . . . 81 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW ' IjO 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH 189 
 
 CHAPTER \T. 
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA 239 
 
 CHAPTER Vn. 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 277 
 
 CHAPTER \'ni. 
 THE FALL OF MAN 329 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE HERITAGE OF TO-DAY 373
 
 The moral ideal. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 
 
 No deeper cleft divides human spirits than that which 
 separates the faith possible to men for whom Evil means 
 a mere negation, a mere shadow, a form of ignorance, 
 from that which regards it as an actual existence, a 
 real antagonism to good. A clearer light, it may be, 
 revealing in each division its line of cleavage from its 
 opposite, will show each alone as the half of a truth 
 too large for our minds, at their present stage, to take 
 in ; but here and now it remains true that almost all 
 other antitheses which divide human spirits either 
 involve or spring from this contrast. So far as men 
 are capable of logical thought, so far as their ideas 
 are combined in any coherent whole (and these quali- 
 fications cover many apparent exceptions), those who 
 diverge here will be found to arrive at different conclu- 
 sions on almost all the important questions which can 
 exercise the mind of man. Their logical and obvious 
 antagonism will prove the smallest part of that which 
 is actual ; on each side separate assumptions will colour 
 common belief; the two parties will draw different con- 
 
 A
 
 2 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 elusions from premises apparently the same, and dis- 
 cover unconquerable divergence, where both seem to seek 
 a common goal. 
 
 The issue, as it is one of the deepest by which human 
 spirits are kept apart, so it is apparently one of the oldest. 
 Almost the earliest event discernible to the straining 
 eye of history in the dim twilight of the world's dawn 
 is the schism which consummated what must have been 
 the long experience of this divergence — which showed 
 the twin children of young humanity that their paths 
 lay in different directions and led them to part company 
 and increase their remoteness at every step. The 
 faiths of Persia and India, in their complete develop- 
 ment, afford typical specimens, respectively, of that 
 which looks upon Evil as an antagonistic principle to 
 good, and that which sees it as a mere illusion ; and 
 during the centuries which the twin tribes who after- 
 wards held these beliefs spent together in the high- 
 lands of Western Asia they must have discovered the 
 profound and far-reaching character of the moral differ- 
 ences which, culminating in religion, influence the whole 
 of life and thought. The Rig-Veda,^ the oldest sacred 
 book in the world, appears in parts at all events a 
 record of this earlier condition, though its existence as 
 
 1 The hymns of which the Rig-Veda is composed were collected about looo 
 B.C., and must, of course, be themselves considerably older. Some of them 
 are even supposed to express the beliefs of the Indo-Persian branch of the 
 Aryan race before the separation of its two members, a view which would take 
 back these utterances to the dim dawn of civilization on our planet. Their age 
 is brought home to the mind by the fact that they contain not a single allusion 
 to writing, a fact the significance of which, as Prof. Max Miiller observes 
 (" History of Sanscrit Literature," p. 497), will be obvious to the reader who 
 recalls the frequent allusions to writing, ' ' the book," &c. , in the Old Testament. 
 The geographical scene of these hymns is the Indus. " In India," says Dr. 
 Roth in his address to the meeting of orientalists at Darmstadt, 1845 (translated 
 by John Muir and published at Calcutta by Government), " the Veda occupies 
 the place of Homer." This comparison gathers up the whole contrast of 
 Indian and Hellenic life.
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 3 
 
 a scripture is subsequent to the separation. It depicts 
 the dawning aspirations of young humanity, and would 
 not, to one who knew no further development of the 
 feehngs there chronicled, suggest any latent divergence 
 among those whose spiritual life it expressed ; but looking 
 back from the developed faiths of a later day, we may 
 find them both here in germ, though not with equal 
 distinctness. If we take our stand on the religion of 
 the Veda, we may regard the Pantheism of later India 
 as the plant fully developed on its native soil ; while 
 the dualism of Persia is a young shoot transplanted to 
 another climate, and bearing evidence of changed circum- 
 stance and new influences. But both lay in embryo in 
 one seed, and we find within the earliest religion of 
 man the inchoate expression of the deepest divergence 
 of these two ideals, as perchance we shall find in the 
 most complete and perfected religion of man an ex- 
 pression of their fullest harmony. A primeval race 
 finding in Light the symbol of all that is Divine was 
 divided by the development of these tendencies into two 
 branches, one of which found in Darkness the symbolic 
 expression of evil, while the other saw in Darkness no 
 more than the passing shadow which symbolizes man's 
 weakness and illusion, and looked upon all creation as 
 the outcome of one vast Unity. The two religions 
 are perennial forms of human faith, but the symbolism 
 by which they were expressed belongs to the circum- 
 stances of the infant race ; and for us, in so different 
 a condition, it is not to be entered into without an effort 
 of imagination. 
 
 Light and darkness form the great contrast of the 
 outward world for all races and all generations, but 
 the contrast, as it is exhibited to civilized eyes in the 
 rhythmic succession of day and night, is no contrast of 
 good and evil. A darkness which we can dispel at
 
 4 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 will, and which comes upon us amid the safety and con- 
 veniences of modern civiHzation, is a type rather of rest 
 than of evil. But to a race for whom darkness meant 
 helplessness in peril, the possible approach of the most 
 dreaded foe, the alternation of light and darkness would 
 repeat the familiar imagery of conflict, and associate the 
 unseen powers of nature with recollections of defeat and 
 victory. The dawn of a new day, to men who had no 
 light but daylight, was the return into safety from a 
 plunge into an ab3'ss of peril ; the joy which hailed 
 the morning must have gathered up into itself every 
 association of deliverance, and become the t^^pe of all 
 thankfulness and all worship. The different repre- 
 sentations of this triumph were, by their very variet}^, 
 fitted to give, breadth and solidity to the impersonations 
 which they created ; the one unique daily victory of light 
 over darkness had its more gradual, more variable re- 
 petition in the return of spring ; and the combat was 
 represented before the imaginative eyes of those early 
 races in a still more vivid form, when in the dark 
 thunder-cloud the principle of light seemed imprisoned, 
 and then burst forth with dazzling suddenness. But 
 the typical event representing the triumph of beneficent 
 power was the dawn of day, and the hymns which greet 
 it gather up all that a young and vigorous race can 
 express of thankfulness, relief, and hope.^ They breathe 
 in every line the exuberant gladness of young life, 
 unfettered by inherited ills, untrammelled by ancestral 
 error, free to delight in all exercise of energetic strength, 
 and abounding in effervescent power of enjo3mient and 
 of action. The vivid sense of life finds its exact and 
 
 ^ The translation of the Rig- Veda always quoted here is the latest, and the 
 only complete one with any pretension to accuracy — " Der Rigveda, oder die 
 heiligen Hymnen der Brahmana, zum ersten Male vollstandig ins Deutsche 
 iibersetzt mit Commentar und Einleitung von Alfred Ludwig, Prag, 1876."
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. $ 
 
 expressive symbol in the birth of every new day out 
 of the darkness, and seems to passo ver into a sort of 
 surprise that the recall into activity and consciousness 
 which the Dawn brought to the slumbering earth should 
 not penetrate to the world of the dead. " She awakens 
 to movement all living," ^ and that wide picture of rising 
 activity in which the human and infra-human worlds 
 combine reminds the singer of its limitations. " Yet the 
 dead she revives not." " How expressive of eager rever- 
 ence is that exception ! Aurora, it seems, might be 
 expected to have called back to life the inhabitants of 
 the underworld. She is invoked by men to whom the 
 distinction between sleep and death is not sufficiently 
 familiar to be passed over in silence. She wakens the 
 sleepers on earth — why not sleepers below earth ? Light 
 pursues its orderly and periodic victory over darkness ; 
 how is it that the mysterious principle which light 
 symbolizes is baffled in the encounter with Death ? 
 Why, beside the transient shadow from which life 
 emerges refreshed and reinvigorated, have we this 
 supreme darkness from which there is no dawn ? 
 These thoughts, or others allied to them, repeat them- 
 selves in dreams, and the Dawn is invoked to banish 
 them,^ along with the other terrors of the night. The 
 gladness of her approach is symbolized by the kindling 
 of the morning sacrifice, and to the imaginative ear of 
 the worshipper* the crackling flames greeted her with 
 a joyous song, the flaming altar seeming to mirror and 
 concentrate the flaming East ; Agni, the god of Fire, is 
 a divinity equal in importance to Ushas, the goddess of 
 Dawn. Her healing, reviving power associated itself 
 at once with the images of homcl}'-, naive enjoyment, 
 natural to a pastoral people, and the ideas of radiant 
 
 1 Ludwig, 4, 9. 2 liid., 5, 8. 
 
 » /a J.. 125, i8. * Ibid., 18, 2.
 
 6 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 beauty belonging to awakening powers in an unspoilt 
 earth. The white radiance streams upon a world palpi- 
 tating with welcome as the milk ^ is poured from the cow, 
 while the bold image, " with her advent the eye is born," ^ 
 sets before us the recurrent vision of beauty which she 
 seems almost as much to create as to reveal. Her ap- 
 proach is hymned in strains of glowing richness, which 
 suggests Guide's well-known picture of the classic 
 Aurora.^ Other associations, equally familiar, touch on 
 her moral aspect ; the prayer to become the " Sons of the 
 Dawn " ^ reminds us that from the first the expression 
 " children of light " had its present typical significance. 
 For the most part, however, the desires of the young race 
 were child-like and unmoral ; their prayer to the new day 
 was for "joy in heroes, cattle, steeds ; " ^ their desire for 
 wealth is expressed with a fearless confidence impossible 
 to a race familiarized by long inheritance with the tempta- 
 tions and abuses of wealth. It had then none but pure 
 and healthful associations, and seems always connected 
 with desire for a numerous posterity. Earth had a 
 welcome for each new-comer, and the hopes of new 
 life balanced and compensated for the terrors of death. 
 All images of child-like enjoyment, of manly hope, of 
 moral inspiration and picturesque beauty, are united 
 in the hymn to the new Day ; ® and the association of 
 the light with all that is most worthy of reverence has 
 remained ever since indelibly impressed upon the very 
 structure of language. Heaven means both the world 
 of light above us and the world of hope within us, and 
 
 1 Ludwig, 9, 8. 2 Jhiif^^ i6, i. 
 
 3 Ibid., i8, 4, " Betreten hat sie den Wagen, den leicht angefiigte Rosse 
 fiihren." ^ Ibid., 21, 4. 
 
 * e.g., 15, 8 ; but the expression recurs often. 
 
 ® See especially the whole of 5. Ver. 9 shows the mutual relations of gods 
 and men, " als du" (Ushas) "die Menschen, die opfern sollten, wecktest, 
 thatest du den Gottern damit ein gutes Werk."
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. y 
 
 the earliest name ^ of the Divine beings is simply " the 
 bright ones." Such names are more than metaphors. 
 But if they were simply metaphors they would show 
 how closely the world without is adapted to express and 
 render definite the yearnings and the fears of the world 
 within. 
 
 The antagonism between Light and Darkness, though 
 it was adopted later by the Persian faith as the symbol 
 of that between Good and Evil, does not truly lend itself 
 to a principle of dualism. Light is a full and adequate 
 type of all that is felt as desirable by the spirit of man, 
 so full and adequate, that it seems something more than 
 a type ; it would appear rather the common expression 
 of the needs of our dual nature than the description of 
 any bodily need or satisfaction transferred to the realm 
 of spirit. But the opposite of all this is not true of 
 Darkness. However vividly the return of day brought 
 back the sense of safet}^, however close was the asso- 
 ciation of darkness and peril, still it remains that the 
 difference between light and darkness, as far as ordinary 
 experience extends, is a difference only of degree. Abso- 
 lute darkness is known only to the artificial arrangements 
 of man and the ideal of the supernatural, it is a part of 
 the horror of the dungeon, it is a characteristic of the 
 imaginary underworld ; it has no part in the whole realm 
 of nature. The symbolism of Light and Darkness, in a 
 genial clime, measures truly the ideal of good and evil 
 in the later Indian creed. But the Vcdic belief took 
 in instincts and emotions which later seem to have 
 withered away, and uttered aspirations and desires be- 
 longing to the realm of the Conscience. We find our- 
 selves here in contact with a race that felt the antagonism 
 
 1 Deva, from the root div, to sliine, meant originally bright. "The same 
 word lives on in the Latin deus" (Professor Max Miiller, "Lectures on the 
 Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religions of India").
 
 8 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 of duty, a race to whom Sin was a reality sufficiently 
 definite to associate the Divine power with the idea of 
 Redemption, The prayer for long life passes naturally 
 into the entreaty/ " extinguish our sins," as though sin 
 and death were already connected ; we find even that 
 mysterious idea of inherited guilt ^ which is so per- 
 plexing to the moral sense. But the yearning thoughts 
 which turn to God ^ " as kine move on to their pas- 
 tures " are speedily delivered from all that is oppressive 
 in that yearning. The pain of unsatisfied desire, already 
 familiar, is recognised as a mere subjective delusion.* 
 "Thirst came upon the worshipper, though he stood 
 in the midst of the waters." ^ Nothing was needed for 
 his satisfaction but the removal of his own blindness. 
 The doubt which interrupts prayer is transient,^ the God 
 reveals himself at once — " Here am I, behold me ! in 
 might I surpass all things." " Did I see the God who 
 is to be seen by all ? " exclaims the worshipper,"^ with 
 
 1 " Laszt fortdauern unser Leben, loscht aus unser Gebrechen " (32, 4 
 Ludwig). These expressions are found mainly in the prayers to Varuna, 81-90 
 Ludwig. 
 
 2 " Die Verschuldungen, die ich mir zugezogen, sende weithin, nicht, mog' 
 ich biiszen, was ein anderer gethan hat " (83, 9). " Lasz uns nach, was unsere 
 Viiter Untreues gethan und was wir selber in eigner Person" (85, 5). This last 
 hymn appears in an English version by Max Miiller, in the lecture on the Vedas 
 republished in the Selected Essays already quoted. M. Ludwig's translations 
 appear crabbed and often barely intelligible after the graceful rendering of his 
 countryman, to which, it must be added, he has always enabled the reader to 
 refer them, by a double index. 
 
 3 MIM. Rv. i. 25, 16 ; Ludwig, 82, 16. The meaning is much more defined 
 in the former. 
 
 4 MM. Rv. i. 41, 4 ; Ludwig, 88, 4. 
 
 5 Ludwig, 88, 4. 
 
 6 MM. Rv. viii. 100, 3 ; Ludwig, 983, 3. Here the German seems to me the 
 more expressive — •" Es gibt keinen Indra, so hat der eine und der andere gesagt, 
 wer hat ihn gesehn?" There is something very striking in the modern form 
 which doubt here assumes. The answer comes immediately, ver. 4 — " Hier bin 
 ich, o Sanger, schau mich an hier, alles Geborene iibertreff ich an Grosze." 
 
 7 MM. i. 25, 18 ; Ludwig, 82, 18, " Dasz man sehe den Allsichtbaren, sehe 
 den Wagen iiber die Erde hin, finde er Gefallen an diesen Liedern mein."
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 9 
 
 joyous triumph. " Did I see his chariot above the earth ? 
 He must have accepted my prayer." The prayer of the 
 transgressor ascends with a sense of confidence to a God 
 eager to forgive and awaiting only the justification of 
 humble entreaty; while the human expiation is no arduous 
 penance, onl}' the trustful utterance of the psalm in which 
 penitence is found as a mere parenthesis. We feel in 
 perusing it as though listening to the confessions of 
 children, with whom the penitent tear is forgotten almost 
 before it is dry. The few chords in the plaintive minor 
 succeed, and are followed by, a strain of which its inter- 
 ruption only enhances the vivid hopefulness ; and the 
 dread of evil seems only just enough to intensify the 
 leaning on supernatural power, to bind man to God. 
 Life is strong, joyous, hopeful, full of activity, full of 
 scope for activity ; all natural desire is innocent, the 
 object of Divine sympathy, or indeed, for a great part, of 
 Divine participation. The Gods delight in the Soma 
 drink, the psalms of the worshippers soothe them with 
 placid enjoyment ; ^ they hear without scorn the eager 
 petitions for wealth, for children, for cattle ; they show 
 at moments the severity of the wise father to the erring 
 son, but never the alienation of the monarch towards the 
 rebel, never the blank hostility of the ruler towards the 
 traitor. The sense of sin in these scriptures is fitful, 
 evanescent, fragmentary ; it finds no large consistent 
 symbol, it is the expression of a small part of the 
 nature, and it threw no dark shadow into the unseen. 
 Evil appeared as an exceptional, fragmentary, fitful 
 influence, the Gods could make it as though it had not 
 been.^ Man looked to the world of supernatural power 
 
 1 " Wie der Wagenlenker das angebundene Ross, so losen wir zur Gnade 
 Varuna dcinen Sinn mit Liedcrn" (Ludwig, 82, 3). Prayer is welcome to the 
 god as rest to the weary steed. 
 
 2 " • Deos fecit timor' dit le poete latin. Cast une assertion que rhistoire ne 
 confirmc pas. ... II est possible de trouver une religion sans terreurs ; telle
 
 ro THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 as wholly one of deliverance from evil. Varuna is able 
 to deliver man even from the sins which he has com- 
 mitted. The earliest litany of the human race ^ that has 
 come down to us confesses transgressions, but pleads 
 with the " strong and bright God " that through want 
 of strength his worshipper has gone astray. " If I 
 move along trembling, like a cloud driven by the wind 
 — have mercy, Varuna, have mercy." " It was not our 
 doing, Varuna," pleads the worshipper ; " it was a slip, 
 an intoxicating draught, thoughtlessness " — never the 
 prompting of a mighty rival. Human frailty was subject 
 to error, but all that was strong was elevating. 
 
 It is interesting to trace this feeling in the symbolism 
 of Light and Darkness. While day was an object of 
 rapturous welcome, night was not an object of unmixed 
 horror. Side by side with the sense of peril in dark- 
 ness we find certain inconsistent indications of what we 
 may call a more modern feeling towards it.^ Though 
 sometimes the foe, it appears often as the sister of 
 Dawn ; a sister whose dark steeds prepare ^ the pathway 
 for the glowing chariot of the Day ; and who has, more- 
 over, her own revelation of light. Her coming unveils 
 the stars which fly away "as a thief" at the return of 
 morning.^ " These constellations which are placed on 
 high, by night alone may we discern them ; whither have 
 
 a €i6 la religion de nos ancetres Aryans " (Emile Burnouf, " Essai sur le Veda "). 
 The allusion to a future hell is so rare in the Rig-Veda that it has been found 
 possible to deny, erroneously I believe, the existence of such an idea. 
 
 1 Given in Max Miiller's Lecture on the Vedas, republished in his Selected 
 Essays. Rv. i. 41, 9 ; Ludwig, 88, 2. 
 
 2 " Usas kommt mit dem Lichte, . . . wegdrangend alle unheilvolle Fins- 
 ternisz" (Ludwig, 18, 2). But Night and Dawn are associated, 55, i, " Weg 
 von ihrer Schwester Usas geht die Nacht ;" 236, i, " Usas und Nacht, die 
 beiden Hohen, Schonen ; " and they are often named together as mutually 
 friendly powers. 
 
 3 ■' Weg von ihrer Schwester Usas geht die Nacht, es macht frei die Schwarze 
 der Rothen die Bahn " (Ludwig, 55, i). 
 
 * Ludwig, 127, 2.
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. ii 
 
 they fled by day." ^ Varuna commands the darkness as 
 well as the light in Heaven.^ Night is invoked as 
 the bringer of rest.^ Even the awful last night from 
 which the welcomers of the Dawn turned in terror was 
 not wholly devoid of gentle and gracious associations. 
 Night was the bringer of rest ; might it not be that Death 
 was also ? ■* The beloved Dead was laid in the arms of 
 Earth as a child on the mother's breast ; she is entreated 
 to make room for him with an embrace, to enfold him in 
 her garment with the tenderness with which the mother 
 enwraps the child. There is supreme desire in the 
 living to live, but there is no horror in the thought of 
 death. Darkness, and all that darkness symbolized, 
 was a transitory phenomenon ; the light seemed the great 
 reality ; it was positive, actual ; where it was interrupted 
 it was not opposed by any antithetic influence, only 
 checked and hindered by something that was little more 
 than a symbol of the imperfection, the failure, the doubts 
 of humanity. If we seem to make inconsistent asser- 
 tions, it is because we are speaking of a state of mind 
 not perfectly consistent, of the rich confusion of an 
 awakening civilization, as yet uncommitted to definite 
 exclusions and distinct alternatives. The Vedic faith 
 embodied two divergent ideas — the sense of conflict and 
 the sense of order ; — the moral life which centres in the 
 conscience and confronts an antagonism of being — the 
 spiritual life which finds its counterpart in nature, and 
 feels everywhere after one vast Unity. But the two 
 
 1 Ludwig, 8i, lo. 2 /iid., 87, 2. 
 
 3 mj., 131, 1, "Ich mfe zum Heile Ratri (die Nacht) die das Lebende zur 
 Ruhc bringt." 
 
 ■4 " Begib dich bin zur Mutter Erde da, der wcit gerauniigcn, hcilbringen- 
 den, wcich wie WoUe. . . . Spring auf, o Erde. press dich nicht niedcr, gib 
 leichten Zutritt diesem, frcundlich hieran dich kriiminend, wic die Mutter don 
 Sohn mit dcm Saume so, o Erde, bedecke diesen " (943. 10, 11). M. lUirnouf 
 gives a more graceful translation of this hymn in his " Essai sur le Veda," p. 92 ; 
 it is perhaps the best known in the whole collection.
 
 12 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 ideals were not equivalent. Tlie joyous spirit of the 
 young race gave to the one a hasty, passing recognition, 
 and lingered over the other, as expressing its deepest 
 thought. The sense of Evil, though it was distinct, was 
 faint, and occupied but a small space in thought and 
 utterance ; we somewhat exaggerate the general impres- 
 sion when we speak of it as a sense of Sin. 
 
 Perhaps it was the development of civilization which 
 strengthened the belief in Evil. Certainly there is some- 
 thing in the mere evolution of industrial activity to bring 
 forward the part of life that belongs to disaster. As 
 nomad tribes became stationary and herdsmen tillers of the 
 soil, the passage into a more arduous form of civilization 
 brings with it a greater sense of all the opposition that 
 nature sets up to the careful toil of man, and a wider 
 illustration of all that thwarts and disappoints patient 
 effort. Even to a pastoral people the order of nature 
 cannot have been entirely beneficent. In the return of 
 the seasons there must have been many a misfit between 
 anticipation and result ; the visits of the celestial herds 
 whom the storm gods drove onwards to yield their milk 
 to the thirsty earth would not be so regular as the need 
 for their presence ; the earthly herds sometimes failed 
 to find their pasture because the heavenly ones failed 
 to visit the empty sky.^ In this earlier condition order 
 would be felt as infinitely greater than disorder ; but 
 agriculture must always bring a different element into 
 the feeling with which man regards nature. He has, 
 as it were, entered into partnership with the powers of 
 the earth and sky, he regards their doings with a keener 
 interest ; the general order, which was almost enough 
 
 1 "The Iranians," says Dr. Martin Haug, " forsaking thepastoral life of their 
 ancestors, became agriculturists. Hence inevitable feuds between these tribes, 
 for the settled agricultural races would be the sure mark for the freebooters 
 among these nomads" (Haug's " Essays on the Sacred Language, &c., of the 
 Parsis," second edition, 1878, edited by E. W. West).
 
 INDIA AXD THE PRIMAL UNITY. 13 
 
 while he had made no effort to modify the face of the 
 land, discovers grievous want of adjustment of anticipation 
 to event, when once he had embarked on this endeavour. 
 The storm which would only have refreshed the pastures 
 la3's the crops low ; the drought of which a wandering 
 people could have escaped the worst effects makes the 
 harvest a melancholy record of wasted effort. Nor would 
 this change take effect in the world of nature alone ; the 
 mere growth of agriculture brings out the ideas of pro- 
 perty and right, and with them gives occasion for new 
 offences, of which an earlier civilization knows nothing. 
 It is a far more advanced stage of honesty which respects 
 the waving crops, their near and similar kindred the 
 growing pastures being still accepted public property, 
 than that which refrains from driving off the half-personal 
 beings so closely associated with the home, and, as is 
 evident in all early legends, playing a large part in 
 mythic representations of orderly power in conflict with 
 lawless power. The inconstant Heavens and the hostile 
 brethren would thus become agencies of evil together. 
 And thus the sense of conflict which had been there 
 from the first, finding a developed symbolism in the 
 world of nature, and a more frequent illustration in the 
 world of m,an, passed into the sense of wrong. 
 
 We are thus driven to recognize in this early faith 
 two ideas which, in their full development, are mutually 
 hostile. No idea is more characteristic of the Veda than 
 the conception of the Order of Nature as a Holy Order. 
 The expression recurs constantly. The Gods are the 
 " increasers and guardians of the holy order," ^ a signi- 
 ficant expression ; they are not its originators. The 
 worshipper prays that he may share with them this 
 
 1 The A<;vina are addressed as " Mchrer dcr hciligen Ordnung" (Ludwis;, 
 63, 5). The reader is reminded of the " Mehrer des Reichs" of tlie Holy 
 Roman Empire. So Milra and Varuna are " Behuter der Ordnung," 100, i.
 
 14 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 Divine work.^ Variina, the god who stands in the 
 nearest connection to moral ideas, is the leader of the 
 Holy Order. These passages, and many in harmony 
 with them, breathe the spirit of an elevated monotheism. 
 If it be not literally true in human affairs that one law 
 implies one law-giver, we cannot conceive it to be 
 otherwise in the Divine world. The law may be, as we 
 often see in our own day, a more ultimate conception 
 than the law-giver; in fact, it was so in this dawn of 
 thought to which we recur. But a universal law and 
 a perennial conflict are inconsistent ideas. Yet the 
 Vedic belief embodies the idea of an original Unity, ex- 
 pressed in the Holy Order, and also dwells constantly 
 on the fact of a great continuous conflict, a strife 
 between the God of Light and some hostile power which 
 opposes itself to all the beneficent action of the warrior 
 god, Indra, who is Supreme God of the Vedic period. 
 The thunder is his voice, his aid is sought in the din of 
 war. Images of conflict are always associated with him ; 
 it is by his darts that the black clouds which collect 
 before the annual rains are forced to let loose their 
 flow of longed-for water ; and while the growling thunder 
 would seem his shout of victory, the flashing of the 
 lightning would express in some confused way the 
 triumphant principle of Light, wresting the treasure from 
 the dark power which was, by a S3'mbolism not very com- 
 prehensible to our mind, represented as the withholder 
 of the precious floods which we should more naturally 
 regard as its gift. This power seemed to hold the 
 water-bag ; Indra's flashing spear rent it open, and gave 
 the thirsty land its need, and the event most desired 
 by a people of shepherds and herdsmen was always 
 associated with images of conflict. In these latitudes 
 
 1 " Mogen wir mehren, Variina, des Gesetzes Brunnen" (Ludwig, 83, 5).
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 15 
 
 Heaven gave its longed-for boon only with the, storm. 
 The blessed gift of nature, the life-giving rain, never 
 known to India except with the accompaniment of 
 thunder, seemed wrung from some reluctant and hostile 
 power, of whose overthrow the re-emergence of the sun 
 was a witness, the antithesis of light as good and dark- 
 ness as evil being thus retained even under those aspects 
 where to us it appears unnatural. The idea of a conflict 
 thus inherent within the very being of nature is funda- 
 mentally inconsistent with that of a Holy Order, and the 
 symbolism of nature expresses the development of the 
 inward life. The progress of thought was towards the 
 idea of the Unity of the Divine, and there can be no wor- 
 ship further in its spirit from monotheism than that of a 
 warrior god. A prolonged struggle implies an adversary 
 — not a mere disorderly mob of vague mutinous beings 
 — but a rival. And so far as this idea was logically 
 carried out, the conflict in the Heavens would change its 
 character from the incessant triumph of a mighty monarch 
 over the mutiny of a rebel crowd, to the duel between 
 two great potentates equal in distinctness and analogous 
 in claim. The Persian element in Vedism would thus 
 detach itself from the parent stem. The halving of the 
 Divine kingdom between hostile powers was abhorrent 
 to the spirit which sought for Unity, and it would seem 
 as though it were in the recoil produced by the discovery 
 of this tendency within itself, that India plunged into 
 the mystic Pantheism which belongs to her completed 
 thought. History shows us Aryan faith in its infancy 
 as an eager personification of the variety of nature, a 
 glad, reverent recognition of the Powers expressed in 
 nature as harmonious and convergent in their action ; 
 and then, again, it shows Indian thought in its com- 
 pleteness as recoiling from the idea of any multiplicity, 
 any variety, and, above all, from any dualism, not only
 
 1 6 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 in the Divine Being, but in any being at all. We 
 cannot but believe that in the interval something has 
 rendered this particular branch of the Aryan race more 
 a unity within itself, detaching from it some foreign 
 element, and intensifying all that remained with a sense 
 of contrast. We know, at all events, that in the interval 
 the creed which ranges all Being under two heads had 
 taken its rise, and when we add that the creed of India 
 embodies a latent protest against this ethical antithesis, 
 we do little more than interpret the hints that remain 
 of remote events by the experience of all time. 
 
 For it is, after all, this interpretation which forms our 
 chief material. We can know but little of the ethical 
 development of the races that precede history, we 
 could know nothing of it if it were a process confined 
 to the experience of the infant world. But perennial 
 experience lights up the dim records of the past, and the 
 process here suggested by history is always going on 
 among the human beings we know. A man may repeat 
 the words of a creed with unhesitating sincerity, he 
 would say at a certain stage that it expressed his entire 
 conviction. Then suddenly its influence on another 
 character flashes upon him its true meaning, and he 
 repudiates it. He sees side by side his inconsistent 
 admissions and his characteristic beliefs, and learning 
 what it is that he denies, he first knows what it is 
 that he asserts. To others he seems to have undergone 
 a violent change. He himself, perhaps, is not conscious 
 of any change, only of learning to know his own mind. 
 But he is changed, a shock has influenced his direc- 
 tion ; he diverges from his old path, though often 
 unawares. The shock has precipitated some element 
 dissolved in his unconscious thought, and that which is 
 left is a new thing, though it may seem to him only 
 the old purified. The moral evolution is twofold. It is
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 17 
 
 not only that the new faith is different from the old, but 
 antagonism to it makes the old faith different from what 
 it has been. Because the one party turns to the right, 
 the other will turn to the left ; latent tendencies become 
 distinct, protest changes the proportion of belief, denial 
 gives new meaning to assertion, and thus the varying 
 aspects of a single creed become hostile faiths opposed 
 at every point, and moulding life, where life shows no 
 obvious connection with faith. 
 
 The primeval Aryan faith held in solution the religion 
 of the conscience, and that of nature, combined in a 
 seemingly homogeneous unity. The religion of nature 
 recognized imperfection, the religion of conscience did 
 not emphasize sin. But the union was an unstable one, 
 and while one race awoke to the energetic definite- 
 ness of organized conflict, the other plunged deeper and 
 deeper into the mystic repose of a vast unity accepted 
 as the ground of all Being, and therefore as the har- 
 mony of all opposites and the end of all strife. The 
 religion of nature was not Pantheistic in its origin, but 
 as it recoiled from Dualism it moved towards Pantheism. 
 The religion of conscience was not dualistic in its origin, 
 but as it recoiled from Pantheism it moved towards 
 Dualism. The latent Pantheism of the earlier creed 
 would seem idolatry to those who believed that the rule 
 of the supernatural was shared by a Power which it 
 was a sin to adore, a Power which in all its manifesta- 
 tions should be the object of unfading hostility and pro- 
 test. The definite dualism of the new creed would 
 seem deadly heresy to those who believed that a Divine 
 world surrounded and interpenetrated the human world, 
 and that all good and evil were mere phenomenal dis- 
 tinctions, destined to fade in the light of a new know- 
 ledge. We can imagine how,^ to the more ethical 
 
 1 This view, brought forward in the most definite and historic form by 
 
 13
 
 l8 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 believers of the new creed, the faint distinction of good 
 and evil which marked the old, roused a fierce Puritan 
 zeal, while to the defenders of the old Faith this ignoring 
 of the Holy Order as the one ultimate reality would 
 seem the worst impiety and the most fatal heresy. We 
 know that the twin tribes separated ; the relation between 
 their separation and their difference of religion is a matter 
 of controversy. It is asserted by some students, and 
 strongly denied by others, that this separation was the 
 result of an impulse towards religious reform on the 
 part of the Persian race. The claim to arbitrate between 
 these two parties, as far as their difference is grounded 
 in questions of scholarship, is here emphatically abjured. 
 But in all historic questions a religion must be its own 
 best witness, and in default of overwhelming external 
 evidence, it is enough to say that we most naturally 
 explain the change between the earliest and latest 
 form of the Indian faith if we suppose that when the 
 early hymns which compose the Veda were first sung — 
 though not when they were written down — the ancestors 
 of the Puritans of a later age dwelt still among their 
 
 Dr. Martin Hauq^, and generally accepted up to a recent period, is vehemently 
 opposed by M. James Darmesteter, an elegant writer and ripe scholar, whose 
 verdict on such a question it seems presumptuous to dispute. "Dans cette 
 pretendue revolution religieuse," he says, " il n'y a qu'un accident de langage," 
 and he tries to explain away, in a dissertation, which is to my mind the only un- 
 satisfactory passage in his brilliant work, '' Ormazd et Ahriman," the facts 
 that the dcvas of India become the divs or devils of Persia, that the great deity 
 of India, Indra, becomes the demon Andra, and that the great Ahitra, who is 
 Ormazd, is one of the Indian group Asura, in the Brahmanic period the official 
 name of demons. The latter fact, he thinks, loses all significance when we dis- 
 cover that at the Vedic period Asura was the most august name of the Divinity ; 
 a discovery which appears to me only to confirm, in its most rational 
 form, the theory against which he contends — i.e., that the evolution of Indian 
 thought produced the revolution of Persian thought. This view surely depends 
 not on a few etymologies (though even these can be got rid of only by very 
 forced reasoning), -.but on the whole spirit of the Persian religion, deeply 
 stamped as it is with the character of reaction and protest, and moulded on 
 an ideal wholly antagonistic to that of India.
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 19 
 
 Pantheistic brethren, and that these early psalms held 
 the germ of hostile creeds. 
 
 This view serves to render explicable the change 
 which came over the spirit of the Indian faith. The 
 early Aryans saw God in the sunny and starry sky, 
 in the dawn, in the thunderstorm, in all the various 
 manifestations of Light that revealed the world in its 
 new wonderful beauty to the eyes of an infant race. 
 Their Indian sons, mindful perhaps of their severance 
 from the race which had discovered Ahriman as a sharer 
 with Ormazd, turned from all the variety of the outward 
 to the sense of oneness within as the interpreter of the 
 Divine.^ Indra, Ushas, Agni, what were they all but 
 the varied hues that tinged and disguised the one white 
 ray? What was the multiplicity of sense, the con- 
 tinually varying manifestation of the world revealed b}^ 
 e3'e or ear, but the veil of that great central Unity to 
 which consciousness was the clue and of which it was 
 interpreter ? For man only reaches the idea of com- 
 plete oneness when he says " I." Nothing in the life- 
 less world, so far as we come in contact with it on our 
 earth, can be called truly one. Wherever we contem- 
 plate any external object as a unity we either see or 
 imagine the principle of life. A stone has no unity ; 
 
 1 This is the central doctrine of the Upnnishnds, a collection of theologic 
 or theosophic treatises of great antiquity " which close the canon of Vedic 
 revelation" (" Philosophy of the Upanishads," A. E. Gough). It is by theni, 
 says Prof. Max Miiller, that his love for Sanscrit literature was first kindled, 
 and he has enabled all English readers to enjoy them in his own lucid English 
 in the " Sacred Books of the East." He is not the first of his countrymen whom 
 they have thus impressed. Schopenhauer, though making acquaintance with 
 them only at third hand, was profoundly impressed by them. They had been, 
 he said, the solace of his life, and would be of his death ; and he anticipitcd for 
 the Sanscrit literature which they represented to his mind an influence not less 
 profound than that of Greek at the revival of learning. I have given a few 
 references to th(!Se volumes, always numbering them (the Indian division 
 being so elaborate) merely by their position in Professor Miillcr's translation, 
 (and sometimes omitting a few words.
 
 20 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 break it and the two halves are each as much one as 
 it was itself. Fire has no unity ; a hundred candles 
 may be lighted from it and leave it undiminished. A 
 tree has a certain partial unity ; but the typical unity, 
 that which gives meaning to every other, is only to be 
 found in the personal world. Apart from life oneness 
 is something imposed from without, like the oneness of 
 a constellation. There is no principle of affinity in 
 brick and slate and timber whereby these constitute 
 a house ; they become a unity only in relation to the 
 aim of the architect. Nothing in all the outward world 
 is one as a man is one ; but only in so far as any 
 object is the result of human purpose, or partakes 
 in the principle of life, can it be said to be a unity 
 in any sense. And when we would understand even 
 the lifeless world we are driven to conceptions which 
 belong to the realm of purpose and will. Force, the 
 elemental material of science, has no meaning to us 
 except in so far as we construe it by our own experi- 
 ence of muscular exertion ; that is to say, of something 
 associated with all the attempts of the self to impress 
 the world around.^ We find the many in the world 
 without only by finding the one in consciousness within, 
 and then the one within leads us to a One that is both 
 within and without, a Being who is at once the centre 
 and the ground of all personal being. The unity of 
 spirit, as we know it, is combined with a plurality. 
 
 1 " Our notion of force is a generalisation of those muscular sensations 
 which we have when we are ourselves the producers of changes in outward 
 things. . , . The liberty we have to think of light, heat, sound, &c. , as in 
 themselves different from our sensations of them is due to our possession of 
 other sensations by which to symbolize them — namely, those of mechanical 
 force. But if we endeavour to think of mechanical force itself as different from 
 our impression of it, there arises the unsurmountable difficulty that there is no 
 remaining species of impression to represent it. All other experiences being 
 represented to the mind in terms of this experience, this experience cannot be 
 represented in any terms but its own " (Herbert Spencer, " Psychology ").
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 21 
 
 Consciousness reveals the One, but experience reveals 
 a plurality of conscious beings. " La pluralite des con- 
 sciences," says an acute thinker, " est un postulat que 
 Ton pent considerer comme acquis a la science sans 
 demonstration."^ The most consistent sceptic does not 
 doubt the existence of other men. He feels a unity 
 within ; he comes in contact with an assemblage of 
 phenomena which suggest a similar unity without ; he 
 does not question this testimony. We do not realize 
 how much of what we mean by Faith is involved in this 
 acceptance unless we discern that it is a step towards a 
 larger faith. Is there no central unit}'', only a succession 
 of partial ephemeral unities ? Surely all these partial 
 selves are but fragments of a deeper self; — /lie one, of 
 which all other ones are but varied and partial manifesta- 
 tions. Nor can the lesser self attain a true unity until 
 it finds its place in the greater self, or rather these two 
 achievements are one.^ It is incomplete till it know its 
 incompleteness, it is a prey to inward conflict till it find 
 itself part of a larger whole. 
 
 1 Paul Janet, " Problemes du XIX^ Siecle," p. 313. 
 
 2 " As one finds lost cattle by following their steps, thus one finds out 
 everything if one has found out the Self" (Upanishads, ii. 86). . . . 
 " He who dwells in the earth, whom the earth does not know, wliose body 
 the earth is, ke is thy Self, the puller within " (ii, 128). "When the sun has 
 set, and the moon has set, and the fire is gone out, and the sound hushed, what 
 is then the light of man? . . . The Self indeed is his light" (ii. 163). . . . 
 "The wise, who by meditation on his Self recognizes the Ancient who is 
 difficult to see, who has entered into the dark, who dwells in the abyss, who is 
 hidden in the cave as God, he indeed leaves joy and sorrow far behind " 
 ("Secret of Death," in vol. ii.) . . . "That Self is hidden in all beings, and 
 does not shine forth, but is seen by subtle seers" {Ibid.) ..." The wise, when 
 he knows that that by which he perceives all objects is the great omnipresent Self, 
 grieves no more. lie who knows this living soul as being the Self, always near 
 the Lord of the past and future, henceforward fears no more" (Ibid.) . . . 
 " As the arrow becomes one with the target, so shall a man become one with 
 Brahman, . . . know him alone as the Self" (ii. 37). "To him who is con- 
 scious of llie true Self within, all desires vanish even here on earth" (ii. 40). 
 . . . "That Self is Agni (fire), it is Aditya (the sun), it is Kandranias (the 
 moon) " (ii. 248).
 
 22 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 The course of thought here suggested is essentially 
 the same, whether it guide the thinker from the many 
 human personaHties to one Divine ground of all person- 
 ality, or, as in the order of History, from the many Divine 
 impersonations to the one Divine Being who is the 
 ground of all that is. For the Indian mind, indeed, the 
 difference between gods and men was one of very little 
 distinctness or importance. The earlier gods were not 
 denied, they were accepted as all manifestations of the 
 One. The discovery of the one in the many marks the 
 glad awakening of a national genius to the consciousness 
 of its true direction, the forward bound with which the 
 traveller enters upon the path which, after long wander- 
 ings, he recognizes as that which leads him home. 
 
 The best interpreter of Hindu religion is nineteenth 
 century science ; the scientific movement of our own day 
 presents us with a type of that change by which the 
 many gods of the Vedas were absorbed in God. Our 
 lathers studied what they called the imponderable 
 agencies — light, heat, electricity, magnetism ; they dealt 
 with them as ultimate forces of nature, separate indivi- 
 dualities, the results of which might be registered and 
 brought into orderly sequence, but which themselves 
 Ibrmed ultimate objects of intellectual attention, and were 
 regarded as resting-places of all analysis. Then arose 
 on the horizon the great idea of the correlation of force. 
 Light, heat, electricity, were seen to differ only as varied 
 manifestations of the first great unity which we know as 
 force, the mystic agency which seemed to link the worlds 
 of matter and of spirit, the tyrannous power which 
 brings anthropomorphism into Science, and bids her 
 import into the world of things the impulses and efforts 
 of the personal world. 
 
 We have seen the wondrous stimulus which has 
 come to all scientific thought with the dawn of this
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 23 
 
 unit}^ the strange charm which invested all the revela- 
 tions of nature, from the time that nature was dis- 
 cerned to be One, To be shown a single actual being 
 as the explanation of a multitude of phenomena, to 
 recognize one permanent entity amid many shifting 
 forms, one element through all its various modifica- 
 tions — this is the fundamental craving of the human 
 intellect. In our day, as in Newton's da}^ Science has 
 exhibited on a grand scale that triumphant substitution 
 of the one for the many which at all times she is labour- 
 ing to achieve on some scale ; and the world has drunk 
 in her teaching with something like intoxication in its 
 delight. But that delight must be a feeble image of 
 what was felt by our forefathers when, some 2500 years 
 ago, they awoke up to discover that where they had 
 imagined themselves to see many gods they had merely 
 discerned the aspects, the different attributes, through 
 which God appears to man. It is impossible for us to 
 recover the sense of originality with which this idea 
 must have come upon the world for the first time. We 
 cannot divest ourselves of the peculiar message of 
 the Semitic race that God is one. But to our Indian 
 ancestors it was a discovery, just as the correlation of 
 force is a discovery. No traditions brought them the 
 message, " These many gods whom you adore are but 
 the different manifestations of the one Power, just as the 
 various hues of the rainbow mark successively the partial 
 obscurations of the one white ray ; " it was a revelation 
 to the children of the dawn. The prismatic hues of 
 the Outward melted, before their vision, into the pure 
 white ray of the Divine. 
 
 It is possible that a change in the circumstances 
 of the Indian tribes gave this inward change its ex- 
 pression in the development of a new symbolism. 
 In the centuries which elapse between the composition
 
 24 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 of the Rig- Veda and any subsequent record they were 
 advancing farther into the peninsula of Hindustan, and 
 becoming more famihar with the Ocean, of which the 
 earher mentions are slight. Several expressions in , 
 their later philosophy would lead us to believe that the \ 
 spectacle of the rivers swallowed up in the sea, yet never '. 
 over-filling it, was to them an impressive sight, pregnant ; 
 with a symbolic meaning.'^ It presented to them a kind 
 of parable of the many and the One — the continual 
 change of the ideas of sense, the unchangeable calm of 
 the reality of consciousness, receiving all, yet still itself , 
 unaffected by the abundant variety. The Ganges poured i 
 its ceaseless floods into the Ocean, yet the Ocean never 
 overflowed its shore ; the unpausing hurry of the river, 
 the unchanging fulness of the vast expanse in which it\ 
 was swallowed up, might well become the t3'pe of that 
 contrast between the vicissitude of the world of percep- 
 tion and the oneness felt by all who turned to the 
 inward world. But whether or not the changed circum- 
 stances of the Hindus gave them a new symbolism, 
 their thoughts on^ the Divine certainty took a new 
 channel ; their attention was diverted from the religion 
 of its earlier activity, the discernment that God was 
 One was the discovery that He must be sought not in 
 the variety of nature, but within the soul of man. 
 
 Hitherto we have been only tracing the universal 
 thought of humanity in a particular example. In pro- 
 portion as men believe in the spiritual world they tend 
 to give it a centre, whether they call its inhabitants 
 human or divine. But to regard God as the One is not 
 necessarily to regard Him as the All. If logic seem 
 to demand the inference, it is possible to disregard it 
 
 1 e.g. Mababharata, xii. 7971^, pp. 249, 250: — "Just as all rivers vhen 
 they reach the ocean lose their individualities and their names, and the larger 
 rivers swallow up the smaller, so are beings absorbed."
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 2; 
 
 as an invader when we are considering the Infinite. 
 Logic, we may believe, is a law of men's thought con- 
 cerning objects of thought which can be expressed in 
 adequate nomenclature ; a guide, therefore, which must 
 be regarded as fallacious when we deal with that con- 
 cerning which all language is not only inadequate, but 
 to a certain extent misleading. Considerations such as 
 these enable us to make room for the Not-God beside 
 God — to regard Him as in some special sense the 
 One, and 3-et to believe the Universe of Being contains 
 that which is heterogeneous with Him. But to the more 
 logical and less moral Eastern mind this was impossible. 
 If He were the One, He must be the All. There could 
 be no discontinuity of Being between Him and any part 
 of Being. A man was an exclusive unity. Oneness 
 was in him combined with negation, he was this and 
 not that. But in God the unity was absolute. He was 
 all of Being. The seeming antagonism which separated 
 from Him any part of true existence was as fallacious 
 as some turn in a river by which it should seem to 
 flow away from the sea. " Thou," exclaims the Indian 
 seer, overwhelmed with the spectacle of the Divine in 
 the Universe — "Thou art youth, thou art maiden, thou 
 art woman, thou art man, thou as an old man totterest 
 along on thy staff. Thou art the dark blue bee, thou 
 art the green parrot with red eyes, thou art the thunder- 
 cloud, the seasons, the seas." ^ There is something 
 wonderfully expressive in this stammering hurry of 
 enumeration, this gathering up of the great All in 
 some hap-chosen specimens as they struck the keen, 
 eager fancy of one who, as much as Spinoza, might be 
 called a God-intoxicated man. He feels that all these 
 things conceal God as much as tlicy reveal Him ; we 
 must not look without for any manifestations of His 
 
 ^ Upanishads, ii. 249, 250.
 
 25 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 presence. "There is no image of Him whose name 
 is great Glory ; no one perceives Him with the eye." ^ 
 " He is the ruler of many who seem to act, but do 
 not act ; He makes the one seed manifold." " He is the 
 hidden light, of whom all other light is but the shadow ; 
 " like the fire of the sun that is set in the Ocean," ^ the 
 suffused glow that lights up the world, but has no 
 visible centre. Or again, He is symbolized by that fiery 
 principle which converted all to its own essence, and 
 which seems to have been contemplated also as the 
 principle of growth so inseparably united with heat. 
 But the difference in these varied manifestations of the 
 one is only seeming ; the identity is actual. All that 
 seems to separate man from God belongs to the realm 
 of illusion ; in proportion as man approaches the True 
 he recognizes his own being as embraced and inter- 
 penetrated by the Divine, and sees that, so far as he 
 truly is, he is one with God. " There is one eternal 
 thinker, thinking non-eternal thoughts ; He, though 
 One, fulfils the desires of many. The wise who per- 
 ceive Him within their Self, to them belongs eternal 
 peace. " '^ This, in truth, is the escape from all the per- 
 turbation of our deceptive phehomenal existence — this 
 is the secret of true wisdom. " In that vast Brahma 
 wheel," the outward creation, "in which all things live 
 and rest, the bird (the soul) flutters about so long as 
 he thinks that the self in him is different from the 
 mover. . . . But when that God is known all fetters 
 fall off", all sufferings are destroyed." ^ The conflict is 
 ended. Man is one with himself, and unsatisfied desire 
 is at an end. 
 
 The intellectual attractions of Pantheism are equally 
 strong at all times. It must always be a temptation to 
 
 1 Upanishads, ii. 253. 2 /bid., ii. 264. s jtid., ii, 265. 
 
 4 Ibid., ii. 19. ^ Ibid., ii, 236, repeated, 243,
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 27 
 
 explain the universe of Being by a single principle ; 
 by setting all that exists on one level of claim, to make a 
 clean sweep of all preliminary distinctions of a )'ighi to be. 
 But as a doctrine satisfying to the moral nature, it will 
 appear in very different aspects according as it is viewed 
 in different states of society. For an inhabitant of 
 London or Paris, familiar with the development of poverty 
 and crime which our modern civilization forces on the 
 attention of every one, the thought that God is all can 
 surely never come as a gospel. Nor is it easy to imagine 
 human beings so different from those we see around us 
 as to delight in the thought that the Divine meant no 
 more than the sum of all their own impulse and desire 
 and all the circumstances which surrounded them. But 
 perhaps this is partly due to the weakness of our ima- 
 gination. Where nature is more genial and the needs 
 of man are simpler and fewer, life is much less full 
 of struggle, and there the circumstances of average 
 humanity contain less to make it a mockery to regard 
 the All as Divine.^ " As the sun, the e3^e of the world, 
 is not contaminated by the external impurities seen by 
 the eye, thus the one Self within all things is never con- 
 taminated by the suffering of the w^orld, being Himself 
 apart." " To imagine the Divine Being contemplating 
 unmoved " the sufferings of the world " w'ould seem to 
 transport into the Divine the worst attributes of humanit3^ 
 But it depends partly on what the suflcrings of the world 
 are. And however we explain it, we must accept the 
 fact that this belief in Pantheism came upon the early 
 race as a great gospel for humanity. There was a sort 
 
 1 "In India," says Max Miiller, "the earth without much labour supplied 
 all that was wanted, and the climate was such that life in the forest was not 
 only easy but delightful. Several of the names given to the forest by the Aryans 
 meant originally delight or bliss" (" Lectures on the Origin and Growth of 
 Religions as illustrated by the Religions of India," 1882), 
 
 - L'panishads, ii. 19.
 
 28 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 of rapture of repose in their belief that God was All, and 
 to the Hindu repose was joy. After severance from the 
 active Persian race, the delight in activity so marked in 
 the earlier Scriptures seems to have gradually dried up. 
 Perhaps a tropical climate opposed itself to all delight in 
 activity. But though the world without might strengthen 
 the delight in repose, this feeling had its source in the 
 world within. It was the characteristic of a race that 
 sought above all things the unity of the absolute, and 
 turned from the various, the eventful, the multiform, as 
 from the realm of illusion, the realm in which sojourn was 
 inevitable, but in which it was impossible to find a home. 
 We can trace the association of this delight in repose 
 — partly as cause and partly as effect, or rather perhaps 
 in that deeper correlation which lies below the idea of 
 causation — with all cosmic theory, and through cosmic 
 theory on all moral aim. For the Indian mind there 
 must be no event of transcendent importance in the his- 
 tory of the Universe. God is no Creator. The world 
 is not a creation, but a growth. It has not been made, 
 it commemorates no act of conscious will, no exertion 
 of definitely directed power. Its origin is indistinct, a 
 subject for vague surmise, for a confession of perplexity, 
 for merely negative statement. The Hindu gazed back- 
 wards into the dim dawn of the Universe, and saw that 
 " Being was not yet, nor Not-Being ; the atmosphere did 
 not exist, nor the firmament above it. Where, then, was 
 the world ? Where were the waters, the gulf which no 
 plummet may sound ? ^ Death was not yet, nor therefore 
 could there be immortality ; night and day " (their earthly 
 types) " were indistinguishable." Only one belief was 
 positive — the primal unity must have been there already. 
 
 1 This hymn (Rigveda, x. 129), which has been frequently quoted, is given from 
 M. Darmesteter's " Essais Orientaux," p. 205. He says that in the writer, 
 •' Pascal eCit reconnu un frere, Spinoza lui eiit tendu la main."
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 29 
 
 " A breath arose self-moved ; it was the One ; there was 
 nothing beside that One, nor above it. All was dark- 
 ness. Enveloped in night, the Universe was but an 
 indistinct wave. Whence came the ray which gave 
 shape to the world ? . . . Who knows ? Who can say 
 whence issued this creation ? The gods are younger ; 
 who, then, can declare its birth, or say whether it had a 
 Creator ? He who from the height of the world surveys 
 the world. He knows ; or perhaps even He knows it 
 not." Nothing in the whole range of human speculation is 
 more sublimely consistent than this audacious agnosticism. 
 God is so far from being the Creator that He is not even 
 cognizant of the fact of Creation. Sometimes Creation 
 and dissolution are represented as the breathing of God, 
 the coming forth and drawing back of His life in orderly 
 and harmonious exchange of expansion and contraction. 
 "When this God awakens, the universe accomplishes its 
 acts ; when He slumbers, plunged in a profound repose, 
 the world is dissolved." ^ The differences of such views 
 are, from our point of view, unimportant ; their common 
 element — the negation of all Will in the origin of the 
 Universe — is that upon which the moral influence of 
 belief turns. There is no stamp of Divine sympathy 
 upon work. The world of incident lacks the one ini- 
 tial event which associated God in the activity of man. 
 No Indian teacher could ever say or feel, " My Fatlier 
 worketh hitherto, and I work." His aim was rather 
 to attain the eternal repose of the Divine — a repose not 
 alternating with and dependent on labour, as all repose 
 which is actually known by man, but something deeper — a 
 sort of sublime passivity, which knows no intermittence. 
 Creative impulse was no part of the Divine character, 
 and therefore work was no part of ideal humanity. 
 There was no Divine sanction on effort, no sacred sig- 
 
 1 " Institutes of Munu," i. 51, 5:"."^
 
 so THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 nificance in labour. It was associated with servitude, 
 with social scorn and rehgious contempt. And then 
 again history lost its importance, events had no Divine 
 significance. " There is," says Professor Max Miiller,^ 
 " no taste for history in India, still less for bio- 
 graphy. Home life is shrouded in a veil which no 
 one ventures to lift, while public life has no existence. 
 On the other hand, fable and myth are marvellously 
 busy in the East, and though Rammohun Roy has been 
 dead only fifty years, several stories are told of him 
 which have clearly a mythical character." Here we see 
 the indifference to fact which is a result, indirect indeed, 
 but not remote, of the belief that the One is the All. 
 The realm of difference becomes insignificant, unworthy 
 of careful attention. What matters accuracy in reference 
 to the world of illusion ? All event is unreal, myth has 
 a deeper truth than fact. A transcript from experience 
 can have none but unimportant truthfulness, but myth ex- 
 presses wisdom. The truth of thought is so exclusively the 
 Hindu ideal that it shuts out all care for accuracy of fact. 
 " There is in all national morality something that 
 illustrates that law by which the image of some bright 
 object is impressed on the closed eye in reversed light 
 and shade. The life of India reveals this Protestant 
 tendency in more than one direction ; the spirit of a true 
 unity seems continually to bear witness against an ex- 
 clusive and monotonous unity. " They who believe not 
 in the identity of Being have fallen into a deep night, 
 but they who believe only in its identit}' have fallen 
 into one yet deeper. There is a recompense for those 
 who believe in the identity of beings ; there is another for 
 those who believe in their difference." " This striking 
 
 ^ In an article, I think, in the Contemporary Review, March 1885. 
 
 2 This passage is quoted by M. Adolphe Francke, in his very interesting 
 " Etudes Orientales," 1S61, as a quotation from the Veda, translated by B. St. 
 Hilaire, but I have not been able to idcntifv it.
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 31 
 
 passage is an instance of most rare union of insight 
 at once into a truth and into its opposite ; the Indian 
 was apt to forget that " those who beheve only the 
 identity of Being have fallen into a deep night ; " what 
 we find for the most part is a protest against all 
 diversity. " The rivers in the sea do not know I am 
 this or that river ; " ^ in like manner, man has as his 
 aim to escape all that is individual, to be " merged in 
 the true," i.e., lost in an Ocean of Being wherein all 
 difference shall be swallowed up. " There is no bliss 
 in anything finite," " and so it would seem there is no 
 reality in it. B3' a subtle development of this passive 
 spirit the idea of conflict is exchanged for the idea of 
 endurance ; courage stiffens into asceticism. The con- 
 trast of good and evil, only dimly present at any stage of 
 this religion, wholl}' vanishes, and its place is taken by the 
 contrast of the real and the unreal. The world of sense 
 is seen as a fleeting vision ; only what lies beyond it is 
 worthy of the attention of man. But the religion which 
 confuses God and man sets up lines of ineffaceable dis- 
 tinction between man and man. This harsh separateness 
 of the Hindu system of caste is not so much an exception 
 to this unifying tendency as a natural recoil from it. 
 Truth neglected in one direction must be exaggerated 
 in another, and a tendency which, carried to its logical 
 outcome, becomes destructive to society is always liable 
 to sudden and complete inversion. In the very first 
 glance at Indian literature we are struck by the confusion 
 between the human and divine worlds. We remember 
 with difficulty in any legend or myth which of the 
 personages are divine, which human ; there is no clear 
 dividing line between the natural and supernatural 
 
 1 Upanishads, i. 102. 
 
 - Ibid., i. 123. The definition of the Infinite follows : — " Wlicn one hears nnd 
 sees nothing else" (when all sense of diversity is lost), " that is the Infinite."
 
 32 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 sphere. The divine combatant is revealed by hfs 
 superhuman strength, but awakens no surprise by his 
 supernatural nature. It is a part of the same ideal that 
 there should be so ineffaceable a difference between the 
 Brahman and the Sudra. The Divine oneness satisfied 
 the instinct which seeks unity, the human world was 
 given up to an opposite principle. The whole system 
 of things in which we live is a mere fleeting phenomenon, 
 a ripple on the Ocean of Being, a rainbow in the eternal 
 light ; within this system the Indian sought no unity ; 
 that could only be discerned from a point beyond it. 
 The world of event was the v/orld of illusion. " If the 
 slayer think that he sla3's, if his victim think that he 
 is slain, they are both of them in error." ^ The insigni- 
 ficance, the transitoriness of life suited well with the 
 hopeless division of the caste system. . The only thing 
 of value in it was the recognition of the Divine, and 
 the sacred caste set apart to bear witness to this was 
 naturally separated from all others by an impassable 
 chasm. 
 
 The caste system of Brahmanism is an emphatic asser- 
 tion of Predestination in its most absolute form. Birth 
 fixes the whole of life ; to be born a priest, a warrior, 
 an artisan, a labourer, is to have marked out the whole 
 of fate and the bent of character. The Sudra who sets 
 before himself the virtues of the Brahman commits deadly 
 sin, he disturbs the order of the universe. The distinc- 
 tion of "the elect" and "the reprobate" lies at the base 
 of this system. The lowest class is born and must 
 remain in sin ; its members have no right to share in the 
 common rites of the superior castes ; the Brahman is 
 even forbidden to accept their offerings. If a Brahman 
 marry a Sudra "he sinks into the regions of torture;" 
 
 1 Upanishads, ii. ii. The passage has been versified by Mr. Muir in his 
 metrical translations from Sanscrit texts.
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 33 
 
 hell is the penalty for an unlawful condescension from 
 the high to the low.^ " The self-existent created the 
 Sudra merely for the sake of the Brahman ; servitude 
 is innate in him (the Sudra) ; who, then, can take it from 
 him ? " " His whole duty is comprised in obedience to 
 the higher class. He has no concern with religion ; 
 the Brahman may take any of the Sudra's propert}'- if 
 he need it for sacrifice, but must not accept it ; ^ if it be 
 contributed to ritual observance, it must be involuntarily. 
 The arrogance of the priestly caste is not left to take 
 care of itself, but is ensured by a number of minute 
 precepts, enjoining on men who live only to teach the 
 meaning of holiness the mingled scorn of the Pharisee 
 and the Ancien Regime — the hateful pride of righteous- 
 ness combined with the vulgar pride of birth.* Scorn 
 was needed for the defence of their pre-eminence ; it was 
 the buttress of their virtue. " Better one's own duty 
 performed ill than the duty of another performed well," ^ 
 is a sentence w^hich occurs more than once in the sacred 
 Indian code. In the sense in which we read the words 
 there is a truth for all time. Better that a parent should 
 perform the duties of a parent very imperfectly than 
 that he or she should allow a child to govern. Better 
 a very poor piece of handiwork than hands set to do 
 the work of feet. But whenever we can say this we 
 must feel duty rooted in the deep part of the nature. It 
 must be either a claim resting on a broad human basis, 
 like that of human kindred, or else on a deep inward 
 vocation, like that of character. In the mere distinction 
 of class the better mind of modern Europe sees nothing 
 to be emphasized, nothing which natural endowments 
 may not traverse. English aristocracy itself is a record 
 of continuous infusion of a new element, it lives by that 
 
 1 "Institutes of Menu," iii. 17. - Ibid.^ viii. 413, 414. 
 
 ' Ibid., viii. 417. * e.g.. Ibid., ii. 119. ' Ibid., x. 97.
 
 34 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 very receptivity which Brahmanism abhors. Our Peerage 
 is powerful because we open its doors to every form of 
 capacity, because, in a word, it is not an Order. In 
 India a member of the priestly caste was separate from 
 a member of the servile caste by a chasm that could be 
 bridged by no extremity of virtue, since the only pos- 
 sible virtue for the servile class was that spirit of docile 
 submission, which, in attempting to quit this caste, he 
 must lose. The Sudra who set before himself the virtues 
 of the Brahman committed deadly sin, he disturbed the 
 order of the universe — that order of human separateness 
 which has succeeded to the Holy Order of Nature, and to 
 which an equal loyalty was due. , 
 
 We need no more emphatic testimony to the sacred- 
 ness of the caste system in Indian feeling than the fact 
 that India rejected Buddhism. What is Buddhism ? It 
 is, if we leave out its protest against the caste system, 
 the completed development of all those impulses and 
 instincts which we have endeavoured to set forth as 
 characteristic of Indian thought.'^ It is the yearning for 
 an escape from the bondage of desire carried out to a 
 hope of escape from the trammels of existence. How- 
 ever we explain Nirvana^ — whether or not we contrive 
 to avoid, in interpreting it, the idea of absolute annihi- 
 lation — still we must feel it a consummation of that 
 negative ideal of life of which every utterance of the 
 Indian is an expression. It is a gathering up of all the 
 
 1 It is a striking testimony to this spirit that it is nowhere more evident than 
 in this very Code of Menu, which contains so much that is directly hostile to it. 
 The idea of Renunciation shines through the harshest assertion of privilege ; 
 ^•^•) "• 95' "Resignation of all pleasures is far better than attainment of 
 them ; " and there are several passages which equal the Christian Scriptures in 
 the ideal of forbearance and forgiveness. 
 
 2 "Le Nirvana," says Eugene Burnouf, the great authority on Buddhism, 
 " est pour les Th^istes I'absorption de la vie individuelle en Dieu, et pour les 
 Ath^es I'absorption de cette vie individuelle dans le ndant. Mais pour les uns 
 et pour les autres le Nirvana c'est affranchissement supreme " (" Introduction k 
 I'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien"). It is literally "blown-out-ness."
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 35 
 
 longing for rest, for silence, for escape from individual 
 limit into the desire to escape from all that we can 
 recognize as life. " Even in heavenly pleasures the 
 awakened finds no satisfaction, the disciple who is fully 
 awakened delights only in the destruction of all desires." ^ 
 Victory " breeds hatred, for the conquered is unhappy. 
 He who has given up victory is happy." ^ " Those who 
 love nothing and hate nothing have no fetters." ^ Ever}^- 
 where the Desire is \ht fetter. Freedom is found not in 
 enjoyment, but in renunciation. The deliverance from 
 Self is the sole aim for the enlightened soul ; all else is 
 worthy of effort only in so far as it furthers this. The 
 Indian ideal of negation is here at its height. The life of 
 Cakya-Muni, the Indian prince who gives this ideal its 
 concrete illustration, sets forth this aim in its fullest accom- 
 plishment ; he leaves the joys of home, of marriage, of 
 paternity, to wander forth as a homeless mendicant ; he 
 has all this world can give, and he renounces all, trans- 
 lating into a splendid abdication the theory of surrender, 
 which, in its degree, must be the aim of each one who 
 knows the secret of blessedness. His reward is to 
 teach suffering humanity the path of a true redemption — 
 the path to Nirvana. However hard for a Western reader 
 to conceive that Heaven should mean the extinction from 
 which it seems to us hardly less natural to shrink than 
 from pain, yet we cannot but feel Nirvana the consumma- 
 tion of all those aspirations which we have endeavoured to 
 trace in following the development of Indian philosophy. 
 Buddhism is the essence of all that gives its moral interest 
 to Brahmanism. Whence, then, was it treated by Brah- 
 manism as its deadly foe ? How comes it that, though 
 Indian in origin and in feeling, Buddhism has been 
 
 1 Dhammapada, 187. Some pr^rt of this sacred book of the Buddhists is 
 believed to be the utterance of the Buddha himself. 
 
 2 Ibid., 201. » Ibid., 210.
 
 36 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 driven from India to find its home among men of another 
 race ? There can be but one answer — its attack on the 
 cherished caste system of India. In all else the two 
 religions are at one. In the position of (^akya-Muni 
 there was nothing original/ he was but one of those 
 ascetics who had from immemorial time wandered home- 
 less in India ; his belief in transmigration, the basis of 
 his gospel of Nirvana, was shared by him with other 
 Indian teachers ; the only novelty in his position was 
 that he was a preacher, and by that fact alone an enemy 
 to the caste system. " My law is a law of grace for all," ^ 
 he answered when taunted with the wretchedness of his 
 converts. " Come unto me, all ye that are weary and 
 heavy laden," seems to have been the animating spirit 
 of his attitude towards all. In the Order founded by 
 him, or, at all events, which grew up out of the crowd of 
 disciples attracted by his preaching, the most wretched 
 and despised slave could find a home, so that the aspira- 
 tions nourished by the caste system were satisfied while 
 all their limits were defied, the outcast found his place 
 in an organic system, the human atom was the member 
 of an Order. But this order was essentially a creation 
 of spirit ; the outward order was defied. " Is there," 
 asks one of the lower caste, in a Buddhist legend ^ — 
 " Is there between a Brahman and another man the 
 difference of gold from stone ? He has not issued from 
 the ether or the wind, he has not burst forth from the 
 
 1 " II se presentait comme un de ces ascetes qui depuis les temps les plus 
 anciens parcourent I'lnde en prechant la morale, d'autant jilus respectfe de la 
 socidt^ qu'ils affectent de la m^priser d'avantage " (" Introduction k I'Histoire 
 du Buddhisme Indien," par Eugene Burnouf, 184^). 
 
 - Ibid., p. 199. 
 
 3 Given in Burnouf. The Tchandala (one of the lowest caste) has asked the 
 daughter of a BraViman in marriage, and provokes an outburst of rage and hate 
 from the Brahman, " Comment oses-tu demander I'union du plus noble avcc 
 I'etre le plus vil?" The answer of the Tchandala has some pa3sages curiously 
 recalling the denunciations of the Pharisees by Christ.
 
 IXDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 37 
 
 earth, he is born of woman, as is the member of the caste 
 he most despises." It was the declaration of this truth, 
 and this alone, that made Buddhism a heresy. 
 
 In truth, no doctrine ever provokes a deadlier hatred 
 than that which opposes itself to the spirit of caste. It 
 thereby offends at once the low and the high impulses of 
 humanity. For the instincts which entrench themselves 
 within this rampart are not by any means altogether evil, 
 they are wrought up with the profoundly moral conviction 
 that " we are members one of another." The ideal of caste 
 is closely bound up with that organic character of virtue 
 which our own day, with its worship of equality, is but 
 too ready to overlook, but which can never be neglected 
 without a general lowering of all arduous ideals of 
 virtue. Nothing can be more elevating than the exposi- 
 tion of the duties of the warrior caste as given in the 
 Code of Menu, though it is streaked here and there with 
 strangely contrasting precepts : — " No one should in battle 
 slay enemies with concealed or poisoned weapons ; " ^ 
 " The warrior is bound to respect weakness, to pity even 
 cowardice ; " " That king is dead from whose kingdom 
 the people crying out are carried off by savages ; " 
 The chief duty of a warrior is the protection of the 
 people ; " "That king goes to hell who in exercise of his 
 sovereign power will not meekly bear reviling." ^ The 
 ascetic Brahman in like manner must bear a reproachful 
 spirit with patience, must speak reproachfully to no man ; 
 abused, he must answer mildly, he must be to all the 
 pattern of patience, high-mindedness, and spiritual devo- 
 tion. The high castes are appointed to set forth the 
 excellence of their special virtues, they are to be to all 
 below them a luminous illustration of the meaning and 
 beauty of goodness. This is the aspect of caste to all 
 
 1 "Institutes of .Menu," vii. 90; rf. 91-93. - /did,, vii. 1.13, i.;.}. 
 
 3 Ibid., viii. 313. 
 
 14 43 "l 2
 
 38 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 who find it attract the nobler part of their nature, an 
 aspect without which it could not gain any permanent 
 hold on the spirit of man. For nothing, we may be 
 sure, that appeals wholly to the vulgar and self-centred 
 elements in humanity keeps its hold on the human heart 
 from generation to generation. The temptations that 
 assail the mere self in each one of us are permanent only 
 in their hostility to what is highest, in themselves is 
 nothing enduring, they change their character from age 
 to age, nay, from hour to hour. The institutions which 
 human beings cherish and defend have pushed their 
 roots into a part of the being below the limits of selfish- 
 ness, though they may owe some nourishment also to 
 this surface stratum of life. They could not obviously 
 and irresistibly sway human desire if they had no con- 
 nection with its vulgarest source, they could not retain 
 their hold of a Nation, if this were all. 
 
 Of all the various forms taken by the spirit that 
 identifies the one with the man}^, but not with the All, 
 the family and the nation alone escape the baser tempta- 
 tions which creep in with the association of self. Hardly 
 can it ever have happened in the whole course of the 
 world's history that it might truly be said of a man's 
 love for his country, " He loved not wisely but too well." 
 In the literal sense of the words they cannot indeed be 
 applied to any love ; but even in that sense in which 
 they are consecrated by the pathetic utterance of a jealous 
 love suddenly revealed to itself as ignorant and erring, 
 they have no place with reference to patriotism. A 
 nation is indeed a limited being ; it is conceivably 
 possible to make the love of one the hate of more. But 
 the love of the nation is the love of the neighbour. It 
 is the love of all whom we have, in ordinary life, any 
 power to help or hurt. It turns all beneficent effort into 
 the same channel with knowledge and power, it leaves
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 39 
 
 outside of interest those only whom interest would not 
 profit. Such feeling is in its nature expansive. It finds 
 within its scope the greatest possible variety ; it can 
 permit itself to grow rigid in no single attitude, it must 
 look down, it must look up, it must accustom itself to 
 the level gaze of equal right, to reverence for authority, 
 to pity for weakness, to indignation against crime. All 
 these things are found within the sacred enclosure of a 
 Nation, all these feelings must be associated with the 
 fervour of patriotism, and we may ^'surely conclude that 
 the character in which they have found their fullest 
 exercise must be ready for all new attachment, must 
 have become responsive to every claim and sensitive to 
 every appeal. The love of the Nation is the love of 
 humanity in germ. But nothing of this holds good of 
 the class. Here the limit is the most conspicuous fact 
 in the enclosure. The love of the Nation, we have said, 
 is love of the neighbour ; the love of the class is often 
 scorn and hate of the neighbour. " He who declares the 
 law to a servile man and instructs him in the mode 
 of expiating sin sinks with that very man into hell." ^ 
 Where could hatred breathe a deadlier spirit than in 
 that declaration from the sacred Indian code ? Here 
 we see in ambush the fiercest spirit of persecution ; 
 here, long before the appearance of the Buddha, we come 
 in contact with denunciation of all that was holy and 
 beneficent and potent in the preaching of Buddha. It 
 is as if the Indian worship of Unity had foreseen and 
 denounced, as a fatal misconception, that spirit of unity 
 which sought the redemption of all mankind. And with 
 the hatred of baffled privilege and defeated arrogance 
 there yet mingled, we may be sure, some element of 
 the nobler feeling that comes in wherever men have 
 learned to say " We " instead of " I," and to exchange 
 
 1 " Institutes of Menu," iv. 81.
 
 40 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 the narrowest forms of selfishness for something wider. 
 There was the feeling that the break up of caste obli- 
 gation " would cause the universe to shake," ^ that Order 
 must perish, if the limits of the high and low were con- 
 founded. And hence, though Buddhism was, in all but 
 its neglect of the caste system, a mere carrying out of 
 what is most characteristic of Indian thought, yet this 
 one exception made it the object of deadly hostility to 
 Brahmanism, and though the religion of a third of the 
 human race, it is now the religion of a minority in India. 
 Buddhism is, in fact, no more than the purely spiritual 
 half of Brahmanism, purified from that reactionary ten- 
 dency which shows itself in the distinction of caste. 
 It is the reassertion of the primal unity, against that 
 element of rigid distinction which arose partly as a 
 kind of guarantee to the practical side of human nature 
 against the all-obliterating wave of the Infinite, partly 
 as a protest against that ultimate antithesis of good 
 and evil which is always the most dangerous foe of 
 Pantheism. The condition of things in this world is 
 a mere fleeting phenomenon, a ripple on the great Ocean 
 of Being, a rainbow in eternal light. Within this cycle 
 of fugitive phenomena no great distinction must be 
 introduced dividing the actual from the conventional, 
 the transient from the eternal, because that has been 
 done once for all in recognizing the whole of life as 
 transient and illusory. The substitution of virtues for 
 virtue which marks the spirit of caste is the ally of the 
 spirit of Pantheism. Virtue thus becomes something 
 relative, temporary, earthly. The virtue of the warrior 
 is one thing, that of the labourer another ; the slave has 
 no other virtue than docility and obedience. Goodness 
 thus broken up and divided loses its distinctness as 
 part of a great antithesis ; there is no idea of a con- 
 
 i " Institutes of Menu," viii. 418.
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 41 
 
 flict of good and evil. And it is this idea of conflict 
 which forms the stumbling-block to Pantheism. 
 
 The antagonist of this spirit of unity is not the belief 
 in multiplicity, but the belief in dualism. It is not 
 difficult for the many to be absorbed in the one ; this 
 process is a very natural one. That which resists it is 
 the antithesis suggested by desire and fear, more espe- 
 cially by the desires and fears which belong to the 
 realm of the conscience. All desire, it is true, is not 
 moral ; the larger part is not. But all desire is the 
 material of morality, all suggests the antagonism of good 
 and evil. The Indian clearly recognized this antagonism 
 in all desire to the mystic Unity in which he found his 
 life, and treated it consistently as a danger. The " pairs 
 of opposites " are the object of continual warning in the 
 " Divine lay " ^ which embodies the more dramatic form of 
 Indian wisdom ; all wish and aversion are there treated 
 as the opponents of truth. And so in a very important 
 sense they are. To a Being of pure intellect Evil would 
 be inconceivable. So far as man is purely intellectual 
 he desires truth, but it would be a very forced and 
 unnatural way of expressing this to say that he dreads 
 error or ignorance. Ignorance is to him a mere ncga- 
 
 1 The Bhagavadgita, or " The Lord's Lay " (to give it the name chosen by its 
 latest translator), is an episode in the Mahabharata, the Iliad of India, and 
 has the special interest for an English reader of having been the medium in an 
 English translation (1785) of awakening interest in Sanscrit literature. It is 
 an address from the Divine Being to Arjuna, a warrior prince, who in the hour 
 of battle shrinks back from the duty of slaughter and needs the Divine warning, 
 impressing on him the insignificance and illusory nature of all event, before he 
 can rouse himself to take his place as a Kschatriyia at the head of his battahons. 
 It is an interesting and impressive illustration of the close connection between 
 the caste system and Pantheism. A comparison between this lengthy discourse 
 spoken on the field of battle and the gleaming Thcophanies of Homer brings 
 out strongly the undramatic character of Indian thought, drama melting into 
 philosophy on the one hand, as philosophy melts into drama on ilu- other. 
 The warnings against the "pairs of opposites" occur constantly, e.s;., iv. 23. 
 The work is translated in the "Sacred Books of the East." I have also con- 
 sulted what appears an admirable translation by John Davies (1882).
 
 42 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 tion, and just so far as his mind becomes wholly intel- 
 lectual he loses the sense of any difference between 
 ignorance and error. This is the explanation of the 
 fierce antagonism exhibited at all times, and so conspicu- 
 ous in our day, between the love of truth and the love 
 of a truth. " I cannot conceive," said a celebrated man 
 of science of our day, when he was speaking to a person 
 who expressed a dislike to his theories — " I cannot con- 
 ceive feeling either like or dislike to any theory what- 
 ever." Perhaps it was not literally true either of the 
 speaker or of any actual man, but it would be true of 
 any one who dwelt in the region of pure intellect. Is a 
 theory true ? let us believe it. Is it untrue ? let us leave 
 it alone. There is no antagonism here. If the hatred 
 of error appear side by side of the love of truth, then 
 assuredly we have entered on a moral region. We 
 thus enter a territory where the right borders on the 
 wrong, not on one in which the True is the whole of 
 reality, and the False a mere vacuum. And to a people 
 whose whole life was in the latter region, the spirit of 
 Desire was the one antagonist to be dreaded ; it was 
 opposed by a fierce asceticism, which strove boldly to 
 conquer by inverting this antithesis of hope and fear ; it 
 turned the earlier courage of conflict into the channel of 
 endurance, and strove to demonstrate, by exhibiting this 
 eager pursuit of what was hated, that desire and fear 
 were mere temporal accidents, interchangeable at will — 
 incidents of the temporary, the transitory, and therefore 
 misleading as guides to the Eternal. 
 
 Thus it was that the ideal of India, though it started 
 in the worship of the Light, seems to attain its develop- 
 ment rather in the worship of the Night,^ for thus surely 
 
 1 " TrKeicTTois SauroTs eXvai \6yovs irepi toD davarov" said Megasthenes, 
 the Greek who was sent on a mission to India (cir. 300), in describing tlie 
 Indians (Strabo, xv. 59). Such a contrast to the Hellenic spirit would impress 
 a Greek,
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 43 
 
 we may most truly symbolize that mystic yearning which 
 seeks the revelation of the Divine not in the daylight 
 of reason, but in the pause of an entire silence and 
 passivity throughout the whole being. Unity becomes 
 conscious of itself, it quits the world of appearance, it 
 enters into the background of reality behind appearances. 
 We have cited a text from the earlier scriptures in 
 which the disappearance of a constellation at the return 
 of morning is mentioned with a kind of surprise.^ The 
 discovery that " Light can thus deceive " seems to have 
 dawned on the mind of the Aryan with something of 
 the sense of a mystery that is so finely expanded in 
 the sonnet from which we take these words." It would 
 be altogether out of harmony with the fresh, outward 
 simplicity of the Rig- Veda to make much of this single 
 allusion to the revelation of darkness. And 3'et it 
 seems impossible not to accept it as an unconscious 
 prophecy of the course which later thought was to 
 follow. The faith of India turned from the seen to the 
 unseen ; if this hint of a sense of Light as the concealer 
 was a mere accident, at all events it was an accidental 
 touch which gives the clue to the labyrinth. A potent 
 influence beckoned the Indian race away from the realm 
 of the Outward, curtained off the invasion of eye and 
 ear from a realm where the spirit might study the 
 mysteries which lay in the depth of its own being. 
 The world of event, of observation, faded and became 
 remote, and the thinker was alone in the world of 
 thought in which he found his home. Duty became 
 almost a negation. The moral life was one of pure 
 receptivity. All effort was needed for the one great 
 work of man — to make a vacuum within for that mighty 
 
 1 See back, p. 10. 
 * " Why do we then shun Death with restless strife ? 
 If Liijht can thus deceive, wherefore not Life ? " 
 
 — Sonnet by Blanco White.
 
 44 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 tide of God always surging up into every human heart 
 that was open to receive it. To this behef God was the 
 universal agent ; man had but to cease from exertion, and 
 the Divine life would flood his own with its inexhaustible 
 wealth. " When a man sleeps here," says the mystic 
 teacher, " he becomes united with the True, he is gone to 
 his own Self." ^ The silence of sense is the revelation of 
 spirit ; the outer eye must be closed before the inner eye 
 can be opened. " He, the highest Person, is awake in 
 us while we are asleep." ^ There is a curious fable many 
 times repeated in these sacred scriptures which would 
 seem to set in the strongest manner the supremacy of 
 the passive over the active principle in man. The senses 
 strive with breath for the pre-eminence, and are suc- 
 cessively defeated ; that is, we may suppose, the principle 
 in man which connects him with the outer world, which 
 fosters the exercise of will, which is associated with 
 desire, is a part of the lower order, of the deceptive un- 
 real world. " A wise man should keep down speech and 
 mind." ^ He should make room for the evolution of the 
 primal unity by repressing all that is individual — all that 
 belongs to the world of the many, all that records the 
 separateness of individual being, with its hopes and 
 fears, its futile activities, its illusive centre of creative 
 influence. The need of Humanity was a deliverance 
 from all that was multiform, a simple recognition of that 
 mysterious ground of all being, so near the conscious- 
 ness of every man that its least misleading name was 
 the Self. 
 
 It is not without a great effort, both of the imagina- 
 tion and the reason, that we come near enough to the 
 doctrine here set forth, either to agree or disagree with 
 it. It is apt to seem not merely erroneous, but mean- 
 
 ^ Upanishads, i. 98. 2 Jtid.^ W. 19. 
 
 3 Ibid., ii. 13.
 
 INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 45 
 
 ingless. How can we cease from our own personality ? 
 What is the meaning of this teaching which would rob 
 us of ourselves ? We find it difficult to construe to 
 imagination any concrete result of such exhortation, and 
 turn from it impatiently, as from mere words ; and yet 
 the words meet us from very different quarters, and 
 we are forced to believe in some common ideal, which 
 appeals to the most various minds and the m^ost remote 
 ages. Fenelon and Madame Guyon repeat the lesson of 
 the Indian m3'stic,^ and again we find it in the raptures 
 of Mohammedan piety. And there are phases in most 
 human lives, if they pass beyond a merely child-like 
 or outward experience, which light up the fervours of 
 mystic piety with an illumination rendering them intel- 
 ligible to many who could not use their dialect. No 
 one, surel}', ever looked back on some action that he 
 recognized as wrong without feeling, " I have followed 
 too much the devices and desires of my own heart." 
 He has substituted the Individual for the Universal. 
 Where Personality should have been quiescent, leaving 
 place to Law, some gust of individual feeling has broken 
 in, and disturbed the harmony of things. The great 
 maxim of the moral life formulated by a philosophic 
 teacher, "Act so that thy principle of action could 
 become that of every moral agent," can never be trans- 
 lated into experience by any one desiring to leave the 
 impress of his own individuality on the structure of 
 circumstances. " Do unto all men as you would they 
 should do unto you " may be so read as to encourage 
 each man thus to impress his own individuality on 
 the world ; but it means, in fact, the same as Kant's 
 maxim, it bids us invert the impulses of individuality, 
 test them b}^ their effects, see them in another mind. 
 
 1 The reader of the Buddhist scriptures is constantly reminded of i liomas a 
 Kempis.
 
 46 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 He who has ever truly sought to put himself in the 
 place of another has, unless he has merely identified 
 himself with another, risen above the differences of 
 human beings towards the common platform of Huma- 
 nity. My enemy has wounded my feelings, mortified 
 my vanity, injured my interests, and an opportunity has 
 arisen where I might in some degree do unto him as 
 he has done unto me ; it is easy for every man to per- 
 suade himself at such a crisis that he is following the 
 precept of Kant, if not of Christ. It may seem for the 
 advantage of all that this man should be made to re- 
 cognize what he has made me suffer ; we may place 
 ourselves so close to our own interests that they may 
 seem the interests of Humanity. But when we look back 
 on such a course after long years, we see that we have 
 thus looked at the individual, where the object of our 
 own view should have been the moral commonwealth of 
 our kind. My enemy, it may be pleaded, is an indi- 
 vidual as much as I am. Yes ; but when I endeavour 
 to respect his rights, to imagine his excuses, to consult 
 his interests, I am driven perforce out of the confines 
 of individuality into the realm of the human. I quit 
 the enclosure of idiosyncrasy for the open space of 
 common desires and fears. How can it be otherwise ? 
 I have no other clue to the desires I seek to gratify. 
 Between us, as separate individuals, there is nothing 
 but repulsion ; to find our common gravitation I must 
 turn to that which is a characteristic of catholic 
 humanity. 
 
 The law of truth is here the same as the law of love. 
 What is all party spirit, all fanaticism, all prejudice, but the 
 intrusion of choice into the realm of passivity ? " Surtout 
 messieurs point de zele," though the warning be spoken 
 b}' worldly lips, is one constantly needed by the seeker 
 after truth. Truth, as much as Right, if indeed they can
 
 ■INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY. 47 
 
 be severed, demands the sacrifice of individual choice,^ the 
 silence of individual activity ; it demands that creation of 
 a vacuum which we have discovered in the material world 
 to afford one of the mightiest forces, and which we must 
 learn in the same way to recognize as a power in the 
 spiritual world. When Paul proclaimed with stammering 
 and pleonastic eagerness which often broke down grammar 
 and logic that man is justified by Faith, he saw what the 
 Indian saw, that God is everywhere pressing around man 
 like the atmosphere, that wherever man empties himself 
 of his own choice, his own notions, his own opinion, 
 God fills the vacuum with Himself. And over and over 
 again, in the progress of the ages, this discovery has 
 burst upon some human spirit as it did upon Paul's, 
 and has given an equal energy and resonance to his 
 call to his brethren to come and share his joy ; — for the 
 joy and the message are one, the truth is in its very 
 nature a truth for all. 
 
 1 The most interesting illustration of the truth here suggested is to my mind 
 the word heresy (ai'pecrts). Its original meaning of choice or election remains 
 as an unconscious protest, embedded in the very structure of language, against 
 the tendency of man to impress his individuality on his belief, and bears witness 
 to the deep principle which we can express only as an audacious paradox, that 
 in some sense Free Will must often be regarded rather as an infirmity than a 
 power.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 
 
 In reviewing life we often find our thoughts carried back 
 to a time when we Hved in close and satisfied union with 
 some whose voices .now come faintly towards us across 
 a wide interval, yet without being able to recognize 
 any violent change of belief or feeling, either on their 
 side or our own. We remember a sense of sympath}^, 
 of common ground, which seems strange to us now. 
 We see in looking back that every step carried us 
 farther apart, though we hardly know how to account 
 for the divergence. Perhaps this may be the feeling of 
 both sides. It sometimes happens that the mere growth 
 of thought brings out the strongest antagonism between 
 two who during long periods of their intellectual journey 
 could travel almost hand in hand. But more often pro- 
 bably one party feels that this gradual growth in the 
 other has brought about a reaction in his own mind, and 
 opened his eyes to the presence in his own creed of 
 assumptions between which he was forced to make a 
 choice. For all belief, all thought, is a developmxCnt ; 
 words which we could have echoed with perfect sincerity 
 when their latent tendency was hidden from us may 
 become hateful falsehood by the mere opening of that 
 vista. We are often taught by facts that the words in 
 which logic has failed to discover a flaw are the very 
 opposite of our deepest convictions ; we thus learn to
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 49 
 
 regard Truth and even Error (which is indeed but a 
 parasitic growth of Truth) not as a set of opinions, but 
 as a hving organism. We come to see that whenever 
 this ceases to be the case with any belief, then it can 
 be called neither truth nor error, but an empty formula, 
 a withered husk, that can tell us nothing of the germ 
 from which it has parted company, nay, that may often 
 lead to utter misconception as to its very nature. 
 
 Such a process must be familiar in our own day to 
 many persons. Probably there never was a time when 
 it was not going on more or less, for the twilight of one 
 form of thought is always blending with the dawn of 
 another, and men are constantly discovering that the}-- 
 have confused the two. All reformers, probably, have 
 begun by aspirations that they have discarded as the pro- 
 gress of their own thought and action have acted upon 
 each other, and shown them what it was that they were 
 really attacking, and what it was that they actually 
 sought to embody in life and fact. The discovery which 
 thus separates many between whom at one stage of 
 their progress sympathy was apparently complete is an 
 incident of the development of thought throughout all 
 history. But it can never have been so striking as in 
 that remote age when the young race first awoke to the 
 nascent antagonism within itself of the most fundamen- 
 tally antithetic religions ; never again could a reformer 
 recoil from any creed with the same energy of protest 
 as he who first discerned that the progress was towards 
 an obliteration of the distinction of good and evil. 
 
 The Persian, if we have rightly seized the clue of 
 his thought, was the first to give to belief the distinct 
 outline created by denial. He first confronted a false 
 religion} The failh of later India is an important modi- 
 
 1 Tlie neiglibourhood of heresy is clt-arly impressed on th<; pa^cs of the 
 ZcndavebU (now made accessible to all our countrymen in M. James Darnie- 
 
 D
 
 50 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 fication of the faith of the Veda. The faith of Persia 
 is manifestly a recoil from the ripened and developed 
 faith of the Veda ; it is distinctly a Protestant reli- 
 gion. Doubt, we have seen, was familiar long before, 
 but with the division of the two races there arose for 
 the first time the idea of a zvrojig belief. The beliefs 
 thus contrasted are the most antithetic of all beliefs. 
 The dividing question of all thought is — In this universe 
 of life and sense and feeling have we to do with a unity 
 or with a dualism ? Is the familiar contrast of right and 
 wrong, good and bad, a misleading expression for the 
 mere fact of more and less, or does it express a funda- 
 mental truth ? This was the question in which the two 
 races found their division line. India saw at the root of 
 all existence a vast unity, disguised under the multiplicity 
 of Nature ; Persia saw a profound Duality, carrying on 
 the struggle of Conscience beyond the boundaries of the 
 phenomenal world. On the one hand, the Indian faith 
 discovered everywhere the unfolding of a single principle ; 
 it recognised no other antagonism throughout existence 
 than the distinction of that which seems and that which 
 is. On the other hand, the Persian faith took up the 
 position of that faculty in man which keeps its arduous 
 watch on the boundary of good and evil ; every step was 
 an approach to or progress from a deadly foe. In the 
 legendary history, the mythology, the moral standard, and 
 even in the actual history of Persia we see in its fullest 
 development the kind of belief and character which springs 
 from and which again results in the ideal of warfare, 
 of struggle, of the choice between good and evil, the life 
 of the Conscience, the constant appeal of Duty with its 
 
 Eteter's translation in the "Sacred Books of the East," vols. iv. and xxiii. , to 
 which all the following references are made), e.g. : — " It is a sin worthy of many 
 stripes to teach one of the faithful a wrong creed " (" Sacred Books of the East," 
 iv. 172). It is true that the date of this passage is uncertain, but it seems to me 
 in accordance with the spirit of the whole.
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 51 
 
 shadow of sin, the sharp and all-pervading antithesis of 
 Right and Wrong. 
 
 The idea of conflict does indeed haunt all mythology ; 
 all the heroes of legendary lore triumph over some 
 incarnation of malignant destructive power, or some 
 guardian of hidden wealth. Even in India, the least 
 prone of any nation to the idea, we have the legendary 
 conflict of the Mahabharata side by side with the 
 mythic conflict of Indra and Vritra. But when we turn 
 to the Persian faith, this conflict expands to fill the 
 whole space occupied by the history of this world. It 
 arose in conflict, endures in conflict ; it is thus to end. 
 Legend and myth alike are absorbed by the idea of a 
 continuous struggle pervading all existence, the antithesis 
 of good and evil runs through all creation with an exact 
 equivalence, so that the evil world represents no mere 
 mutiny against the good,^ but a hostile power, con- 
 fronting it from without ; it ceases to be the expres- 
 sion of human failure, it becomes an ideal of all that 
 against which human effort is directed. The conflict 
 between the powers of good and evil began with the 
 creation, which was itself the result of their discover- 
 ing each other ; the material universe is a bastion 
 placed in the empty space which is between the two 
 principles. The work of creation is an exercise of 
 rivalry between these powers ; the fair and fruitful 
 regions called into existence by Ormazd became object 
 of a kind of inverted imitation on the part of Ahri- 
 man ; each new exertion of the creative power of 
 
 1 " Le v(5disme connalt des forces mauvaises, il ne connait pas des forces 
 m(5chantes. . . . Le mazd(5ism a pr6cis(5 : son d(5mon fait le mal pour Ic mal : 
 sa ni(jchancet6 est ' d6ik de destruction ' tout ce que criiera Ormazd dcvicndra 
 la niire de son effort, sa ni(':chancut('; est organisd'e p.ir la bont<5 d'Ormazd " 
 (" Ormazd et Ahrinian, leur Origincs et Icur llistoire," par James Darmcblcter, 
 1877, pp. 9, 10). See also p. 244. Where no other reference is given, this 
 treatise is the justification fur any statement given ln:rc which needs a liistoric 
 reference.
 
 52 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 the beneficent Deity becomes the occasion of a like 
 exertion on the part of his opponent ; so that we must 
 think of the worlds of good and evil as opposed in 
 symmetric equivalence throughout all existence. Ihe 
 whole of life is seen through this medium of fierce 
 antagonism. As Ahriman is opposed in deadly hostility 
 to Ormazd in the opening of the great drama of the 
 world, so the most important event in the course of 
 history is his antagonism to Zoroaster, and the victories 
 of both the God and the Prophet are blended in com- 
 mon visions of apocalyptic splendour, preluded by those 
 images of horror which naturally characterize the last 
 outbreak of hostile power before it is swept away for 
 ever. 
 
 Zoroaster is the representative of Ormazd on earth, 
 an incarnation of righteous law, of moral purity, of the 
 spirit, that is, which in face of evil is one of unresting 
 conflict. Before his birth his mother has a vision of 
 fearful wild beasts approaching to attack him,^ and is 
 only reassured by his voice addressing her in tones of 
 encouragement, the portent being fully justified by a life 
 of struggle crowned by victory at every point, but assailed 
 with fierce persistence by all the powers of evil. He is 
 the first inhabitant of the material universe who pro- 
 claimed the word by which the demon is to be overcome.'^ 
 He is the object of a double attack from Ahriman, first 
 as a deadly foe, second in the more dangerous character 
 of the Tempter. "Zoroaster,"^ says Ahriman, "is the only 
 one who can banish me from this world ; he smites me 
 with the mystic word as with the lightning." Vainly in 
 Ahriman's effort at resistance does he aim at confounding 
 
 1 " L'Avesla, Zoroastre et le Mazdeisme," par Abel Hovelacque, p. 142, 
 1880 : — " La voix de I'enfant lui-merne vient la rassurer." 
 
 ' Zendavesta, translated by Darmesteter, "Sacred Books of the East," vol. 
 xxiii. 201, 2. 
 
 2 Ibid., 274, 5 ; the passage is here in paraphrase merely.
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 53 
 
 the Prophet by his own weapons, assaihng him by mystic 
 enigmas which would seem to symbohze the doubts 
 infused by the spirit of negation, weapons that would 
 be most deadly against the seeker after truth. Vain 
 are his subsequent overtures of peace/ " Destroy not 
 my creation, O holy Zoroaster. Renounce the law of 
 Ormazd, and thou shalt possess the sovereignty of the 
 world for a thousand years." " Never," declares Zoroaster, 
 "will I renounce the holy law; no, not though my body 
 and soul should be shattered and crushed in the struggle." 
 And his recital of the m3^stic word, the invocation which 
 _is the weapon of Faith, drives Ahriman to the depths of 
 hell. Zoroaster is the revealer of the Law, the human 
 expression (as Ormazd is the Divine expression) of the 
 revealing Light, or, from another point of view which 
 hardly is another, of the revealing word ; for language is 
 to thought as Light to the material universe ; and silence 
 and darkness are the same negation expressed by a dif- 
 ferent symbol. 
 
 The victory of the Prophet is succeeded by an ap- 
 parently final defeat, and completed by a miraculous 
 revival which needs that blackness of disaster to enhance 
 its splendour. He is not an immortal being. The 
 legend of his death takes various forms, according as it 
 is regarded through a mythic or a legendary medium ; he 
 is the victim of some hostile force human or divine ; his 
 life closes as it opens, in storm ; the lightning flash, 
 which is the weapon of the Demon as well as the God, 
 reaches him at last, and he perishes. But the storm 
 which is the death of Light is also its birth. In many 
 forms the hero rises from the tomb. 'I'he spirit which 
 survives defeat and turns it to gain is incarnate in 
 an avenger, generally the brother or son of tiie dead 
 hero ; himself, that is, in another form. Or else the 
 
 1 Vcndidad, 19, i, 6, 7. " Sacrcrl I5ooks of ilic East," vol. iv. p. 206.
 
 54 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 same idea takes shape in an aspect familiar to us. We 
 know how often an earlier mythology, throwing its con- 
 fusing shadows on histor}'', takes possession of some 
 actual hero, and hides him in mystic seclusion, whence it 
 foretells his glorious reappearance as the conqueror in 
 a conflict which shall bring in the final triumph over 
 all that is conceived as evil. Persian mythology knows 
 many a kindred hero with Arthur and Barbarossa. The 
 daily resurrection of the dawn, the yearly resurrection 
 of the spring, the sudden outburst of light from the 
 thundercloud, all combined to leave on the imagination 
 and hope of the Persian an ideal of the final triumph 
 of light, expressed in -one form among many as the 
 awakening of some warrior from what had seemed the 
 sleep of death to a new and more glorious activity. 
 The hero seemed dead ; he was but wrapt in slumber. 
 He is to appear, when least expected, as the triumphant 
 destroyer of evil. 
 
 For in all these dreams of a hero wrapped in death- 
 like sleep there lies hid in germ the conception of a 
 saviour of the world. The revival is always to be 
 something glorious and mysterious, something fitted to 
 herald the dawn of a brighter day. But the faith in a 
 renovated future — in a " restitution of all things " — 
 suggests the prophecy of some divine hero who has 
 no other office ; it concentrates itself in a being who is 
 affiliated by inheritance with the past, but who himself 
 belongs to the future which he is to herald. In the 
 Persian faith this saviour of the world is a son of 
 Zoroaster not yet born, who is to bring in that age in 
 which the desires of all hearts shall be fulfilled. The 
 appearance of the Deliverer is preluded by a storm 
 of all the ills of this life, such as is painted in the 
 apocalyptic visions of the New Testament. The days 
 are shortened, the trees and plants lose their fer-
 
 PERSIA AXD THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 55 
 
 tilit}', the world is ravaged by wars, enough blood is 
 shed to turn the mills. A terrible winter draws on, 
 lasting three years, bringing such bitter cold, such 
 storms, that man and beast shall perish and the earth 
 become a desert. But the night, the winter, the storm, 
 are the heralds of a reign of eternal unclouded Light. 
 When the tempest has raged itself away Ahriman has 
 disappeared. The conflict of the ages, intensified in 
 this last hour of the world's history into a combat 
 between all the powers of good and their antagonist, is 
 ended in a victory so complete that it conceals its own 
 greatness ; the world of evil has vanished ; the Earth 
 is renovated for the spirits of just men made perfect, 
 and the long night of the world gives place to an 
 eternal day. 
 
 Here, then. Dualism bears witness to its own incom- 
 pleteness. We see that the religion of conflict, if it is 
 to be in truth a religion, must keep before itself the 
 hope of victory. The primal unit}-, banished as an 
 actual basis of the world in which we live, returns as 
 an ultimate hope. Darkness is the invading shadow. 
 Light is the enduring reality. The whole course of the 
 world's history, in comparison with that glorious morrow 
 of the resurrection, is but one long night. The race 
 has greeted the daily returning light with daily hope, 
 but the curtain of night has been lifted on deadly strife, 
 on crime, on wretchedness of every kind, the light of 
 common day is, as it were, polluted by the deeds in 
 which it has appeared as an accomplice ; and the na'ive 
 joy with which primitive man greeted the dawn of 
 common day is transfigured into a mystic hope for the 
 " mighty dawn " which is to herald a brighter day than 
 that of this world. 
 
 The very symbolism which expresses two principles 
 is an implicit assertion of the predominance of good.
 
 56 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 The ab3'ss of light was a reality, the abyss of darkness 
 was a logical creation, a supposed antithesis below the 
 earth to that Heaven of brightness above it, an infinite 
 expansion of the darkness of the tomb. Darkness itself 
 was not a logical creation, that was real and terrible 
 enough, but it was the logical imagination which con- 
 densed and intensified it into a principle and gave it 
 an equivalence to the opposite world of light. There 
 was no need, in like manner, for the Persian to discover 
 a Divine Ruler over all things ; that belief seems to have 
 been as old as humanity ; at all events, as the tj^pical 
 humanity of the Aryan race. But the antagonist of this 
 Divine Ruler is a new creation ; and this is the special 
 work of the Zoroastrian creed. It gave distinctness to 
 the ideal of right by first conceiving of the world of 
 wrong, and then by intensifying this world into a central 
 individuality. But note how the eternal laws oppose 
 themselves to a false completeness in this antagonism. 
 Ormazd is a much more simple conception than Ahriman ; 
 Ormazd is akin to Varuna, he is the all-Father of Aryan 
 worship. Ahriman is a mythic personage moulded on 
 a contrasted ideal and transformed b}^ the neighbourhood 
 of his divine antagonist. But the antagonism is, after 
 all, incomplete. Ormazd is Light, Ahriman is Dark- 
 ness ; Ormazd has discernment, foreknowledge, Ahriman 
 is blind. ^ The equivalent antagonist of Ormazd should 
 be the spirit of lies. But Ahriman is saved from that 
 by being the spirit of ignorance. He is accurately the 
 spiritualized ideal of darkness, for darkness does not 
 deceive, it only hides. Thus science is for ever on 
 the side of Goodness, and the victory is certain. The 
 antagonism of Light and Darkness, even when it is 
 endowed with an ideal completeness which nature does 
 
 1 "Bundahis," ch. 2., translated by E. W. West, in "Sacred Books of the 
 East," V. 5.
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 57 
 
 not supply, gives no accurate model for an antagonism 
 of Truth and Falsehood. And the metaphysical develop- 
 ment of the religion repeats this lesson of its origin. 
 With the process of rationalizing reflection a primeval 
 unit}^ arises behind the primitive dualism ; Time, or 
 Destiny, is the source both of good and evil, of Ormazd 
 and Ahriman. Then the allegory is forgotten, and 
 the impersonation of Time ^ becomes a conscious being 
 who craved for a son, and Ormazd was born to him 
 as the result of his sacrifices. Ahriman was the son 
 of his doubts. A mysterious being is thus revealed 
 to us even beyond this impersonation to whom these 
 sacrifices may be paid. In every direction we are re- 
 minded that all Dualism, where it is based on a moral 
 order, is compelled at last to bear witness to Unity. 
 That which is a unity shall remain. Division is a 
 property of the transient, even though it be a charac- 
 teristic of the whole stage of our being that is passed 
 on this world. 
 
 But to look forward to victory is not to deny conflict. 
 There is the widest possible gulf between the religion 
 which allows that struggling is transient and that which 
 urges that struggle is unreal. The spirit that denies 
 Difference is separated by a whole world of feeling and 
 belief from the spirit which hopes for an ultimate unity, 
 " If the slayer think that he slays, if the slain think 
 that he is slain, they are both of them mistaken," is the 
 verdict of Indian wisdom on the conflict of life, but 
 Persian wisdom sees strife as the great reality of all 
 experience ; strife in the world without, and not less 
 in the inner world, in which India sought its type of 
 Unity. India described God as the Self, but Persia saw 
 in the Self not a Unity, but a Dualism. That strange 
 
 I The sect of Zervanites who referred the two principles to Zervan {i.e. , Tiiuc) 
 became orthodox in I'ersia in the fifth century of ilie Cliristinn era.
 
 58 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 but yet familiar experience by which, at the very depth 
 of our own individual being, we are made sensible of 
 multiplicity, that mystery by which Self seems at once 
 to lose and to double its meaning, is the true clue 
 to the Persian religion. " I have plainly two souls, 
 O Cyrus," says a Persian soldier in the earliest speci- 
 men of the historic novel that has come down to us, 
 " for a single soul cannot be at once good and bad." ^ 
 The " Cyropaedia" is a mere romance, but it was written 
 by a Greek who knew Persia, and these words may be 
 taken as gathering up the aspect of Persian feeling as it 
 revealed itself to the soldier-pupil of Socrates. He was 
 awakened by the teaching of his master to an interest in 
 the moral life of those among whom he sojourned ; and 
 though he knew the nation only in its military aspect, 
 he here records that consciousness of struggle which, 
 if we may trust its most ancient scriptures, was the 
 dominant influence in its moral life. 
 
 It is not only belief which is different according to 
 the apprehension of evil ; the whole world of duty and 
 of desire is influenced by the difference. The object of 
 yearning and hope, in the Indian ideal, is the life of 
 repose ; all moral aspirations turn towards quiescence 
 of will, and the giving up of that which marks indivi- 
 dual personality. The Persian blessedness is the exact 
 opposite of all this. It is found in the life of strenuous 
 activity, of resolute exertion. Persian religion is, if we 
 sum up its tendencies in a single word, the religion of 
 will,- — the religion which seeks everywhere to impress 
 personality on the world of things, which sees the 
 Universe of Being as a field for the exercise of choice, 
 which discerns through all the varied colouring of life the 
 fundamental contrast of light and darkness. We appre- 
 hend this faith most distinctly when we give a large place 
 
 1 Xcnophon, Cyropaedia, vi. i, 41.
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 59 
 
 to its element of protest. The injunctions to industry, 
 the elaborate provisions for agriculture, the constant 
 stimulus to exertion of every kind/ are most intelligible 
 when we see in them a recoil from the faith which 
 appeared to this active race a confusion of good and evil. 
 We might express the contrast of the two religions 
 with a certain exaggeration, but with a real indication of 
 what is characteristic in each belief, by saying that India 
 turns towards the ideal of Death, Persia upholds in 
 every varied form of its manifestations the worship of 
 Life. India craves a surrender of all independent exist- 
 ence, Persia reiterates the sanction on all that is indivi- 
 dual, vivid, personal. Life and Death are not here the 
 rhythmic breathing of the Supreme God, but the varying 
 victory of the good and evil powers respectively. A 
 spirit of keen activity penetrates the whole world of 
 duty, every faculty is to be kept at the highest point, all 
 that opposes itself to energetic life is seen as a spiritual 
 foe ; thus even protracted sleep is the work of the demon 
 Busyacta with its " long hands " holding men back from 
 vigorous exertion.^ All that is not good is an enemy of 
 good. Death is to the righteous the entrance on eternal 
 joy, yet Death itself is to this vivid, life-loving religion 
 an object of horror. The double feeling thus aroused 
 is brought out in the account of the pilgrimage of the 
 faithful soul who has " come from the material world to 
 the world of the spirit, from the decaying world into the 
 undecaying." " Even in those raptures there is a tone of 
 
 1 " He who does not till the Earth of Zoroaster with the left arm and the right, 
 to him thus saith the Earth, • O man who doth not till the Earth of Zoroaster, 
 ever shall thou stand at the door of the stranger among those who beg for 
 bread, and wait there for the refuse that is brought to thee'" (Zendavesta, 
 p'argard, iii. ; "Sacred Books of the East," vol. iv. 29). 
 
 - "Busyacta . . . runs with long hands from the north region, saying 
 ' Sleep, O men I Sleep ye who lead a sinful life ' " (Khordah-A vesta, Frag. 39 ; 
 Bleeek's translation of Spiegel, ii. 139 ; see DarmestLler, p. 181. 2). 
 
 3 Zendavesta ; " Sacred Books of the East," xxiii. 314-318.
 
 6o THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 solemnity, of awe, in the reference to Death. "How didst 
 thou depart this life, thou holy man ? " he is asked by 
 one who is gone before, with a profound glance back- 
 ward to the homely pleasures of Earth that is full of 
 pathos. " How didst thou come from the abodes full 
 of cattle, and full of wishes and enjoyments of love ? " 
 And Ormazd interposes to keep that reminiscence un- 
 spoken, "Ask him not — him who hast just gone the 
 dreary way, full of fear and distress, where the soul and 
 the body separate." It is the way on which man tastes 
 more bliss than all that is enjoyed in the life that is 
 ended : but there is a horror in the thought that it is 
 the way of Death. The body is no burden which it is 
 a release to lay down. There is a solemn shudder in 
 the thought of that divorce even in the blessedness of 
 Heaven. 
 
 For, in truth, the fulness of achievement, the strain 
 of tense endeavour, of unremitting activity, which 
 belongs to this ideal is exactly that which appears to 
 man inseparable from the life of this world. When we 
 contemplate an existence beyond the grave, we have to 
 imagine the pure life of spirit, a life remote from all 
 images of activity and exertion such as we most easily 
 conceive. The Persian religion, almost alone among 
 the religions of antiquity, made immortality a definite 
 and vivid hope by joining to it the belief in a human 
 Resurrection ; yet even so it could not but pay the tribute 
 of this reverent awe to the separation of the spirit from 
 the associate and implements of its active days. No 
 other religion sets so deep a stamp of importance on the 
 activities of this life. When the great Persian host 
 gathered up its shattered strength for its last struggle 
 at Plataea after the departure of Xerxes, a banquet given 
 by the friendly Thebans brought Greek and Persian 
 side by side, and left on the page of the historian an
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 6i 
 
 expressive utterance of this ^-earning after achievement. 
 "See'st thou this host?" asks the Persian noble, addressing 
 his Greek neighbour. "All shortly shall perish, and leave 
 but a few survivors from the vast multitude." " Surely," 
 urges his neighbour, " thou shouldst communicate this 
 knowledge to the general of the arm3\" " My friend," 
 answers the Persian, with a flood of tears, " the effort 
 were in vain. This is the curse of life, with abundant 
 knowledge to accomplish nothing." ^ In that lament 
 we discern clearly the aim of the historic nation, we feel 
 ourselves among the people whose rise marks the start 
 of the narrative of civilized human life, as a single 
 sequence of connected events. When we turn from 
 India to Persia we have crossed the barrier that separates 
 the men who breathe philosophy from the men who make 
 history. On that side no chronology, no definiteness, 
 no narrative. On this everything is definite, everything 
 is expressed in terms of time and space, of before and 
 after, of event and circumstance. There the ideal is 
 resignation, silence, repose ; here it is courage, speech, 
 activity. India, we have allowed ourselves to say, has 
 no history ; we may say, with the same kind of one-sided 
 truth, that history begins only with the rise of Persia. 
 There must have been great events in the previous ages ; 
 the rise and fall of great nations is impossible without 
 them. But the historian may ignore them all, till he 
 comes to the race that worshipped Ormazd and dreaded 
 Ahriman. 
 
 It is the fierce swoop of Persian invasion which 
 overcomes the mutual repulsion of the Hellenic States 
 
 1 iXOiffTT] 0( oouvri eo'Tl Tuiv f.v dvOpuiTTOicn avrrj, ttoWo. (ppoviovra ftrjoevbi 
 Kporeei;' (llerodolus, ix. i6). Grotc, who quotes this passage, points out its an- 
 tagonism to the Greek ideal. 'I hu way in which Herodotus mentions the name 
 of his informant, and the fact tliat the latter was said to have told others what 
 lie told the historian, surely justify us in believing that we have here a genuine 
 Persian utterance.
 
 62 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 and welds Greece into a nation. Even for the history 
 of England/ says a thinker who has very little sympathy 
 with classic life, the battle of Marathon is more important 
 than that of Hastings. Alone of the empires of Asia, 
 Persia must be recognised by the student of European 
 history. Xerxes is an image almost as familiar to our 
 imagination as an English king ; his words have become 
 proverbial among us ; we feel him to belong to the 
 classical world. He, almost as much as Homer, may be 
 called the author of Greek unity. With his appearance 
 on European soil, all that in the most typical sense 
 we recognise as History takes it rise. Before that 
 event we have isolated facts and vague surmise ; after 
 it History is consecutive, coherent, organic. We might 
 almost say that no history is so historic as the tale of 
 Thermopylae, of Salamis, of Plataea. None other con- 
 denses into so narrow a space the destiny of States, the 
 lessons of national experience, the images of colossal 
 hopes, and not less colossal achievements. It seems 
 a rehearsal, in its most condensed form, of the drama 
 of History, before the stage clears for its detailed repre- 
 sentation. 
 
 The strong historic spirit of Persia is equally mani- 
 fest also in that glow of legendary narrative which is 
 but the penumbra of history. The scholar " to whose 
 industry Western Europe owes its knowledge of these 
 legends as a whole gives as a reason for their wealth 
 the extent of Persian conquest, the mingled vicissitude 
 and continuity of Persian dominion, and the magni- 
 
 1 "The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more 
 important than the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been 
 different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the 
 woods" (" Dissertations and Discussions," J. S. Mill, ii. 283). 
 
 2 M. Jules Mohl, whose French translation of the Shah-Nameh, " Livre des 
 Rois," enables the reader to enjoy these legends with all the effortless interest 
 with which he peruses contemporary fiction. The references here are to the 
 first edition in folio.
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 6 
 
 J 
 
 ficence of the monuments by which it is recorded ; 
 — all strong conservative influences no doubt, yet we 
 ma}' perhaps regard as the strongest one not mentioned 
 in his enumeration, the spirit of a faith which in its ' 
 protest against the confusion of good and evil marked / 
 all action with a stamp of praise or of blame. Nar- 
 rative becomes vivid when events are regarded as 
 important. In India we cannot say that any event 
 is important. There is a great wealth of tradition 
 there ; the epic which embodies it is the longest in the 
 world ; but the interest that it has for the Western 
 reader lies in its being a repository of philosophic thought 
 rather than a narrative ; the best-known portion of it is, 
 indeed, a striking testimony to that negative ideal which 
 is opposed to the historic spirit. In its assumption 
 that the temptation of the wise and good is to a pro- 
 found resignation which would amount to civil suicide, it 
 takes the heart out of all history and even all legend ; and 
 its protest against this temptation renders the testimony 
 only the stronger. Nothing can be more undramatic / 
 than these Indian legends ; they melt into vague thought, 
 glowing description ; the events seem to fade as one / 
 tries to grasp them. The legends of the Shah-Nameh, 
 on the other hand, are full of vivid dramatic interest, 
 of sharply contrasted character, of distinctly conceived 
 action, of elaborate plot and clearly marked design. 
 The only episode well known to the English reader — ■ 
 the pathetic tale of Sohrab and Rustem ^ — is not, per- 
 haps, a very typical specimen. The father and son who 
 encounter each other unconsciously in battle — the heroic 
 warrior who, with yearning in his heart for the father 
 known to liim only by description, is prevented by 
 treachery from recognizing him when they meet on the 
 
 1 "Cette histoirc d'un p6re et d'un fils que ne se reconnaissent pas a fait lo 
 tour du inondc " (Mohl, Preface).
 
 64 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 battlefield, and learns his name only in receiving from 
 him his death-blow — these touching images of heroic 
 disaster are not characteristic samples from the drama 
 of the conflict of Iran and Turan. They seem rather to 
 express a sort of unconscious protest against the religion 
 of conflict, to hint that the fierce blow may be given 
 ignorantly, and may perchance wound a beloved son. 
 This is the lesson of a large part of life, and the 
 animating principle of much that is most interesting in 
 history and drama. But it is not characteristic of a 
 keen eye for the struggle of virtue with crime to per- 
 ceive distinctly the hardly less frequent struggle of virtue 
 with virtue. The ideal of the Shah-Nameh is utterl}^ 
 unlike that of either classic or of chivalric romance. We 
 find here a curiously modern t3'pe of feeling ; magna- 
 nimous forgiveness meets gigantic crime, generally to 
 fall as its victim, but alwa^^s to bring out its meaning 
 by contrast with its extreme opposite. In no classical 
 epic, probably in no other epic whatever, does ingratitude 
 play so large a part. Zohak, the wicked king of the 
 Arabs, begins his career of superhuman wickedness by 
 yielding to the temptation of Ahriman and murdering his 
 father,^ and the manifestation of pure evil shown in the 
 return of evil for good is repeated again and again 
 throughout the series of legends, together with the 
 manifestation of pure good shown in the return of good 
 for evil. Perhaps the most striking instance is in the 
 murder of Iridj," the eponymous hero of the Iranian 
 race, by his two brothers, of whom Tur in like manner 
 represents the Turanian. Their antagonism typifies at 
 once the conflict between two races and two ideals ; the 
 hero of the noble Persian race represents the ideal of 
 heroic purit}', and his Turanian opponent is clothed in 
 all the darkest hues of moral evil. Nothing more truly 
 
 1 Mohl, " Livre des Rois," i. 57-59. . ^ iHd., 159.
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 65 
 
 Christian has ever been imagined in fiction than the 
 demeanour of Iridj when the envy of his brothers is 
 aroused by the fond affection of their father, who has 
 enriched his beloved son with the noblest portion of 
 his domain. " O my brothers," he responds to their 
 insulting demand that he should surrender to them the 
 crown of Iran (Persia), placed on his head by their 
 father, " dear to me as my own soul, the power that 
 breeds discord is undesired by me. I yield to you the 
 diadem ; let my rule and your hatred die together. I do 
 not attack 3^ou, I would not afflict the heart of any 
 human being." The soft answer does not turn away 
 wrath ; the generous sacrifice is made in vain. The 
 wicked brothers requite the trust which brings him, 
 in voluntary defencelessness, to face their power, with 
 treacherous murder, and send his head to their father 
 with a message of scorn. A special significance is 
 attached to the battle which avenges his death, by a 
 mysterious voice declaring that the combat about to open 
 is one with Ahriman, " who is in his heart the enemy 
 of the Creator." The ideal saint and the ideal fiend, 
 embodied as they are in the type of the Iranian and the 
 Turanian races, never were delineated in sharper con- 
 trast or with a fuller sense of their mutual dependence. 
 The wickedness of Tur could not reach its height apart 
 from the neighbourhood of magnanimous generosity ; the 
 pure and gentle Iridj would likewise lose his halo if the 
 background of perfidious cruelty were withdrawn. Wc 
 arc kept throughout the legend on that boundary-line 
 of good and evil, where each is seen in its sharpest 
 distinctness against its opposite. And this one legend 
 is typical of the whole. 
 
 This spirit is manifest in all Persian history and 
 mythology for good and for evil. Its evil is seen, 
 perhaps, in the hideous cruelty which stains the annals 
 
 £
 
 66 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 of Persian rule, for it is a part of the belief that life 
 is a conflict between virtue and crime, to infuse cruelty 
 into all struggle. Its good is seen in a high ideal of 
 truth and a profound reverence for labour. The religion 
 of Persia has been called ■^ " the revelation of the Word." 
 We have seen that the Indian thought of God is that 
 He is only to be expressed by "No, No." To the Persian, 
 on the other hand, the word reveals as the light reveals, 
 and the demon is vanquished by its utterance. Language 
 is sacred, its perversion is a crime. With the sense 
 of a great spiritual conflict — a struggle against invisible 
 enemies — Deceit rises to an importance which it could 
 never possess when contemplated as mere failure of 
 accuracy. The non-historic nation could not care for 
 such failure ; facts are not sufficiently important to be 
 buttressed with reverence. What is a distortion of 
 experience but a mere additional illusion where all is 
 illusory ? A Pantheistic religion can never admit of 
 any steady condemnation of falsehood ; all thought is 
 divine, all is in some sense true. Of course in all 
 societies the inconveniences of lies about matters of 
 fact must be more or less recognized ; but Truth will 
 never be the ideal virtue where Falsehood is mere 
 misstatement. Where one vast Unity lies at the root 
 of all things, there is no room for any development 
 of the antithesis which separates truth and falsehood. 
 But the Persian race, inasmuch as it begins History, vin- 
 dicates Truth. Falsehood is no longer mere inaccuracy, 
 but an act of treason against the Divine Being. 
 
 The later development of the Persian religion im- 
 personated this Divine claim. Mithra, the god whose 
 fading radiance shone forth in the dawn of Christianity," 
 
 1 By Edgar Quinet, " G6nie des Religions." 
 
 " "Mithra, ce dieu puissant qui un instant disputa au Christ I'empire du 
 monde" (Darmesteter's " Ormazd and Ahriman," p. 21).
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 67 
 
 is an embodiment of the Divine s^'mpathy with human 
 faithfulness. " The ruffian who lies to Mithra brings 
 death upon the whole country." ^ Mithra represents the 
 idea of light as the witness to all contract, the guar- 
 dian of open and fair feeling, the upholder of that in 
 man which man can trust. No strength or agility 
 makes up for the withdrawal of support from the God 
 of Truth ; no skill can give a true aim to the weapons 
 of the deceiver. " The spear that the foe of Mithra 
 flings darts backward ; . . . even though his spear be 
 truly aimed, it makes no wound." ^ Mithra upholds 
 the columns of the lofty house, and makes its pillars 
 solid ; he sets the battle a-going, and stands against 
 armies in battle. . . . Sad is the abode, unprovided 
 with children, where abide men who lie unto Mithra"^ 
 (who hears and avenges all lies). All power of dis- 
 cernment, all the sight of the eyes, the hearing of the 
 ears, is from him ; he is the Revealer, the witness to 
 all truth ; he takes sight from the eyes, hearing from the 
 ears of those who have misused their sight and hearing 
 to the confusion of another. Especially the connection 
 of courage with truth is dwelt on with a lofty confidence. 
 Mithra guards the life of the true man, blunts the darts 
 and hinders the aim of the false man, supplies the lack 
 or annuls the aid of all material weapons, according as 
 the warrior has or has not kept his allegiance to the 
 Revealer. He watches with a discriminating care over 
 graduated claim ; " Mithra," or the contract, " is twenty- 
 fold between two friends, fiftyfold between husband 
 and wife, a hundredfold between father and son.""* So 
 far, perhaps, we may doubt the wisdom of a grada- 
 tion which leaves least guarded the contract in which 
 there is least affection ; but there is something very 
 
 ^ Zcndavesta, " .Sncred Cooks of the East," vol. xxiii. 120. 
 2 /did., 124, s. * /6id., pp. 126-129. * Ibid., 149, 150.
 
 68 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 characteristic of this rehgion of distinctness in the view 
 of human beings, however closely connected, as still 
 separate individualities, facing each other as parties to 
 a contract. And observe the sanction laid on the 
 contract which after so many centuries we are still far 
 from regarding with a worthy reverence. " Mithra is 
 a thousandfold between nations ; " — " a fair recognition 
 of \he jus gentium, ^^ says the brilliant scholar to whom 
 we owe the translation here epitomized. This is 
 a recognition of the duty of nation to nation which 
 modern Europe has not yet succeeded in working out 
 in its practical application. We must remember, too, 
 in this connection, that the study of truth is not 
 limited to our dealings with those who are loyal sub- 
 jects of the truth, " Break not the contract which 
 thou hast entered into with one of the faithful or 
 the unfaithful, for Mithra stands for both the faithful 
 and the iinfaithfuir ^ Surely an unique expression of 
 that sublime principle which all true religion should 
 uphold, and which all forms of religion often practically 
 deny, that Truth is no claim of an individual, but an act 
 of loyalty to that which makes humanity one. 
 
 This ideal of truth is indeed discernible even in the 
 narration which ascribes falsehood to Persian agents. 
 " When a lie is to be told, let it be told," ^ says Darius 
 to his fellow-conspirators, when they are meditating the 
 deceit by which they will win entrance to the apart- 
 ments of the false Smerdis. How often in history 
 would a soldier feel even such a momentary hesita- 
 tion as the words imply in using deceit to overthrow 
 an impostor? It may be objected that we are now 
 criticising a narrative which is the mere work of Greek 
 
 1 Zendavesta, "Sacred Books of the East," vol. xxiii. 120. 
 
 2 Herodotus, iii. 72. The conclusion of the speech, it is true, is rather Greek 
 than Persian in this respect ; but the mere fact of an apology from any one in 
 the position of Darius appears to suggest a conventional respect for truth.
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 69 
 
 imagination. But if Herodotus gives us a romance in 
 his account of the overthrow of the false Smerdis by 
 the seven conspirators, his fiction is almost as good 
 evidence to the characters he describes as his facts are. 
 For at least he knows what the Persians w-ere, and 
 his truthfulness as a dramatist is unquestionable, what- 
 ever his accuracy as a historian may be. And the most 
 unassailable portion of his narrative corroborates this 
 testimony ; it teaches us, at least, that something in the 
 Persian atmosphere created an expectation of hearing 
 the truth, in circum.stances where most minds would be 
 set to disbelieve. The invasion of Greece by Xerxes 
 was surely an occasion for exceptional wariness of belief. 
 There was every possible temptation to deceit on the 
 part of the tiny nation confronted with the might of 
 Asia ; and we should naturally have expected that their 
 dangerous foe would be perpetually on the alert against 
 every apparently friendly communication which might 
 be the channel of hostile intent ; instead of which we 
 find that Xerxes believed every word the Greeks said to 
 him. He never seemed to have suspected that a Greek 
 message could be anything but what it professed to 
 be. In this confidence he hurries to the disaster of 
 Salamis ; ^ and in his subsequent flight from Greece 
 he still acts on Greek advice with absolute confidence. 
 Falsehood must have been a more unnatural idea to 
 him than to most rulers of an invading army. The 
 Great King must have known plenty of instances of it, 
 but some influence was at work on him which made 
 
 1 Herodotus, viii. 75. This instance of credulity on the part of the Persian 
 commanders appears the more striking because Sicinnus, the Greek who brings 
 the message which was to hire them into the trap, does not claim reward or 
 shelter. '0 fxiv ravrd a-rjfxrjvai (kwoqwv airr)Wda(j€TO. It would almost seem 
 as if the historian intended to express surprise at their credulity in the next 
 sf-ntence (76) : — Totcrt oe ws wiarii ^y^vtro tA dyyeMhra. Sicinnus returns quite 
 fearlessly to Xerxes afier the battle. See viii. no, with the comments of Grote. 
 V. 191, note.
 
 70 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 him curiously unsuspicious. Truth was the assumption 
 as to human intercourse, even where all experience must 
 have supplied a warning against credulity. 
 
 The Persian reverence for industry is closely con- 
 nected with the Persian reverence for truth. The two 
 qualities belong to the same ideal. The Greek on the 
 one hand, the Indian on the other, despises both. As 
 Pantheism knows no error in falsehood, so it also dis- 
 cerns no danger in indolence. And then again, to the 
 lively Greek falsehood is a mark of intellect, as indolence 
 is of freedom. Persia sees both claims from what we 
 may perhaps call a modern point of view. Agriculture 
 is, in its sacred scriptures, surrounded with religious 
 sanction. " When wheat is coming up, it is as though 
 red-hot irons were turned in the throats of the demons." 
 " Unhappy is the land that has long lain unsown, and 
 wants a husbandman, as a fair maiden a husband ; " the 
 earth is to be to the husbandman " as a loving bride." 
 The place " where the Earth feels most happy " is the 
 place whereon " one of the faithful erects a house, with 
 a priest within, with cattle, with wife, child, and good 
 herds ; where the cattle thrive, where the dog thrives, 
 the wife and child and every blessing of life, where one 
 of the faithful cultivates much corn, grass, and fruit, 
 where he waters ground that is dry, or dries ground 
 that is wet." ^ Perhaps we may find in the course of a 
 nation's legendary history a more impressive testimony 
 to its ideal than even in the injunctions of its sacred 
 scriptures; and the testimony of the Shah-Nameh is not 
 less emphatic on this point than that of the Zend- 
 avesta. Djemschid, the ideal Persian king, institutes 
 castes, as does the ideal Indian legislator; but note 
 the difference. The labourers in the Persian epic render 
 neither homage nor obedience to any one, although their 
 
 1 Zendavesta, "Sacred Books of the East," vol. iv. pp. 22-30.
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 71 
 
 garments are mean and their work arduous. " They are 
 free ; they have no enemies, no quarrels. A wise man 
 has said, "Tis indolence which enslaves those who should 
 be free.' " ^ No figure of prince or noble in these legends 
 is more full of heroic significance than the blacksmith 
 Gaveh, whose leathern apron set with gold and gems, 
 increased by every successive Persian monarch, becomes 
 the standard of Persia, and from whom the proudest are 
 glad to claim descent.^ It is this son of lowly toil who 
 resists the tyrant Zohak and sets the glorious Feridun 
 upon the throne. Zohak has permitted the demon Iblis 
 to kiss his shoulders, and from each kiss has sprung a 
 serpent, to whose hunger the miserable people over whom 
 he has usurped dominion are compelled to furnish a 
 tribute ; for these creatures, true to their devilish origin, 
 feed onl}^ on human brains. The two sons of the black- 
 smith have been seized as their prey, but his fierce 
 indignation compels their restitution and initiates a 
 revolt, in which the demon usurper perishes, and a 
 member of the lawful dynasty is placed upon the 
 throne. Honour to toil is secure with a people whose 
 imagination associates labour and glory, and makes of 
 the apron of toil the sacred standard of victory. 
 
 This spirit of reverence for work is equally manifest 
 in the religion of Persia. The change of feeling from 
 sympathy with repose to sympathy with activity, is shown 
 in the fact that all the ideas of cosmogony seemed to 
 have passed over from the region of growth to the region 
 of art. India knows nothing of that which we mean by 
 Creation. The universe is an egg, a germ in a fluid 
 environment; it has become; li vjas not made. Whence 
 came that germ of being is a point on which, as we have 
 seen, not only the human but even the Divine Teacher 
 is profoundly ignorant. God himself partakes in the 
 1 Mohl, " Livre dcs Kois," i. 51. ^ JUJ,^ 91.
 
 72 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 uncertainty of man. That of which He speaks is a Unity 
 including all existence ; it lies outside all Will, it pre- 
 cedes, and therefore baffles, all Thought. None can 
 possess any record of that primal dawn which initiated 
 the whole of Being, for all are the product of that 
 evolution which then took its start. Gods and men 
 alike are but the fruit of its later growth, and can 
 preserve no independent view of a process commemo- 
 rated in the very structure of their being ; it is, then, in 
 vain to seek to pass beyond its scope and decide on 
 anything external to its operation. We can but catch a 
 glimpse of its later stages and chronicle some observations 
 of a process of which we are as much the result as the 
 spectator ; and the form in which all suggestions exceed- 
 ing this limit are cast is quite unhistorical. 
 
 Nothing can be more strongly contrasted with this 
 audacious agnosticism than the Persian Genesis.^ The 
 origin of this universe is related in terms much more 
 definite than those of a great part of ordinary history. 
 The whole conflict of good and evil which makes up 
 the history of the universe is contained within a C3'cle 
 of 12,000 years, that is to say, a gigantic year, of which 
 every month is a millennium ; and the same sharp dis- 
 tinctness which defines this period arranges its various 
 stages ; there are seonian seasons for this aeonian year. 
 The conception is definite, chronological, almost geo- 
 graphical. The worlds of Ormazd and Ahriman are 
 conceived as two vast regions, separated by an empty 
 
 1 " Le role capitale d'Ormazd," says M. Hovelacque, "est celui du Dieu 
 crtateur. . . . Zoroastre, iniplorant d'Ormazd la r^v^lation I'appelle a chaque 
 instant de ce nom : datare 6 createur ! .... A plusieurs reprises, Ormazd lui- 
 meme se proclame createur. . . . Azem . . . yo dadhwao Ahuromazdao, ' moi 
 qui suis le createur Ahuraniazda.' . . . Darius dit dans son inscription d'Alvend, 
 Auramazda est un dieu puissant, qui a fait cette terre, qui a fait le ciel, qui a 
 fait I'homme, qui a fait la satisfaction de rhomme. II r^pete cette formule dans 
 les inscriptions de Persdpolis, et Xerxes la repete apres lui " ( " L'Avesta, Zoroastre 
 et le Mazd6isme," par Abel Hovelacque, i8So, p. 168-171).
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. y^ 
 
 space — an idealization of the sk}' and subterranean 
 darkness, with the atmosphere as a sort of neutral 
 space between them. Ormazd in his realm of light is 
 conscious of the opposed darkness, but Ahriman has 
 no corresponding knowledge, he suspects the presence 
 of no mighty rival, and to all appearance thinks that his 
 congenial darkness is the whole of being. But Ormazd, 
 aware of the impending battle, makes his preparations ; 
 he calls into existence spiritual beings who are to be 
 enlisted in the hosts of righteousness, and for the first 
 great season of the secular year this spiritual creation 
 exists alone. The second 3000 years begin with the 
 emerging of Ahriman from his native darkness and his 
 discovery of the Light. Filled with hatred and fierce 
 wrath at the sight, he prepares for battle, but the first 
 approach to his mighty rival changes his wrath to terror ; 
 he takes flight into the abyss, and calls into existence 
 his army of demons, preparatory to the struggle which 
 he is ready to undertake.^ Ormazd meanwhile occupies 
 this second season of the great year in his material 
 creation, which is a sort of bastion placed in the empty 
 space between the two principles — the face which the 
 Divine world turns towards Evil — the outlying barrier of 
 the light as it confronts the realm of darkness. Beyond 
 this barrier the two great chiefs meet in preliminary con- 
 ference, and the overtures of Ormazd being rejected, the 
 battle begins, and the third season of the great year makes 
 up the whole history of human kind. Throughout the 
 whole nothing is dim or uncertain ; the record is one of 
 continuous activity. We are confronted at every stage 
 with the result of vigorous, efficient will. In Indian life 
 we see history itself melting into philosophy. In Persia 
 it is the very opposite ; religious philosophy takes the 
 form of the most definite history. The universe takes 
 
 i Sec the Bundabis, "Sacred Books of the East," v. 7-10, 15.
 
 74 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 shape before our eyes in the clear daylight of historic 
 record, and for every stage of creation we have a definite 
 date and an adequate explanatory motive. 
 
 The strong monarchic spirit of Persia is the natural 
 result of such a faith as has been described. It is the 
 tendency of all organized warfare to cultivate uncritical 
 devotion to a single head. The religion of conflict was 
 the religion of loyalty. We are reminded continually 
 that " the Great King " was the name by which the 
 deadliest enemies of Persia spoke of its ruler. There 
 are kings in plenty in Indian tradition, but none of 
 them emerges into this typical importance, as a link be- 
 tween the human and the Divine. The caste system is 
 utterly opposed to all monarchic feeling ; an elaborately 
 organized aristocracy is incompatible with the dominion 
 of an autocrat. In Persia, on the other hand, the dis- 
 tinction between the sovereign and the subject is one 
 that leaves scant room for any other. The latest editor 
 of Herodotus ^ notes an instructive instance of the want 
 of Greek knowledge of Persian feeling in this respect ; 
 the messenger, in the drama of vEschylus, who brings 
 the news of the colossal disaster, fails to announce the 
 monarch's safety as his opening communication.^ "The 
 Persians," says Herodotus (viii. 99), with truer appre- 
 hension, "were overwhelmed with consternation when 
 they heard of the disaster at Salamis, not so much on 
 account of the destruction of the fleet as from their fears 
 for the safety of Xerxes, . . . and their lamentations 
 were kept up until the king put an end to them 
 by his return." His return removed, it would seem, 
 their deepest anxiety. To lose their king would be a 
 
 1 Instead of representing the safety of the King as the first thought of the 
 Persians, the messenger is on the stage for half a scene before the point is 
 touched (Rawlinson's Herodotus, iv. pp. 336, 337, note). 
 
 2 ..Eschylus, PersEe, 248, seq.
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 75 
 
 calamity more terrible than to lose all that vast host that 
 had drained the strength of Asia. There was nothing 
 rational in such a leeling ; it was a part of their worship. 
 Lo^^alty cannot be incorporated with religion without 
 profoundly modifying the whole spirit of both. Political 
 feeling becomes a different thing when it is developed 
 in such close proximity to religious feelings that it is 
 subject to the contagion of all religious impulse. The 
 cruelty which is naturally developed by the belief in a 
 conflict between good and evil pervading all existence, 
 finds an additional stimulus in the prostrate submission 
 of a race at the feet of a monarch whose dominion is 
 regarded as something almost divine. The earthly 
 ruler who shares the claim of the heavenly to uncritical 
 obedience, must develop a tendency towards ruthless 
 tyranny, unless he be secured by some peculiar idiosyn- 
 crasy of gentleness or wisdom. Man shares in his own 
 worship ; the reluctance of his worshipper becomes an 
 object not alone of human displeasure, but of indigna- 
 tion against impiety. The blackest crime narrated by 
 Herodotus of Xerxes — his slaughter of four noble Lydian 
 youths,^ freely offered to his service, because their father, 
 alarmed by a dream, asked for the restoration of one 
 — would assume to the Great King, the reader feels, 
 the aspect almost of a zeal for religion. The father 
 who grudged his all to the sovereign was, in his view, 
 worthy of the severest tortures that could lacerate a 
 father's heart. This is no mere exhibition of human 
 rage, it is justified to the tyrant by a confusion of the 
 Divine claim with the claim of self. There arc not 
 wanting instances which prove the character of Xerxes 
 to have been by no means one of universal barbarity 
 where the sense of his own Divinity was not concerned, 
 which exhibit even magnanimity in dealing with those 
 
 1 Herodotus, vii. 27, 28, 38, 39.
 
 76 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 who did not come within the circuit of his regal claim. 
 It is in contrast with what could be regarded as dis- 
 loyalty that we see in him the cnielty of a fiend. And 
 cruelty in the strong, when it is watched without resist- 
 ance or indignation, is sure to become cruelty in the 
 weak. Our moral standard is influenced far more by 
 those actions which we admire or condemn than by 
 those which we endeavour to imitate. A thousand 
 accidents decide what part of our neighbour's conduct 
 shall be the model of our own, but our ideal acts on us 
 at every moment, and influences our whole being in a 
 region far deeper than the conscious will. And thus 
 a religion which finds in a series of individual men a 
 special type and representative of God upon earth, tends 
 to make room in its moral ideal for the passions of hatred 
 and resentment, and to incorporate the zeal for what is 
 divine with the worst forms of cruelty and revenge. 
 
 This characteristic of Persian morals is brought out 
 by the Persian antagonism to the nation which has 
 most strongly influenced the intellectual development of 
 Europe. The narrative of the deliverance of Greece 
 shows the impression made by Persian barbarity on a 
 people comparatively humane, and the reader is taught 
 to shudder at the dominion of Persia as synonymous 
 with the triumph of all that is terrible and hateful ; the 
 conflict not only of a lower with a higher form of civiliza- 
 tion, but of a hideous despotism with an enlightened, 
 beneficent form of government and of society. We feel 
 as if the salvation of Greece had been the repulse of all 
 that was evil ; we seem to see the combat of Ahriman 
 with Ormazd in flesh and blood. The Persian faith 
 seems to detach itself from the Persian nation, and to 
 exhibit its worshippers, from an external point of view, 
 as an embodiment of that evil principle in which it 
 taught men to believe. Doubtless it was so, in the
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 77 
 
 aspect which it showed itself to Greece. Persian victory 
 would here have been the touch of paralysis on all that 
 has been, to the intellectual development of Europe, the 
 very spring of energy and fount of inspiration. It would 
 have been slavery instead of freedom, torpor instead of 
 genius, death instead of life. 
 
 But there was another race, equally well known to the 
 modern world, to which Persian victory brought deliver- 
 ance, and to whose faith that of the Persians seemed 
 closely akin. The Jew felt that the Persian might join 
 him in the worship of Jehovah, if only the Evil Principle 
 were deposed from sharing the Heavenly throne. We 
 seem to hear a protest against the dual Divinities of the 
 Persian from that great Hebrew Prophet whose utterances 
 we have been taught to confuse with those of Isaiah — 
 " Thus saith the Lord thy Redeemer, I am the Lord that 
 maketh all things, that stretcheth forth the heavens alone, 
 that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself"-^ — the God 
 who has had no hostile partner in creation, who has made 
 both light and darkness — " who saith to the deep. Be dry, 
 and I will dry up thy rivers ; " " — the God who destroys 
 all separation at His will — " that saith of Cyrus, He is my 
 shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure ; even saying 
 to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built ; and to the temple. Thy 
 foundation shall be laid." " The Great King is the shep- 
 herd of Israel ; to him is applied a title elsewhere only 
 given to David and to the Son of David. He has, in- 
 deed, a more sacred title ; we might startle Christian cars 
 by quoting the passage of Scripture w^hich names him 
 literally — he is the Christ, the Anointed, " whose right 
 hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him ; to 
 make the crooked places straight, to break in pieces 
 the gates of brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron." * 
 
 1 Isa. xliv. 24. 2 isa. xliv. 27. 
 
 3 Isa. xliv. 28. * Isa. xlv. i, 2.
 
 78 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 To him shall be revealed the excellence of that which 
 has taken the aspect of the foe of all excellence — " I will 
 give thee the treasures of darkness, that thou mayest 
 know that I, which call thee by thy name, am the God 
 of Israel. I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not 
 known me. I am the Lord, and there is none else," 
 no rival creator, no hostile ruler, no potent Ahriman, 
 Darkness is no foe of Light, only the shadow that gives 
 it meaning. " I form the light and create darkness. . . . 
 I the Lord do all these things." 
 
 The protest is there, and yet it is not emphatic, and it 
 is not finally victorious. The Persian dualism filtered 
 into the religion which here repudiates it, and emerges 
 in the religion which was born of Judaism, in a more 
 distinct form. Satan gradually expands to the limits 
 of Ahriman. The earlier books of the Old Testament 
 know nothing of him, his name does not occur, nor is 
 there any place for him in the scheme of thought the}'- 
 portray. Jehovah is the one Supreme Ruler of all 
 things visible and invisible ; there are evil agencies (as 
 also in the Veda), but they are neither prominent nor in 
 our sense of the word diabolic ; they are all indistinct and, 
 we may say, excusable. An adversary provokes Hannah 
 to make her fret,^ but her urgent importunity wins its 
 object and makes her the mother of Samuel ; a lying 
 spirit appears before the throne of Jehovah," but it is to 
 carry out His purpose, in the destruction of Ahab ; finally 
 (for here the idea seems to have taken its full develop- 
 ment as far as it was independent of Persian influence), 
 " ihe adversary " appears among the sons of God to 
 accuse a righteous man, but it is to bring forth that 
 righteousness sifted and purified ; and after the trials 
 
 ^ I Samuel i. 6. 
 
 ' I Kings xxii. 21-23. C/. Job i. 6-12. The similarity of the lying spirit 
 to the o&Xoj oveifot of Iliad ii. 8 has been often noticed.
 
 PERSIA AND THE RELIGION OF CONFLICT. 79 
 
 which have separated the chaff from the wheat we hear 
 no more of Satan ; ^ the human adversaries are rebuked, 
 but the accusing spirit is forgotten. Was he really an 
 evil spirit ? Is not the sifting spirit a part of the 
 agency of Heaven ? Judaism leaves the question un- 
 answered, or perhaps we may say that it suggests an 
 affirmative answer, though the spirit that sifts is too 
 near the spirit that doubts for it to give that answer 
 distinctly. The influence that questions what is good 
 is wonderfully close to the influence that purifies what 
 is partly evil. We should be struck by this in the 
 allusions of Christ if we could read the Bible with the 
 same unprejudiced mind as we read any other book. 
 " Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you that 
 he may sift you as tvhcaty ^ An arrogant purpose in 
 a created being, but not in itself evil, na}', dangerous 
 only because it is a copy of that which is the prerogative 
 of the creator. Satan desires to sift the true Israel, but 
 the Lord achieves that sifting so that " not the least 
 grain falls upon the earth." His alone is the power, but 
 not His alone is the desire. It is shared by the one 
 in whom men have seen the principle of all evil. And 
 there is no doubt that that conception was developed 
 by the Hebrew contact with Persia. The later books 
 show a strong trace of this influence, while they exhibit 
 in a striking form that tendency by which the Tempter 
 stands so near the Redeemer that it almost seems as 
 if they may at some moment exchange parts. Jehovah 
 provokes David to number Israel in the original history, 
 but in the redaction made after the exile that part 
 is ascribed to " the adversary ; " and the exchange is 
 a significant, though it seems a trifling, instance of the 
 tendency by which at last Satan is elevated into the 
 strong conspicuous position which he takes in the latest 
 
 1 Job xlii. 1-8. 2 Luke xxii. 31. C/. Amos ix. 9.
 
 8o THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 expression of Jewish feeling in the Bible — the Book of 
 Revelation. Here we are again on the battlefield of 
 two principles. Evil is once more a mighty, for the 
 present we may say even a victorious power, and its 
 future defeat is not (for it cannot be) more distinct than 
 it is in the religion of Persia. Here, then, we may say 
 that the element which entered Judaism with Persian 
 influence attains its fullest development ; we have here 
 an army of evil powers, a Prince of darkness, a mighty 
 foe to the Divine ruler. To many persons it seems 
 that we have all this in the teaching of Christ. They 
 forget that He beheld Satan fall from Heaven ; ^ that He 
 applied the name to the most trusted of His followers ; " 
 that when His own homage was claimed for this evil 
 being. He answered with no denunciation,^ but with a 
 calm assertion of the claim of the One. The teaching of 
 His disciple has obscured His own, and there is a great 
 deal of what we must call Christianity in which the 
 belief in Ahriman is quite as real, and more active, than 
 it was in the ancient creed of Persia. And so deep has 
 this spirit put its roots into the faith of Christendom, 
 that, now that it has fallen, a great vacuum seems left 
 in our religion, and much of what is most essential to 
 it is, there can be no doubt, explained away by those 
 who still speak its language and call themselves by its 
 name. 
 
 1 Luke X. 1 8. 
 
 2 Matt. xvi. 23, and parallel passages in the other synoptics. 
 
 3 Matt. iv. 10, and parallel passages.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 
 
 We only half understand the principle of dualism when 
 we contrast it with the principle of unity. The spirit 
 that sees all events, all characters, all phenomena, as the 
 development or symbol of a great conflict between two 
 fundamental principles is not more antagonistic to the 
 spirit which sees them all as the various expression of 
 one, than each is to that which looks with an impartial 
 interest on the whole play of natural impulse, and sees 
 in the struggle of life's opposing forces the appropriate 
 gymnastic for all that is most truly human, the battle 
 that tests and develops all that is destined for rule. It 
 is only on a superficial view that we could suppose 
 this latter spirit an ally of either antagonist against 
 its enemy. According to our point of view, it is either 
 impartially hostile to both or impartially friendly to 
 both. " Life," said the Indian, " is the seeming change 
 in one unchangeable reality ; let us neglect what seems, 
 and turn to what is." "Life," said the Persian, "is the 
 actual conflict between tvv'o deadly foes ; let us take 
 part with the good and oppose the evil." But these two 
 forms of thought, embodied not merely in two creeds 
 of the past, but in many kinds of speculation that belong 
 to all time, are hardly more unlike each other than 
 both are unlike one which we may call by very different 
 names, and recognize under very different aspects, for 
 it also belongs to all time and to ail thought ; while 
 
 F
 
 82 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 its typical expression remains also fixed for all time in 
 the records of a nation's life, and that the nation which 
 has most deeply influenced the intellectual development 
 of our race. It is the ideal of the artist throughout all 
 history, and it is the ideal, at a particular point in history, 
 of the artist people ; it moulds the poetry, the art, and 
 the philosophy of Greece. 
 
 This spirit is sympathetic to all forms of thought, and 
 also critical to them all. It does not turn from what 
 seems to absorb itself in what is, as the Pantheism of 
 India. It does not rank itself on the side of righteous- 
 ness, and find its ver}'- life in a conflict with evil, as the 
 dualism of Persia. It admits no great fundamental anti- 
 thesis either of illusion and reality or of good and evil ; 
 and from some points of view the two hostile doctrines 
 which severally accept these contrasts as the leading 
 distinctions of the moral world, are nearer to each other 
 than is either to the spirit that finds truth in a balance 
 of opposites, and the aim of life in a harmony of its 
 contending forces. 
 
 This is the ideal of genius. It is the perennial 
 aspect that life bears to the Poet. It is the side of 
 all human dealings which they turn towards the world 
 of Art. To the race dowered with genius it was the 
 national ideal, and all the records of what they have 
 done and been are but various and not always obvious 
 illustrations of this spirit of balance, of harmony, of 
 rhythm. At times it takes a deeply moral aspect, and 
 seems to anticipate the deepest lessons and the most 
 urgent warnings of the Christian Scriptures. But this 
 resemblance is misleading. The Greek dread of extra- 
 vagance has a merely external similarity to the Christian 
 dread of sin ; in its most characteristic aspects, it is 
 indeed antagonistic to earnest moral feeling, to all zeal 
 for righteousness, to all hatred of iniquity. Genius is not
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 83 
 
 immoral ; probably in this respect its records would show 
 favourably in comparison with the records of common- 
 place humanity. But it is utterly unmoral. It metes 
 out its interest according to other laws than those which 
 regulate the moral sympathies ; it demands only the play of 
 opposite forces and the balance of contending impulses, 
 and wherever these are found, there is the soil for its 
 roots and the atmosphere in which its blossoms may 
 expand in all their beauty. Against such an ideal the 
 conscience, in some sense, always embodies a latent 
 protest. It is a protest only in the sense in which 
 we may imagine youthful vigour to protest against that 
 invitation to repose which is to renew all its springs. 
 But the faculty which centres in the conscience, and the 
 creative powers of genius, are hostile in this sense, that 
 they must emerge into distinctness alternately. It is as 
 with the light of the sun and moon ; if we are to see 
 them together, the light of one or both must be compara- 
 tively faint. Genius, however we reconcile that truth 
 with others not less certain, implies always a certain 
 moral impartiality ; hence its dangers : hence also — if 
 we would remember that the whole of our nature, and 
 no part more than the conscience, needs repose — its 
 deepest benefits alike to those who share it and those 
 who only share its gifts. 
 
 Greece represents the moral ideal of genius, with all 
 its wealth and all its peril. It shows us moral truth as 
 we see the moon by da3dight — faint, delicate, forgetable, 
 secondary, yet never indistinct. Not that passion is faint, 
 not that the moral sympathies are feeble, but that it is 
 manifold, that they are balanced. There is fierce wrath, 
 there is passionate love, but wherever we can distinguish 
 the poet's feeling it sympathises with both. Greek life is 
 penetrated wiih that spirit of balanced judgment, of elastic 
 sympathy, which, allowing vehement utterance to all feel-
 
 84 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 ing, refuses decided predominance to any ; — which tends 
 to exhibit all conflict as gymnastic, all antagonism as the 
 harmonious play of opposite emotions. Greek mythology, 
 Greek legend, Greek history, are all full of the idea of a 
 struggle, but we never find that any combatant can be re- 
 garded as a principle of evil. As compared with the Persian 
 ideal, we find that we have exchanged a moral contrast of 
 light and darkness for an artistic balance of hght and shade. 
 The idea of a primeval conflict, symbolized by the great 
 phenomena of nature and typical of all that is most 
 impressive in human history — this fruitful germ of myth 
 and legend was the inheritance of the Aryan race, and 
 nowhere do we find it more prolific than on the soil of 
 Greece. But it never develops into any parable of the 
 conflict of good and evil. Greek mythology knows of 
 no Ahriman and Ormazd ; Greek deities are as little 
 like one of these beings as like the other. Whatever 
 is evil is vague ; the objects of antagonism partake 
 rather the character of things than of persons. Perhaps 
 we may say that the contrast of persons and things marks 
 the nearest approach made by the Greek mind towards 
 the contrast of good and evil. All heroic achievement 
 impresses on brute matter the record of Will, banishing 
 the hurtful, the monstrous, the foul ; humanizing the 
 confused material w^orld ; extending the empire of Spirit. 
 The conflict repeats in a condensed form the work of 
 primitive man ; the hero must slay m.onsters, drain 
 marshes, go through arduous toils in subduing the 
 powers of nature, but his struggles never take the aspect 
 of a great duel between equal or nearly equal foes, he 
 knows no spiritual adversary. Hercules is a great 
 hunter, a daring traveller ; a beneficent helper ; he is 
 never a wrestler with any principle of evil. He and all 
 those heroes of whom he is a typical example express 
 the spirit of civilization overcoming the lower forces that
 
 GREECE, AXD THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 85 
 
 rise up against it, never the spirit of righteousness set- 
 ting itself to overcome the spirit of iniquity. That is an 
 antithesis of which Greece knows nothing ; when mytho- 
 logy and philosophy come nearest to such a conception 
 we see most clearl}^ how impossible it was to the Greek 
 mind. Its philosophy, when most occupied with moral 
 problems, scarcely takes cognizance of right and wrong ; 
 its mythology, when absorbed in the moral aspects of the 
 Invisible world, seems at times to recognize this antithesis 
 only to invert it, and to give to the claimants for human 
 worship the attributes and aspect of the Tempter. 
 
 Those who know something of the writings of Plato, 
 and still more those who only know his name, may be 
 inclined to dispute this description of the philosophy 
 that has sown the seed of so much of the world's 
 thought. The name and the writings of his great pupil, 
 if equally familiar, would be a much stronger cause for 
 protest, for all our ethical study takes its rise with 
 Aristotle. And nevertheless it remains true that moral 
 truth is discernible on Greek soil only as the moon is 
 discernible by day. The very fact which seems to 
 confute this is its strongest proof. Aristotle originates 
 ethical science, it takes its start with the thought that 
 ripened in the stormy autumn of Greek life. Plato never i 
 recognized the life of the Conscience. He knows only 1 
 two antitheses — the pleasant in contrast to the painful,! 
 the true in contrast to the false. His own disastrous 
 and disappointing experience as the guide of a ruler who 
 embodied his ideal — that of the philosopher on a throne 
 — may have shown him that clear vision does not alwa3's 
 imply right action ; and the dialogue of his melanchol}' 
 old age appears to bear some traces of the dislocating 
 shock of that discovery.^ But from all his characteristic 
 
 1 It must be confessed tlial tliis is denied by the writer who has made of Plato 
 almost an English classic. But Dr. Jowctt's assertion (I'lato, vol. iv, p. 7) that
 
 86 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 utterance we should conclude that the supreme glory 
 which centred in the idea of Truth gathered up into itself 
 all excellence, and left nothing to be appropriated by that 
 of Duty and Virtue. What we mean by true and what 
 we mean by right were blended for him in one great 
 ideal, which he called the good. This was to the man's 
 nature as light to the eye, as air to the lungs ; nothing 
 was wanted but that it should be presented to its appro- 
 priate organ. If this were so, the word ought would b 
 emptied of its meaning. It would be as impossible to 
 see that an action was right without doing it, as it is to 
 see that a doctrine is true without believing it. In the 
 wider sense of morals in which the word indicates the 
 impulses, the S3^mpathies, the ultimate needs of humanity, 
 /'no people have contributed more to its development than 
 the countrymen of Plato. To those who have given us 
 the very name of Ethical Science we are indebted for the 
 larger part of all that makes the subject interesting and , 
 I vivid. In the narrower sense, in which it traces the I 
 / claim of Duty, we can only say that Greek thought 
 I beckons us into realms whence we see the mountain 
 1 as the cloud, 
 
 U^ Thus it is that, while Greek philosophy is non-moral, 
 Greek mythology is non-theistic. To the Greek mind, 
 in its most natural and characteristic attitude, the Divine 
 
 there is no reason "to imagine that this melancholy tone is attributable to 
 disappointment at having failed to convert a Sicilian tyrant into a philosopher" 
 is very surprising to me. If the melancholy tone and the disappointment both 
 exist, can we help connecting them ? And when Plato says.'^A/)' ovv, c& Oavfidaie 
 'KeXTjdafiev avOponroi Trdvres . . . olofievoi fxev iKaaroTe tl Ka\bt> opqv irpdyfia. 
 yevofievov Kal Bavfiaffra av ipyaad/Jievov (Leges, 686), and continues that this 
 opinion often turns out a mistake, is it possible not to connect this mournful 
 confession with the assertion in the " Republic," 473 : — 'Ed;' fj.ri, rj oi ^i\6ao<poi 
 ^aa-iKeiKTUcnv if rais TroXecnv t) oi /SacriX^s . . . (pi\o(ro(pT]a(j3crt. . . . ovk icrri 
 KaKQ>v TrduXa (and then, it appeared, there would be)? Was Plato not remem- 
 bering, when he wrote the sentence in the Laws, that he kad seen this noble 
 thing, a Philosopher on the throne, from which he had hoped so greatly ; and 
 could anything have blurred his memory of that disappointment ?
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 87 
 
 Being was out of sight. Greek feeling is not atheistic, 
 it denies nothing that human instincts have ever asserted. 
 But it hurries on to other realms, it never lingers before 
 the Divine Throne. We hear in its deeper music the 
 note of a profound reverence and faith, but it is not a 
 characteristic note ; the most Greek of all Greek poems 
 knows nothing of it. Greek mythology knows neither 
 a truly Divine nor a truly Satanic being, but if we 
 are to associate the Greek divinities with either, they 
 come nearer to the last. The desire of Plato to banish 
 poets from his Republic is justified by many passages in 
 Homer ; the gods are, from a moral point of view, inferior 
 to the objects of their capricious protection and dislike. 
 " The Law of Mithra is fiftyfold between nations," says 
 the Persian hymn ; but when the enemies of the. Greeks 
 have to be defeated, the daughter of Jove, the divine 
 Athene,^ takes the part of Ahriman, and provokes a 
 Trojan to a treacherous breach of the truce just agreed 
 on. The poet has opened a vista towards all that 
 enhances the guilt of this treachery — the weariness of 
 long warfare, the longing for home, the yearning for 
 all the blessings of Peace — and then, with no sense of 
 anything surprising or unnatural, passes on to tell how 
 the Goddess of Wisdom bends her irresistible might 
 to pour temptation into a Trojan heart and wing from 
 a Trojan bow the arrow that shall rekindle the half- 
 extinguished flames of war. It is a striking illustration 
 of the truth that no religion can be consistently unmoral. 
 It is not enough to say that Olympus reflects the incon- 
 sistencies and contradictions of human beings, it must 
 be confessed in this case enormously to exaggerate 
 them ; and we are reminded, as we contemplate such 
 
 1 11., iv, 93, sey. Note especially 104, tui 0^ tpp^vas S.(l>povt irciOev, words 
 which MiUon might have translated to describe the iiilluciice of the serpent on .^ 
 Eve ; c/. iii. 2.
 
 88 ■ THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 a picture, that man's conception of the Divine, if it is 
 not to rise above the human world, must sink far below 
 it. Wherever God is not regarded as the inspirer of 
 all high and pure desires He takes the aspect of the 
 Tempter ; if no spirit of trust lift to Him the prayer, 
 " Lead us not into temptation," then all temptation seems 
 to come from Him. And thus the characteristically 
 Greek spirit is irreligious, and was felt as such even by 
 the deeper thinkers among the Greeks themselves. It 
 knows of no spiritual foe to humanity, but any God may 
 take the place of such a foe, and those promptings to evil 
 which Christianity has associated with a single invisible 
 personality are diffused throughout the whole realm of 
 supernatural agency and suggestion. And if ever we 
 come near the distinct conception of a principle of Evil, 
 we shall find that we are equally near the very opposite 
 idea — that where the Greek spirit most approaches the 
 contemplation of an Ahriman or a Satan there also it 
 comes nearest to the sense of a Redeemer. Not because 
 the two mutually suggest each other — in all religions 
 we find the Tempter and the Saviour become visible 
 together — but because to the Greek the two were but 
 different aspects of one reality. They seem to have 
 passed over by the merest hair's-breadth of change from 
 the sense of evil, which is characteristic of the spirit 
 that strives with evil, to evil itself. Like some eagle 
 hovering on poised wing above the summit of the Andes, 
 they exchanged, as it were with a stroke of the wing, 
 the slope that sends its waters to the east for that 
 which sends its waters to the west, and confused in 
 their lofty gaze the springs of mighty rivers, which 
 increase their remoteness with every foot of progress, 
 and find their issue in oceans that are thousands of 
 miles apart. 
 
 The group of Greek divinities known to some English
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 89 
 
 readers under the somewhat misleading title of " The 
 Furies," and supposed to be called "The Gentle Ones" 
 only b}-- a euphemism, affords us the most striking ex- 
 ample of this elastic vibration between the ideas of good 
 and evil, bringing us nearer a religious sense of the 
 meaning of remorse and repentance than we find else- 
 where, and nearer also to an identification of these 
 feelings with evil.r~The Eumenides belong to an older 
 system ^ than the '^tjyous go3s~of Olympus, and migiit, 
 ' ^— seenij'trxve let fancy ^settle their affinities, to embody 
 the reminiscence of an earlier historic phase, when all 
 that is characteristically Greek was undeveloped. We 
 might, from some points of view, call them the Greek 
 equivalent of Ahriman. They are daughters of night ; 
 they enter into conflict with the God of Day, who shelters 
 from them the object of their pursuit, banishes them 
 from his temple with fierce invective, and forces them to 
 surrender their victim to his protection. They are hate- 
 ful beings, embodiments of the curses of vengeance, of 
 the spirit that, in seeking to cure ill by ill, would make 
 it eternal ; and their struggle with Apollo is the nearest 
 approach to the Persian symbolism of a struggle of 
 light and darkness that we can discover through the 
 Greek mythology — the radiant Sun-god, in all his 
 majesty and beauty, on the one hand ; on the other, 
 these daughters of night, odious in aspect and pitiless 
 to the hunted being to whom he extends a merciful and 
 soothing care. We are reminded of Satan by them 
 more than by any other representation known to classic 
 thought ; sometimes even of the vulgar Satan with 
 horns and hoofs,- of Mephistophcles clamorous for his 
 prey, for they inspire horror by their mere aspect, and 
 their haunting presence is the worst torment they can 
 
 1 yl-'schylus, " Humcn.," 162, 731, 778, 847. 
 " /6id., 46-59.
 
 90 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 inflict on their victim. And Satan as he appears in the 
 Old Testament — the accusing spirit — seems exactly that 
 which they are intended to represent. They take the 
 same place as he does when he appears among the sons 
 of God to bear witness against Job. But Greek thought, 
 unlike Jewish, gives them a permanent place in Heaven, 
 and passing on light wing that boundary-line of good 
 and evil which never had much significance for it, sees 
 them as types not of the resentment and hatred which 
 attend the footsteps of and perpetuate wrong, but as 
 that witness of wrong within which is also the eternal 
 witness of right. The Goddess of Wisdom appeases the 
 wrath of the pitiless beings, and even induces them to 
 take up their abode with those who have dared to shelter 
 their victim from them ; they remain as beneficent 
 guardians on the domain they had entered as foes ; and 
 the Furies become the Gracious ones ; the Accuser of 
 the Brethren is reverenced as the Guardian of Law.^ 
 
 The poet who first brought the Eumenides into the 
 world of tragic representation himself conceived of them 
 under this dual aspect, and it is from his verse that we 
 may draw the most emphatic vindication of the right 
 of the daughters of night to a place in the elect city. 
 But the successor of yEschylus takes a further step, 
 and obliterates altogether that aspect of horror which 
 is predominant in the earlier poem. He even ventures 
 to reconcile these awful beings with their Divine foe. 
 Phoebus himself, in the verse of Sophocles, appears as 
 their ally, and the God of Day refers his supplicant to 
 
 ^ ^schylus, " Eiimen. ," 88i, sei/. Is it not possible that the reason why modern 
 associations with these deities belong so exclusively to their malii;;nant aspect 
 may be the failure of the dull Roman intelligence to grasp this antithesis? 
 The mention both of Tacitus and Lucretius shows that; they were to the 
 Roman merely " the Furies ; " and when Pausanius visited Athens about a.d. 
 170, he seems to have been surprised to have found nothing horrible in the 
 representation of them.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES, 91 
 
 the healing care of night. His oracle has promised 
 peace to the woe-worn CEdipus " when he shall come to 
 the seat of awful Divinities ; " and when, in their sacred 
 grove of Colonos, he learns that he is in their territory, 
 a solemn pathos like that of music breathes through 
 the prayer in which he entreats them to " be not harsh 
 to Phoebus and to me." ^ It is as if the younger 
 poet had set himself to complete the harmony of oppo- 
 sites which the elder had begun ; to show us these 
 dark beings, who had been welcomed, in the verse of 
 ^Iischylus, by the Goddess of Wisdom, but detested 
 and defied by the God of Day, as reconciled even to the 
 God who had confronted them as Ormazd confronts 
 Ahriman. The God of radiance, of beauty, of healing, 
 recognizes the claim of the Divinities who typify 
 remorse and punishment ; he points the weary pilgrim 
 to their shrine as to a shelter from the stormy blast. 
 We seem to grasp some clue which leads us to a unity 
 below the antithesis of Light and Darkness, and all that 
 they symbolize ; to hear som.e whisper of a music in 
 which the harshest discords are to find their place as 
 elements of a harmony as much richer and more varied 
 than all that could be without them as harmony itself is 
 richer than unison. 
 
 Here we have in its fullest blossom the spirit that 
 always insists on hearing the other side. Greek worship 
 makes a place for that which is most abhorrent to Greek 
 feeling. Greece lives in the world of Light; here is 
 its home ; the Sun-god is the " cliief of all the gods ; " " 
 yet the daughters of night are honoured not only with 
 reverent fear, but with a sort of mystic rapture. There 
 is a marvellous depth of meaning in tlie invocation of 
 the blind Qidipus to the " sweti daughters of the ancient 
 
 ' Sophocles, Oul. Col., 86-91. 
 '■« CEd. Tyr., 660.
 
 92 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 darkness." ^ His life has, since the discovery of his 
 unconscious crime, been spent in their realm, and the 
 dread summons, which he alone of any Greek hero is to 
 hear with joy, cannot remove him from the light, which 
 in that moment of horror he resolved to see no more. 
 To the powers of darkness he then devoted himself, and 
 now that, after many wanderings, he finds himself in 
 their sacred grove, and learns the name of propitious 
 omen by which the Athenians worship them, he knows 
 his toils are past, he feels the stillness of a vast and 
 sudden calm and a mysterious hope. The Avengers 
 have become the Gentle Ones, their sacred grove is the 
 refuge of the broken heart, the domain on which the 
 indigent wanderer is to deal with a Prince on equal 
 terms. And yet this complete change of view is the 
 result of no sudden and wonderful revelation, of no 
 rush upwards into a higher region. It is due less to 
 the teaching of the moralist than to the instinct of the 
 artist. It does not (as we see from the harsh vindictive- 
 ness of Qiidipus to his son) imply any of that sense 
 of the blessedness of forgiveness which we cannot help 
 reading into every line. It is simply an expression of 
 that swift elastic expansion of sympathy which moves 
 naturally to an opposite pole — of that spirit of measure 
 and balance, which refuses confinement to a single 
 point of view, and desires to look at its object from 
 every side. It has an element of profound morality. 
 It is pregnant with deep lessons on the meaning of Con- 
 science ; it vindicates with noble earnestness the homage 
 owed by the city to the spirit of righteous fear; it sees 
 with keen insight into the play of moral forces, and 
 accepts as a great fact the sense of guilt and the need 
 
 1 it' wy\vK€iai tra^Ses dpxa-!-ov'ZK6TOv(<^d. Col., io6). Professor Jebb thinks 
 that no other poet of the classical ages "ventures on this use of yXvKvs in 
 addressing Deities."
 
 GREECE, AXD THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 93 
 
 of expiation. But it sees these as facts just like any 
 other facts, not as affording a clue to the central prin- 
 ciples of our being. The impartial Greek spirit looks 
 at crime from various points of view ; it finds a good 
 deal to say for deeds which bear a criminal aspect as 
 well as against them. It discovers the truth not in any 
 single view, but in the harmony of all. 
 
 No legend can be richer in august associations than 
 that which Sophocles has here treated. Much that has 
 called itself history has evidently been moulded upon 
 the story of Oedipus ; it is the refraction of his destiny 
 through the legendary lore of Persia and of Rome 
 which has created the more picturesque and vivid in- 
 cidents in the biographies of C3a-us and of Romulus. 
 The moral element in the legend is indeed dropped in 
 its historic adaptation ; but it is surely to this moral 
 element that the story owes all its power, and we may 
 take the historic echoes of the theme of Sophocles 
 as a tribute even to that portion which they fail to 
 repeat. To him it would appear as if the tale of the 
 House of Labdacus had gathered up the problem of 
 guilt and of disaster; — of man as a unit, and man as 
 the member of a group in which his individual will 
 was submerged, and his responsibility lost in some 
 more mysterious embodiment of purpose and volition. 
 We see the development of this idea in the comparison 
 already suggested. Orestes is in truth the slayer of a 
 parent ; the deed may be excused, but not denied. Fate 
 works through his will, using it as an instrument ; he is 
 fully conscious of what he is doing in slaying Clytem- 
 nestra, and works out the curse on his house by his own 
 deliberate and impassioned purpose. Hence individual 
 choice runs in the same current with the will of Fate, 
 and cannot be distinguished from it. But in the case 
 of G£dipus, guilt, if it docs exist, exists outside the will.
 
 94 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 The Labdacids may collectively be stained with crime, but 
 (Edipus individually is innocent. Who could be more 
 free from bloodguiltiness than one who, as an infant, 
 was cast out by his parents to perish, who had killed 
 his father only when, as a stranger, he was attacked by 
 him with a superior force, and married his mother only 
 when she appeared to him as the unknown queen of a 
 city he had just delivered from a deadly pest ? And 
 yet in some form we are made to feel that guilt is there. 
 It is not merely that the penalty of guilt falls on 
 (Edipus ; we feel him in his utmost prosperity under a 
 curse. If the crime be not his, it is that of some ances- 
 tor with whom we must think of him as identified in a 
 closeness of union that makes his suffering for sin in 
 some sense just. CEdipus accepts it as such ; he bows 
 before the decree which hurls him from his throne, 
 and executes the vengeance of Heaven on himself by 
 depriving himself for ever of its blessed light. There 
 is no remonstrance, no indignation against the Gods, in 
 the first discovery of their dreadful appointment for him ; 
 the doom which hurls him from his throne to wander a 
 fugitive, deprived by his own hands of sight, and depen- 
 dent on the charity of the indifferent, " asking little and 
 receiving less " — this doom is surely in some form the 
 indignation of the Gods against guilt. It stands in 
 some relation, however obscure, to the idea of justice 
 — it is in some form an exhibition of the law that 
 suffering should follow sin. 
 
 This is the lesson of CEdipus the king. It illustrates 
 with the brilliant light and shade of genius the ideal 
 — which we may, speaking broadl}', call that of the 
 old world — of " man the fragment." It sets forth in 
 colossal simplicity the predominance of Fate, the futility 
 of individual resolution, showing us man as a leaf on 
 the surface of a river ; as a thread of gossamer wafted
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 95 
 
 onwards by the breeze ; as an arrow directed to the 
 target b}^ the hand of a practised archer. The very 
 efforts which are made by this feeble and incomplete 
 being to escape his destiny become links in the chain 
 by which it binds him. The idea is far more definitely 
 developed than in the trilogy of ^Esch^dus. There 
 we see how Apollo may enjoin what the Erinnys may 
 avenge ; how the same deed can be, according to the 
 diiferent points of view, an act of pious homage to one 
 parent or of crime towards the other ; but we see this 
 only as we must always recognize it in that legacy of 
 impulse which is bequeathed by father to son in every 
 age, and which our own generation has made a subject 
 of special investigation and has discovered to be a mine 
 of scientific result. It is indeed not very easy to deter- 
 mine how far the audience is meant to be in sympathy 
 with the plea of Orestes against the deities who would 
 avenge his mother's murder, but we cannot be intended 
 to look either upon their declamations or his apology as 
 wholly void, and it is possible for us to concede a certain 
 validity to both. The predestination here is a predestina- 
 tion of choice; the ills are done, not merely suffered. But 
 when we turn to the tale of CEdipus, we see divinel}'- 
 ordained Fate and human Will in a much more distinct 
 antagonism. Wc cannot feel that he contributed of his 
 own choice any link to that chain in which his family is 
 bound. The Gods are responsible for his murder of his 
 father in quite a different sense from that in which thej' 
 are responsible for the murder of Clytemnestra. It is 
 as if the younger poet had felt dissatisfied with the 
 assertion of their predestination in the work of his pre- 
 decessor, and had brought it out far more distinctly- 
 through the protest of an individual. GIdipus the king 
 represents, wc have said, man the Fragment ; — the death 
 of (Edipus (let it be permitted to give as a substitute
 
 96 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 for the ordinary title an indication of the true impres- 
 sion of the play) brings us in face of man the Individual. 
 As (Edipus looks at his history through the vista of 
 years, he sees his acts from what we may call a modern 
 point of view. These so-called crimes were, after all, 
 only misfortunes. They were " suffered rather than 
 done ; " ^ the murder which he is expiating has yet left 
 him "pure before the law"^ — a remarkable expression, 
 identifying guilt and will to an extent that perhaps we 
 are not meant by the poet always to remember. How 
 can it be any fault of his that the Gods before his birth 
 decreed that he should slay his father ? Creon is more 
 guilty in speaking of his deeds than he in doing them.^ 
 Even the single admission that the burden of hereditary 
 misfortune has any connection with what may properly 
 be called guilt is faint and hesitating.'^ 
 
 " These ills were Heaven's decree, 
 Perchance indignant with our race of yore." 
 
 The whole tone is that of absolute and entire self-justi- 
 fication. Modern feeling takes part with it ; from our 
 point of view (Edipus at Colonos is wholly right, the 
 judgment of his enemies is mere error. But this, if it 
 be taken alone, is not the point of view intended for the 
 spectators of the tragedy by its author, nor that of its 
 great critic,^ when he pointed out Qldipus as the typical 
 figure for a tragic hero, because he was neither wholly 
 guilty nor wholly innocent. We must, if we would be 
 
 1 CEd. Col., 266, 7. 
 
 2 v6ix(^ 5e Ka9ap6s (CEd. Col. , 548). 
 
 3 CEd. Col., 986, 7. 
 
 * TO-x 0.V Tc ix7)VL0v<SLV eiS 7^:^05 TrdXat [Ibid., 965.) 
 
 5 Arist., " Poetica," cxiii. 5 : — ^'Eort 5^ roiovTO% 6 /J-rjTe apery dia^ipuv Kal 
 diKaioavvr], p.7]Te 8ia KaKlav koI ^ox9y]pla.v p.eTaj3a\\u}v eis ri)v 5v(TTvx''0-v, 
 dWa OL 'ap-apTiav tivol, tQv ev /xeydXr) 56|?7 tvTijv . . . olov Oiolirovs. From 
 the numerous references to CEdipus in this treatise, it was evidently almost a 
 type of the ideal tragedy.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 97 
 
 in sympathy with the spirit of ancient life, accept the 
 behef that ancestral is in some sense real guilt. We 
 must teach ourselves to regard the dogma of original sin 
 as a great historic influence, whatever we may think of 
 it on theologic ground. The sense in which the indi- 
 vidual is a fragment and the sense in which he is a 
 unity must both be taken into account if we would reach 
 the point of view from which Greek feeling confronted 
 Fate and Guilt. 
 
 But the antithesis which we have been endeavouring 
 to set forth is no mere contrast of the past. It is 
 what we see and feel every day. We blame ourselves, 
 it ma}' be, in the eyes of others even with an excessive 
 blame ; we lose for the moment every thought of what 
 was inevitable in our wrongdoings ; we see nothing but 
 their wrong. Then some one else speaks of them — it 
 may be in the gentlest of accents, it is conceivable that 
 it should even be in tones of excuse. Even then it will 
 generally be found that something in the measure of 
 individual responsibility taken by the person who is not 
 responsible rouses protest in the one who is. When 
 most repentant the wrongdoer will almost always dis- 
 cern in wrong some clement of the inevitable that is in- 
 visible to every eye but his own. To be conscious 
 of wrongdoing, in fact, is almost the same as to be 
 conscious of this fragmentary life in which we feel that 
 our acts are " suffered rather than done." It is quite 
 true that this is not tlic whole of the consciousness of 
 wrong — that where there is no other feeling than this 
 the consciousness is of being wronged merely. But the 
 greater part of the self-reproach which saddens memory 
 is entangled with some such feeling as this. So far as 
 we condemn ourselves, of course we must be conscious 
 of our own individuality ; the very idea of moral respon- 
 sibihty is based on that sense of initial action wliich we 
 
 u
 
 98 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 speak of as Free Will, and which we can describe only 
 by saying that our actions began with ourselves, and 
 cannot be regarded as the transformation of any pre- 
 vious form of energy. But though most men are con- 
 scious of this feeling, they hardly ever know it apart 
 from its opposite. They too feel like CEdipus that action 
 is passion. One who knew the whole of a man's past 
 as he knows it himself would probably be unable to 
 reproach him with his worst crimes. If the judge could 
 have before him the whole legacy of the past to the 
 present, as he has it in his own experience, he would 
 seem always to hear the remonstrance to Creon,^ " Dost 
 thou with right condemn the unwilling deed ? " And 
 what each one of us feels for himself the poet shows us 
 for all mankind. 
 
 Hence the Greek idea of Fate is no definite limitation 
 of human Will, but a mysterious warp to which Will is 
 illogically conceived as the woof. Ancestral guilt is in 
 some sense real guilt, and has therefore for those under 
 its shadow become fate ; but there must have been a 
 time when it was guilt in the ordinary sense ; divine 
 displeasure must have had a beginning. The legends 
 which have given Fate its moral significance record some 
 whisper at least of the eternal protest against the belief 
 in Fate. The very desire to know the future is rooted 
 in the belief that it lies with man to change the future. 
 If CEdipus were inexorably fated to slay his father and 
 marry his mother, why poison the fragment of life un- 
 stained by crime with any prevision of the inevitable ? 
 His attempt to escape the announced parricide implies a 
 disbelief in the oracle which announces it as an absolute 
 prediction. But, in fact, the legend of CEdipus is the 
 strongest evidence for the absolute character of Oracles. 
 The event predicted in this case has no root in any 
 
 1 CEd. CoL, 977.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 59 
 
 permanent condition of things such as might be made 
 the subject of warning, but must be called, if we are 
 to describe it in the language appropriate to purpose, 
 a mere accident. No foresight, short of an absolute 
 power to read the future, will explain the prevision of a 
 chance encounter between a king and a stranger, and its 
 result in the death of the king and all his train. Only 
 the absolute prediction implies that the future lies open 
 to the seer just as the past lies open to the ken of 
 an ordinary mortal, the trivial accident no less than the 
 tragic achievement. Yet in that case the whole object 
 of consulting the Oracle would be gone. We might 
 fancy it some ironical sense of this futility in the CEdipus 
 legend which made the Oracle cause its own fulfilment, 
 the means taken to avert the dreaded event proving 
 the means of bringing it to pass ; but that cannot have 
 been the intention of the poet ; the contemptuous ex- 
 pression applied to the Oracle by both the unhappy 
 pair came too near that dread discovery of its truth 
 which drives Jocasta to the halter and her son-spouse 
 to madness. In truth, it is impossible to say that the 
 Oracle was consistently either believed or disbelieved. 
 Sometimes it seems to have been regarded as that 
 which must happen, and sometimes as that which might 
 be prevented from happening. Greek love of liberty 
 speaks in the Greek belief in Fate, blurring its limits 
 and hiding its source, but never wholly conquering its 
 influence. The two ideas are held together, and we 
 must forget logic when wc try to judge of their mutual 
 relations. 
 
 This oscillation between the ideas of Will and Law is 
 a striking indication of the bent of national sympathy. 
 The Greek mind seems to demand a certain vagueness 
 in all that claims authority, and to ascribe ultimate 
 power with some hesitation ; where it is granted with
 
 ICO THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 one hand it seems revoked with the other, as though the 
 distrust of power, which made the name of tyrant hateful, 
 swayed belief in Divine, as well as concession to human 
 rule. Whether we say that Fate is the will of Zeus, 
 that Fate is a deity superior to Zeus, or that Fate is 
 some influence antithetic to all personal will, in any 
 case we have something to explain away. " Not thou, 
 dear child, but the Gods, are responsible for this," ^ the 
 gracious Priam consoles the guilty Helen, as he surveys 
 the hosts her flight has brought to Troy for the de- 
 struction of his city. But the consistent application of 
 this identification of Fate with the Divine will would 
 necessitate the sacrifice of all that is most striking in 
 Greek poetry. Jove feels the law of Fate as a king 
 feels the laws of nature, and in man}^ respects the true 
 analogy seems with these laws ; events may be " super- 
 fatal," as we say supernatural.^ Jove cannot decide 
 on the fate of rival heroes without reference to some 
 standard independent of his will,^ and whatever the 
 meaning of the balance in which he weighs these con- 
 trasted fates, it is something which interferes with the 
 idea of his absolute power. Most of all, perhaps, does 
 the recent origin of his power conflict with the idea of 
 its absoluteness. Omnipotence must have no history. 
 Ormazd confronts Ahriman from the beginning. But 
 Jove is a temporal monarch, his origin is a subject of 
 legend, he has passed through infancy, his dominion is 
 characterized by the harshness incident to "new rule"* 
 Surely a reign which has had a beginning shall have an 
 end. The dread of such a contingency is easily raised 
 within his own mind ; he is terrified at learning that he 
 
 1 1 II. iii. 164 ; cf. her address to Hector, vi. 344. 
 
 2 Ibid,, ii. 155 : — '^vda. Kev' Apydoiaip virep/xofta voaros irvx^V, ""less 
 Athene had taken vigorous measures. 
 s /did. , xxii. 209. 
 * ^sch., " Prometheus Vinctus," 34, 35.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. loi 
 
 is doomed, if he contract certain nuptials, to bear a son 
 mightier than himself; he exhausts all his arts to wring 
 from the representative of Foresight a fuller knowledge 
 of his own destiny. The destiny of Jove ! The very 
 words express this Greek reluctance to contemplate 
 steadily any form of absolute power, the Greek tendency 
 to bring in continually some counterbalancing influence 
 to all that is monarchic. Behind the throne of a God 
 who is so far from being omnipotent that he is not 
 omniscient, hovers a dim mysterious power, so vague 
 that we may or may not give it a moral colouring as 
 our sympathies incline, which we cannot bring into any 
 definite relation with the will of any other being, Divine 
 or human. As it is not entirely subordinate to the will 
 of God, so it is not entirely supreme above the will of 
 man, but it is a real agent, and cannot be confused with 
 either. 
 
 This curious reluctance to conceive distinctly of any 
 source of ultimate power is most interesting in its political 
 aspect. The same feeling which hems in ro3'alty with 
 multiform restrictions on Olympus, banishes it in the 
 city ; the impatience of individual authority is common 
 to the visible and invisible worlds. The dread of 
 any overpowering personal predominance is the more 
 striking because it is in a certain sense opposed to the 
 genius of a vivid, dramatic people. But the peculiarities 
 which most strike an observer as national characteristics 
 arc largely made up of precautions against national 
 temptations; the strong tendency to differentiation which 
 in Greece produced so many types of genius must have 
 been a perpetual source of danger from the presence of 
 strong individualities, and Greek feeling in every direc- 
 tion was strongly tinged by the consciousness of the 
 need for a guard against this danger. How much the 
 temptation impressed a teacher who sought to imbue the
 
 102 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 lively Greek temperament with the doctrines of the 
 Gospel we may gather from the frequent use by St. 
 Paul, in addressing the Corinthians, of the term we 
 translate " to be puffed up ; " ^ an expression which, 
 except in addressing the Greek Christians, is not used 
 in the New Testament. And we may set the explicit 
 warnings of Paul beside the implicit warning of another 
 Greek thinker who showed the Greek fear of being 
 " puffed up " as Paul's converts showed the cause for 
 that fear. ^schylus, the poet of the supernatural, 
 breaks through, for once, the cycle of prehistoric legend 
 on which he finds his appropriate ground, and speaks 
 to his fellow-citizens of events they themselves remem- 
 bered, and in which they had taken part. But " the 
 Persians " ^ is no exception to the general iEschylean 
 strain ; awe and terror are excited here more than else- 
 where, for the tale is of the dehverance of Greece, and 
 the colossal character of the disaster lifts it out of the 
 mere course of earthly circumstance and invests it with 
 the awful dignity of Divine intervention. In telling the 
 tale of Persian ruin the page is crowded with Persian 
 names — mostly, one would suppose, the invention of the 
 poet — but throughout the play which celebrates the Greek 
 valour that had just worked a miracle not a single Greek 
 is mentioned. Miltiades and Themistocles — names which 
 shine through the haze of 2000 years with undiminished 
 brilliancy — might be supposed with perfect dramatic pro- 
 priety to be heard at the barbaric court where lies the 
 scene of the drama. But their countryman never allows 
 himself to mention them ; he celebrates the triumph of 
 Athens, he will bring no individual into rivalry with the 
 city of Athene. 
 
 The poet here speaks as the genius of Greece. The 
 
 1 (pvaibw, I Cor. iv. 6, i8, 19 ; v. 2, &c. 
 
 2 i^3ch., " PersES," 249, seq.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 103 
 
 orators of a later age ^ looked back with longing regret 
 to the patriotic modesty of the earlier heroes, when the 
 battles of Salamis or Marathon were cited as victories 
 0/ the Athenian people, the name of the general being 
 left for silent gratitude. The "jealousy of the gods " is 
 shared by the city, the unseen power admits no rivalry 
 from any seen power. It seems as if the poet felt that 
 for a mortal to be clothed in the dazzling radiance 
 which shone upon the day of Greek deliverance was 
 more than mortal could bear. History justifies such 
 mistrust ; the leaders of the victorious host should all 
 have fallen like the victor of Thermopylae, if they were 
 to keep their fame untarnished. Miltiades, Themistocles, 
 Pausanias — all might have envied Leonidas. It would 
 not be easy throughout the whole range of modern 
 history to find such traitors as the two last, and the 
 inglorious death in prison of the victor of Marathon - is 
 a hardly less expressive lesson on the dangers of Greek 
 glory. If the banishment of Aristides shows us the 
 other side of this danger, and illustrates the grudging 
 impatience of superiority felt by the vulgar, yet the very 
 institution which gave effect to the popular jealousy 
 tends to show that in itself the feeling was but the base 
 alloy of a true national instinct, guarding a race dowered 
 with genius from the temptations incident to such a 
 nature, and counteracting them with a strong attraction 
 to all that belonged to the golden mean, such as to 
 our notions would seem alien from poetic genius and 
 philosophic originality. 
 
 The Greek hatred of monarchy is but another aspect 
 
 1 Demosthenes (if the speech be really liis), Trepl ^wraffcot, 171, 20, oi^Stis 
 ham tiv ii-Koi T7]f if ^aXaiMvi vaviJ-axiav Of/j.i(TTOK\iovs, d\\ Ad-qvaluf, ovSi 
 TTiV iv 'MapaOCifi. /J.dxv MtXTidoou dXXd riji TriXewy. 
 
 2 Grote docs not believe that Miltiades was put in prison : see his arguments, 
 iv. 496. The reader must choose between him and I'lutarch. The hero's 
 death was in any case disgraceful.
 
 I04 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 of this feeling. It is only another side of the Greek 
 dread of all arrogance and excess. To set up any one 
 human being at so vast a height above his kind seemed 
 to them a sort of impiety to the gods, as well as an 
 insult to his fellow-men ; above all, it was impiety to 
 that true Divinity of Greek worship — the State. Rever- 
 ence paid to a visible head robbed of its right that un- 
 seen Being whose presence made the many a corporate 
 whole ; it broke the unseen bond, it destroyed Liberty. 
 The sense of a common relation to the unseen, except in 
 so far as any one excellence is connected with all excel- 
 lence, has nothing to do with what we mean by Liberty. 
 But few distinctions are so important for a true under- 
 standing of History as that between Liberty in the 
 classic and in the modern sense of the word. An 
 Englishman, when he desires Liberty, thinks of it as 
 the opportunity of individual development, the soil on 
 which strongly marked character flourishes most vigo- 
 rously. It is doubtful whether a Greek would have . 
 understood what this means, and still more whether he 
 would have thought it desirable. Indeed, to some extent, 
 we may say that the Greek love of liberty embodied \ 
 the very opposite feeling to this. There never could j 
 have been a city less free than Sparta, according to J 
 our ideas ; and evidently in making it the model of his \ 
 Republic Plato was not eyen contemplating as a possi- 
 bility the reproach that he was a foe to Liberty. He 
 and his contemporaries meant by Liberty something 
 which was compatible with any amount of despotic regu- 
 lation of individual life. The ideal Republic of liberty- 
 loving Greece would have been a despotism more in- 
 tolerable to modern feeling than the most despotic king- 
 dom of modern Europe. 
 
 It is hardly a stretch of words to say that Liberty was 
 to the Greek the unseen bond which made a collection
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 105 
 
 of men into a city. What made the name of a tyrant 
 hateful was not that he was cruel or despotic, but that 
 he destroyed this invisible bond ; he, a mortal, took the 
 place of an immortal. And hence the love of liberty 
 necessarily involved the reverence for law, as no doubt 
 with the best men it does always, but as with ordinary 
 men it does not now. The Spartans who, by a deeply 
 religious influence, were led to the court of the great King 
 to offer up their own lives as a voluntary atonement 
 for the murder of his heralds slain by their city in 
 defiance of sacred law, refused indignantly to prostrate 
 themselves before the mortal at whose command they 
 were ready to die.^ They had made a long and toilsome 
 journey from their own beloved city to confront the King 
 on his throne and suffer his will, but they would not 
 bow down before him, " for it was not their way to wor- 
 ship men ; " and the great King, impressed by the rare 
 spectacle of fearless submission, dismissed them un- 
 harmed. Their journey from Sparta to Susa, and their | 
 return, express the Greek submission to law and resist-J 
 ance to personal claim. That resistance implies no ' 
 recoil from tyranny as we understand the words ; there 
 never was a more detested tyranny than that which 
 Sperthias and Bulls would have died to perpetuate. 
 While equally ready to die at the Divine command, they 
 would not renounce an opportunity of protest against the 
 claim of a mortal to intercept even the mere symbol of 
 that homage which was the claim of the State. The bond 
 which made a multitude into a city, the many into one, 
 must be something invisible. The seen monarch was 
 an embodiment not only of impious arrogance, but 
 we might say (if all our associations with the words 
 were not too shallow) of vulgarity and bad taste. The 
 supreme despot was barbaric, lawless, and in the 
 
 1 Herodotus, vii. 134, sf^.
 
 io6 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 stress of conflict weak. The supreme Law was an 
 inspiring and unconquerable influence, at whose com- 
 mand or in whose defence men were ready to die, and 
 whose claim they would rather die than transfer to a 
 mortal. 
 
 Any association of monarchy which seems incompatible 
 with this supremacy of the unseen is wholly superficial. 
 The Homeric kings are not kings in any other sense 
 than that they are the leaders of the armies, and when 
 Ulysses says that the rule of one is necessary, he means 
 only that the rank and file must wait for the word 
 of command.^ Monarchy was un-Greek, Asiatic, an 
 institution associated with barbarism, and discredited 
 by Asiatic defeat in the one respect in which lay its 
 supposed strength. The great King leading the might 
 of Asia was ruined by the onset of the populations of 
 a few small towns ; and thus in those few generations 
 which contain all that is most brilliant of Greek poetry 
 and art, monarchy was associated not merely with de- 
 grading bondage, but also with degrading failure. Never 
 was the tyrant opposed to the city without suffering 
 defeat ; the associations of victory were all on the side 
 of the State that owned an invisible bond. The con- 
 quest over the seen power is closely associated with 
 a trust in the unseen ; some divine influence appears 
 when human power fails to give its weight and sanc- 
 tion to the resolute spirit of freedom. The victory of 
 Greece over Persia is the victory of spirit over matter, 
 of will over might. The Gods protect the man who 
 spurns mere human dominion. An Unseen Power 
 fights on the side of those who dare to defy all law- 
 
 1 II. ii. 204. It does not seem, when we attend to the context, a good oppor- 
 tunity for the remark (h^ Kolpavot iaru), which is perhaps made more famiHar 
 by the quotation of Aristotle (Met., Bk. x.), and its actual reference somewhat 
 disguised thereby.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 107 
 
 less power, and the supreme influences of the world 
 above are in harmony with those who reject all bondage 
 here. 
 
 It is necessary to dwell on this thought, because the 
 miracle by which a few small towns scattered the might 
 of Asia has not been always worked wherever brave men 
 have been willing to die for their country. Nor, on the 
 other hand, has the rule of the monarch, throughout 
 modern historj', been invariably associated with tyranny ; 
 the despotism from which modern nations have suffered 
 most is not that of an individual, but an order. The 
 conditions which prevailed in the ancient world during 
 the short period of the life of Greece, were such that both 
 her dread of individual pre-eminence and her confidence 
 in unseen power were justified and enforced by all that 
 is most striking in her history. Nowhere, not even in 
 Judaea, do we find a nation more distinctly marked by 
 Heaven for the part it has to play in the world's history. 
 What a scholar meant by history until quite lately was little 
 more than Greek history ; and surely he who knows the 
 history of Greece may with very little exaggeration be 
 said to know what History means. He sees, disentangled 
 from the confusing cross lights of modern life, and exhibited 
 on a scale which the eye can take in, what the meaning 
 is of a ^lational vocation. It is not more true of Greece 
 than of England that a national vocation exists, but the 
 writer who should endeavour to bring out in the his- 
 tory of England any moral purpose, as he cannot 
 help bringing it out in the history of Greece, would be 
 continually tempted to falsify facts ; he would lose that 
 intellectual disinterestedness which is the first duty of 
 a historian, and would take up the irritating position of 
 the teacher who infuses his moral into his facts instead 
 of drawing it from them. But it is hardly possible to 
 narrate the history of Greece without assuming that it
 
 io8 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 has a lesson for the world. In merely setting forth the 
 facts of Greek history we must speak of the triumph of 
 the resolute few, the downfall of the barbaric armament, 
 the Nemesis of arrogance, the vindication of the spirit of 
 liberty. No one can w^ite the history of Greece without 
 expanding the text, " He hath put down the mighty from 
 their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek." 
 What the historian longs to discover in all history is 
 written in the tale of Salamis and Thermopylae, so that 
 he who runs may read. 
 
 Yet the sentiment which we best express in the text 
 just quoted was, after all, so faintly moral that it 
 melts into a belief known as much through the protest 
 of Plato ^ as the continued assertion of Herodotus — the 
 belief in the envy of the Gods. The words suggest 
 fallacious analogies. They have not really any relation 
 to the assertion, " I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous 
 God." The Greek feeling is not a claim on the devotion 
 of man, but a grudge against the advancement of man ; 
 it is the jealousy not of a spouse, but of a rival. It % 
 
 seems to reproduce on the field of the Divine the lowest 
 and most vulgar feelings of earth, and to associate the 
 idea of Divinity with the temptations of a paltry aristo- 
 cracy, repressing a pushing how-geoisie. The displea- 
 sure of the Gods is attracted not only by arrogance or 
 intemperance, but by a mere excess of prosperity ; they 
 wish to keep unmingled good fortune to themselves, as 
 a privilege of their order, and are resolute to shut out 
 mankind into the realm of vicissitude, far from all partici- 
 
 1 Timceus, 29, ar^o-QQ hi oi)Se!s 7re/)i oiiZevhi ovoiiroTe iyyiyverai <f)96voi. The 
 emphatic form of this protest reminds us that the belief it opposes was popular 
 as well as orthodox. I suppose Plato was thinking of the speech of Achilles to 
 Priam, II. xxiv. 525, 6, but he may also have intended to confute many passages 
 in Herodotus. Timoeus, in whose mouth the remark is placed, was a Pytha- 
 gorean philosopher, who has, says the Platonic Socrates " attained the summits 
 of philosophy." 
 
 >!:
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 109 
 
 pation in their own invulnerable bliss. The prosperous 
 man who fails to propitiate them by sacrifice of a cherished 
 possession is doomed by them to a fearful death ;^ it does 
 not appear that anything but the prosperity of Polycrates 
 was hateful to them ; he dies a victim to their grudge, 
 not to their justice. The sentiments thus attributed to 
 the Gods were indeed, as one of their own poets has 
 said," shameful among ordinary men. But see how this 
 mobile national spirit crosses on light wing the water- 
 shed of good and ill, and melts the low into the high. 
 The envy of the Gods, from a slightly shifted point of 
 view, becomes their compassion. The feeling to which 
 we may give either of these names, on one side so ignoble, 
 has its justification and expression in all that is grandest 
 in Greek history, and makes that history come nearer 
 than any other to being an exhibition of the justice of 
 that power which rules the world. 
 
 The profound and hidden junction between piety 
 and pity — between a reverent awe for what is high, 
 a generous compassion for what is lowl}' — seems con- 
 tinually indicated by the expressions in which Hero- 
 dotus clothes this belief. The shipwreck of Asia on 
 the rock of Greek freedom does not appear to a modern 
 reader an illustration of that theme ; he is already too 
 familiar with the issue. But if we had been present at 
 the conflict and watched the result, we should have felt, 
 as Herodotus did, that God had rebuked the insolence 
 of the proud, and taken part with the weak. The wise 
 Persian who endeavours to turn Xerxes from the expedi- 
 tion that is to end in his ruin uses almost the same words 
 as we have cited from a Psalm, ^ and though, no doubt, 
 he is chiefly a creation of Greek imagination, he is none 
 
 1 Herodotus, iii. 41-43, 125. 
 
 2 Sec the l-'ragmcnts of Xenophanes, ed. by Karsten; Fr. vii. 
 
 ' Herodotus, vii. 10, 5 .—tplXiei ydp 6 Ocb^ rh mtpixovTO. irdi/ra KoXoveiv.
 
 no THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 the less a figure of historic significance on the canvas of 
 Herodotus. He tells us how that great event looked 
 to those who were to pass on its influence to the modern 
 world, and such a representation must be allowed to 
 possess the highest kind of historic truth, even if from 
 the literal point of view it is mere fiction. And some 
 of the forms in which Herodotus expresses this feeling 
 must be allowed to have more than this kind of authen- 
 ticity. When he represents Greek envoys from the 
 army at Thermopylae striving to encourage allies with 
 the reminder that ^ " the invader is not a God, but a man, 
 and that there never had been and never would be a man 
 who was not liable to misfortunes greater in proportion 
 to his own greatness ; " when he paints a victorious general 
 dissuading the army from pursuit of the defeated host 
 with the reminder that ^ " we have not achieved this 
 victory by our own might, it is the work of Gods and 
 heroes who were jealous that one man should be king at 
 once over Greece and Asia" — the reader may doubt 
 whether these are the very expressions which were actu- 
 ally used as a matter of fact, but can hardly suppose 
 that the historian, in professing to cite words so memor- 
 able, so recent, and so public, would make use of any 
 very unlike those which were actually uttered. The 
 sense of the constant nearness of disappointment to hope, 
 of a hidden irony in the adjustment of anticipation and 
 effort to result, is not ordinarily or necessarily a moral 
 feeling ; sometimes it is an immoral feeling. But, as we 
 have said of the Eumenides, it belongs to that frontier 
 region of human thought where a step sets us on a 
 different kingdom. It seems almost as if the same words, 
 with a different emphasis, might belong to either realm 
 — as if we might cross over with hardly any change 
 of a word from the envy of the Gods to the love of 
 
 1 Herodotus, vii. 203. " Ibid,, viii. 109.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. iii 
 
 the Father that chasteneth His children for their profit. 
 Doubtless this is an illusion ; when we have reached 
 this belief we have quitted the hand of our guide. 
 But the illusion is almost inevitable, and it is difficult 
 to understand the true Greek feeling without entertain- 
 ing it for a moment. 
 
 The feeling gives an epic unity to the great prose 
 Iliad. A spectator, watching the mighty host passing 
 the Hellespont,^ wonders why Jove, in the likeness 
 of a Persian, has led the whole race of men for the 
 destruction of Greece ; and the subsequent fall is pre- 
 faced and preluded by the presumption which these 
 words reflected. It casts back shadows on the impe- 
 tuous spirit of Xerxes; the tears which he explains by 
 the transitoriness of all things earthly suggest a sense of 
 inadequacy in any prize to justify such effort in beings 
 so ephemeral. Some dim foreboding seems present of 
 the illusory nature of the hopes on which such efforts 
 are founded, a conviction, as in the words which follow, 
 that, short as life is, it is too long for success, that 
 the shadow of disappointment and failure darkens what 
 is spared from the darkness of the grave. And this 
 conviction is presented always with a sense of compas- 
 sion ; we feel the ills of humanity lamented, not those 
 alone of an individual. " Short as our time here is," 
 answers the Persian prince to the lament of Xerxes 
 over the transitoriness of life, " there is no man who 
 is so fortunate as not to have felt the wish for death, 
 not once, but many times." ^ Is there not in these words 
 a sense of compassion for the dumb multitudes whom 
 the great King had just reviewed, who were driven 
 
 1 Herodotus, vii. 56. 
 
 - Ibid., vii. 45, 46: — TfOvivai ^o<u\€aOai fia.\')\ov f) ^iheiv. The spcccli curi- 
 ously rc-scmblcs llanilct's "To be, or not to be," and is spoken by a Prince 
 in somcwliat similar circumstances.
 
 112 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 on under the lash to a fate which was certain for 
 many of them, however the presumptuous hopes of their 
 monarch might be fulfilled ? Such a feeling seems 
 alwa^'s heard as a tremulous undertone through the 
 cheerful, light-hearted strain of the narrative, everywhere 
 we feel the sighs of suffering mingle with notes of 
 triumph ; we see the envy of the Gods melt into the 
 compassion of noble men. 
 
 At times we watch a higher transformation, we see 
 the envy of the Gods as a thin veil, covering the love of 
 God. The dispensation which takes the aspect of Divine 
 envy to mortals might, it seems, from a higher point of 
 view, be discerned as the very opposite ; human vicissi- 
 tude is the result of a Divine love anxious not to keep 
 but to share the true blessedness which comes in the 
 form of sorrow. The fall of Croesus changes a tyrant 
 to a philosopher.^ No contrast between different men 
 could be more striking than that between the vain- 
 glorious King and the philosophic exile ; he emerges from 
 that hour's anguish on the burning pyre a sage to whom 
 the great King may safely bequeath the onerous task of 
 admonishing his son, and who never betrays that trust. 
 His history is an eloquent sermon on the teaching of 
 adversity. Christian interpretation, we have allowed, 
 infuses a foreign element into this teaching. We mis- 
 interpret it when we see it under the shadow of the 
 Cross ; the only words we can use to replace the Greek 
 expressions are for us marked indelibly by the worship 
 of a suffering God ; and to the Greek the associations oi 
 pity and pardon which they convey are wholly want- 
 ing. Yet we hold a sure clue to the deepest feeling of 
 Greece when we point out that this misinterpretation is 
 almost inevitable. " The quality of mercy," says Shake- 
 speare, "is mightiest in the mighty." "Zeus himself," 
 
 1 Herodotus, i. 85 ; <^ iii. 35.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 113 
 
 says Sophocles, " hath mercy ^ for the sharer of his 
 throne." We are not reminded that between the utter- 
 ance of Sophocles and Shakespeare came the utterance 
 of one who bade his hearers be merciful as their Father 
 in Heaven was merciful ; rather the resemblance is 
 greatest where it could not possibly have been conscious. 
 In both what moulds the thought is rather creative art 
 than holy aspiration, yet we cannot sharply divide the 
 two. The Venetian lady pleads for her friend as the 
 Theban prince for himself; it is the insight of genius 
 which gives a moral precept as an appeal of need. 
 Probabl}' it has happened only once in the world's his- 
 tor}' that mercy was enjoined on the heart and conscience 
 by one who, in the hour of need, never sought it for 
 himself Man, for the most part, learns the excellence 
 of the high by experiencing the needs of the low, and feels 
 the beauty of tenderness first as the claim of weakness. 
 And thus it is that the perfect artist cannot but preach 
 virtue when all he desires is to paint the lot of ordinary 
 humanity, with its burden of toil, and difficult}', and 
 sorrow. 
 
 Among the artist people this is true of every great 
 writer. The historian illustrates its force as well as the 
 poet. We may almost sa}'' that on the soil of Greece 
 the historian blossoms into the poet ; poetry lies in his 
 theme, a faithful transcript reproduces it on his page. 
 We have seen how that sense of human vicissitude, 
 disguised in a misleading garb as the " envy of the 
 Gods," weaves in a continued strain of pathos into the 
 narrative of Herodotus ; we trace it with more difficulty 
 in the work of his successor, yet perhaps the belief 
 it.self is more striking when it escapes as a half in- 
 consistency in a dry neutral narrative than when it 
 forms the central idea which gives the narrative epic 
 
 ' Al5tl)t, so translated by Prof. Jebb, CEd. Col., 1268, g. 
 
 H
 
 114 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 unity. Not a single word is left us by Thucydides 
 to show that he believed in any power but that of 
 man ; his tone is in this respect curiously recent ; and 
 yet the shadow of some influence that seems to mock 
 at the hopes of man falls on his page, and the strange 
 dramatic contrast between men's hopes and their for- 
 tunes seems to intensify the narrative of facts into an 
 utterance of regret and a claim for compassion. As 
 he describes the modest desire of Nicias " to leave to 
 posterity a name associated with no disaster to the city," ^ 
 he suggests the terrible catastrophe by which the name 
 of Nicias is for ever associated with the greatest disaster 
 that Athens ever knew. The description of the Athenian 
 Armada's start for Sicily glows with picturesque colour- 
 ing ; the historian's dry tradesmanlike account of the 
 expense incurred in this, the most costly expedition 
 ever sent out from Athens, is mingled with a richness 
 of detail that seems almost to belong to the page of 
 romance. We see the crowds hurrying from an emptied 
 city to the Piraeus ; those who hastened to embrace sons p 
 
 and brothers they were never to see again jostled by 
 idlers eager to behold a spectacle of splendour " exceed- 
 ing belief; " the flashing gold and silver goblets catch 
 our eye as the libations are poured on the decks of the 
 noble fleet, gay with a wealth of adornment that attracts 
 the admiring gaze even of those from whom it bears 
 away their nearest and dearest. We hear the clarion 
 note of the trumpet announce a solemn prayer which 
 goes up from the united army and from the attendant 
 crowds on the banks as from one man, and the musical 
 thunder of the P^an, as it mingles with the rattle of 
 weighed anchors and the last bustle of the final start. ^ 
 
 1 NtKt'as fiev pov\6/j,evos . . . rco /x^Wovti xP'^^V KaToKiweif ovofia ws oiidev 
 (r(prj\as ti]v Tvb'XLv oceyeuero (Thucyd., vi. i). 
 
 2 Thucyd., vi. 30-32. 
 
 \d
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 115 
 
 All that tells of pride and hope in that description 
 reminds us that, of the joyous army then flushed with 
 anticipations of victory, some few stragglers alone are 
 to return to Athens with a ghastly tale of dead left 
 unburied on a foreign soil, their corpses an object of 
 envy to the wounded who cumbered the fugitives with 
 helpless clinging, and made the inevitable flight seem 
 heartless treacher3^ That impressive contrast on the 
 page of Thucydides expresses a creed as well as an 
 event. As we compare the triumphant but not un- 
 reasonable hope with which the Sicilian expedition was 
 decided on, with the unmatched disaster in which it 
 issued, we feel that the jealous fate w^hich shattered the 
 pride of the Great King was to the Greek no partial 
 Deity, but a supreme influence casting down all un- 
 measured ambition, intervening to overthrow even reason- 
 able when it was gigantic anticipation, and constantly 
 bringing in unexpected hope to the vanquished, unexpected 
 humiliation to the conqueror. It seemed the very same 
 power which saved Athens from Persia and Syracuse 
 from Athens. It was not the genius of Athens arising 
 to repel her foes. It was the ultimate divine influence 
 of the whole Hellenic world, the God of proportion, of 
 measure, of balanced forces ; the Divinity by whom all 
 intemperance was abhorred and whose sway is repre- 
 sented by the ceaseless vicissitude of human fortune, 
 the chequered aspect of human life. When Athens is 
 threatened by the might of Asia she rises ; when her 
 power appears to justify the aim at dominion within the 
 Hellenic world she falls. There is no room on the soil 
 of Greece for an " empire city ; " the miniature Europe on 
 which the struggles of history are repeated on a small 
 scale, and with such vivid contrast of light and shade, 
 does not allow any rehearsal of the part of Rome. The 
 spirit of proportion, of limit, which animates Greek
 
 Ii6 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 literature regulates Greek history ; its ideal is that of 
 equal and independent states, and those efforts which 
 foreshadow empire initiate intestine strife and rapid 
 national decay. 
 
 It is a striking illustration both of the richness and 
 the balanced dualism of Greek life that the two historians 
 who chronicled the brightness of its spring and the 
 glowing decay of its autumn might have known each 
 other.-' If we imagine Froissart and Voltaire as con- 
 temporaries we bring home to our minds some shadow 
 of the rich variety shown forth in the contrast between 
 the historians of the Persian and Peloponnesian war. 
 How wonderful is the adaptation between each of them 
 and the subject he has made familiar to every student ! 
 There never was a narrator more perfectly adapted to 
 the earlier tale than Herodotus. His genius seems 
 ripened in the sunshine that flings its glow; on his 
 canvas ; he tells of the glory of Greece, and Greek 
 feeling moulds every line. All that is here set forth 
 might be justified and illustrated from his page alone. 
 Homer is not more fitly the singer of those legends 
 than Herodotus a narrator of those events which alike 
 worked to make Greece a unity. The reader who knows 
 him, and him alone, is familiar with all that is most 
 characteristic of Greek feeling and Greek life. All, we 
 repeat, that is uiost characteristic. The cold scepticism 
 of Thucydides has its own place ; it is but one phase 
 of the Greek desire to see the other side ; it is such 
 an example of Greek balance, Greek impartiality, as we 
 find nowhere else. But if a reader desires to make 
 acquaintance with Greek life in a single book, we should 
 give him Herodotus. There he will find what is best 
 
 1 Herodotus is said (on no good evidence) to have given a recitation of his 
 History in 456 B.C. to an audience at Olympia, by which Thucydides, as a 
 boy, was moved to tears. The legend measures chronological possibihties.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 117 
 
 worth remembering in the history of Greece — what 
 stands out from the history known to students and takes 
 its place in the history known to all readers and to some 
 who can scarcely claim a place even among readers — 
 the history which has seasoned the world of allusion 
 and proverb, and glides into the mind almost apart from 
 its conscious effort. And there he finds too the fitting 
 spirit in which such history should be chronicled — the 
 unquestioning belief in the Invisible, the profound sense 
 of a national vocation, the light touches of delicate 
 humour and keen sarcasm without which this conception 
 would have lacked its true counterpoise and appropriate 
 relief. There he finds History written in the dialect in 
 which it reaches not only the student but the dreamer, 
 the idler, the lover of gossip, of anecdote, of moral 
 reflection. In that dialect it was fit that the world 
 should possess the history of the race which appeals 
 to it with the bewitching aspect of vast hope, immense 
 promise, and a vivid delight in freedom. 
 
 For the history of its decay another voice was needed, 
 a voice that reaches a different and a much smaller audi- 
 ence, but one which will never fail as long as men care 
 for literature. The prose life of Greece is set forth with 
 as much perfection as its poetry, and with, perhaps, 
 more of instruction and warning for modern Europe. 
 Indeed the extreme modernness of tone is what at first 
 most strikes the reader of Thuc3'dides. The eighteenth 
 century seems to breathe in every page, especially if 
 memories of Herodotus be present to his mind. The 
 resemblance is not an accidental one. The history of 
 Greece after the Peloponnesian war continually suggests 
 the history of Europe after the Reformation. Europe 
 had its Catholic unity, as Greece had its Hellenic unity ; 
 and then Athens and Sparta represent much the same 
 entanglement of patriotism witii an opposite principle,
 
 Ii8 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 bringing in cross lines of division that perplex the dis- 
 tinction of the city or the nation. But the moving 
 forces that are in European history confused and indis- 
 tinct show themselves in Greek history sharp and clear, 
 and make it the typical specimen of what we mean by 
 history. Greece is modern Europe on a tiny scale, but 
 with all the intellectual forces of modern Europe on a 
 gigantic scale. It presents that platform of culture above 
 barbarism which Europe, and that greater England which 
 forms a vast appendix to Europe, present in contrast to 
 the African and Asiatic populations ; while in diminish- 
 ing the breadth of the platform no less than in increasing 
 its height it concentrates and intensifies the teaching of 
 history, and is indeed to all other history what the best 
 fiction is to biography. The art is present in the very 
 course of events which it traces. 
 
 Thus as the struggle of Greece with Persia shows the 
 dynamic vitality developed by a nation's first self-con- 
 sciousness — the heat generated by a rush of union — 
 so the struggle of Athens with Sparta shows the para- 
 lyzing touch of party spirit on patriotism, the chill of 
 disintegration. If there be any principle of corporate 
 union of which we may say broadly that it is evil, we 
 may say it of party spirit. In all that binds there must 
 be some good ; and since almost all that binds also 
 separates, there will be probably some evil also. But 
 nowhere else is the gain so small, and the loss so 
 great. Reversing the noble sentence of Antigone, the 
 political partizan may almost say, '* I was not born to 
 share thy love, but hate." On that soil all love withers 
 and all hate flourishes. The love of country is the 
 love of the neighbour. It sets us in kindly relation- 
 ship with those of whom we know most, for whom 
 we can do most ; it includes every variety of opinion, 
 of circumstance, of character ; it contains within itself
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 119 
 
 lessons of tolerance and forbearance, and it becomes in 
 a healthy mind an expansive feeling, passing be3^ond its 
 own large boundaries, and ready to embrace the world. 
 It may no doubt pass into the hatred of the foreigner, 
 but as far as it does so it becomes an exceptional 
 influence, not concerning the life of every day. Irra- 
 tional dislike, if it must be felt at all, had better be felt 
 for those whom we rarely see, and have small power to 
 injure. When it is turned into the current of partizan 
 feeling it sets up a principle of division in every house- 
 hold and stirs hostility where the power to give pain is 
 at its highest. It is the parent of that "madness in the 
 brain " that comes from being " wroth with one we love." 
 Its bonds have no elasticity. The patriot is the possible 
 philanthropist. The partizan is as much cut off from 
 that possibility as is the mere egotist. For, however 
 numerous the sharers of his sympathies, those sym- 
 pathies have nothing catholic in them ; — party spirit is 
 that spirit of taste, of preference, which is strong enough 
 in every man, strengthened by a sense of duty. Friend- 
 ship on such a basis is a house built on the sand, for 
 the ally ma}^ any day become the traitor. Enmity, 
 on the other hand, is a fortress on a rock, for the foe 
 can never become the trusted ally. It is the negative 
 principle of human intercourse, put in the place of the 
 positive. 
 
 These considerations refer to party spirit at all time 
 and in all places. Wherever it prevails it is a solvent 
 to friendship and natural affection, an antagonist to pity, 
 generosity, and justice. But it never again shows itself 
 in its naked repulsiveness as in the history of Greece. 
 For no modern life is quite so sensitive to party spirit 
 as was the city life of antiquit}'. It is hurtful to all 
 national feelings, but a nation is large enough to absorb 
 it and triumph over it. A city becomes its prey. Eng-
 
 I20 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 land has survived the rise and fall of many parties. 
 But when Greece was divided between oligarchic Sparta 
 and democratic Athens its life was rent asunder in the 
 strife. It is true that Athens was a small city, and that 
 the adherents of Democracy were a large party. But 
 the smallest city is less exclusive than the largest party. 
 A family, a tribe, a city, a nation — any natural group 
 whatever — is founded on something more allied to self- 
 sacrifice than the spirit of choice. A party is a conse- 
 cration of all those egotistic impulses which everywhere 
 adhere to the spirit of choice. Thus the exchange of 
 patriotism for partizan feeling in Greece was a narrow- 
 ing influence, even though it did exchange a number 
 of small groups for two large ones. It was the more 
 narrowing because the groups it dissolved were small. 
 The disease attacked an organism unfitted to cope with 
 it. Party spirit was more hostile to civic than it could 
 ever be to national life, because it met with nothing 
 strong enough to swallow it up. And it is still more 
 to our purpose to note that Greece was disloyal to its 
 fundamental principle when it gave itself up to party 
 spirit. It ceased to hold to the spirit of the balance, it 
 loosed its hold on what was in truth the rudder of its 
 political life. Greek feeling, divorced from the harmony 
 of opposites, lost all vitality, all coherent moral stan- 
 dard. Greek liveliness was then converted to hatred. 
 Party spirit is a deliberate refusal to hear the other side. 
 The Greek ideal could not admit such a refusal ; where 
 the last was victorious the first perished. We may 
 record the completeness of the victory in the oath 
 taken, in some states, at the time of Aristotle,^ by 
 the members of the oligarchy, " I swear to be eter- 
 nally hostile to the commonalt}^, and to do it all the 
 
 1 Kol Tt^ 5i7/U(p KaKbvovs IffOfiai /cot |3ovXei/crw S rt Slv e^w KaKov (Ar., Pol., 
 V. 7. 19)-
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 121 
 
 harm in my power by my counsels." Hatred and 
 treachery were thus incorporated in political life, and 
 Greece, broken up into warring factions, ceased to be 
 a nation. 
 
 "The universe," says one of the earliest thinkers of 
 Greece, " is the harmony of the lyre and bow." ^ The 
 order of nature, in its widest sense, Heracleitus thought, 
 rests on the harmon}- of all that the lyre symbolizes, 
 and all that the bow symbolizes — the union of the 
 power that gives to life all its value with the power 
 that destroys life. The harmony would lose all its 
 richness with the withdrawal of its discords. " The 
 hidden harmony is better than that which is mani- 
 fest." " It is not well that man should choose his 
 fate ; his true good is resignation, not pleasure." Plea- 
 sure is the manifest, resignation the hidden, harmony ; 
 — the element of discord is lacking where man has his 
 own will, and with it all the finest music of humanity. 
 Even death and life join in the lesson of the indissoluble 
 unity of opposites ; man chooses life which is truly death, 
 and flees from death which is truly life. The union 
 of antagonistic principles is the clue to all that man can 
 achieve or know. 
 
 "It is not well that man should choose his fate."' 
 One might fancy that sentence as an utterance from 
 the cloister; it seems a strange expression from one of 
 the joy-loving, art-loving Greek race. Yet, in truth, it 
 is one of the most characteristic that have come to us in 
 the Greek tongue. It represents a large part of what 
 is most impressive in Greek literature. It would not be 
 possible, probably, to gather so many illustrations of the 
 
 ' These fragments are tnkcn from t]ie work of Ferdinand Lassalle, "Die 
 rhilosophie Ileracleitos des Dunkkn," with liis interpretation. 
 
 ' AfOpuirois ylytcOat oKbaa 6i\ovci.v, ovk A/*f ivoi' (Lassaile's " Ileracleitos," 
 ii. 448).
 
 122 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 belief in the blessings of adversity from any other his- 
 torian as from Herodotus. The story of Croesus at its 
 opening sets the ke3'note, and Polycrates supplies the 
 best-knoAvn illustration of the theme; but perhaps nothing 
 is so impressive as the decision of Solon, so offensive to 
 Croesus, that the second place in human happiness is 
 to be given to the two Argive youths who drew their 
 mother to the temple of Juno in place of the oxen, and 
 after her prayer to the goddess to grant them that which 
 is best for man, fell asleep in the holy precincts, and 
 awoke no more.^ What ! one is tempted to ask, is the 
 earthly doom of humanity one prolonged mistake ? Is 
 it better to quit this scene of existence as soon as it is 
 fully open? The spirit which seems to answer "Yes" 
 is the spirit which most delights in all the beauty, 
 the pleasure, the joy of earth. The power to see its 
 charm seems but the other side of the power to see its 
 emptiness. " Man is the dream of a shade," says the 
 poet who has immortalized the games of Greece." The 
 sense of life's brightness and the sense of its vanity seem 
 to have attained their summit together. We have all 
 known moments in which we could understand the con- 
 junction — moments in which the crash of dance music 
 or the brightness of a summer's day seemed to hold 
 some profound, unspeakable melancholy, a melancholy 
 lying at the very core of all that was its very opposite. 
 Such a feeling is found often in the poetry of Scott, 
 and lends it a peculiar Greek grace — a grace with us 
 somewhat allied to what is conventional, and not char- 
 acteristic of the highest poetry of the modern age, which 
 demands a fuller grasp on the great realities of the 
 spiritual world. For we come in contact with hardly 
 
 1 Herodotus, i. 31. 
 
 2 Pindar, Pyth,, viii. :— cr/ctay tvap avdpwwo's. The line is imitated by 
 Sophocles.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 123 
 
 anything that is original, in our sense of the word, in 
 Greek poetry ; we meet very little thought stamped with 
 idios3'ncrasie3 of a peculiar character. But we meet the 
 ideas to which we are accustomed in their well-worn, 
 half-obliterated banality, fresh from the mint of human 
 thought. And thus that sentiment of the fleetingness 
 in all things earthly, which with us, from its very depth 
 and breadth, has become commonplace, touches the 
 grandest poetr}' of antiquity. 
 
 For, in truth, all modern literature is more or less 
 impregnated with the ideas of Greece, and we meet 
 here at first hand what elsewhere we meet at second 
 hand. We have literatures which know nothing of the 
 classical world, but all to which we give the name of 
 literature absorbs this influence from a thousand sources, 
 however little it may reproduce its form. Shakespeare 
 himself is but the most perfect blossom of the Re- 
 naissance culture which found its root in the buried 
 treasures of Greece, and all that has attained any 
 perennial hold on the literary mind of Europe has 
 hitherto owed its power to this magic influence. Other 
 kinds of excellence there may be where the Greek sense 
 of balance and harmony is wanting — philosophic or 
 scientific thought, theologic earnestness, historic truth ; — 
 and it may be that in some books of very deep value it 
 is lacking. But we cannot say that, in any deep sense, 
 the result is literary. In the world of art this is 
 obvious. Dramatic power is inseparable from intellec- 
 tual disinterestedness, and intellectual disinterestedness 
 means a fine sense of the opposite forces that mould 
 character. Art can live only in the leisure of a mind 
 not occupied by any sense of the claim of the Right to 
 continual emphasis and unvaried illustration. Wherever 
 we meet dramatic power we meet this spirit ; the 
 temper of mii^.d which throws itself with strenuous
 
 124 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 resolve into the part of a defender of right, an avenger 
 of wrong, affords the dramatist some of his finest 
 material, but is itself undramatic. We take up the 
 Iliad with a sense of escape from all we long to forget, 
 because it is a picture of vivid, stirring life, reflected 
 in the still waters of a perfectly dramatic impartiality. 
 Few recognize the source of this mingled vigour and 
 repose, but it is felt by all. The Greek poet takes all 
 his most pathetic, most inspiring images from the foes 
 of Greece. The noblest utterance of patriotism and the 
 purest picture of domestic love are both from the Trojan 
 side ; the Trojan King sets an example of chivalrous 
 courtesy ; even the effeminate Asiatic prince touches 
 the reader by his candid confession under the rebuke of 
 his heroic brother. The intercourse which takes place 
 between the warrior chiefs in the intervals of battle has 
 nothing fierce or hostile ; it is the discourse of brave men 
 who hope to kill each other, but who in the meantime 
 have no difficulty in recognizing each other's nobility. 
 This makes the Iliad not a national but a human epic. 
 We have described this excellence in negative terms, 
 but it is in the highest degree positive. It is the 
 secret which gives brightness of colour and delicacy of 
 form to every touch. Achilles — Hector — Helen — they 
 live and move before us, because their images are un- 
 blurred by any rufQing breeze, because a fine balance 
 of sympathies keeps the poise even and avoids every 
 disturbing jar. We see Greek impartiality at its 
 highest if we turn from the Greek to the Persian epic. 
 The poem which enshrines the legend associated with a 
 belief in Ahriman and Ormazd is indeed full of interest. 
 But it is an interest for the student. It is a picture of 
 the strife of good and evil. The contrast between the 
 Hellenic and the Persian epics strikingly brings out 
 the character of the two religions which they express.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 125 
 
 The Shah-Nameh is, for the most part, a series of 
 struggles between heroes of noble virtue and monsters 
 of wickedness, and between a people of light (Iran, 
 the Persian race) and a people of darkness (Turan). 
 Where a hero falls, it is through the temptation of 
 Ahriman. Zohak, the serpent king who bears on his 
 shoulders twin snakes sprung from a kiss of the Evil 
 One, has yielded to impious seductions ; promises of 
 splendid dominion have led him to plunge into guilt, and 
 the crimes of his monstrous double nature have earned 
 an awful punishment ; he is not to be speedily slain, but 
 to die a death of agony. How unlike anything in the 
 Iliad ! Where Homer gives us fierce anger Firdusi 
 gives us bitter hatred. Where Firdusi gives us a com- 
 bat of saints and devils Homer gives us a struggle of 
 hero with hero. The poem that opens Greek literature 
 can never grow old, because it is committed to no tem- 
 porary, no local emotion — it sets no stamp of condem- 
 nation on any actor of the drama ; it claims sympathy, 
 in turn, for all. 
 
 This we may say of the poem which stands on the 
 threshold of Greek literature, and to which, to a certain 
 extent, we may say that Greece owes its unity. And 
 then, again, we may say it of that work of literary genius 
 which, of all that has been bequeathed us by Greece, 
 has least of the poetic spirit, and which most expresses 
 the antagonism within the bosom of Greece. Few im- 
 mortal works treating of a similar subject can be so 
 unlike as the Iliad, and the history which Thucydides 
 has left of the Pcloponnesian war. The contrast of 
 poetry and prose, of the spirit of simple childlike faith, 
 and of cold wary scepticism, of glowing fancy, and of 
 realistic effort after accurate narration — all these arc 
 brought to a climax when we set the two works together : 
 they seem to belong to different worlds. And yet wc
 
 126 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 cannot forget that they belong to the same race. We 
 can hardly say that Thucydides and Homer have any- 
 thing else in common, but they are alike impartial. It 
 is equally impossible to discern any various colouring in 
 the sympathies of the narrator according as he follows 
 the fortunes of those with whom his interests were 
 identified, and of those to whom they were opposed. The 
 narration keeps its hard disinterested accuracy whether 
 it sets before us the fate of Athenian or Spartan, as the 
 poem keeps its glowing richness of colouring whether 
 it paints the fortune of Trojan or Greek. This equality 
 of interest cannot be more absolute in the one case than 
 the other, but it is far more striking on the page of the 
 historian than in the song of the bard. Homer relates 
 no deed of the Greek army that may be set by the 
 side of the taking of Melos as a specimen of ruthless 
 barbarity ; and Thucydides, even in that part of the 
 narrative which must be due to his fancy, shows not 
 the faintest temptation to soften a line in the picture 
 of his country's crime.^ That the Athenians slew the 
 adult males and enslaved the women and children of 
 a State which had done nothing to incur their enmity, 
 was a fact which the great Athenian writer must re- 
 cognize ; but when he describes the pleadings on either 
 side, which must in great measure be due to his own 
 fanc}', we might have looked for some indication of a 
 wish to make out a case for his own countrymen, such 
 as, assuredly, an English writer would betray in narrating 
 the bombardment of Copenhagen or the fate of Drogheda. 
 Assuredly we shall not find it. " It is hard indeed," 
 the Melians concede, "to contend against your power 
 and your fortune ; yet we lose not our faith in Divine 
 aid, for we are innocent and confronted with the un- 
 righteous." " We are quite easy as to that," reply the 
 
 1 Thucyd., v. 89-105.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITES. 127 
 
 Athenians. " It is certainly a law for human beings that 
 they should take who have the power, and we suppose 
 this law holds good in the Divine world also." What 
 reader would not suspect, in reading that dramatic frag- 
 ment, that the sympathies of the writer were with the 
 vanquished ? Perhaps in some sense they were, but 
 not in any sense that made Thucydides less of an 
 Athenian, not in any sense that shows itself in one word 
 of condemnation when he comes to speak of the cruel 
 fate of those whose trust in Divine aid was met with 
 utter failure. He sympathized with the Melians only 
 so far as he threw himself on to their side with dramatic 
 disinterestedness of attention, only so far, we may say, 
 as he was a true Greek. 
 
 The " grand impartiality " ^ of Thucydides is not only 
 national, it is personal. For twenty years the great 
 historian was an exile from his native city. I^le was a 
 general in the war he has made known to all time, and 
 it is evident that he was banished for the failure to 
 relieve an important city which he mentions ; but the 
 two facts are both mentioned so slightly that the reader 
 has to discover their connection himself. Though his 
 chronological method is one of somewhat tiresome accu- 
 racy and precision, he tells us of his own exile out 
 of its proper place, and in a mere parenthesis of his 
 narrative. " I happened to be in exile for twenty years 
 after my command at Amphipolis, and thus to have 
 great advantages for ascertaining the facts iVom both 
 sides," is all he tells us about it. The unfortunate 
 command which led to this punishment is told with 
 the same brief, disinterested lightness. There is not 
 a word in the few lines referring to it which, if he 
 had left out " the present writer," would have led us to 
 think he was speaking of himself. A historian of Greek 
 ^ Jowctl's "Thucydides," vol. ii. p. 303, note 26.
 
 128 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 literature has been so much impressed with this reserve, 
 that he explains it by supposing it to be due to the con- 
 sciousness of guilt. Thucydides "neither attempts to vin- 
 dicate himself nor specifies the ground of his sentence," ^ 
 his critic thinks, because he had been more occupied in 
 looking after his own property than in the interests of 
 his country. The fact may have been so. There is 
 nothing whatever in literary impartiality to secure poli- 
 tical disinterestedness. But so temperate a reference to 
 the incident, by one who might have given his own 
 colouring to the narrative, does not look like conscious- 
 ness of guilt ; it may have covered such a feeling, but 
 what it expresses is the reticence demanded by that fine 
 sense of proportion, which gives the art of Greece its 
 immortal predominance. 
 
 If history shows us the harmony of opposites, in 
 Greek life, as a momentary and swiftly baffled aspiration, 
 in philosoph}'- and in literature we find it as a perennial 
 spring, which no frost can seal and no drought exhaust. 
 We may associate the Greek virtue — temperance — with 
 the productions, not of genius, but of talent. To us it 
 suggests the performance, not of virtue, but of respect- 
 able mediocrity. But the Greek saw in this idea the 
 key to all that is finest in art, noblest in virtue, most 
 desirable in experience. Genius, by the very fact that 
 it often reaches, never craves extravagance. There is 
 a profound meaning in the seemingly fantastic Greek 
 speculations on the principle of number as the mystic 
 root of orderly and developed Being. " The art of 
 measurement," says Plato, " is that which would save the 
 soul ; " - and the pupil of Plato expanded that statement 
 into the doctrine so well known, yet so little understood, 
 
 1 "A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece," 
 by William Mure of Caldwell, v. 40. 
 
 2 Plato, Protagoras, 356.
 
 GREECE, AND THE HARMONY OF OPPOSITE S. 129 
 
 of the golden mean. To the English mind, a kind of 
 dulness clings round the notion. We have it sufficiently 
 represented in our achievement ; what we crave in our 
 ideal is something different. For Greek thought the 
 idea of the mean takes in the moral universe the place 
 taken in the physical universe by that law which marks 
 out the path of the planet ; it is, in like manner, a 
 diagonal, the result of warring forces. What draws 
 the spirit one way was to them no more evil than 
 what draws it another. Cowardice drags it downwards ; 
 rashness drives it away from its true centre. A wise 
 manliness finds its orbit settled by the contest of these 
 two conflicting forces, and revolves about its centre with 
 an equal attraction and repulsion for both. All vivid 
 feelings were legitimate ; their harmony, their balance, 
 was the only conscious need. The ideal of the Con- 
 science belonged to the great foe of Greece. The Hellenic 
 spirit welcomed a// impulse, but impressed its own delicate 
 distinctness on all, and joined the Pantheistic fervour 
 of India to Persian definiteness, with a wealth of illus- 
 tration and glow of feeling that belongs to it alone, 
 among all the nations of the earth.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 
 
 Greece contains so much more than the ideal common 
 to it with Rome, that, in confining our gaze to the hfe 
 of Greece, we do not see clearly the contrast between 
 Ancient and Modern thought. The race that is dowered 
 with genius can hardly exhibit limitations, even when 
 subject to them ; amid the rich blossoming of distinct 
 and striking individualities, we discern with difficulty 
 that a person was hardly regarded as what we mean by 
 an individual. But the ideal of antique life is illus- 
 trated as much by Athenian thought as by Roman life, 
 or is only less illustrated there because Greek thought 
 is various in its abounding wealth and Roman life is 
 meagre in its simplicity. All the grandeur of the 
 classical world, Greek or Roman, depends on a sense 
 of corporate unity, which appears to the modern intel- 
 lect rather the goal of eminent goodness than the 
 possible assumption of average practical life. We 
 hardly reach with much effort that sense of the value 
 of organic corporate life which the citizen of antiquity 
 could not lose. Among us, it would require exalted 
 virtue to make the tribe or the nation the starting-point 
 of thought, as it must have been the starting-point of 
 thought to an average Athenian or Roman. The object 
 of conservation to him was a set of groups ; the indi- 
 vidual was a fraction of one or more of these groups, 
 not an entity that could be considered in himself. The 
 
 I
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 131 
 
 mere perception that a certain regulation tended to 
 preserve these groups gave motive-power ; there was 
 no need of adding to it (what unquestionably would 
 be needed in modern hfe) some argument to show that 
 the thing thus preserved was valuable. 
 
 At the very moment at which these lines are written 
 (1887) it is less necessary than it was a short time ago to 
 dwell on the social weakness produced by modern indivi- 
 dualism. Perhaps we now more need reminding of its 
 strength. But this reminder points out the difference 
 of the two ideals quite as forcibly. We cannot attain 
 the antique unity of the Family. The attempt without 
 this to merge individuality in the State tends to deprive 
 us of both the ancient and the modern unity. When 
 we make the effort we are hindered as much by our 
 virtues as by our vices ; we are neither good enough 
 nor bad enough for the thing we are trying to do. 
 At our best, we cannot so surrender our own rights ; 
 at our worst, we cannot so trample on those of others. 
 For the unity of the State, based as it was on the 
 unity of the Family, was preserved by the relegation 
 of all the perplexities of modern civilization to a region 
 with which the State refused to concern itself. The 
 fact that a Greek or Roman saw all Liberty against 
 a background of slavery is as important as the fact 
 that he meant by Liberty no mere immunity from inter- 
 ference, but an actual share in a corporate unity which 
 preceded and would survive him. Here are the strength 
 and the weakness of the antique ideal side by side. 
 The Greek or Roman was better than the modern 
 Englishman, so far as he was vitally the member of 
 a commonwealth. lie was worse, so far as he was the 
 member of a dominant caste. It was no proof of exalted 
 virtue in him to merge his own interests in those of 
 his country to an extent which would require exalted
 
 132 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 virtue now ; but neither was indifference to the interests 
 not bound up in this great dominant claim a sign of 
 exceptional hardness of heart, as it would be with us. 
 The best among the ancients disregarded the ills of all 
 beyond a certain enclosure, as the ills of others are, in 
 our day, disregarded only by the pre-eminently selfish ; 
 but they aimed at the welfare of all within that enclosure, 
 as in our day only the unselfish aim at any welfare but 
 their own. 
 
 What we have said of the abundant and almost be- 
 wildering wealth of Greek ideas is eminentl}^ true of the ; 
 Greek from whom all philosophy takes its start ; amid 
 the tropical luxuriance of Plato's thought, conceptions 
 which he held in common with his countrymen are not 
 conspicuous. But it is striking to note in that delineation -j 
 of an ideal State, which is, perhaps, the fragment of ancient f; 
 thought most familiar to modern ears, how far away was 
 the Greek starting-point of moral speculation from ours. 
 Among moderns no one would set about answering the i: 
 question. What is goodness ? by discussing forms of 
 government. A modern writer might incidentally illus- 
 trate his idea of goodness by pointing out what form of 
 government the best men would seek to establish (and 
 even this most people would feel a matter of very 
 questionable relevance), but to start from this point 
 would be impossible. When Socrates is made to say 
 that it is simpler to investigate Righteousness in a State 
 rather than in an individual,^ his hearers see as little 
 room for doubt, as if he had said that they could judge 
 better of a man's character by taking in the whole of his 
 life rather than a part of it. An Englishman does not 
 think the thing that Plato meant by the righteousness 
 of a State less important or real than Plato did. He sees 
 that in some States the various members of the com- 
 
 I 
 
 ^ Plato, Rep., 368, 9.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 133 
 
 munity keep more or less to their true function, and in 
 others they fail to do so ; and he is aware that the differ- 
 ence is one of vital importance. But he would deny that 
 the quality which makes a nation into a harmonious com- 
 munity is the quality which makes a righteous man ; at 
 all events he would never begin by assuming this. And 
 in all the dialogue there is no hint that any Greek could 
 even see as a difficulty what most Englishmen would feel 
 an insuperable objection. 
 
 This shifting of the moral centre of gravity has 
 affected every department of our moral being. It is 
 recorded in change of desires, of aspirations, of tastes ; 
 it is discernible in the new associations of some words 
 relating to that part of our nature which we should have 
 thought permanent ; it tinges with colouring unknown 
 to antiquity names which denote the largest objects 
 of human desire. Even that in man which is least 
 changeable is not entirely unchanged from generation 
 to generation. Liberty, we should have thought, must 
 always have had the same meaning. But it has the same 
 meaning now and 2000 years ago, only in the sense 
 that two copies of the same outline differently coloured 
 form the same picture. At all times a man must dis- 
 like being prevented doing what he chooses to do ; 
 that is merely saying twice over that he chooses to do 
 it ; but while the moderns mean no more than this 
 by Liberty, the ancients included so much beside, that 
 the whole idea was different. An Englishman thinks 
 of Freedom as something that is to be a limit to govern- 
 ment ; to a Greek or a Roman the aim of limiting 
 government in ord,cr to leave scope to Freedom would 
 have been like cutting off the roots to leave room for 
 the branches. Freedom was, in their view, mainly a 
 share in government. It niiglit include other advan- 
 tages, but tlicy were insignificant compared to this ;
 
 134 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 take it away, and it would have been difficult, from the 
 ancient point of view, to see what remained. To be 
 free was not so much a condition as a relation. Liberty, 
 in the modern world, is a part of the democratic ideal ; 
 in ancient life it was incurably aristocratic. It was 
 there, an unquestionable privilege of the few ; it is 
 here, the inalienable right of the many. Liberty that 
 is not liberty for all is something that the modern world 
 regards without sympathy, something that individuals 
 may desire, as men may desire selfishly to possess any 
 good, but that can never unite them in a common aspira- 
 tion or close their ranks in a firm resistance. To the 
 modern mind it is the rightful possession of the human 
 race, and in any sense in which this is impossible, it is 
 not the rightful possession of any one. 
 
 When we turn from human desire to human admira- 
 tion, this change of feeling becomes yet more evident. 
 We should more accurately represent to ourselves the 
 earlier force of the word virtue if we associated it with 
 the sense still in use in which we speak of the virtues 
 of plants ; it is that which makes a man efficient ; man- 
 liness, valour, distinction, public spirit — that, in short, 
 which tells in the citizen. We may almost say that the 
 modern sense is the very opposite of this. What an 
 ordinary Englishman means by virtue is that kind of 
 excellence which does not tell in the citizen. No one, 
 for instance, would speak of Nelson as a virtuous man, 
 though he had all, and more than all, that a Roman 
 meant by virtue. What speaks most of the change is 
 the fact that virtue has even altered its sex ; the Roman 
 would have found it difficult to associate virtus with any 
 possible feminine excellence ; the Englishman rarely uses 
 the word except with reference to women. When Cicero 
 said of his daughter, " Her virtue is wonderful," ^ he 
 
 1 " Cujus quidem virtus mirifica. Quo modo ilia fert publicam cladem !
 
 ROUE AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 135 
 
 meant, " It is wonderful to see so much manly fortitude 
 in a woman," and accordingly his best translator has 
 here rendered the word spirit The woman had no place 
 in the civic world, any more than the slave had ; and 
 the civic world was the world of virtue. Beyond it, 
 virtue became merely a negative thing ; the woman 
 could be a criminal as the slave might, and as a 
 mother she was capable of a vicarious lustre which the 
 slave could not share ; but the sphere of womanly good- 
 ness did not exist. The world of duty was wholly 
 masculine. 
 
 In the case of Virtue, modern association has changed 
 manliness into womanliness ; in the case of Freedom, it 
 has changed manliness into humanliness. It is men as 
 human beings who desire Freedom in England, France, 
 and Germany ; it was men as embodying the ideal of 
 manliness who desired it in Greece and Rome. On 
 both sides we have an expression, more or less distinct, 
 of the great watershed which divides the moral life of 
 the ancients from ours. Political duty for them was 
 duty. Excellence which did not buttress the life of the 
 citizen was to their eyes almost invisible. Freedom 
 which did not mean a life of government hardly counted 
 as freedom, and the life of government meant a life free 
 from the cares that are, on the modern view, the lot of 
 average humanity. 
 
 The change we are considering has affected the moral 
 world in its widest sense ; it extends to a region where 
 questions of right and wrong are out of sight ; it 
 speaks of a new attitude as much of taste as of con- 
 science. Tiie word Nature to a Roman meant human 
 nature ; its most dignified associations were those of the 
 
 Quo moflo domesticas tricas ! " (Cic. , Ad Att. , x. 8). .See the tr.inslation of this 
 passage in the " Life and Letters of Cieero," by the kev. G. E. jeans, p. 247. 
 C/. QuEcst. Tusc, iL 18, " Appellata est ex viro viitus,"
 
 135 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 Senate and the forum ; its whole scope of reference lay 
 in the desires and actions of men. To a countryman of 
 Wordsworth's the word suggests the shade of bird-haunted 
 thickets, the trackless breadth of moorland ; it fills his 
 ears with the rustle of the wind in the trees or the wave 
 on the shingle, and sways his mind with the rhythm of 
 the seasons, the pulsation of yearly growth and decay. 
 Every image is for our generation associated with the 
 utterance of genius, as well as the investigations of 
 thinkers. Poetry and science, foes as they appear, 
 have worked in harmony to enrich and illustrate the 
 world of beauty and orderly sequence that begins where 
 human effort ends. We see this change very clearly 
 when we put side by side ancient and modern specimens 
 of identical feeling. Socrates did not, for he could not, 
 care less for the country than Dr. Johnson did, but Dr. 
 Johnson was a man who could not be left alone with 
 his thoughts. Many whose hearts were haunted by 
 something unbearable must have shared his clinging to 
 crowded streets, but probably no modern whose spirit 
 was as unclouded as that of Socrates would have cared 
 so little to visit that grassy bank within a few miles of the 
 Acropolis, where the waters of the Ilissus murmured 
 through the shade of the lofty plane-trees, and shrubs 
 framed the odorous nook with clustering blossoms, 
 shutting in the stroller into a paradise of sight, scent, 
 and sound. So at least the Cockney of our day would 
 feel it, and so did Socrates for a moment, but apparently 
 for no longer. He acquiesces in the scoff of his com- 
 panion, "You are really just like a tourist with 3'our 
 guide." ^ " Trees and country places," he urges in apolog}^ 
 " have nothing to teach a learner." To the cultivated 
 inhabitant of Athens or Rome the country might be a 
 pleasing scene for music and lovemaking, or a prized 
 1 ^auyoixitxf TLvl Kal qvk eVixwpiv ioiKa^ (Plato, Phaedrus, 230).
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 137 
 
 source of wealth, but all that was an object of ordinary 
 and earnest aspiration was left behind in the towns. 
 The enjoyment of rural life belongs to the modern world, 
 where the unity is the nation, not the city ; where the 
 privacy of home has won itself a long tradition of rever- 
 ence, where the passive side of life is associated with 
 honour and picturesqueness, and the city has fallen so 
 much into the background that a taste has arisen for 
 whatever is most unlike a town. 
 
 This local change thus gathers up and symbolizes the 
 moral change between the world of antiquity and of our 
 own day. What a Greek or Roman meant by a good man 
 was a good citizen.'^ A good man, in the modern concep- 
 tion, may possibly be a very indifferent citizen ; a good 
 citizen may certainly be an immoral man. Or rather 
 the very word citizen has ceased to be applicable, and 
 the difficulty of finding another with which to replace 
 it shows that the relation it expresses has changed its 
 importance. An English or French man may be in all 
 private relations just, truthful, and generous, and may 
 take very little interest in the welfare of his country. 
 It is a defect in him that he fails to do so, no doubt ; 
 still a man may have some good qualities and not all 
 good qualities. But how much more than this we 
 should mean if we were to speak of an Athenian as 
 indifferent to tlie welfare of Athens ! The difference 
 between him and a similar Englishman is twofold. 
 In one sense England is too large to be to an English- 
 man what Athens was to an Athenian ; in another 
 sense it is too small. It is not an entity that can be 
 associated with definite and familiar images, with ideas 
 
 ' Tiicrc is a passage in ,1 letter of Cicero's to I-cntulus, Ad Fam. ix. (quern 
 bonum civern semper habuisset, bonum viruni esse [)ateretur), which may appear 
 a confutation of Ibis statement, I believe that one who studies the whole letter 
 will find in it a fresh illustration of the view in the text, but it docs also show 
 that Cicero was on the threshold of a different view.
 
 138 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 all called up at once by the word home. It requires 
 some power of abstraction to take in. And then, again, 
 it is only a part of that whole which a modern con- 
 templates as making just the same sort of claim that 
 in the ancient world the city made upon the citizen. 
 The nation is a whole at once more vast and more 
 incomplete than was the city. It loses unity both as 
 a combination of many classes and interests and also 
 as a fraction of humanity. It refers to unities below 
 itself and a unity above ; and though it has a unity of 
 its own, and one of a majestic and enduring character, 
 still we feel that many causes may prevent good men 
 from entering into any conscious relation with this unity ; 
 they may fail to respond to the claim which it makes, 
 and yet be worthy of much respect. But a Greek who 
 was indifferent to political duty had almost no other 
 duty to fall back upon ; a Roman had absolutely none. 
 Philosophy did present to a few spirits some such alter- 
 native among the nation of thinkers ; the Athenian could . 
 find a country elsewhere than in the city which nestled j 
 at the foot of the Acropolis. But in the very mention 
 of such an alternative, we circumscribe the field of duty, 
 for average mankind, within the region that concerns the 
 relation of a man to the State of which he forms a part. 
 We cannot follow this change on the supposition that 
 it is simply a matter of addition (if we regard the 
 duties that a sense of individuality has added to the 
 ancient standard as the most important element), or of 
 subtraction (if we think that of the political energy which 
 we have lost by the change.) It is not arithmetic but 
 chemistry that gives us its type. The whole of duty is 
 modified when we change the hierarchy of duty. How 
 significant is the etymology of " prerogative," the section 
 that was asked first for its opinion ! There lies the 
 whole force of an ideal. Which do you consult first ?
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 139 
 
 Everything else will be different. An Englishman is 
 asked first whether he is a good son, a good father, a 
 good husband ; if he be all these, the fact that he is 
 not a good citizen is viewed indulgently. A Greek was 
 asked first whether he was a good citizen ; if he must 
 answer this in the negative, his filial, paternal, conjugal 
 excellence went for nothing. What we demand first 
 gives the keynote to duty ; duties are not merely re- 
 arranged, they are transformed by change of order. 
 Those influences which gave the ancient State its sacred 
 character cannot so expand their area as to take in 
 humanity ; their power and their limitations disappear 
 together. The class, the nation, even the human race 
 in its totality, are all unfitted to succeed the classical 
 ideal of the State. There is no possible human group 
 which we can contemplate as the Greek contemplated 
 the city ; no man can feel himself a part of the human 
 race with the same definiteness of loyal reverence as an 
 Athenian felt himself a son of Athens or a Roman of 
 Rome. And yet the moment we fix our attention on 
 some smaller group than the human race, we encumber 
 ourselves with a problem almost as strange to the 
 ancients as the differential calculus ; — we want some 
 code as to our demeanour to " them that are without." 
 It is an essential part of this ancient ideal that only 
 some human beings should have rights. The city was 
 an exclusive unity in a sense in which no modern group 
 is exclusive. We cannot look at the world or at the 
 nation as the Greek looked at the city ; his city had its 
 slaves, his world had its foes ; his virtue depended on 
 both. Give the slave and the enemy rights and you 
 need a new starting-point of moral thought. 
 
 Slavery has been a part of modern life for at least 
 as long as it was of ancient life, and has been defended 
 in modern, far more passionately than in ancient times.
 
 I40 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 But the whole movement of modern thought has been 
 away from it. It has been defended by those who were 
 interested in its preservation. In ancient times there 
 was neither defence nor attack. When Plato drew up 
 a constitution for an ideal State — a State so far removed 
 from all actual experience that no mother among the 
 governing class should know her own child — the only 
 change he suggested in reference to slavery was that no 
 Greek should enslave a Greek. And this mild measure 
 of reform was so little original to his genius that it had 
 already been put in practice by one of the Athenian 
 generals in the great war drawing to its conclusion at 
 the supposed date of the Dialogue.'^ Plato only conceived 
 it possible to imagine, in his ideal city, such a modifica- 
 tion of slavery as a countryman had already carried out 
 amid all the difficulties of actual warfare. Perhaps no 
 other passage shows us so forcibly how deeply slavery 
 had sent its roots into the heart of all ancient thought. 
 The experience of the teacher, we should have thought, 
 would have been no less suggestive than that of the 
 soldier ; the life of Socrates himself might surely have 
 shown that it was possible for a man to lead the life of 
 a freeman with hardly any recourse to the labour of a 
 slave. But it was not so. Greek was not, in the ideal 
 Greek city, to enslave Greek ; the men who shared each 
 other's language and religion were not to strip each 
 other of all that made life worth having ; but this was 
 all. And it is evident, from the whole history of the 
 time, that to men reared in the atmosphere of slavery, 
 this was much. 
 
 The men who felt so differently about slavery would 
 feel differently about much beside. It would form the 
 
 1 Plato, Rep., 469 ; cf. Xenoph., Hellen., i. 6, 14. Callicratidas, the Spartan 
 admiral, who refused to sell Greek prisoners into slavery, succeeded Lysander, 
 B.C. 406.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 141 
 
 mould of all subordination and supply the associations 
 of all power. It would fix the position of those who 
 were not slaves in name, but who were, almost as much 
 as slaves, cut off from the life which a Greek regarded 
 as alone worth living. The whole artizan class was 
 attracted, as it were, by the neighbourhood of slavery 
 into an atmosphere of degradation. Labour was servile ; 
 its associations all carried the mind towards a life of 
 bondage. "There is nothing disgraceful in work," says 
 Hesiod,^ but the words are rather a protest against Greek 
 feeling than an expression of it. The hatred of labour 
 was stamped on the very structure of language ; Greek 
 denotes labour and pain by the same word. All work 
 rendered political life impossible, and there was no 
 interest in any other. The union of professional and 
 political life is a discovery of the modern world ; it 
 belongs to representative government. What we mean 
 by the Franchise was a boon that a Greek would have 
 despised. Once every three or four years to take part 
 in nominating the legislators of the land would have 
 been to his imagination a very paltry advance towards 
 the life of a Freeman. We come nearer his point of 
 view in regarding all Greek citizens as members of Parlia- 
 ment, as, in fact, they were. Englishmen feel it very flat 
 to lose this keen interest when once they have shared 
 it, but they do not connect the loss with any ideas or 
 disgrace. They know that a man may lead a refined, 
 liberal life — the life of a gentleman in the best sense 
 of the word — without taking any part in the work of 
 legislation. But the loss of this interest deprived a 
 
 1 " Works and Days," 300. C/. Plato, Charmides, 163, for a curiously vivid 
 illustration of Greek recoil from this praise of industry :—f/j.aOov yap nap' 
 '11(tl6oov' (s.iys Critias) os iifv ^pyov 5' ouo^v bveidoi' oiVt ouv avrov, . . . d rd 
 Totai/ra ouoivi ftc ivtiooi <f>6.vai dvai ffKvTOTOfioOvTi, &c. Critias thinks that 
 Hcsiod could not possibly have had such work as the shoemaker's in his mind 
 when he said work was not disgraceful.
 
 142 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 Greek of all that was worth having. The associations 
 of slave labour took the heart out of all work. And 
 a man obliged to work for his living could even less , 
 have taken part in the ancient than the modern Parlia- / 
 mentary councils, the former not being arranged, like-. 
 the latter, with a view to professional life. Hence the ' 
 life of a Freeman stopped where industry, as we under- 
 stand the word, began. On the one hand there was the 
 life of politics, on the other that of slavery, and there was 
 no other difference between human beings which could 
 approach in importance that between these two lives. 
 
 Hence the division between the rich and the poor 
 was, in a political point of view, greater in the ancient 
 city than in the modern State. No difference between 
 two inhabitants of Athens or Sparta, it is true, can have 
 equalled the differences that separate an inhabitant of 
 Park Lane from the inhabitants of some back street, as 
 far as all outward circumstances go. But the develop- 
 ment of industrial and commercial life on the one hand, 
 and on the other that of representative government, 
 have changed all the associations of labour. A Duke's 
 son in England engages in employment that an Athenian 
 would have thought disgraceful for any freeman ; while 
 those who would hardly have ranked with freemen, if 
 we take in all the associations of the word, assist in 
 the nomination of the governors. We must empty in 
 imagination the chasm which has thus been filled up, if 
 we would understand the ancient contempt for labour. 
 It is the foremost thinkers of Greece, who formulate in 
 its hardest distinctness, the scorn for the artizan class 
 which means virtual slavery. The artizans, Plato tells 
 us, must be taught that they differ from the true free- 
 men of a city as wood differs from gold.^ " The artizan," ) 
 
 1 Plato, Rep. , 415. This passage is curiously like the description of castes in 
 the " Institutes of Menu," but it is also unlike, for Socrates says : — ^ari 6' ore 
 tK xpi'O'oi' yevv-qduT) hv dpyvpovv. But the guardians were to judge of this.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 143 
 
 says Aristotle, " only partakes of virtue as far as he 
 partakes of slavery." ^ They both felt that civil life, in 
 the true sense of the word, must be something excep- 
 tional. It would be a gain that the artizan class should 
 be reduced to slavery, inasmuch as the free labourers 
 seemed a specimen of that chaotic condition which 
 showed what all society would be if a share in free- 
 dom ceased to mean a share in government. The 
 slave stood closer to civil life than the artizan, since 
 he belonged to a governing famil}', and in some sense, 
 therefore, must be considered more of a participant in 
 the blessing of freedom. For those who, by the decrees 
 of nature, were shut out from taking a share in govern- 
 ment the next best thing was to be fully and entirely 
 its objects. 
 
 We cannot too often remind ourselves of the difference 
 between the sanction of reluctant practical acquiescence 
 and that of incorporation in an ideal. When Disraeli 
 called the rich and the poor the two nations, he pointed 
 to a blot on our civilization which all reformers desire 
 to remove. But when Socrates is made by Plato to 
 use the same language about the " two States," he 
 refers to a division which his ideal was to exaggerate 
 and petrify.^ People who know Plato only by repute 
 are apt to imagine that the regulations as to women and 
 children, which are all that they know about his " Re- 
 public," apply to the bulk of his citizens. This seems 
 to have been the belief even of so diligent a student 
 of Plato as Sir T. More, when he gave his version of 
 Plato's romance and enriched our language with a word 
 which commemorates the yearning for an ideal State. 
 
 1 Ar., Pol., i. 13, 13 :— /caJ roaovrov f7rt/3dX\ei (sc. 6 uoOXos) dpcr^s 6Vov irtp 
 Kttt SouXfiay. 
 
 > Plato, kcp., 422, 3 :— 5i/o filv, k&v onovv ■3, &c. He thought he was going 
 to get rid of this duality, but his pupil has ail readers with him when he says, 
 iv fiiq. yap TriXtt ovo ttIi\u% dcaYKaioi' tlvM {Ar., Pol., ii. 5, p. 1254, a. 24).
 
 144 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 It is a natural mistake, and one which a hasty perusal 
 of the " Republic " does not remove. The truth is, that 
 Plato took so very little interest in average citizens that 
 we may almost forget their existence when we are con- 
 sidering his political ideas. The bulk of his common- 
 wealth must, like any other, have been made up of 
 those employed in the hard, prosaic work of life ; and, 
 as he himself reminds us, every single class among his 
 artizans and mechanics must have outnumbered the 
 class of the guardians many times over. And yet when 
 Socrates seems to be speaking of the citizens, we find 
 that he always means the rulers — the aristocracy, as we 
 should best name them if we wanted to keep in mind 
 their relative proportion to the rest. The habit of 
 mind engendered by slavery made it easy for him to 
 ignore average mankind to an extent that a modern 
 finds it impossible to follow. The artizans, the agricul- 
 turists, the mechanics, who would make up the average 
 body of citizens, are in the "Republic" absorbed into 
 that vast atmosphere of slavery which encircles the life 
 of the city with a bulk far exceeding its own. To all 
 intents and purposes they are slaves. They have no 
 share in the government ; they are simple objects of rule 
 to the guardians, whose necessities they are obliged 
 to supply, and whose decisions they have no power of 
 influencing. The guardians are self-denying beings, 
 devoted to the welfare of the State ; and in our modern 
 sense they may be regarded as less free than any other 
 class, for all those oppressive regulations which Plato 
 had adapted from the discipline of Lycurgus apply to 
 them alone. The rest of the citizens are to be treated, 
 we must presume, like commonplace mortals, but we 
 hear almost nothing about them. They stand side by 
 side with the true citizens as aliens do, and thus consti- 
 tute a sort of rival State, which had little interest for the
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LA W. 145 
 
 philosophic thinker, but in which the modern politician 
 finds the main object of his care. This moral insigni- 
 ficance, to a mind like Plato's, of the whole artizan class, 
 measures for us the contagion of slavery far more effec- 
 tively than any severe regulations for the repression of 
 this class. No cleft is so deep as that between beings 
 who are and are not worth the effort of discipline. 
 
 Greece gathers up the ideal of the past and the future. 
 It was impossible that such a nation should be other 
 than short-lived. Of that brilliant blossoming-time of 
 early life and thought, as perhaps of the blossoming-time 
 of all that is most precious in human development, we 
 may say, if we measure it by the lifetime of nations, 
 that it was — 
 
 " Momentary as a sound, 
 Swift as a shadow, short as any dream ; 
 Brief as the lightning in the coUied night 
 That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, 
 And ere a man hath power to say ' Behold ! ' 
 The jaws of darkness do devour it up. 
 So quick bright things come to confusion." 
 
 Two long lives, indeed, would include the whole of 
 that period of " bright things " which has left the trace 
 of its lustre so deeply impressed on the thought and 
 imagination of all subsequent ages that v^e are apt to 
 forget how transitory it was as an actual fact. Ancient 
 life was not constituted for any " balance of power." Its 
 genius led irresistibly to a view of national relations in 
 which every member was either master or slave, and 
 the life of a nation organized on an ideal other than this 
 was necessarily brief. Indeed, it is just this element of 
 equality which explains the fugitiveness of Greek life ; it 
 was the amount of divergent impulse within itself that 
 prevented any stable unity, and left it a prey to attack 
 from without. The whole life of Greece must be regarded
 
 146 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 as a sort of prophetic rehearsal of modern Europe, before 
 the stage was cleared for that drama of history which 
 forms a consecutive whole. 
 
 The ideal city in the classic essay of Greek political 
 genius embodies the hard and narrow exclusiveness which 
 belonged to ancient politics. But this exclusive unity 
 is very imperfectly exhibited in the life of Greece. A 
 rich genius, on the one hand, brings out individual life 
 into compromising predominance ; on the other, a strong 
 national tendency confuses the unity of the city by suggest- 
 ingthe unity of the race. We have endeavoured tomeasure 
 the tendency towards individual distinctness by showing 
 how fierce a jealousy watched over every personality 
 that seemed to draw the eye away from the supreme 
 oneness of the State ; we have sought to shadow forth 
 the prophetic element which was embodied in the life of 
 the artist people, and which awakened that fine repulsion 
 by which genius is warned to turn aside from the soli- 
 citations of something tempting and premature. But we 
 see the tendency more clearly than the checks on it. 
 Greece foreshadowed both the individual and the inter- 
 national life that belong to the modern world. Greek 
 political life is troubled by its own wealth ; it seems to 
 have realized the saying of Montaigne—" Malheur a celui 
 qui est en avance de son siecle ! " It anticipates in its 
 tiny area the life of Europe, and shows the swift decay 
 that follows so often on premature development. The 
 state of antiquity must be either hamm.er or anvil. But 
 Greece, with its system of varied and equivalent interests 
 and its common ideas and beliefs, presented the same 
 kind of unity and the same kind of diversity that modern 
 Europe exhibits on a larger scale, while yet it occu- 
 pied only the moral stage of a race totally unequipped 
 for relations with foreigners. The cities of Greece, 
 hke the nations of Europe, were the occupants of a
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 147 
 
 common platform, from which they looked down on the 
 barbarian world, and within which each member felt 
 himself bound to his fellows by the close and inde- 
 structible ties of a common race ; but, unlike the nations 
 of modern Europe, they had no standard for the mutual 
 relations of such members. Europe has had little enough 
 at any time, it is true ; but Dante's dream of a Holy 
 Roman Empire throws a thin, pure ray across the dust 
 of the ages, and that sense of human brotherhood which 
 formed the vital influence of the eighteenth century, 
 begins to dawn before it is quite extinct. We have 
 always been struggling towards some ideal of a brother- 
 hood of nations. The ancient world, if it caught sight 
 of such an ideal for a moment, had to struggle away 
 from it. 
 
 It is in the power contrasted with Greece, as the oak 
 is contrasted with the blossom of a day, that we find 
 this ideal of inequality and exclusiveness which makes up 
 the moral code of antiquit}', worked out consistently and 
 logically. The master and slave view of human life 
 colours not only the individual relations, but the national 
 ideal of the Roman. Here are no Athens and Sparta ; 
 here is no community of kindred States among which 
 rivalry is possible, and from which a prophetic genius 
 might conceivably fashion forth some such expansion of 
 development as modern Europe. Here in that civiliza- 
 tion, under the shadow of which we must look for the 
 origin of ours, the belief that some men exist for the 
 sake of others is worked out in its hardest distinctness. 
 Rome is to rule the world, and Romans alone are truly 
 free. Greece, with its wealth of relations, hesitated 
 between the unity of the city and of the nation, and, 
 belonging to that ancient life in which there was no 
 other unity, it perished in the struggle. Rome, in its 
 meagre and monotonous development, is free from all
 
 148 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 such perplexity ; it accepts consistently and logically the 
 aristocratic theory on which ancient society is based, 
 and carries out the ideal of the old world in all its naked 
 impressiveness. It is here, then, that we must seek the 
 true moral bearing of a view of life which depends in 
 the last resort upon slavery. Greece shows us this, but 
 show us so much else, that in Greek life we do not see 
 it distinctly. Rome shows us this, and shows us little 
 else. As we turn from the variety, the dramatic effec- 
 tiveness, the light and shade, the strong individuality of 
 Greek history, to the monotonous onward march of that 
 in which it is swallowed up, we cannot but feel that 
 here the life of antiquity reaches its maturity. The 
 hesitation of a rich ideal is past, and the leading shoot, 
 as it were, is allowed a free development. The indi- 
 vidual and the nation are alike crushed, and the unit}'' 
 of the city is recognized as the only basis of right. 
 
 Both those influences, which at once enrich and dis- 
 turb the course of Greek development, are wanting to 
 Rome. She would never have become the mistress of 
 the world if there had been an ancient Italy in the same 
 sense as there was an ancient Greece. And then, again, 
 Rome has no personal interest ; the Roman character is 
 monotonous, prosaic, intellectually commonplace, want- 
 ing in vividness and individuality. All the interest of 
 Roman history lies in its victims ; the only striking 
 figure it shows us, till we reach the threshold of the 
 modern world, is that of Rome's heroic foe, shattered in 
 the attempt to save his country from being pulverized 
 beneath her tread. The blank of character brings out 
 the greatness of destiny. The valour of Romans ex- 
 plains insufficiently the sway of Rome ; its success 
 suggests some supernatural influence seconding their 
 patriotism by a hostile demeanour to every foe and 
 neutralizing alike the power of genius and of numbers,
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 149 
 
 when they combined against the elect cit\^ Hannibal 
 was brought to seek peace by being taught to distrust 
 the fortune of his race/ " seeing how she sports with 
 us as with children ; " but Caesar could encourage his 
 soldiers in their hour of despondency "^ by urging them 
 to trust in his fortune no less than in his prowess, and 
 the dagger of the assassin could not confute a trust com- 
 memorated in the establishment of the Empire. The 
 Fortune of Hannibal shows us the fitful gleam accorded 
 to the adversary of Rome, as the Fortune of Caesar 
 shows us the steady blaze shed on its representative. 
 The historian who reviewed the progress of Rome from 
 its summit discovered in it a harmony of the colossal 
 and the minute which bore witness to the all-inclusive 
 character of the supernatural power to which it was due. 
 The genius of Rome seemed to Plutarch to watch over 
 the smallest events with unfaltering vigilance and over 
 the greatest with unimpaired power.^ By him the death 
 of Alexander and the cackling of geese in the Capitol 
 were equally regarded as links in the mighty chain. 
 In his eyes the premature close of the greatest earthly 
 career was not more distinctly foreordained with a view 
 to the protection of the State which that career might 
 have overshadowed, than was the hiss of frightened fowl, 
 preserving the city from enemies more numerous but 
 less formidable. Rome is, in fact, the heir of Alexander,* 
 succeeding to his influence, his fame, and, above all, 
 his Fortune. This brilliant personality condenses and 
 prefigures the part that Rome is to play in the world's 
 
 ' In his address to Scipio before Zama (Polybius, Excerpt xv. i). 
 
 » CrEsar, " Uc Bcllo Gallico," i. 40 ; Plutarch, " Dc Fortune Romanorum," 6, 
 
 ' Sec his treatise, "De KortunA liomanorum," pi ssim. Virtue and Fortune 
 contest the authorship of Roman greatness ; the speech of Fortune only is pre- 
 served, and was ihercfonr, one imagines, the best. For the gcjse in the Capitol, 
 c. 12 ; for the d<;alh of .Mcxander, c. 13. 
 
 * I'lutarch, " Dc Alexandri Magni Fortuni aut Virtule."
 
 ISO THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 history, and the antithesis of the conquering State and 
 the conquering hero is not confused by any striking 
 heroic figure within the State itself. The throne is 
 left empty for supernatural power by the failure of any 
 natural claimant. 
 
 In truth, it is first with the rise of Rome that the 
 History of Europe may be said to begin. The history 
 of Greece is one of the most interesting chapters in the 
 biography of our race ; the history of Rome, so far as 
 that is possible to a series of very important events, 
 would be allowed by most readers to be one of the least 
 interesting. Yet the arid, prosaic narrative is a part of 
 history in a sense that the vivid drama is not. It would 
 be possible to know the outward development of the 
 modern world thoroughly, and not to know that Greece 
 had existed. Philosophy and Literature bear its record 
 in the very structure of their growth, but History, as a 
 connected sequence of events, finds no point of juncture 
 between the life of Greece and that of our own day. It 
 blossomed into a sudden wealth of life and beauty, withered 
 as suddenly, and dropping a hundred seeds into the bosom 
 of all art and all thought, passed away, leaving no heir in 
 the life of nations. Rome, on the other hand, lived its 
 hard, narrow, prosaic life as a member of the genealogy 
 of modern Europe. History is inexplicable if it omit her 
 life ; we shall never find ourselves at home in France or 
 Germany, or even in England, unless we know Rome. 
 And we may say, therefore, that the idea of a philosophy 
 of history first emerges in the allegoric conception of a 
 Fortune of Rome. The expression sounds exaggerated, 
 but it is almost copied from the Greek historian, who 
 tells us that he began his history from the assured pre- 
 dominance of Rome because this is the very start of all 
 he understands by History. Before that time he could 
 discern only a desultory narrative of unconnected events ;
 
 RO^fE AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 151 
 
 after it History assumes ^ " an entire and perfect body," 
 to which the Empire State has supphed a heart. All 
 events take a new meaning in their relation to the goal 
 which then appears for the first time. Other nations 
 have " had their day and ceased to be ; " they are epi- 
 sodes in the biography of the race. But Rome, when 
 she has ceased to exist as a ruling power, remains as an 
 ancestral reminiscence ; she' bequeathed to the world the 
 mould of Government and the framework of a Church. 
 The connection of such a State with divine influence is 
 visible from the first ; a mysterious power seemed to 
 hover over the small spot of earth hemmed in by so 
 great a multitude of enemies, and to explain its triumph 
 over all. 
 
 Hence we may say of Roman rule that it is, in an 
 important, though a narrow, sense, a preparation for 
 monotheism. It is not, as in Greece, where Mythology 
 seems to provide some sort of rival to Law, a fount of 
 picturesque imagery, of various and fanciful legend ; it 
 is reticent, prosaic, sombre, affording little food to the 
 imagination, and no point of crystallization of allegory and 
 mystic thought. But it tends from the first towards unity. 
 Its abundant abstractions, evidently mere epithets of the 
 supreme power of which Rome appeared the incarnate 
 expression, reveal its true meaning, and, prosaic as they 
 are, yet prepare a place for the One. In almost all moral 
 aspects we may say that Rome was a sort of antitype of 
 the God made known by Christ. But a large element 
 of awe of the Unseen is non-moral. Not only in that 
 just law which Roman dominion was always defying 
 even while it spread its area, but even in that very 
 dominion in the establishment of which there was no 
 attempt at justice, and sometimes the most flagrant 
 injustice, there yet was a training for submission, a 
 
 ' cwfiaroeioi] cvfipalyu yhfaOai tj/j' 'i(TTopU v ^Polybius, i. 3).
 
 J 52 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 discipline in acceptance of the inevitable, which de- 
 velops capacities needed, and only fully exercised, in 
 the acknowledgment of the One Invisible Ruler. The 
 power of Rome was not elevating in any spiritual sense ; 
 it was a hard, crushing despotism. But even a hard 
 crushing despotism is more tolerable when it is strong 
 and steady. Tyranny is usually a fitful thing ; we hardly 
 recognize how much easier it is to bear when it is per- 
 fectly stable. There was something in the very com- 
 pleteness of Roman conquests that, to a certain extent, 
 softened the evil of conquest. If Freedom be the first 
 blessing of a State, surely the second is subordination 
 to a conqueror who rules the world. The subject thus 
 escapes the cruelty springing from fear — that is, the 
 larger part of all cruelty. 
 
 The progress of a conquering nation to the rule of the 
 world, the gradual attraction to itself of all power, the 
 evolution, as it were, of the central idea of history — all 
 this supplied the rule of Rome with potent and subtle 
 allies, captivating to the imagination, enthralling to the 
 intellect, even of those whose national life it crushed. 
 The desire for unity is so deep in the human heart that-^ 
 even in what is arduous and trying, the sense of a plan, 
 a meaning, brings with it a wonderful alleviation. It 
 cannot, indeed, overcome the intensity of vivid individual 
 desire ; it cannot allay the fever of anguish or melt the 
 ice of a hard despair. But in all ordinary human trials 
 it will be found that there is a wonderful influence in 
 the contemplation of a large enduring reality, the sense 
 of a link with the past and the future, the neighbourhood 
 of what is impressive and permanent. It may exist 
 where there is no love, no justice, no moral nobility, 
 and yet it has its own steady, persistent claim ; it over- 
 comes weak resistance, and there is more weak than 
 strong resistance in the world.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. i53 
 
 The rule of Rome was rarely moral ; it was some- 
 times profoundly immoral. Nevertheless its irresistible 
 onward march roused a profound feeling of resignation 
 when once it obtained any submission at all. That 
 State of which the assured predominance was the central 
 fact in the world's history might claim from its sub- 
 jects an obedience in which there was nothing base. 
 "The Carthaginians at the moment of their fall perished 
 from the earth, but the Greeks look on at their own 
 calamities," ^ exclaims a Greek, with a sense of envy, it 
 would appear, for the victim of Rome whose fate was 
 that of more absolute ruin. Yet when he speaks of the 
 conqueror of Greece as the favourite of Providence, the 
 expression is neither a mere flight of rhetoric nor a 
 piece of abject flattery, but a simple summing up in a 
 few words of the impression made by the records he 
 had set himself to interpret. The Fortune of Rome 
 was for Polybius no partial goddess, though she had 
 set her inexorable decree against his own country, but 
 a being in whose predominance there was a claim to 
 allegiance swallowing up even the claim of patriotism ; 
 the State was marked by indications of Divine care so 
 definite and overwhelming, that the duty of submission to 
 its sway was a part of the duty of submission to Heaven. 
 Hence it arises that to the children of Rome there 
 seems to have been in the very idea of dominion that 
 same kind of fascination which ordinarily belongs only 
 to the sense of its exercise. Occupying the summit of 
 an elaborately fortified position, not only secured from 
 invasion by the eager hope kindled in the circle im- 
 mediately below, but strengthened by the organization 
 which kept up within the citadel itself the principle 
 of unreserved subjection and irresponsible control, they 
 
 ' Polybius, Kxccrpt xxxviii. la. Sec an excellent article in the Quarterly 
 Review, vol. cxlviii.
 
 154 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 jwere trained by every influence of education and associa- 
 'tion to join perfect liberty with dominion as part of the 
 same ideal. Every aspiration to escape bondage found 
 itself, by the necessity of things, aiming at dominion. 
 Independence was assumed to be an exceptional con- 
 dition of humanity, and by that very fact was invariably 
 associated with rule. While to us the question is always, 
 Why should such a one be deprived of the right of 
 control over his own acts ? to them it was rather. Why 
 should he be endowed with it ? The absolute submis- 
 sion which every one owed the State he also either 
 owed or claimed as a member of that group which was 
 the unit of political organization. He was thus taught 
 from his earliest hour to regard irresponsible control as 
 natural. He was led by all the potent and subtle in- 
 fluences of law to submit to or to exercise this dominion 
 without criticism or scruple. Irresponsible authority, 
 unreserved obedience, were the two poles of domestic, 
 no less than of political, relation. The " Son under 
 Power " was, against his father, no less defenceless than 
 the slave. No age, almost no dignity, ended his sub- 
 jection ; he might be a father himself, he might fill the 
 highest offices of the State — he none the less held fife, 
 liberty, and fortune at the pleasure of another. History 
 describes to us few and dubious exercises of these paternal 
 rights, but what may be done has always some relation 
 to what is done. The relation of the most indulgent 
 father to the most independent son must have been in- 
 fluenced by the fact that if the parental authority had 
 been exercised to the detriment of the son's life or liberty 
 the law would not have stepped in to abridge it. We 
 see this influence of legal right in the only part of 
 English law which contemplates (or did contemplate till 
 very lately) the exercise of control over mature and 
 blameless human beings — the position of married women.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 155 
 
 This is a fair but inadequate illustration of the effect of 
 the Roman patna potestas. The English law takes cog- 
 nizance of offences within the relation of dependence ; 
 the Roman law did not recognize right on the one side, 
 or duty on the other. The plea which has more than 
 once been set up for an English female offender, that 
 she could not refuse to obey the orders of her hus- 
 band, has been felt by every one, even where it was 
 not overruled, to be wholly out of harmony with the 
 spirit of our legal system. But when a Roman officer ^ 
 was accused in the Senate of the heaviest crime of 
 which it could take cognizance — organizing Civil War — 
 Tiberius, not speaking with authority as Emperor, but 
 pleading as an anxious and careful vindicator of the 
 laws, seems to have carried the Senate with him in his 
 decision that " a son cannot decline the comm.and of his 
 father." He was speaking at a time when the whole 
 system of which this paternal authority was the keystone 
 had admitted a foreign element, when there was another 
 spirit in the world, and the whole fabric of Roman 
 greatness was about to enter on its period of decay. 
 Yet even then it appeared to a conservative that dis- 
 loyalty to the State, great as was the crime, had no pos- 
 sible alternative in disobedience to the Father. " There 
 are hardly any other men," says the Roman jurist,^ "who 
 have such power [over their sons as we have." It was 
 a natural result that no other State had such power over 
 its subjects as Rome. 
 
 How large and lofty was the Roman ideal of Obe- 
 dience, compared with that temporary or degrading 
 submission which is all that the word suggests to the 
 average mind of our own day, is seen in the noble 
 
 ' Marcus, son of the Piso who was accused of poisoning Gcrmanicus. Sec 
 Tac. , Ann., iii. 17. 
 ' Gaius, "Corp. Jur. Rom. Ante-Just.," § 55.
 
 156 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 words of Cicero, when he speaks of the incomplete 
 virtue — what we should call Duty — as typified by the 
 obedience of the soldier, a loyal but difiicult obedience, 
 and contrasts it with that moral rightness which is 
 higher than duty, when a man is made aware of 
 a claim that unites kindred with authority, and meets 
 it with the obedience of a son.^ Perhaps there is no 
 passage in classical literature that comes so near the 
 spirit of Christianity ; yet it is no more than the per- 
 fection of that sense of membership which was the 
 starting-point of political life in antiquity, and which 
 Rome first disentangled from all admixture and brought 
 out in its naked simplicity. In the life of Rome was 
 fulfilled the command with promise made to the chosen 
 people ; she taught the honour of the Father, and the 
 da^^s of her children were long in the land. In truth, 
 union of the command with the promise is no excep- 
 tional grant to a favoured race, but a permanent law 
 of human society. The generations of man are thus 
 " bound each to each in natural piety ; " the nation has 
 the foundations of a religion. It is rooted in the order 
 that is permanent. 
 
 And while this central claim for an unlimited subjec- 
 tion — the power of the Father — gave Roman dominion 
 its keynote, we have not less to remark the political 
 wisdom, perhaps never absent from this high standard 
 of domestic obedience, which taught Romans to secure 
 their dominion by setting off every added shade of liberty 
 against a background of subjection, and thus rousing a 
 vivid appreciation for every grant by bringing it into a 
 close proximity to vain desire. Unbuttressed by con- 
 cessions, privilege would be short-lived ; the many ex- 
 cluded would not quietly confront the view included if 
 these two parties stood face to face. If a system of 
 
 1 Cicero, Quaest. Tusc, ii. 22.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 157 
 
 privilege is to be durable, the harshness of contrast 
 must be broken, the transition from power to weakness 
 must be made to seem natural by being gradual ; a 
 neutral zone must intervene between the privileged and 
 unprivileged, keeping up hope in the last body, and 
 assigning a set of defenders to the first. The disfran- 
 chised world was not homogeneous ; the compromise it 
 exhibited between entire independence and entire sub- 
 jection it also repeated within its own limits, and carried 
 out in a graduated approach to the position of aspiration 
 and envy. A dawn of Roman right preceded its full 
 concession, and Rome had always a band of subjects 
 who were in that most favourable position for loyalty 
 — in sight of coveted advantages only just be3^ond their 
 reach. Perhaps in enumerating all that was tangible 
 in these advantages we hardly exhaust the attractions 
 of Roman citizenship. There is a kind of satisfaction 
 in association with a favoured race which escapes the 
 analysis of Logic ; — which may be connected with 
 the instinct in our nature that turns in weariness from 
 the transitoriness of things to whatever presents any 
 show of permanence, and takes the mind into the far 
 past and the distant future. Nor must we leave out 
 of sight the alloy of mere vulgar feeling, which gave 
 the compound no small share of its firmness and 
 strength. As we watch the invasion of this platform 
 of privilege by the excluded class, the successive devices 
 by which the defenders endeavoured to render their 
 concessions meaningless, and the strange transforma- 
 tion by which the sons of the victorious assailants are 
 found among the most resolute defenders of the coveted 
 vantage-ground, wc arc forced to realize that in the idea 
 of privilege there is something which objects of desire, 
 in themselves far more excellent, cannot rival. We see 
 that in the evolution of national life what is desirable
 
 1 58 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 is always at first confused with what is exceptional, 
 and we thus learn to accept as an inevitable phase of 
 social development, that husk of ungenerous denial which 
 guards the kernel of almost all righteous claim. 
 
 When we cross the chasm which formed the most 
 characteristic division of the old world we realize the 
 full power of this exclusive ideal, and its darkest influ- 
 ences. Another people, distinguished by no mark of 
 complexion, dress, or cultivation, were separated from 
 the children of Rome, among whom they dwelt, by the 
 barrier of legal helplessness. We underrate the import- 
 ance of slavery in the ancient world when we replace 
 in imagination our domestic servants by slaves. The 
 free-born Roman had no monopoly of cultivation. Few 
 pursuits which in our day absorb and reward the 
 attention of the professional class were unrepresented 
 in the slave-gang of a wealthy Roman. A writer 
 who has made the subject his study h^s given his 
 opinion, borne out to some extent by the low price of 
 books at Rome, that what the press performs for modern 
 life was effected for the ancient world by slavery. ■"• 
 What a world of thought, feeling, hope, and fear, 
 shut out from all large interests of life, is implied in 
 the fact that it is possible to suppose the slaves under 
 the Empire as active in diffusing literature as the print- 
 ing-press ! The friend and fellow-worker of the cultured 
 thinker of antiquity was the specimen of a class that 
 had no rights." We need no harrowing pictures to make 
 us believe in the forlorn condition of a people legally 
 defenceless ; such a condition is painted for us by the 
 tone of allusion to cruelties in men who were not other- 
 wise cruel. The philosophic historian records,^ with 
 
 1 See a note in Merivale's " Roman Empire," vi. 233, 
 
 2 Tiro, Cicero's freedman, is believed to have edited his letters, 
 
 3 Tac, Ann,, xiv. 42-45. Their only crime was their failure to prevent the
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 159 
 
 apparent sympath}^, the arguments by which the mas- 
 sacre of four hundred innocent slaves was justified 
 in the Roman Senate, as a measure of expedienc}', 
 about the same time that Seneca was reminding his 
 correspondent, with an eloquence doubtless meant for 
 posterity, that " he whom thou callest slave is sprung 
 from the same race as thyself." The most humane, 
 perhaps, of all classic writers expresses a certain 
 sympathy with an example of heartless cruelty that 
 will to many readers appear more odious — the cruci- 
 fixion of a poor Sicilian shepherd who had, at a time 
 when the use of weapons was forbidden to slaves, 
 rid the country of the ravages of a fierce boar.-^ What 
 Tacitus and Cicero could record without protest must 
 have been possible to every Roman. The cruelties they 
 sanctioned with their sympathy were not the excesses 
 of bad men, but the illustrations of an ideal. 
 
 The structure of Roman dominion rests on a fusion 
 of the loyal obedience of the son and the hopeless 
 subjection of the slave. The legal system which 
 graduated and defended civic right shows the skilful 
 blending of both which made them work to a common 
 end. A sense of separateness, unsoftened by any ad- 
 mixture of that sense of a common humanity present 
 to some degree in almost all modern feeling, is ex- 
 hibited to us in slavery ; and it is vain to deny that 
 here Rome and the whole antique world, but Rome in 
 a special sense, had a simplicity of strength lacking 
 to all modern government. We may almost say that 
 
 ruurdcr of ihcir master by one of tlieir number. The indignation of the 
 populace at this barbarity almost occasioned an imeute. 
 
 1 Cicero, " In Vcrrem," v. 3. At least, he says that some will think this hard, 
 but he declares himself " maluisse Domitium (the proutor) crudelem in anim- 
 advcrtcndo quam in practcrmittendo dissolutum videri." He preferred that 
 a public benefactor should be rewarded with the cross, rather than that a slave 
 should, at a critical momt-nt, be trusted with a hunting-spear. I know of no 
 other passage which so vividly illustrates what is hateful in slavery. f
 
 i6o THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 Rome drew from slavery the strength that any modern 
 Government would gain if its poor suddenly became 
 satisfied. True, the slave sometimes made Rome feel 
 that he was not satisfied. But the insurrection of a 
 Spartacus did hardly as much to diminish the power 
 of government as the discontent of the least discontented 
 peasantry of the modern world does. It was, while it 
 lasted, a terror and a danger. But an insurrection does 
 not sap the strength of the nation if it does not in any 
 degree enlist the sympathy of the upper class. Spartacus, 
 in any modern State, would have had sympathizing ad- 
 mirers in the Senate. We can hardly conceive that it 
 never entered into the heart of a Roman to hesitate in 
 his desire for the defeat of the slaves. Probably the 
 only result of their approach to success was to weld the 
 structure they attacked into a closer unity. Not a single 
 arm was paralyzed by the doubt whether the blow was 
 just. We might be favoured by Nature with abundant 
 harvests, and by Fortune with prosperous trade ; all 
 legislative concession might be made to the lower 
 class, all but the inevitable privileges of the higher 
 abolished — and still we should not have reached that 
 position of convenient and secure independence which 
 the Romans gained by being steeled against pity. Per- 
 fect justice in poor and rich alike would be needed 
 before we should reach the disentanglement from all our 
 difficulties that they gained by perfect injustice, by a 
 repudiation of all those feelings and ideas on which 
 justice is founded. 
 
 The contrast of Rome and Greece is, in this respect, 
 almost as instructive as the contrast of Rome and Eng- 
 land. Both the precept of the Platonic Socrates and 
 the example of Callicratidas show us that when one 
 Greek enslaved another there must have been a latent 
 doubt as to the right, than which nothing can be
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. i6i 
 
 more numbing to vigorous action. The double vision 
 which hovered before the mental eye makes a sure 
 aim impossible. May vvc smite our enemies fearlessly ? 
 What is meant by we ? The second question pre- 
 vents all clear answer to the first. Englishmen en- 
 gaged in strife with Africans or Asiatics know some- 
 thing of the feeling which the Greeks had only just begun 
 to feel in strife with each other. But they had begun 
 to feel it ; and its disturbing influence is shown in the 
 distraction and desultoriness of Greek history. This 
 hesitation between the unity of the city and that of the 
 nation made a place for that which opposes all true unity, 
 the centrifugal impulse of Party. A nation under this 
 impulse is on the path to a swift decay. But in Rome 
 there was something stronger than party spirit. The 
 civil wars passed away, and left the whole world em- 
 braced in an organism to which Rome supplied a heart. 
 And the good and evil of human nature both contributed 
 so much to the unity of this organism that we can hardly 
 say which formed its strength. 
 
 This double element is discernible in the characteris- 
 tic bequest of Rome to the world. Roman Law is the 
 sole product of Roman thought that bears any stamp of 
 originalit}'. The artist people have left their records in 
 work that has taken its place as the perennial model of 
 humanity as to form ; with Rome the idea of Law, as 
 separate from laws, may be almost said to begin. Yet 
 the Roman law, in its narrowest sense, the civil law of 
 Rome, was a consecration of all that is narrow and ex- 
 clusive ; it embodied the spirit that is willing to inhabit 
 a paradise " haunted by shrieks of far-off misery ; " it 
 was an elaboration of the ideal of privilege. This forms 
 no part of the Roman law known to modern Europe ; it 
 withered away, while Roman law in its wider sense — 
 the prx'torian law, by which justice was administered to 
 
 L
 
 1 62 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 the subjects of Rome — grew to its maturity. The latter 
 was the nurse of a liberal justice, the mould of a high 
 morality, the philosophic teacher of political wisdom and 
 guardian of national life. It supplied to all the countries 
 beneath Roman rule a pattern of righteous dealing be- 
 tween the governors and governed — a pattern, indeed, 
 which its administrators neglected and ignored, but which 
 none the less remained as a rebuke to their injustice, 
 and a goal of all true efforts to carry out the ideal 
 dominion of Rome. And it included within its impartial 
 embrace the whole civilized world. An Athenian obeyed 
 a law that many Greeks regarded as a thing external to 
 any loyalty of theirs. The law of the Roman had all 
 the universality of a law of nature, and perhaps we 
 should never have had the latter expression if there had 
 not existed a State which possessed a realm so wide and 
 a sway so irresistible, that its laws gained the association 
 of natural powers, and thus passed into their type. 
 
 Hence the moral legacy of Rome to the world is 
 that of submission to law. Translated into intellectual 
 language, this becomes the central principle of physical 
 science ; and little as the Romans cared for physical 
 science, it is in the first great poem written in their 
 tongue that we see this central conception first steadily 
 grasped and consistently retained. Nothing can be more 
 characteristic of the Roman spirit than the poem of 
 Lucretius, and nothing, surely, that was written more 
 than 2000 years ago is so full of the ideas and beliefs of 
 modern thought. It is unscientific in this sense, that it 
 shows a fundamental misconception of the right method 
 of science ; it assumiCs, in common with the whole of 
 antiquit}', that reason and not experience is to supply, 
 as well as to sift and arrange, the data of physical 
 theory ; and it betrays an indifference to detail which 
 vividly illustrates the result of this false view. But so
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 163 
 
 pregnant is the thought which forms its nucleus that, 
 perhaps, the mistaken notions with which it is associated 
 only bring out its importance the more forcibly ; for the 
 scope and force of a truth come out vividly in its power 
 to swallow up, as it were, the mistakes which cluster 
 round it. The poem is the first manifesto of that school 
 of thought which we know as Positivism, the belief that 
 the investigation of nature begins with the renunciation 
 of those spiritual conceptions which lead man on to the 
 search for truth, and appear to his infant mind as the 
 appointed guide throughout the journey. The analysis of 
 the mental evolution of the race into epochs characterized 
 by the successive dominance of the three ideas of Will, of 
 Cause, and of Force, and thence named the Theologic, Mcta- 
 physic, and Positive stage of thought, has been hailed as 
 one of the widest generalizations ever won to science. But 
 it is present in germ in a poem by a thinker who had no 
 more idea of the experimental method which we almost 
 identify with science itself than he had of using the micro- 
 scope. Yet he was the herald of scientific principle ; and 
 though no man of science ever consulted his work as 
 an authority for a single fact or law, yet all may turn to 
 it for the statement of principles and the expression of 
 feelings which give to science its light and its atmosphere. 
 The " cosmic emotion " of our latest thought is there in 
 its fulness ; and of all who have found a religion in the 
 contemplation of nature, none ever was a more fervent 
 and devout worshipper than the poet of whom we can 
 hardly say that he knew a single one of its laws. 
 
 What Lucretius felt in nature was the spirit of law, 
 of which Rome was the embodiment. He did not, in- 
 deed, consciously recognize what we could call law in 
 nature ; what lie did recognize there, was, if we look at it 
 from our point of view, a mere privation of law. But to 
 him Chance was (almost the contrary of what it is to us)
 
 364 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 the negation of the arbitrary element, of which all Will 
 was the expression. To an Englishman the type of 
 orderly action is Will, and Chance is a mere negation 
 of Will ; but to the Roman, Will was the disorderly 
 interrupting agency, Chance was that general tendency 
 of things which makes for order, if only it be not inter- 
 fered with by the irregular impulse of human passions. 
 Just as Fortune had brought out of the atomic life of 
 separate cities the vast structure of the Roman dominion, 
 so Chance had from the rain of atoms evolved the 
 stately fabric of the Universe and the elaborate life of 
 civil society. The process of evolution between this 
 beginning and the Roman Empire was imperilled 
 only by the desultory impulses of individual desire 
 and aversion ; and Lucretius lived in the da3^s when 
 this individual agency was assuming large and tur- 
 bulent proportions, when the passions of a Marius and 
 a Sulla seemed to threaten the very existence of the 
 one State of the world. His early life was passed amid 
 the terrors of sedition and the horrors of civil blood- 
 shed. In childhood he may have trembled at the days 
 of slaughter which followed the return of Marius ; in 
 boyhood he must have shuddered at the months of 
 assassination which followed the return of Sulla ; the 
 conspiracy of Catiline renewed these memories in his 
 ripe manhood ; and his life closed amid the turmoil 
 which associated itself with the name of Clodius and 
 the tremors of the coming civil war. He lived when the 
 dread of individuality, which animated so much of ancient 
 life, was justified by ebullitions of terrible hatred, deadly 
 revenge, reckless ambition ; when it would seem as if 
 the first necessity of a State was to get rid of its great 
 men. To him Will was the destructive, not the con- 
 structive, agency. He saw in nature an escape from 
 its dominion, and when he eagerly explained away all
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAU\ 165 
 
 purpose in the Universe, he was, little as we can sym- 
 pathize with the feehng, making room for that orderly 
 impulse of law so deeply rooted in his mind that, like 
 the atmosphere, it rushed in to fill every vacancy, and 
 seemed present, wherever the agency of man was with- 
 drawn. The object of his poem is well marked in a few 
 lines ^ where he describes the effect of watching a review 
 from a distance, and after painting the tumult, the glitter, 
 and the movement of the mighty legions, ends with the 
 touch of quiet : — 
 
 " Yet sees the traveller from the mountain's height 
 The hurryir.g crowds as some still speck of light," 
 
 It was his object to contemplate the hurrying crowds of 
 life from that remote height where their distracted move- 
 ment was reduced to rest and their vehement tumult was 
 still. 
 
 Hence the tone of delight in which the poet set forth 
 a scheme of life which, though it must be accepted if it 
 be certain, could never, we should have thought, be an 
 object of any higher feeling than despairing resignation. 
 No divine hope could be too great for the burst of apoca- 
 lyptic joy with which Lucretius brings this scheme for- 
 ward. The new Jerusalem descending out of Heaven 
 is hardly hymned with more mystic rapture than the 
 emptied world from which all divinities have been 
 banished — the world which in the opinion of the singer 
 was then first delivered from the shadow of human 
 jealousy and malignancy, falsely projected upon the 
 heavens. The power and the weakness of the poem 
 are strikingly illustrated by its effect on its most illus- 
 trious reader of modern times. It was a favourite study 
 with Frederick the Great, and was recommended by him 
 
 1 Lucrclius, " iJc R<Tum Natura," ii. 323-332. I" ulial follows I am miicli 
 indebted 10 .M. Martha's study of this poem.
 
 1 66 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 to a bereaved friend as a manual of consolation. Yet 
 when he turned to it in his own troubles, he discovered 
 it to teach only that evil was necessary and remedies 
 were futile.^ The great general was probably far nearer 
 the intellectual position of the Roman poet than is any 
 reader of our day ; he too had been delivered from an 
 oppressive bondage, associated with a religion powerless 
 to elevate and purify, potent only to narrow and harden 
 the soul. He must have come much nearer to the rap- 
 ture of escape, as from a galling prison, expressed in 
 this Pagan psalm, than almost any Christian who has 
 ever read the poem. And yet even he found it potent 
 only for the ills of his neighbour ; it broke down as 
 a remedy for his own. The Pagan King, the friend 
 of Voltaire, was too Christian for the consolations of 
 Lucretius, He felt as a Pagan of our day : — 
 
 " Je souffre, 11 est trop tard ; le monde s'est fait vieux. 
 Une immense esp^rance a traverse la terra 
 Malgrd nous vers le ciel il faut tourner les yeux ; " 
 
 or, at all events, it was no gospel to him in the hour of 
 defeat to be told that there was no Heaven which could 
 meet glances either of hope or of dread, 
 
 A modern, whether he be Christian or Pagan, brings 
 to this poem the inheritance of all that reverence for per- 
 sonal life which has been developed through Christianit}^ 
 The immense hope of the world has passed into his soul, 
 if not as a belief, then as an irremovable contrast to 
 every other belief ; it has fixed the cravings of his heart 
 even when it has not touched a single conviction of his 
 mind. The infinite future it has opened to every soul 
 has remained as a yearning when it has vanished as an 
 
 1 " C'est iin palliatif pour les maladies de I'ame," he wrote to D'Alembert on 
 the death of Mile, de Lespinasse. "Je n'y ai trouv^ que la necessity du nial 
 et I'iiiutilit^ du remede," he answered D'Argens, under the discouragement of 
 defeat in the Seven Years' War.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 167 
 
 expectation ; nothing can close that vista ; and the hope 
 of Heaven, that has thrilled many a heart cold beneath 
 the sod, survives in other forms in those who scoff at it 
 as folly or argue against it as delusion. It is hard for 
 us to put ourselves in the place of men who had neither 
 the hope itself nor an}' of the visions or regrets into 
 which it is transformed — men to whom the world of the 
 citizen, with its finite claims, filled the horizon of interest 
 and became the nurse of all desire. And perhaps it is 
 specially difficult to realise this in the poem of Lucretius, 
 because its tone is in many ways so modern. The sub- 
 ject — the physical scheme of the Universe — is the great 
 interest of our day, and the way in which Lucretius 
 regards it constantly reminds us of the very fashion of 
 the hour. But this resemblance is, to a great extent, 
 misleading. The poet has all the indifference of a 
 Roman to physical science, in itself. His purpose is 
 wholly negative ; all his concern is to banish that idea 
 of Divine agency which we should represent to our 
 minds far more clearly as a sj^stem of interference than 
 of government ; and far from bringing him into harmony 
 with our modern ideas, this aim prevented his keeping 
 abreast with the foremost physical speculation of his own 
 da}'. We find him both anticipating and rejecting the 
 ideas that have been ratified by Science, and it is hard 
 to say whether we may learn most from his latent Dar- 
 winism, or from his scorn of the idea that is associated 
 with the great name of Newton, and which was in some 
 dim fashion manifest to his contemporaries. 
 
 Men make their way up the mountain of truth, as 
 up every other mountain, by a perpetual zig-zag. The 
 progress of Science is the result of oscillation between 
 oppositcs ; it has turned alternately to the organic and 
 the mechanical view of nature, alternatives perhaps 
 brought home more clearly to the imagination when con-
 
 l6S THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 trasted as personal and impersonal. We see them most 
 sharply contrasted in the great scientific battle of our day. 
 Many of us were taught in our childhood that the reason 
 why a horse and an ass, for instance, were as like each 
 other as they are, was the will of the Creator. This 
 can hardly be called a scientific theory ; it was rather 
 accepted by scientific men as the boundary of science ; 
 but it was so accepted within living memory by the 
 scientific world. Then came the doctrine familiar under 
 the name of Natural Selection, and we were all taught 
 that the reason why a horse and an ass w-ere alike was 
 their descent from a common ancestor ; and the reason 
 they were different was that small hereditary variations 
 had proved useful in the struggle for life. Now this 
 latest triumph of science marks its swing towards the 
 impersonable view of nature. Nothing can be more 
 unlike the action of human will than the production 
 of these small variations, useless for the most part, 
 and the wasteful destruction of the greater part of what 
 is produced. Accordingly we find that Lucretius here 
 speaks the language of modern science. Accident, he 
 says, originated all kinds of varieties of structure (that 
 he made them great instead of small has nothing to 
 do with the argument), and those only were pre- 
 served which were fitted to the condition of things in 
 which they found themselves.^ The exposition must 
 be discerned, whenever any one can look at it without 
 prejudice, as an unquestionable anticipation of the great 
 scientific theory of our day. But now go back two cen- 
 turies nearer to Lucretius, to the widest generalization, 
 perhaps, that science has ever achieved — the discovery of 
 gravitation. This was a swing to the other side, a turn 
 
 1 Lucretius, " De Rerum Natura," v. 837, 77. I once showed the passage to 
 Mr, Darwin, but the dialect was too unscientific for him, and I do not think he 
 recognized it as the anticipation of his own views.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 169 
 
 in the zig-zag that brings the traveller very near the 
 idea of personal action. We can hardly enunciate the law 
 Avithout using words that belong to the personal world. 
 '• The most perfect vacuum," says a modern writer/ 
 " ma}' be truly said to be full of this influence," which, 
 though so subtle, so impalpable, that it needs the utmost 
 efforts of genius to demonstrate its existence and its 
 laws, " is yet a necessary concomitant of matter." Now 
 here, surely, we are on the borders of the spiritual world. 
 Imagine yourself hearing, for the first time, that at mid- 
 night, when the whole bulk of earth shut off the sun's 
 light and heat, its gravitation was still acting on every 
 particle of matter in the dark hemisphere, and whirling 
 it through space, and you would feel as if what was 
 described must be supernatural Will. And it is evi- 
 dent that this resemblance to personal agency impelled 
 Lucretius to scorn that dim vision of the law of gravi- 
 tation which was present to his contemporaries ; it is 
 ridiculed by him as an absurd fiction, ascribing the " love 
 of a centre " " to entities of which the chief thing he 
 wanted to say was, that they felt no love. His pas- 
 sionate desire to expunge from nature all relation, all 
 resemblance even, to human agency, to sweep it clear, 
 as it were, of every organic tendency, would have made 
 our modern science appear to him almost as full of im- 
 personations as ancient mythology. We are startled to 
 find the anticipator of the origin of species by natural 
 selection rejecting the theory of the four elements ; a 
 theory which, already preached by one whom he calls 
 " tiie holiest of men,"" lasted till it was absorbed into 
 
 ' The Bishop of ('arlislc, in the Nineteenth Century Review, December 1886. 
 
 * " Haud igitur possunt tali ratione teneri 
 Res in concilio inedii cuppedine viclae." 
 
 — De Rerum Natiira, i. 1081, 2. 
 
 S'-c the whole argument against gravitation from 1052. 
 * i.e., liinpcdoclcs : Ibid.^ i. 712-733.
 
 I70 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 the chemistry of the eighteenth century, and laid the 
 basis of the idea of chemical action. It is set aside in 
 favour of the most childish, the most meagre scheme of 
 the age, simply because it was the most inhuman. The 
 perpetual rain of atoms rushing downwards through void 
 space was surely the most reduced apparatus a philo- 
 sopher could concede to his scheme of the Universe. 
 But it was this rigid parsimony which was the attraction 
 of his scheme to a mind seeking, above all things, the 
 impersonal. We see the anthropomorphism of our scien- 
 tific ideas when we contrast them with his ; we are 
 forced to realise that it is not less in the world without 
 than the world within that we have grown more personal. 
 He would have found no repose in a world composed 
 of our molecules, with their attractions and repulsions ; 
 ridiculous figments, as it would have seemed to him, of 
 love and hatred. His atoms were as unlike as possible 
 to persons, and that was all he asked of them. This 
 meagre simplicity was exactly what his spirit craved. 
 It was the ideal of the one State of the world. All 
 special tendency found its analogue in that individual 
 feeling which Rome set itself to crush, and which, when 
 it could not crush, it feared. Sulla and Marius embodied 
 the individual agency on its darker side, while the dagger 
 of Brutus was, as it were, already sharpening to express 
 the defiance of Rome to their noblest successor. Rome 
 enforced a barren uniformity, and this was the idea 
 carried out by the Roman poet. 
 
 The poem of Lucretius is an expression, in a prosaic 
 and protestant form, of that idea of a Holy Order which 
 we have seen, at its highest pitch, in the speculations of 
 Indian theosophy. His reader is often reminded of these 
 speculations. He finds the same yearning for a deep 
 repose, the same consciousness of a possible deliverance 
 from all the restlessness of life, in a surrender to nature.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LA W. 171 
 
 Lucretius did not deny the existence of the Gods ; he 
 rather saw in them the models for man. They live 
 apart from all desire and fear, in a profound repose. 
 Man too might reach their repose if he would enter into 
 their vision of reality, if he would cease from those 
 impulses of ambition, of avarice, of revenge, which are 
 the invaders of human life, not its legitimate rulers ; if 
 he would recognize the realm of law, which is to him a 
 prison when he endeavours to escape from it, but when 
 he accepts its restraints, the most blessed home. The 
 Indian ideal of Resignation pervades the whole poem ; 
 Nature stretches her compassionate arms towards the 
 feverish sons of man, and w-oos them to repose on that 
 calm bosom that knows not love or hate — knows onl}'- 
 what to the Roman took the aspect of Law. But we 
 have passed from the East to the West, and man needs 
 Resignation, not to live, but to die. Life is finite ; man 
 has to accept its limits. The nation that has left its 
 memorials in the long straight roads that led to the city, 
 the aqueducts that brought it water, the triumphal arch 
 that spoke its glories, had no hope of a Hereafter. That 
 was associated with terror and dread. Rome had no 
 mysteries. The Roman poet rebukes the desire of life 
 beyond the grave, as the Indian would have rebuked it 
 if he could ever have imagined it to exist. But the 
 desire offended the Roman not only because it expressed 
 that arrogance of individualism which to both races was 
 equally abhorrent, but because it embodied a yearning 
 after the Infinite, which, while it was the very breath 
 of life to the Indian, was the seed of all disorder to thd 
 definite positive spirit of the prosaic Roman race. 
 
 The ideal of Lucretius is the indifference of Natural 
 Law to human desire. He has a few passages of ex- 
 quisite pathos, passages which foreshadow tlic tender 
 liuman sympathies of Gray, the pure, delicate, natural
 
 172 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 sympathies of Wordsworth. Nothing in poetry is more 
 full of a subdued, hidden pity than the hnes in which 
 he describes the wanderings of the cow whose calf has 
 fallen at the altars of superstition.^ Nothing is more 
 full of a deep sense of human love and its frail tenure 
 than the description which the English reader knows in 
 the beautiful but still inferior imitation by Gray : " — • 
 
 " For thee no more the cheerful hearth shall burn, 
 And busy housewife ply her evening care, 
 No children run to lisp their sire's return, 
 
 And climb his knees the envied kiss to share." 
 
 But these passages cannot be called characteristic of 
 Lucretius ; or, at least, they are characteristic only as 
 the rare gleams when a finer self seems to break through 
 the habitual self. They are not the utterance of his con- 
 tinuous thought. His habitual theme is the dominance 
 of Law, and this interpolation of pity almost interrupts 
 it ; it is a modulation into a key which must be quitted 
 before the original theme can be taken up. 
 
 When we turn to Virgil we find that the interpolation 
 has become the theme. The feeling that touched the 
 earlier poem with streaks of tender irrelevance expands 
 to colour the whole. Virgil sings the growth of Rome, 
 as Lucretius the formation of the Universe ; there is a 
 kindred nature in the theme, but the note of triumphant 
 dominion in the Roman has dropped into a note of sad 
 submission in the Italian. All the interest of Roman 
 history, we have said, lies in its victims. Virgil gives 
 that interest its supreme expression. He, the dispos- 
 sessed Italian, with the longing for his Mantuan home 
 
 ^ Lucretius, " De Rerum Natura," ii. 352-366. 
 
 2 "Jam jam non domus accipiet te Iseta, neque uxor 
 Optima, nee dulces oceurrent oscula nati 
 Praeripere, et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent." 
 
 — lb. iii. S94.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 173 
 
 always in his heart, and 3-et with a deep acquies- 
 cence in tliat Imperial rule which implies a world of 
 such mournful exiles as himself, was marked out alike by 
 Fate and Nature as the poet of Resignation. This is 
 the clue to his mystic charm ; this explains his strange 
 legendar}' position as the herald of a faith of which 
 he never heard, and in which he would probably have 
 taken a merely literary interest if he had heard of 
 it. The ideal of obedience, of surrender, is the seed 
 of all that has made him immortal.^ In his resolute 
 avoidance of originality he stands alone among the great 
 poets of the world. No other name known to succeed- 
 ing generations belongs to an avowed, unvarying imi- 
 tator ; Virgil's commentators supply us with the Greek 
 original of almost every important passage ; it is as 
 if Goethe had piqued himself on having produced 
 perfect German adaptations from Corneille and Racine. 
 The literature of Greece filled the whole horizon of the 
 intellectual world for the conquerors of Greece ; to 
 adapt, to embod}^, to imitate, was, they thought, the only 
 possible intellectual aim for themselves. The Roman 
 took towards Greek literature the kind of attitude which 
 English faith has taken towards that of Judaea ; origi- 
 nality would have been regarded as equally an error in 
 both cases. The very word by which the Church has 
 designated false doctrine expresses the Roman dread 
 of originalit}^ ; a heresy is a " choice." The spirit of 
 orthodoxy discourages originality. Ultimately, perhaps, 
 it will not be found that the ages of orthodoxy have been 
 tiiosc deficient in originalit}' ; but, for good and for ill 
 
 ' "Una salus victis nullam spcrarc salutem." — A''.n. ii. 354. 
 1 his line, which gives the ^luieid its keynote, miglit well have been taken ns 
 a motto by the subject of Rome. Note also the deep religious feeling which 
 makes Anchises at first refuse to leave Troy : — 
 
 " Me si coelicoln; voluisscnt duccrc vitam : 
 lias niihi scrvasscnt scdes." — lb, ii. 6.^1 643.
 
 174 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 alike, the fact is, that wherever orthodoxy exists, all 
 thought stamped with individual impulse is at a certain 
 disadvantage. And the fact that Roman writers found 
 their orthodox model in Greek literature explains what 
 might almost be called the servile element in Virgil ; his 
 intellectual submission to Greece explains and illustrates 
 the spirit that brought a world into subjection to the 
 dominion of Rome. 
 
 We see in Lucretius the rapture with which the idea 
 of Law — the influence that moulds and penetrates all 
 Roman thought — is hailed when contrasted with images 
 of disorderly impulse and caprice ; we discern the spirit 
 of science in that first energy of distinctness and of 
 narrow limitation which is given by protest against the 
 spirit of superstition. In Virgil this reverence for order 
 is even deeper, but it is less logical. It is deeper, for it 
 demands that continuity with the past which surely is a 
 test of a true order. It accepts history as a witness for 
 man's nature no less trustworthy than science ; it cherishes 
 the fragment of truth hidden in the legendary lore of the 
 past, and never rejects any fiction that may prove a husk 
 of the smallest fact or a vehicle of the vaguest truth. 
 And, at the time, it welcomes with an eager homage 
 the great idea, to sorne extent inconsistent with the other, 
 of Natural Law.^ There is no care for an exact harmony 
 between these two divergent tendencies, only a fearless 
 reverence for both, and a dim feeling of some underlying 
 reality deeper than either. A vague Pantheism har- 
 monizes the world of mythology and the world of science, 
 and enables the poet to tread in the footsteps of Lucretius, 
 
 ^ Compare, for instance, Geo. i. 60-62 : — 
 
 " Continue has leges asternaque foedera certis 
 Imposuit Natura locis, quo tempore primum 
 Deucalion vacuum lapides jactavit in orbem." 
 
 These lines are exactly divided by a complete change in the point of view.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 175 
 
 and yet to remain a constant and reverent visitor in the 
 domain that Lucretius hated. The poet who best inter- 
 prets him to the Enghsh reader is Wordsworth. Nature 
 draws from both the Itahan and the Enghsh poet the 
 solemn dehght of confronting — 
 
 " A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts ; a sense subhme 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things." ^ 
 
 In these noble lines we have no more than a full and 
 fluent expression of a feeling that meets us more than 
 once in brief and broken hints from the earlier poet. 
 The intervening 2000 years, the birth and death of 
 nations, the development of a new faith — all these leave 
 the religion of nature substantially unaffected ; it is more 
 diffuse in Wordsworth than in Virgil, but that is all. 
 
 On the one hand this feeling melts into sympathy 
 with the old mythology, on the other it passes into 
 admiration for the orderly sequences of nature ; so that 
 the two feelings which in the mind of Lucretius, as in 
 that of so many a religious thinker of our day, seem 
 hopelessly opposed, were harmonized by Virgil's vague 
 Pantheism, harmonized more fully than is possible to 
 any one who looks back from our present position, and, 
 watching the conflict of Religion and Science through so 
 many centuries, sees the argument of each side tested 
 by the keen acid of hostile criticism. Thus Virgil has 
 
 ' W (jnliworib, "Tinturn Abbey." Tho quolofi lines are almost a transla- 
 tion of tliratldrcss of Anchiscs to /l-lneas (/En. vi. 724-729), but purliaps Words- 
 worth was not thinking of Virjjil when he wrote it.
 
 176 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 far more sympathy with the scientific spirit than Words- 
 worth ; there is in him no touch of scorn such as that 
 uttered in Wordsworth's " Poet's Epitaph " : — 
 
 " Physician art thou ? — one, all eyes, 
 Philosopher ! a fingering slave, 
 One that would peep and botanize 
 Upon his mother's grave ? " 
 
 To Virgil there would be nothing jarring in the juxta- 
 position of any possible interest in nature and any 
 possible human sorrow ; the harmony of Natural Law- 
 was to him the fitting theme of the bard, partly because 
 individual human sorrow was a slighter thing to the 
 ancients than to us, but partly also because the laws 
 of nature were something deeper. Thus the lay which 
 excites enthusiastic admiration from weary, storm-tossed 
 guests contains the explanation of — 
 
 "The various labours of the wandering moon, ' 
 And whence proceed the eclipses of the sun ; 
 
 The original of men and beasts, and whence ,' 
 
 The rains arise, and fires their warmth dispense, ■ 
 
 And fixed and erring stars dispose their influence ; • 
 
 What shakes the solid earth, what cause delays |, 
 The summer nights and shortens winter days." ' 
 
 The feeling which here binds the poet to Lucretius 
 separates him from Wordsworth ; it is as unlike any 
 modern poet to find in Natural Science the material 
 of Poetry as it is unlike Homer. The choice of such 
 a subject marks the dawn of scientific thought and the 
 twilight of classical poetry. But Virgil's yearnings after 
 science were not stronger than his love of the legendary 
 past ; his devout sense of the Divine Presence that 
 animated Nature did not conflict with a sort of belief in t 
 
 the Gods of Greece, nor, on the other hand, with a deep 
 
 1 ^neid, i. 746, Dryden's translation.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 177 
 
 reverence for the natural laws that seemed to his fore- 
 runner an effective and welcome substitute for the pre- 
 sence of anything that had been thought Divine. 
 
 For he stood at that point in History in which 
 the idea of a universal dominion gathered up into 
 itself the philosophy, mythology, and science of the 
 world. The idea of Law in nature, which to his fore- 
 runner was mainly a negation of personal will in na- 
 ture, was to him the real presence of a spirit of order, 
 penetrating the whole of nature, and infusing its own 
 impulse into all life. It is the spirit which sets every- 
 thing in its place and brings the " perpetual edict " of 
 a Catholic rule to regulate the varied sphere of human 
 achievement. This, we may say, is the ideal of the Uni- 
 versal Empire, as it passed into the ideal of the Universal 
 Church ; and so far as the Roman Empire became uni- 
 versal, it was because, to some extent, it did embody 
 this principle, upholding Law against individual tyranny. 
 This, at least, was the aspect under which such spirits 
 as those of Virgil were able to submit themselves to its 
 dominion. That central influence which makes natural 
 one, that great idea which in our day has dawned upon/ 
 the world as the correlation of force — the idea, that is,A 
 of an energy underlying all phenomena, identical under 1 
 various forms — this idea, translated into the political ' 
 world, finds its best symbol in such an empire as that 
 of Rome, as it represented itself to its best men. And 
 the mind of the great Italian poet reflects this ideal both 
 in the natural and the human world. Nature is a stern 
 ruler, relaxing no severity of claim in pity to human 
 weakness ; man must serve her by arduous, unvarying 
 toil, carrying on a perpetual warfare (as it seems to him) 
 against some hostile power which seeks to withhold from 
 him the produce of the soil, and from which he is designed 
 to wrest it by vigorous struggle. But this arduous 
 
 M
 
 178 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 struggle is, in truth, the task appointed by a beneficent 
 ruler, and in this seeming strife man is truly engaged 
 with a "most just" being, who requites all trust with 
 rich payment/ The steadiness, the law-abiding spirit 
 of nature haunts Virgil's mind with an image of repose 
 deeper than the sense of arduous toil which also belongs 
 to it. The two are sometimes i [logically combined, but 
 they have an actual harmony. Virgil is in this the true 
 exponent of his nation. The Latin language first contains 
 the word by which we express fortitude in toil ; industry 
 was an expression unknown to the Greek tongue, and 
 where it seems indicated in Greek phrase the eulogium 
 is almost an apology. The race which first awakens to 
 the majesty of law also first sets forth the dignity of 
 toil ; the two ideas are correlative ; in the verse of Virgil 
 we find both set to music. 
 
 The same combination of submission to a severe 
 lawgiver and loyalty to a steadfast law is found in his 
 philosophy of life. The power that decides on the 
 destiny of nations is also stern and ruthless ; often it 
 seems cruel. Virtue and piety win no obvious reward ; 
 the sympathy of the poet takes one course, and the 
 decision of Providence another. There is no writer who 
 more than Virgil enlarges on the text, " God moves in 
 a mysterious way." Trust in a lying Greek brings on 
 the ruin of Troy, and no God interposes to avenge the 
 treachery which has requited compassionate aid with 
 ruin. Dido suffers for taking pity on ^Eneas, as Priam 
 for taking pity on Sino, and the hospitality of Latinus 
 involves his country in the miseries of war. As long as 
 we look to the merits and the fate of individuals, all 
 is confusion ; we see nothing but injustice and wanton 
 cruelty. But from the moment when the ghost of 
 Hector ^ appears, in all the horror of the fall of Troy, to 
 
 1 Georg., ii. 459. " ^neid, ii. 270. 
 
 i
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 179 
 
 announce the rising of a new city whose foundations were 
 to be eternal, the glory of Rome closes every vista, and 
 supplies a purpose for all that was bewildering and a jus- 
 tification of all that is harsh. We see no loving Father, 
 not even a just judge, as far as individual fate is concerned. 
 But we do see a single ruler, a single plan, a single goal ; 
 we see in the distance the great idea of a central interest 
 and historic purpose in life, enough to give dignity and 
 strength to resignation, if not enough to give life to hope. 
 And if the ways of God are stern and, except by 
 reference to a distant future, inexplicable, the char- 
 acteristic quality of ideal man is a tender compassion, 
 embracing all that is weak, all that is sad, all even that 
 is repulsive. This is the dominant impression of the 
 JEneid. The fall of Troy, narrated by a survivor of the 
 royal family, prefigures, in all its incidents of pathos and 
 horror, the fate of that city whose Queen hears the tale ; 
 it llings its lurid light on the long train of victims 
 to the great Power whose rise is yet announced with 
 religious reverence, as, in a special sense, the agent of 
 the Divine Will. Dido and Turnus, the Carthaginian 
 Queen and the Italian Prince, gather up the claims of 
 all the vast world that was to be crushed by Rome, and 
 embody all that sympathy with the vanquished and 
 unhappy which we feel latent in every line. Many a 
 minor touch fills in the music with its own subtle varia- 
 tions ; we are taught to feel for the hunted deer^ that 
 flics to die at the feet of the mistress vi^ho has tended 
 him, tiie generous steed that shares the ardour of tlic 
 fierce Mezentius^ and alone attracts his affections; even 
 
 ^ " Saucius at quadrupes nota intra tecta rcfugit 
 
 Successitque gemens stabulis, quoestuque cruentus 
 Atquc imploranti similis tectum onine replebat." 
 
 — /Kncid, vii. 500 502. 
 
 2 " Haud dcjectus cquum duci jubct. Hoc decus illi 
 lioc.solamcn cx\x\."—IbiJ., x. 858-85i;.
 
 I So THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 for the monster Polyphemus,^ followed by the flock whose 
 devotion forms his sole consolation, and the picture of 
 whose attachment to him brings images of gentleness 
 into what is most savage. Much of all this may be 
 found in Homer, but the change of tone from Homer 
 is made the more striking by the similarity of their 
 material, and in proportion as the reader appreciates the 
 song of each he feels the chasm which divides them. 
 Nothing can be more unlike the cheerful bustle of the 
 earlier singer than the plaintive pathos of his imitator. 
 As we read the Iliad we think of Hector, of Achilles, of 
 Priam. As we read the iEneid we think of Virgil. We 
 feel alwa3^s in the poetry of Virgil just that neighbour- 
 hood of a suffering human soul that it is refreshing to 
 miss in the poetry of Homer. A mist of unshed tears 
 seems to haunt the stream of his genius. Sorrow, and 
 endurance, and patience weave themselves into the very 
 web of his verse. He gives a voice to the unhappy, the 
 vanquished ; in touching the inmost heart with a sense 
 of pity, he lightens the burden of humanity by reminding 
 us that we bear it in common. 
 
 Here we have an explanation of the fact that Virgil 
 has become a legendary precursor of Christianity. In 
 choosing him as his guide through the mysteries of the 
 unseen world, Dante was not giving him a totally new 
 position, but expanding many a hint in the previous 
 history of his fame.^ It appears a strange destiny which 
 
 1 " Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum. 
 ****** 
 Lanigerse comitantur oves ; ea sola voluptas 
 Solamenque mali." — ^Eneid, iii. 658-661. 
 
 The word solamen, twice applied to an animal, and in each case expressing 
 the feeling with which it was regarded by a fierce and cruel nature, seems to me 
 to open a vista of wonderful tenderness and pity, quite unlike anything else in 
 ancient literature. 
 
 " As, for instance, the fact that Constantine read Virgil's Fourth Eclogue at 
 the Council of Nice, and the legend that St. Paul came to weep at his tomb.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. i8r 
 
 has transformed the careful revivahst of a past rehgion 
 into the prophet of one that was in the future ; but, in 
 fact, these two things are closely connected ; it is his 
 reverence towards the past which forms his affinity with 
 Christianit}'. The idea of this affinity is true in so deep 
 a sense that the falsehood in its legendary translation 
 may be called unimportant. He has translated the 
 blessing on the poor into sympathy with the van- 
 quished ; he has made failure pathetic, and lifted resig- 
 nation into the region of heroic endeavour. We have 
 compared Virgil with Wordsworth, and it may be said 
 that the poem, where Wordsworth has clothed the idea 
 of Christian resignation in a classic dialect, is no more 
 than the expansion of a few words from the ^neid. 
 Laodamia, the wife whose love calls back her husband 
 across the barrier of death, sa3's in many words only 
 what Creusa, the wife whose love causes her herself to 
 pass that barrier, says in a few : — " Why this immo- 
 derate grief, beloved spouse ? It is the W'ill of God." ^ 
 Not the will of one without whom no sparrow falls 
 to the ground, in whose e3'es our hairs are all num- 
 bered. Such a will, if we can for a moment discern it, 
 craves our embrace rather than our resignation. The 
 fate that tore Creusa from passionate devotion was the 
 will of one who was not loving, not exactly just, certainly 
 not careful to apportion the sufferings to the needs of 
 each one. But it was a will fixed on a design including 
 a vast benefit to the human race — the incorporation of 
 the civilized world in a single system of law and order, 
 the establishment of a single rule that was to give peace 
 to a storm-tossed world. And for such an aim it was 
 worth while to suficr and to perish ; the sacrifice would 
 be made by any one who could realize that gain of which 
 it was the price. 
 
 ' ^neid, ii. 775, 6.
 
 1 82 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 The end was worth the means, on the whole. But 
 in that end there is no compensation for the sufferers. 
 Rather the sufferers do but shadow forth as individuals 
 what nations must endure under the stern dominion 
 which the Gods prepared. The pangs of Dido prefigure 
 and embody the pangs of Carthage : the Queen perishes, 
 as her city is to perish ; and the very words in which 
 the Trojans, entreating her shelter, deprecate the idea of 
 hostile intentions toward her people, seem to reflect upon 
 the barbarous policy to be carried out against her city 
 by the descendants of those to whom she gives a gene- 
 rous shelter.-^ The dominion towards which the whole 
 action of the story moves on was one of crushing 
 severity, and this thought seems never out of the mind 
 of the poet, who treats it as an ordinance of Heaven. 
 Nevertheless he contemplates the stately structure with 
 awe that is not servile ; he feels it to belong to that order 
 of colossal events which must be explained by Divine 
 purpose, and in that light submission takes the aspect of 
 a religious duty. The craving of his soul is for repose. 
 His storm-tossed spirit poured its yearnings into the 
 wail of his wandering hero, and he uttered as aspirations 
 after the unbuilt Rome that desire for the staple Empire 
 which, after the long earthquake of the civil wars, he 
 imagined and desired with passionate need as the very 
 presentation and embodiment of the City of God. There 
 is a passage in the ^Eneid that bears the comparison it 
 invites with one of the most striking parts of the Old 
 Testament. When the servant of Elisha, terrified at the 
 crowd of hostile Syrians, turns to his master for comfort, 
 he is answered by the prayer that his eyes may be opened, 
 and by the sight of the chariots of fire that form the 
 
 1 " Non nos aut ferro Libycos populare Penates 
 Veuimus, aut raptas ad littora vertere prsedas." 
 
 — ^neid, i. 526.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 183 
 
 invisible guards of the Holy Cit3^^ The revelation to 
 /Eneas by his Divine mother of the invisible host come 
 not to guard but to destroy the city of doom would 
 be felt not less full of significance and poetry if w^e 
 could make the comparison fairly. True, the vision of 
 Elisha is full of triumph, and that of ^neas has the 
 aspect of despair. But at the core of that despair lies 
 a hope capable of infinite expansion. The gods have 
 indeed deserted Tro}^ ; " Let them that are in Judaea flee 
 unto the mountains " is the warning prefigured no less 
 clearly than the vision of Elisha is recalled. But the fall 
 of Troy no less than the fall of Jerusalem precedes a 
 mystic resurrection ; from its ashes shall arise a city 
 not unworthy, in the imagination of Virgil, to be set 
 beside all that is loftiest in human achievement. The 
 severity of Heaven, interpreted by Divine Love, must 
 be at all times an idea full of hope and consolation. But 
 many influences when Virgil wrote prepared the mind of 
 humanity to receive this idea with a peculiar welcome. 
 He saw glimmering in the future a mystic vision of 
 Peace ; " his heart was stirred by yearnings after a blessed 
 unity of all life and all nature, and found this unity for 
 the first time suggested by the world without. Human 
 history embodied the idea of purpose, and Will suggests 
 even when it does not express Love, The mere wide- 
 reaching habit of submission to central power, the stately 
 
 ' II. Kings vi. 17. Compare Alncid, ii. 601, ff. : — 
 " Xon tibi Tyndaridis facies invisa Lacasnaj 
 Culpatusve Paris ; divum inclementia, divum, 
 Has cvertit opes, stcriiitque a culmine Trojani. 
 Aspicc, namquc omncni, C|u;x,' nunc obducta tuenti 
 Mortales hebctat visus tibi, ct humida circuni 
 Caligat, nubem eripiam. " 
 
 * " Magnus ab integro sacclorum nascitur ordo 
 Jam nova progenies cqjIo demiuitur alto. 
 Jam redit ct Virgo, rcdeunt Saturnia rcgna." 
 
 — Ec. iv.
 
 i84 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 and growing fabric of universal Law, claimed a sort of 
 reverence that passed into religion. Whether the dying 
 request of the poet to destroy his poem was due in any 
 measure to some dim prophetic anticipations of the ver- 
 dict of History on the Empire, whether some flash of 
 the inspiration of genius revealed to him the fugitive 
 and injurious character of that dominion his Jove had 
 pronounced eternal, we cannot say. He was fastidious, 
 aspiring, exacting in his ideal ; his poem had not received 
 its last touches ; perhaps that was all. But if the other 
 feeling had come in, it would have thrown a strange light 
 on his relations to his own time, and to that which was 
 to succeed him. 
 
 When, therefore, Virgil hails the foundation of the 
 Empire with a record of the legendary past full of mere 
 fiction, and yet containing a prophecy of its eternity, 
 we must not look upon him as a courtly sycophant 
 inaugurating the new art of flattery by a prostitution 
 of genius. Virgil, belonging by blood and bound by 
 sympathy to the conquered Italian race, while culture 
 and friendship attached him to the court of Augustus, 
 was fitted to express both a true loyalty for a ruler of 
 Rome, and a deep sympathy for its subjects and victims. 
 The two feelings seem inharmonious, and in this nine- 
 teenth century after Christ perhaps they are so. We 
 look back upon a long course of struggle between the 
 rulers and the ruled, and discern that no earthly power 
 is the rightful claimant of uncritical submission from 
 mature human beings. We see that the great unity 
 which Virgil welcomed was, in the long course of things, 
 
 1 " His ego nee metas rerum nee tempora pono ; 
 Imperium sine fine dedi. 
 
 ****** 
 Nascetur pulchra Trojanus origine Cassar 
 Imperium oceano, famam qui terminet astris." 
 
 — yEneid, i. 278-287.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 1S5 
 
 the foe of Liberty without being the friend of Peace. 
 While we cannot but recognize the sway of Rome as 
 an important and indispensable stage in the evolution of 
 European civilization — as divine in the sense that that 
 whole evolution is divine — we see also that the antagonism 
 of barbaric invasion was divine in just the same sense, 
 and brought its own contribution to the life of modern 
 Europe. And this would have been to Virgil like saying 
 that good and evil were both divine. He saw a great 
 unity impressed on all life ; and though he felt a keen and 
 almost oppressive sympathy with the life that was crushed, 
 still he never faltered in the conviction that loyalty was 
 due to this unity, and that the sacrifice was made for an 
 adequate object. And then to recognize that this unity 
 was to be broken up, that, so far as it was to endure, it 
 was to pass into the realm of the Invisible, and that even 
 as a Church it was again to become an object of attack 
 from the healthy national life, and of repulsion to the true 
 individual conscience — this was impossible to any one 
 who hailed the Empire. It was not impossible to hate 
 and oppose it, but to see as much of its Divine purpose 
 as Virgil did, and also to see that it was to be swept 
 away, was a discernment only possible to the reverted 
 gaze of History. To anticipate the verdict of History 
 on his own time would not help a man of genius to 
 express and explain it. Doubtless the verdict of tlistor}-' 
 will contain all that is true in his expression. But 
 Virgil could not have told us what the Roman Empire 
 was if he saw what it was to become. We arc not 
 meant to judge any stage of life from the point of view 
 of our successors. Looking back, we see good every- 
 where, and evil everywhere. If the men of the time 
 had seen this, life would be even more desultory, more 
 purposeless, than it is. 
 
 We gain a clue to the whole meaning of the change
 
 1 86 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 that was coming over the world, and to Virgil's part in 
 producing and responding to it, when we note the place 
 that woman takes in the ^neid. The Iliad is a story 
 of men. Women take a large part in it, as in all 
 vivid dramas of life. But they are mere subordinates 
 — the pictures of Andromache, of Helen, beautiful as 
 they are, occupy the background of interest ; they are 
 mere accessories to the male actors. Helen, though 
 she ought to be the principal person of the drama, is 
 a faint, delicate sketch, and for the greater part of the 
 poem we are inclined to forget her altogether. But 
 when we turn to the ^Eneid the whole action depends 
 on female influence. Its most impressive figure is the 
 Carthaginian queen; its central Deity is the Divine mother. 
 The worship of the Virgin seems in the greater part of 
 the poem just trembling into life ; it is one of the many 
 respects in which Virgil may be considered in a double 
 sense the poet of Rome. The image of motherly love, 
 glimmering through the storms of life with a continual 
 reminder of Divine care, and a continual claim on human 
 submission, more prefigures that element in Christian 
 faith which was welcomed by the world with the most 
 urgent sense of need, than any of the loftiest utterances 
 of Greek religion. Homer knows nothing of it; the 
 tragedians only hint at it ; the mysteries may have 
 cherished it, but it attains its first literary expression 
 in Virgil ; and nothing surely distinguishes more clearly 
 the purity of his character and refinement of his genius 
 than the transformation of the ignoble temptress of the 
 Iliad into that ideal of almost omnipotent power shown 
 forth in beneficent tenderness, which Christendom for so 
 many ages accepted as its guiding star.-^ 
 
 1 Any one who will read carefully the last part of ^neid ii. from 589 will dis- 
 cover the suggestion of a " Holy Family" — the Divine Mother, the child with 
 the nimbus, and the mystic Star. See note at end of volume.
 
 ROME AND THE REIGN OF LAW. 187 
 
 The worship of the Divine mother links in wondrous 
 harmony the worlds that lie beneath and above humanity. 
 In the mother's love some ocean seems to break through 
 the shallow vessel which holds ordinary love, as though 
 the Infinite came welling through the limitations of indi- 
 vidual human nature ; what exalted virtue hardl}^ pro- 
 duces in any other relation, the mere conditions of phy- 
 siology seem to ensure between the mother and child. 
 Here we seem to have reached a law wider than 
 humanity ; here we come down to the primal rock of 
 sentient nature, and discern the elements of morality that 
 are older than man. It needs the barest hint of permis- 
 sion to justify worship, where such an ideal passes into 
 the Divine world. Out of a few scanty mentions in the 
 Gospels, some of them apparently conveying a distinct 
 warning against the tendency which fed upon them, 
 Christendom made itself a goddess, and transformed its 
 3'earnings after what Goethe calls " the eternal womanli- 
 ness " into the legend of a Virgin Mother. The subjects 
 of Rome v^^elcomed a mother in the Heavens ; on earth 
 they knew only a hard master, and the Divine Father 
 had associations that shut out love. The transforma- 
 tion of the goddess of lawless self-pleasing love into the 
 goddess of a maternal compassionate love, forms the 
 clue to the power of Virgil over the ages that were to 
 come ; it shows us the imitator of Homer as the teacher 
 of Dante ; the transformation of the classical into the 
 Christian ideal of life. The elevation of woman is the 
 symbol of all that is most vital in that change; the 
 new meaning given to the passive side of life comes out 
 in the new honour paid to the passive sex, and the 
 elevation of that sex into the Divine world. 
 
 When Virgil wrote, the virtues even of the slave were 
 emerging into a development whicli Christianity was 
 shortly to recognize and adopt. Obedience to steady
 
 iS8 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 systematic power, whether the power be in its own nature 
 good or evil, does bring out some valuable qualities 
 which nothing else can develop, and the list of Christian 
 martyrs records the stored-up force of generations of 
 patient, resolute endurance. The death in the amphi- 
 theatre that witnessed to the faith of Christ, witnessed 
 also to power bequeathed by men who had no faith to 
 enlighten their last moments with visions of an opening 
 Heaven. The victim of Roman cruelty, whose only 
 protest was the cry, "I am a citizen of Rome," ^ died 
 in a spirit that prepared his successors in calamity to 
 triumph in their citizenship of the Heavenly City ; for 
 the sense of some dim justice accessible in the name of 
 the City has a real, though a remote, relation to the 
 love and power manifest in the death of Christ. Not 
 only so ; the spirit of fortitude thus developed spread 
 beyond the limits of those ideas by which it was 
 nourished. When we read of female slaves enduring 
 the extremity of torture rather than betray the unhappy 
 mistress they could not save," or finding strength to 
 end life under the very hands of the tormentors lest 
 the exquisite anguish should wring from half-conscious 
 lips denunciations of those who were, as the historian 
 reminds us, not bound to the sufferer by blood, and 
 hardly by acquaintance,^ we feel that the new consecration 
 of suffering and of weakness, the message of the Cross, 
 was realized by those who had never heard it. Rome, 
 the tyrant of the world, taught the lesson of Christ ; 
 under its stern and often cruel rule was learnt the 
 power of submission ; and that power was ready, when 
 adopted by a new faith, to renew the world. 
 
 1 Cic, "In Verrem," V. 62, 2 Tac, Annals, xiv. 60. 
 
 3 Epicharis, a freedwoman, in the conspiracy of Piso. ' ' At illam non verbera, 
 non ignes, non ira eo acrius torquentium ne a femina spernerentur, pervicere 
 quin objecta denegaret " {Ibid., xv. 57). It is one of the few passages in which 
 the historian shows a certain sympathy with tlie victim.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 
 
 The law of human progress is a complex one. Change 
 makes itself manifest at first, mainly as loss. A nega- 
 tive succeeds a positive stage, and it is only after long 
 patience that we find the new life develop into some 
 reminiscence of the old. The perfection of manhood 
 contains the perfection of childhood, but boyhood seems 
 often a mere breaking awa}'' from all that is pure and 
 beautiful in the earlier stage. Youth is negative, criti- 
 cal ; the trust of the child reappears only in the trust of 
 maturity. The caterpillar has far more life than the 
 chrysalis, and if our knowledge stopped with that stage 
 of growth we should believe that growth was death. 
 The three conditions which we may here discover as 
 distinct stages in an upward progress are dimly visible 
 in history. The change of moral ideal from ancient to 
 modern life may be roughly described as a substitution 
 of the aims of the individual for those of the citizen, a 
 transference of hope and fear from corporate to per- 
 sonal achievement. The transition takes place by the 
 same law of development as that which transforms the 
 zoophyte into the animal ; it is a change from a lower 
 to a higher form of life ; the gain is immense and obvious. 
 In our own day the deadliest war and the worst explo- 
 sion of crime alike bear witness, that ordinary men 
 now recognize a relation among human beings as such, 
 of which the best men of antiquity had no conception.
 
 I90 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 Nevertheless, when we compare our sense of union with 
 theirs, we shall often see the loss more clearly than the 
 gain, even after eighteen centuries of growth. Perhaps 
 the wider union can never be recognized as the narrower 
 was ; perhaps the large ideal must always appear vacilla- 
 ting and imperfect, when it is compared with the small. 
 
 Much more shall we feel this if we return to the period 
 that intervenes between the ancient and modern world ; 
 to that age which we may, according to our point of 
 view, call the death of the city, or the birth of the nation. 
 In the dark winter that intervenes between the autumn 
 and the spring, the instincts which measured the vital 
 strength of antiquity had much less scope than they 
 have now. The nation is not the dominant interest that 
 the city was, but still in modern life, as in ancient life, 
 men have felt themselves part of a whole. Only in the 
 epoch of transition was there no bond from man to man, 
 except that which united one man to all men. Men 
 have never been so isolated since then. Christianity has 
 always been a strong binding influence, if also a strong 
 dividing influence ; but at its dawn there was in the 
 whole world no binding influence except that which 
 included the whole world. For while the union of the 
 city or of the nation is a vital reality, that agglomeration 
 which makes up an Empire is strong by means of negation 
 only ; it lives on the crushed lives of the races that are 
 submitted to it; and the moment they awaken to energetic 
 self-assertion it must perish. It marks a complete blank 
 of national life. The dominion of Roman imperialism 
 was indeed the occasion of a new sense of individual 
 life, a sudden and yet permanent illumination of those 
 relations which bind man to man. But the bond which 
 unites one man to all men is a weak thing if it stand 
 alone. The sense of human kindred, if it know no 
 gradation, is powerless to overcome the repulsions of
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. igr 
 
 self-interest or aversion, and to weld separate individuals 
 into a whole that can withstand shocks from without. 
 Even in the best men of that time (who, indeed, may be 
 reckoned among the best men of any time) we do still dis- 
 cern, that meagreness of moral life, that poverty of organic 
 relation which in other representatives of the age comes 
 out in every utterance, and which is stamped upon the 
 history of this period in characters that none may ignore. 
 For the history of the first three centuries of our 
 era is inexplicable without a constant recollection of this 
 moral poverty. The rule of the bad Roman Emperors is 
 remembered as a t3'pe of cruel and oppressive tyranny, 
 even by persons who have no equally definite ideas of 
 any other. Perhaps the dominion of a Nero was not 
 really so oppressive to the body of the people as that 
 of many less celebrated tyrants ; but still we have to 
 account for the strange paralysis that lay on the minds 
 of those distinguished men who did suffer and could 
 have resisted. Other tyrants have been supported 
 either by the spell of genius or the authority of here- 
 ditary claim. Genius in the first century after Christ 
 seemed extinct, and inherited authority was an idea asso- 
 ciated with barbarism and opposed to all the glorious 
 memories of the past.^ The tyrants of the Roman Empire, 
 the most widespread tyranny the world has ever known, 
 were as devoid of energetic character and resolute will 
 as of the prestige of tradition. They had as little legi- 
 timate claim as Napoleon, and as little genius as the 
 Bourbons. Yet as we read how they were obeyed, we 
 feel as if they must have possessed something which all 
 modern tyrants have lacked. Brave and guiltless men, 
 when their death was decreed by the Emperor, heard in 
 vain the appeal of what would seem the irresistible voice 
 
 ^ " IJrly-m Komam a priiicipio rcges habucrc. Libcrtatcm et consulatum L. 
 liruiui iniiiiuii." — lac, Ann., i. i.
 
 192 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 of common sense to make use of the common sympathy 
 and the common danger ; -^ they submitted to the doom 
 in resisting which they would have found thousands of 
 comrades ; they even inflicted it with their own hands 
 at the imperial order. The history of the Roman 
 Empire is as much a problem as a narrative. Why 
 should a General who had enlarged the boundaries of 
 Roman dominion fall on his spear at the command of 
 Nero ? "-^ Why should the virtuous sages he sent to the 
 scaffold bow to his will as to something divine ? ^ The 
 answer is as certain as it is instructive. Because on the 
 side of the oppressor was an ideal of corporate unity, and 
 on the side of the victim was nothing but himself. The 
 traditional loyalty to the State had been transferred to 
 a succession of parvenus, and the filial obedience rendered 
 by the citizen of the Republic was succeeded by the 
 servile obedience rendered by the subject of the Empire. 
 The Emperor had no true strength, but there was no 
 other strength than his. While his victims were mere 
 individuals, in him was incarnate the ideal of the past ; 
 he represented the dead Commonwealth ; and noble 
 spirits, like the faithful hound, keep a long watch beside 
 a corpse. 
 
 The power of resisting tyranny lies in the sense of 
 some organic union between its victims. The common 
 suffering of individuals does not of itself make them 
 into a unity. If they feel that nothing is injured but 
 themselves, they may indeed resist what is intolerable ; 
 
 1 As Rubellius Plautus, who incurred the jealousy of Nero, and was its 
 unresisting victim, A.D. 62. See Tac, Ann., xiv. 58, 59 ; cf. appeal to Piso, xv. 
 59 ; and the lament of the historian, xvi. 16. 
 
 2 Corbulo, the conqueror of the Parthians, thus killed himself, A.D. 67. 
 
 3 See Seneca, " De Tranquillitate Animi," xiv. 3, for a strilving instance of 
 this adulation in the case of Canus Julius, whom Seneca calls one of the greatest 
 cf men, and who thanked Caligula for sending him to the scaffold. The most 
 striking case of ignoble submission is mentioned by the same writer, as shown 
 to the same prince by a Roman knight named Pastor (" De Ira.," ii. 33).
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 193 
 
 but exactly in proportion as they are good and generous, 
 they will be slow to disturb, for the sake of any concern 
 personal to themselves, the advantages produced by any 
 kind of settled order. An injury, if it be not a wrong, 
 is ahva3's more gladly endured than resisted by a noble 
 nature ; it is the generous flame of indignation alone 
 which can fuse the varied elements of individual suffering 
 into the unity that makes a multitude formidable. And 
 thus no number of individuals will possess a common 
 strength, if they are united onl^'' by impulses that slacken 
 in the heart of every man in proportion as he is un- 
 selfish. When men have arisen in successful revolt, 
 they have felt something more than that tyranny was 
 painful ; they have been united by the sense that the 
 t^'rant had abused a sacred trust, that he could be called 
 to account for the charge of a sacred deposit. They 
 have represented some corporate unity ; they have felt 
 themselves bound together by a common race or a 
 common faith. When there is no binding influence on 
 the side of the victims but that common wish for life 
 and ease which is felt by every man, while on the 
 side of the oppressor there is even the ghost of a 
 great idea, the one will be strong, and the many almost 
 powerless. 
 
 Hence that ideal of resignation, which we have seen 
 in Virgil as the moral bequest of Roman dominion, came 
 under the Empire to gather to itself all the moral energy 
 of the nation, and men were strong only in the virtues 
 of the slave. As we look at the outward history of the 
 time, we can remember only what is equally true, that 
 they were weak in his vices. Wc cannot in any other 
 period bring forward, either on so large or on so small 
 a scale, illustrations of a general servility. We need 
 it to explain the submission of a world ; we discern it 
 also in the minutest habits of polite society. No other 
 
 N
 
 194 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 period has possessed an important and influential class 
 of men who had once occupied the position of menials, 
 and having exhibited the abjectness of slavery as shown 
 in the cringing dependent, revealed its other side in the 
 insolence of the upstart, and the cruelty that is bred of 
 inherited fear. A slave utters the loftiest aspirations 
 of that age ; its freedmen show forth its warnings. The 
 business of life was servility ; those must have succeeded 
 best who had known its lowest depths. Thus the spirit 
 that made the Empire possible was exercised and de- 
 veloped in all social intercourse ; and politeness showed 
 itself in a series of attentions not unlike those of the 
 upper servants of a luxurious household to a pampered 
 master (only that in our age some of them vv^ould be to 
 the taste of hardly any one). A sort of inverted sub- 
 servience seems to have found satisfaction in attentions 
 void of all other object than the manifestation of servilit}^; 
 those men who made the world tremble showed most 
 clearly the tastes engendered by slavery. " Tremble 
 before the slave when he bursts his fetters, not before 
 the freeman," says Schiller,^ and the lesson has never 
 been better illustrated than by the society of the Roman 
 Empire. The distinction between the freedman and the 
 freeman was one the Roman of that age could never 
 forget ; it is one he has left recorded in deeds and words 
 which convey its meaning to all time."^ 
 
 1 " Vor dem Sklaven, wenn er die Kette bricht, 
 Vor dem freien Menschen erzittert nicht." 
 
 — Schiller, " Die Worte des Glaubens." 
 
 - The writers who seem to me to bring out most forcibly the tendencies of a 
 servile society, reinforced from the ranks of slaves, are Martial and Seneca, 
 chiefly the former. I should not think so many begging-letters were contained 
 in any other book belonging to literature as in his epigrams ; they are a testi- 
 mony o universal habits of mendicancy, which make his gross flattery of 
 Domitian [e.g., i. 17, 28) a comparative trifle. But perhaps the most striking 
 single llustration of this servile spirit, as it was encouraged by Stoicism, is the 
 flattery of Nero in the opening of the Pharsalia, i. 33-66. If all the miseries
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 155 
 
 How deeply rooted was this spirit of servility is shown 
 by its hold on the intellect of the age. Genius has 
 never stooped so low as in the abasement of men of 
 letters before Nero and Domitian. Perhaps they will, 
 in all ages, be apt to be found on the side of submission ; 
 students are generally timid in the face of revolutionary 
 change. They are apt to feel that the din of civil tumult 
 interrupts things more precious than it can ever establish; 
 and men trained in the atmosphere of study and medi- 
 tation find it easier to die than to resist. " If all are 
 grateful to him whose overruling power secures un- 
 troubled repose," says Seneca,^ " the man whose leisure 
 is occupied with profound and fertile meditation will 
 surely, considering to whom he owes this priceless trea- 
 sure, be ready to exclaim, in the words of Virgil's shep- 
 herd, ' O Meliboeus, a god has given us this repose ! ' " 
 the god being Nero. Nor did he grudge his life as the 
 price of it, when the claim was made by the god of his 
 ignoble idolatry. No far-reaching, deep-rooted national 
 life made a background and shelter for the separate 
 individualities which had formerly owed all their vigour 
 and beauty to such a support. Whatever survived of 
 the belief in that national life ranked itself on the side 
 of submission to Nero ; whatever suggested resistance 
 belonged to the mere unit. The ccmmDnplace secular 
 world was useful only as a husk to preserve the little 
 kernel of Philosophy ; it had no sacredness of its own. 
 The only important duty of the Prince was to keep 
 things quiet, in order that the Philosopher might think 
 and write in peace. If that was all that could be accom- 
 plished by the best of princes, it is not surprising that 
 Nero was not felt to be the worst. 
 
 of the civil wars were the necessary price to pay for tlie blessing of Nero's rule, 
 says the nephew of Seneca, they were well worth while. The first three books 
 of the I'harsalia were published in A.D. 62. 
 1 Epist. 73 ; r/. Virgil, Ec. 1.
 
 1 95 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 Men know little of the meaning of a true Resignation 
 when they imagine it to be the foe of manly activity, of 
 heroic aspiration. No heroic achievement is possible 
 without it ; nothing great was ever done but by one who 
 knew how to endure ; in all achievement lies the latent 
 heat of renunciation. But a true resignation implies a 
 worth}^ allegiance ; it implies some organic unity for the 
 sake of which all that pertains to the Self may be resigned. 
 The dying Socrates preaches such a resignation when he 
 refuses to quit the prison from which escape is easy, and 
 declares that the laws of his country sound in his ears 
 like some strange music deafening him to the appeal of 
 his eager disciple,^ and bidding him rather endure the 
 worst that can be inflicted, than resist the claim whose 
 validity he feels more deeply than any other certainty. 
 But the d3ang Corbulo, falling on his sword at the com- 
 mand of Nero, preaches the very opposite lesson ; he 
 warns all who follow his history against the slavish 
 spirit that prepared a world of victims, and set a monster 
 on the throne. He shows not the heroism that can lay 
 down life for a noble cause, but the weariness and 
 despair that found it easier to die than to resist any 
 authority clothed with an appearance of legitimate claim ; 
 he measures the vacuum of hope and fear that remained 
 even for a brave and successful soldier, when the Com- 
 monwealth had ceased to exist. 
 
 The meagreness and poverty of the private life of 
 antiquity is best seen in the life of which this private 
 side was richest. Cicero is known to us much as we 
 know the hero of a modern biography ; we have his 
 intimate letters, as well as his public utterances, and 
 know his private opinions almost as well as the facts of 
 
 ^ TCLi'Ta , . . iyil) 00K(2 aKoveiy, uianep ol Kopv^avrtuipres ruiv avKQiv ookov- 
 (jiv aKOveiv, koX iv f/xol avTTj i] tjxtJ to6tuv tuiv 'Kb-^uv /3o/x/3ei /cat Troiei ti-q 
 ovvaffdai. Tuiv dWuv aKoveiv (Plato, Crito., 54).
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 197 
 
 his history. In him we come near enough to the hfe of 
 a Roman gentleman, in order to see the strange gaps 
 which it exhibits as compared with any hfe among the 
 cultured classes in modern times. Perhaps the most 
 striking change, from this point of view, is the entire lack 
 of what we mean by a sense of honour. We must 
 descend to an uneducated stratum of society before we 
 reach the bhmtness of feeling which seems to have 
 characterized the best society of Rome. When a letter 
 not addressed to himself falls into the hands of Cicero, 
 and he wishes to know what is inside it, it seems to be 
 the most natural thing in the world to break the seal 
 and peruse its contents. The only approach to an apology 
 is his request to the husband of the writer, to whom he 
 mentions the fact, never to let her know what he has 
 done.^ An impertinent footman in London would be 
 more embarrassed by the confession than was the finest 
 gentleman of Rome. 
 
 The same moral poverty is discernible in a coldness 
 and coarseness of his private relations in other ways. 
 The reader comes with a strange shock on the story of 
 his second marriage ; it would be impossible for any 
 equally affectionate modern, to have divorced a wife who 
 had been in tender relations with him for thirty years, 
 and immediately married a young heiress. He was 
 evidently the most warm-hearted and considerate of 
 kinsmen ; yet his father's death is huddled into a letter 
 of commissions with a brevity which in an intimate 
 communication an Englishman would feel jarring in the 
 
 1 .See Cic, Ad .\tt., v. 11. The letter he opened was one from Pilia, the 
 wife of Atticus, perhaps referring to the eonjugal troubles of his brother, 
 (Juintiis, wlio was married to Atticus's sister. " Accepi fasciculum in quo erat 
 epistola I'iliae, abstuh, aperui, legi," is his straightforward account of the matter. 
 Another time he tells Atticus that he had advised his nephew alw.ays to open 
 and read any letter to his (the young man's) father— "Si quid forte sit quod 
 opus sit sciri " (Ad Att., vi. 3).
 
 198 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 announcement of almost any death among kindred ; and 
 the betrothal of his beloved TuHia is mentioned with 
 just the same apparent carelessness. It is hardly pos- 
 sible to doubt that Cicero was an excellent son ; it is 
 certain that he was an excellent fother; but private 
 relation was evidently a slighter thing to him than 
 it is to an average man in modern England or France. 
 Certainly the lack of delicacy was not personal ; there 
 never was a nature more adapted than that of Cicero for 
 all the fine shades of feeling by which intercourse is kept 
 pure and eas3^ But he belonged to a race that had no 
 moral attention for any private relation, inasmuch as it 
 took no interest in any individual claim. Everything in- 
 dividual was, as it w^ere, considered in a hurry ; the im- 
 portant business of life summoned thought away to other 
 realms, and the group of sentiments and impulses which 
 make up the moral standard of refinement and culture 
 were as little dreamt of among the refined and cultivated 
 classes of Rome as in modern Europe among those crushed 
 by penury, and dulled by arduous and unremitting toil. 
 In his life we see the difference between a private hfe 
 enriched by a long tradition of moral interest, and one 
 which is a mere parenthesis in the life of the citizen. 
 
 But the interests of the citizen came to an end. 
 This bare and meagre life became the only one. And 
 men were thus driven back for the first time on the 
 meaning of the word Self. There were only two objects 
 of attention in the whole world which could be regarded 
 as a unity. The first was that vast Empire which en- 
 folded in its rigid embrace so various a group of races 
 that it might well seem to include all humanity ; the 
 second was the soul of man. Nothing came between 
 that could be called One. Athens, Sparta, Thebes — 
 all that gathered up the glorious memories of the past ; 
 Gaul, Britain, Spain — all then known of that which pre-
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 199 
 
 figured the development of the future, were ahke mere 
 fragments of the Empire ; none could form the focus of 
 any inspiring hope ; any attempt to discover such was 
 associated with disappointment. As for the Empire 
 itself, it was far too vast and too various to exercise in 
 any practical sense the political capacities and energies 
 bequeathed from days when the life of the City was a 
 reality. That statel^^, satisfying life had passed away, 
 leaving no successor. There was for the subject of the 
 Empire a sense of repose, of security, which the citizen 
 of antiquit}' had never known ; but that which had made 
 life worth living was gone utterly. What could occupy 
 the void left by such a bereavement ? Only that which 
 was a unity in even a deeper sense than the City had 
 ever been ; that which is the very type of oneness ; that 
 which each man means when he says " I." There we 
 reach not only a unity, but the Unity. It may be 
 thought that it is in so special a sense tJie Unity that 
 there could have been no period of history at which 
 men made the discovery that it was so, but we think 
 thus only when we fail in historic imagination. The 
 correlation of our moral being is no less complex than 
 that of our ph3'sical organism, and here also we shall 
 find loss and gain hand in hand. " When the seeds in 
 our fruits become atrophied," says Darwin, " the fruit 
 itself gains largely in size and quality." In the evolu- 
 tion of our modern life this process has been inverted, 
 and when we return to the i^ich civil life of antiquity, 
 we find that, as compared with our own, it had a similar 
 price. Nothing is so hostile to the spiritual life, at any 
 time, as the political ; nothing so entirely calls away 
 attention from the problems of the inward world as 
 the responsibilities of the statesman ; and we might 
 call every citizen of antiquity in some sense a states- 
 man. We must exaggerate all political interest, we must
 
 200 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 enormously diminish all other interest, before we can 
 appreciate the absorbing power of the life of the State 
 on a citizen of Athens. Thus only shall we understand 
 the immense fund of intellectual energy released and 
 craving exercise when the Old World came to an end ; 
 thus only enter into the meaning of those emphatic plati- 
 tudes, as they seem to us, which meet us in the more 
 earnest writings of this time. Platitudes to the reader 
 of the nineteenth century, to the writer of the first or 
 second they are original and striking thoughts. If we 
 could imagine ourselves entering upon moral questions 
 of which we found no hint in the New Testament, we 
 should put ourselves in the position of those writers 
 who at this time began to investigate a world of reflec- 
 tion, of emotion, of intellectual interest, on which Plato 
 had hardly touched. It was in very truth to them the 
 entrance on a new world. 
 
 The citizen of Athens or Rome had felt himself to 
 derive all his worth from his relation to an invisible 
 being which preceded, and would survive, him — the 
 State. The life that he most prized was a life that he 
 believed immortal, and it was his participation in this 
 which gave value to his own. The subject of the 
 Roman Empire could cherish no such belief. He stood 
 in no relation to any city, for Rome had ceased to be a 
 city — she was a world. He was no longer a portion 
 of any other life ; he felt, for the first time, that he 
 must be himself a whole. He could not any longer say 
 IVe with any fulness of meaning ; he began to realize 
 what it is that each man means when he says /. As 
 the fruit withered, the seed detached itself. It is not 
 that this was a time of vigorous individuality ; quite 
 the reverse. There was less individuality during the 
 two centuries to which these remarks chiefly apply ^ in 
 
 1 ?.if.,irom the death of Virgil, 19 B.C., to the death of Marcus Aurehus,
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 201 
 
 the whole civiHzed world than there was during the life 
 of Greece, within a region about as large as Wales. 
 But as men missed the exceptional endowment, they 
 learned to prize that universal quality of which it is no 
 more than the conspicuous exhibition. Everywhere the 
 exceptional was changing to the universal. The proud 
 privilege of Roman citizenship was vulgarized by the 
 intrusion of a mob ; even the distinction of bond and 
 free, though not in the slightest degree weakened in 
 practice, was beginning to be felt, by the foremost 
 thinkers of the da}', out of harmony with the true ideal 
 of humanity. The idea of the State — that which is 
 essentially limited, that which, according to the con- 
 ditions of ancient life, was connected with something 
 exceptional, inasmuch as it could not include in its 
 organic framework every human being who came under 
 its sway — this idea was giving way to the most ex- 
 pansive, the most widely inclusive that is known to 
 abstract thought, the idea of Nature. 
 
 A man had felt himself called on to live as a citizen ; 
 he was now bidden to live according to Nature. The 
 injunction is little more than an epitaph on the ideal of 
 ancient life, and when it has been repeated in the modern 
 world, it has lost half its meaning. From the most con- 
 crete object of human 103'alty the men of that day turned 
 towards the most abstract. The city was indeed an invi- 
 sible reality, but those outward images with which it was 
 associated were small and definite almost beyond w^iat a 
 modern can bring himself to realize.^ Nature, on the other 
 hand, is the vaguest idea, perhaps, that we associate with 
 a single word. It is strange to reflect that about two thou- 
 
 180 A.n. The half-century which saw the invasion of Xerxes, 500-450 c.c, 
 )ias a far greater wealth of character and genius. 
 
 1 The minute range of impressive associations is vividly brought homo to 
 the reader by the whole of the Q'Idipus at Colonus, One constantly imagines 
 distances ten times as great as the reality.
 
 202 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 sand years after the belief of Life according to Nature came 
 to men as a gospel, John Stuart Mill devoted an Essay, 
 left behind as the expression of his latest thought, to ask — 
 What is Nature ? How could the Roman Stoics have felt 
 it any gain to live according to something of which Mill, 
 looking back on many centuries of other people's study 
 of it, and his own long life of studying their opinions, 
 declared that he did not know what it was ? Because 
 the word came to them as the symbol of a sudden 
 expansion of moral aim which was best expressed 
 by the vaguest of names. It started them on a new 
 path ; it carried them far away from that which, they 
 clearly saw, should be left behind. It came with the 
 irresistible charm of a new inspiration to men cumbered 
 and shackled by the ruins of the old ; it left the old 
 barriers out of sight, and men for the hour asked no 
 more. To inhabit the city of Zeus ^ instead of the city 
 of Cecrops seemed a wonderful expansion given to all 
 possibilities on which the heart of man could dwell ; and 
 in their recoil from what was narrow, the men of that 
 day failed to discern that in removing the limitations 
 of their ideal home they deprived it of all form. They 
 escaped from the river to the ocean, and forgot that 
 the change would leave them without guidance till they 
 learned to guide themselves by the stars. 
 
 The breeze of their own high aims, to a certain 
 extent, served to direct them. The words of all thinkers 
 in the age we speak of were full of a lofty humanity. 
 The extreme Radicals of our own day do not go beyond 
 them in their recognition of the truth, ignored or denied 
 by heroic Greece, that the sacred thing in man is his 
 humanity. But, indeed, that belief is so entirel}'- a com- 
 monplace of our day, that the only difference between 
 
 ^ "Fjicetvo^ fj.h rprjcri iruXi cplXr) KiKpowo? av be ovk (pe7s & voXi (jiD\-q At6s ; — 
 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, iv. 23.
 
 THE A GE OF DEA TH. 203 
 
 the highest Tory and the broadest Radical is as to the 
 fitness of their respective schemes for bringing this 
 fundamental truth into practice. " When you have 
 come to my age, my dear," said Sir Walter Scott to 
 his daughter, who had spoken of something as " vulgar " 
 which he thought undeserving of contempt, " you will 
 thank God that everything which is supremely precious 
 is common." He was essentially a Tory ; his genius 
 was quickened and stirred by all that was exceptional ; 
 the pomp of chivalry kindled his imagination, a tawdry 
 imitation of it ruined his life; yet that gentle rebuke to 
 his child expresses the deepest part of his ideal ; to the 
 very core of his being he felt, and rejoiced to feel, that 
 all which is supremely precious is common. There is 
 the ideal of the modern world ; in the ages of classic 
 antiquity the best of men had just as little S3'mpathy 
 with it as the worst had. 
 
 If we judge by men's words, we should say that in 
 the first century of our era, the latter standard was in 
 its fullest maturity substituted for the earlier. If we 
 judge by their deeds, we should say that the new day 
 had not yet begun to dawn. Seneca preaches a morality 
 that our own time has not surpassed ; and he may have 
 been a listener to that debate in the Senate which decided 
 on the slaughter of 400 innocent slaves.^ But we must 
 not think that words without deeds are necessarily 
 empty of all meaning. The birth of the Enthusiasm of 
 Humanity is a great epoch in tlie moral life of man, 
 even though wc must date it by words only. That 
 enthusiasm seemed in some sense a greater thing then 
 than it does now. The very fact that people did not 
 
 1 But that debate shows also that tlie feeling of the minority was growing 
 stronger. " Nemo unus contra ire ausus est," says the Historian, after giving 
 the arguments for severity, " ita dissonae voces respondebant, nunierum . . . 
 ac plurimorum indubilam innocenliam miserantiutn " (.'\nn., xiv. 45). This 
 was A.I). 60.
 
 204 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 act upon it kept it from perilous shocks. We have 
 seen, after eighteen centuries of the ideal, what it can- 
 not do; to the Roman Stoics it seemed omnipotent. It 
 may be said, that to us, as to them, its true powers 
 are untried ; but it has at all events been in the modern 
 world a standard of life steadily advancing in claim, 
 influencing always what men wish to seem, and some- 
 times, therefore, what they wish to be. Eighteen 
 hundred years ago nothing was known of the diffi- 
 culties of philanthropy ; the idea was unfamiliar, the 
 attempt to carry it out was unheard of. It was possible 
 to think that the attempt would unite the human race 
 with a firmer cohesion than that which bound the Roman 
 oligarchy of the past, that it would bring into a unity 
 such as that of Rome all that claimed the name of 
 man. 
 
 •^ The fact that an old ideal is perishing must always 
 be a stronger, or at least a more obvious, moral influence 
 than the fact that a new one is coming into life. A death 
 is more impressive than a birth. We always see what 
 we are losing more clearly than what we are gaining ; we 
 never, indeed, see what we have possessed so clearly as 
 in the moment of losing it. Hence we find impressed 
 on these first centuries of our era — the age between the 
 secure establishment of the Empire and that of Chris- 
 tianity — a set of feelings and beliefs that we best sum 
 up in describing it as the Age of Death. The words 
 may be taken quite literally. All life seems at that time 
 to have been coloured by an anticipation of its end. 
 Why, the reader asks continually, this new sense of im- 
 pressiveness in Death ? How can it be more significant 
 to one generation than to another, that man is snatched 
 away from all work and interest, often before he has 
 come to any full discernment of their purport, almost 
 always before he is ready to depart ? The sense of
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 205 
 
 hurry in life must be almost coeval with humanity ; 
 wherever men have lived they must have found Death 
 as much the interruption as the close of Life. Why at 
 this time do we come upon the sort of occupation of 
 mind about Death which usually occurs only on the 
 discovery of a new truth, which would, if it were pos- 
 sible, suggest that it was new in the world ? Because 
 in an important sense Death was new. It had been for 
 the first time in history recognized as an influence in the 
 career of nations. The citizen of the old world shared 
 in the perennial life of a commonwealth, and had no ear 
 for those lessons of mortality which did not touch the 
 deeper life. The subjects of the Empire had learnt that 
 the perennial life was not eternal. The new scope given 
 to the fact of mortality brought in this new impressive- 
 ness to the close of human life. Nothing is so impres- 
 sive as Death itself, and therefore, for those who live in 
 the full blaze of literary expression, nothing is so trite 
 as reflections about Death. But to the men of the first 
 and second centuries these reflections came like a new 
 revelation. An Englishman looking back on the vicissi- 
 tudes of the seventeen centuries which separate us from 
 the thinkers of that time is not more struck than they 
 were with the fact that a State can perish — is not so 
 much struck with it. All the variety of illustration inac- 
 cessible to them which we possess of that truth does not 
 equal in impressiveness the mere fact itself, when it was 
 recognized for the first time.^ 
 
 1 See the well-known letter of Scrvius Sulpicius on the death of Tullia, from 
 which Cicero declares himself to have derived much consolation, 'Ep. ad 
 Diversos (Ernesti), iv. 5 : — " Post me crat TF.sjina, ante Megara : dextra Pirxus 
 . . . quae oppida qiiodam tempore florentissima fuerunt." The English reader 
 knows the passage in " Childe Harold " — 
 
 " The Roman saw these tombs in his own age, 
 The sepulchres of cities, which excite 
 Sad wonder, and his yet surviving page 
 The moral lesson bears, drawn from such pilgrimage."
 
 2o6 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 The influence of the idea was curiously strong in 
 opposite directions. We have to describe it in language 
 of candid paradox ; death seems never to have been 
 feared so much, or so little. It was accepted with an 
 acquiescence in ordinary times unknown, except in as- 
 sociation with some lofty and inspiring cause, and it 
 was even voluntarily sought to a degree that is pro- 
 bably unique in the world's history. At the same time, 
 it was dreaded as it had never been in the heroic 
 days of antiquity, and men of genius were ready to 
 commit any baseness to escape it. The dread was 
 strong enough to lead the poet of the civil wars to 
 denounce his mother,^ the preacher of fine Stoic morality 
 to connive at the murder of the Emperor's mother, yet it 
 collapsed the moment it might have inspired vigorous 
 action. Death occupied men's minds with a sway 
 which could change in a moment from terror to fascina- 
 tion ; the General who fell on his sword at the Emperor's 
 command was probably ready, unless he was unlike the 
 other great men of the time, to have saved his life at the 
 expense of that of his own kindred. Although some- 
 thing had gone out of the world which made life worth 
 living, that did not give men courage to face Death in 
 resolute resistance ; on the contrary, there is no age 
 when it seems to have been so abjectly feared. 
 
 It is but another way of saying that Death had 
 obtained a new hold on men's minds to add that the 
 problem of a life beyond Death had begun to take new 
 significance. It is easy not to think of Death, but who 
 an think of Death and not ask whether it be the end 
 of desire and fear, or a great crisis in the development 
 of all desires and fears ? Thus the general disintegra- 
 tion and decay which made Death an object of attention 
 
 1 See the account of Lucan's treachery in the conspiracy of Piso (Tac, Ann., 
 XV. 56), and of Seneca's acquiescence in Agrippina's murder (Ann., .\iv. 7).
 
 THE A GE OF DBA TH. 207 
 
 quickened the yearnings after immortality into new 
 vividness. We see them pierce the husk of vs^orldly 
 frivohty ; ^ we find them in the vivid recognition given to 
 the hopes cherished by those races witli which Rome 
 was now for the first time coming into contact, and to 
 whom belonged the world of the future. Death was, 
 the Romans discovered, regarded by the mystic priests 
 of the Gauls as " an incident in a long life," ^ and the 
 poet who was afterwards to attempt to buy his life at 
 so hideous a price records their confidence with a sigh 
 of envy. Why, it may be asked, should the successor 
 of Virgil envy the Druids a faith which Virgil was to 
 confirm in Dante ? The expression we have quoted 
 explains it — an incident in a long ///<?. Some dim 
 survival in a mysterious underworld was the ancestral 
 belief of the race. Virgil had indeed deepened and 
 illumined the picture drawn by Homer with gleams 
 of a purer radiance and shadows of more sombre signi- 
 ficance, but had left it still a mere epilogue to the life 
 of this world. We see in this longing mention of the 
 Druidic belief how the world was beginning to thirst 
 for something beyond this, how men were yearning 
 for a future that should not merely reflect in pallid 
 memories the life of earth, but should carry on all 
 that had begun here into new development, and fill out 
 t^e hopes and aspirations of earth with achievement. 
 That burst of enthusiasm with which Lucan records this 
 possible vista into the life beyond the grave, measures 
 for us the longings shadowed forth indeed in the ^Eneid, 
 but brought into distinctness, it seems, only by contact 
 with the race whose whole life lay in the future. "Happy 
 
 J Several times in the most frivolous writer, I should think, who ever used 
 the Latin tongue. Sec Martial, Ep. v. 34, a pretty little poem on the death 
 of a child, and ix. 21 ; x. loi. I do not mc:in that wc see here more tlian the 
 d.iwn of a conventional Heaven, but it is not less. 
 
 2 Lucan, Pharsalia, i. 442, sey.
 
 2o8 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 are they in their delusion," sighs Lucan ; and it is a 
 characteristic expression ; he could not conceive of their 
 belief as truth, yet yearned to share it as a mere dream. 
 To nobler spirits it seemed more than a dream. Shut 
 out from the life of the State, to which there was no 
 definite term, men were awakening to the discovery 
 that the individual life contained some principle of 
 growth for which the State provided no scope, that 
 within the heart of man lay emotions and desires which 
 were an enormous over-provision for any call that this 
 world was to make on them, and that if man's existence 
 were an intelligible whole, it could not end with the 
 threescore years and ten of his sojourn here. We mis- 
 understand the hope of immortality when we look upon 
 it as a mere anticipation. It is rather an actual dis- 
 cernment of some principle of growth disproportionate 
 to its environment, and suggesting a different scheme 
 of existence from the outward one. The prospect of 
 Immortality was, in the ages of classical antiquity, a 
 dim and not specially attractive anticipation, detached 
 from all experience interesting to the hearts of men. 
 It became, in the age of which we speak, a belief 
 necessary to render life in this world harmonious and 
 explicable, an indispensable refuge for the need of per- 
 manence formerly satisfied by the life of the Common- 
 wealth, an answer to the craving now first made con- 
 scious of its own infinite scope, and satisfied only b}' 
 Eternity. 
 
 The thinker in whom these new ideas find their most 
 characteristic expression is the Stoic Emperor, Marcus 
 Aurelius Antoninus. His ^^ Journal intime^^ is, in some 
 ways, a deeper revelation of an individual soul than 
 almost any other book that ever was written. We 
 have here the outpourings of one whom we might almost 
 call the first hermit. He was not a hermit ; he lived a
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 209 
 
 family life as well as that of a soldier and monarch — 
 his was a career of varied activity and constant com- 
 panionship — but nothing of this reaches the reader ; we 
 never breathe the atmosphere of the camp or the court ; 
 we find ourselves overhearing, for the first time, the 
 communings of a human spirit with itself. It is this 
 which M. Renan must mean when he says of the book, 
 " C'est le livre le plus purement humain qu'il y ait." 
 Those who take it up with that introduction will be apt 
 to lay it down with disappointment. It is not human 
 in the sense that it makes any approach towards the 
 various, many-sided utterance which belongs to any 
 complete human character ; it contains no trace of subtle 
 observation ; we are never reminded of the writers to 
 whom we turn for mottoes ; we never come to a thought 
 that makes us stop to say, " There is the man who 
 knew mankind." Except so far as we are now and then 
 reminded that a court must have the same dangers in 
 all ages, we find nothing in it that bears on the concrete 
 difficulties and temptations of particular bodies of men 
 or of individuals. But it is human in this sense, that 
 it opens to us those depths in a human soul which 
 belong to humanity as such ; not to the second century 
 or to the nineteenth century, not to the Italian or English 
 race, not to the king or the slave, but to a human soul 
 at all times and in all places, wherever it is made 
 conscious of its own personalit}', wherever it is led to 
 retire into its own depths, and realize that which remains 
 to a man apart from all circumstance. This spiritual 
 attitude is not characteristic of the most important periods 
 of history ; a great man's own personality is not there 
 an object of supreme interest to himself. It is charac- 
 teristic of an Age of Death, and is most completely ex- 
 hibited in one, who even in that age of disintegration 
 must have been the loneliest of men. 
 
 o
 
 2IO THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 All monarchs must be solitary in some sense, but a 
 monarch in modern Europe is a member of a select 
 society ; he is one of a band of equals. The Emperor of 
 Rome was alone in the world. We see in a Caligula 
 or a Tiberius the moral insanity which results from 
 such unnatural isolation ; in Marcus Aurelius that in- 
 fluence is traceable in a freezing loneliness, a sense of 
 almost despair, softened into resignation. He was as 
 lonely in literary communion as in the intercourse of 
 society and the commerce of daily life ; he did not 
 know the Psalms, and there was then nothing else at 
 all like his Meditations. In some ways he is curiously 
 modern, and to the modern reader this tells as a 
 disadvantage. He was the first to come in sight 
 of certain ideas that the modern world has dwelt..on 
 and returned upon until they have become common- 
 place, and we turn from many of his most original 
 reflections as tedious, because they spring from a seed 
 that has been eminently fertile. The writer whom he 
 oftenest recalls is Pascal. A deep mournfulness, a 
 sense of transitoriness and futilit}^ in all things earthly, 
 an utter detachment from all interest in the fleeting 
 pageant, seems set to exactly the sanie key in the 
 thoughts of the Frenchman and the Roman ; we should 
 hardly discover the difference if, as we turned the leaf, 
 the one book were exchanged for the other. " Comme 
 tout disparait en un instant ! dans le monde les personnes, 
 ct dans la duree les souvenirs ! comment des objets si 
 frivoles, si decousus pourraient ils occuper notre intelli- 
 gence et notre raison." That is not Pascal, but Marcus 
 Aurelius speaking through a French translation ; and he 
 returns to the thought again and again with a persist- 
 ence which reminds us that it was an original one to 
 him. " Serait-ce la vaine opinion des hommes qui 
 t'agite ? alors regarde I'oubli rapide de toutes les choses.
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 211 
 
 I'abime du temps pris dans les deux sens " (i.e., the 
 boundless past and the boundless future), " et I'exiguite 
 du lieu oil la renommee se renferme." It is exactl}' the 
 feeling of Pascal, but it has a typical impressiveness 
 which Pascal lacks. There speaks the man who has 
 touched the limits of all earthly desire. Is there any 
 one, since the line of his successors came to an end, of 
 whom we may sa}', as we can of him, that it was impos- 
 sible for him to frame a wish for any earthly gain ? 
 Kings in the modern world have not been shut out from 
 ambition ; they have seen a height above them. But 
 the master of the Roman world had touched the summit 
 of earth, and if he found it jo3^1ess, there was no refuge 
 but in the world within. 
 
 What Marcus Aurelius felt was the unique and pro- 
 found disappointment of the Philosopher on a throne. 
 Plato at S3'racuse may, perhaps, have known something 
 of the feeling ; he must have discovered how little the 
 approach there made towards his own ideal — that kings 
 should become philosophers, or philosophers kings — 
 had done for the happiness of mankind. But with 
 the Emperor that dream was realized more fully than it 
 had been realized under the influence of the greatest of 
 Philosophers on one of the most virtuous of Statesmen. 
 Plato might discover some shadow of an explanation of 
 Dion's grievous failure in the baleful inheritance of 
 despotic rule ; but for an Antonine there was no such 
 refuge from the oppressive discovery that the Philo- 
 sopher on a throne could do but little to make his sub- 
 jects wise and good, or even happy.^ To him the whole 
 of life must have been coloured and shaped by disap- 
 
 ' Sfc Wordsworth's poem on Dion : — 
 
 " And what pure homage //icn did wait 
 On Dion's virtues, while tlic kinar beam 
 Of Plato's genius, from its lofty sphere, 
 I-'cll round him in the grove of .Academe,
 
 213 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 pointment, and his sense of its transitoriness is even a 
 deeper feeling than that of its futihty. " Reflect often 
 on thy last hour," is the burden of the Meditations. 
 Life is a vapour, a smoke, a winter torrent ; the interval 
 between the shortest and the longest life is comparable to 
 that between the disappearance of two grains of incense 
 flung into the altar-fire.^ Life hurries to its close; its 
 futilities are soon to be hushed in the silence of the 
 tomb : why make ado about anything so ephemeral ? 
 Is there no Life that more truly deserves the name ? 
 
 This question is not answered by Marcus Aurelius, 
 otherwise than with dim yearnings, repressed by pious 
 resignation. " How is it," he writes at a time apparently 
 not long before his death, " that the Gods, who have 
 arranged all things well, and lovingly for mortals, have 
 in this one respect overlooked their interest, that men, 
 even excellent men, who have entered into frequent 
 communion with them, through devout ministrations — 
 when once they have died quit existence altogether, and 
 are utterly extinguished ? If, indeed, this is so, be 
 assured that the Gods would have arranged it otherwise, 
 if that had been right. For it would have been possible 
 if it had been right." ^ It is instructive in this respect to 
 compare him with a shallower and more cheerful writer, 
 
 Softening their inbred dignity austere. 
 
 ****** 
 Mourn hills and groves of Attica ! and mourn 
 Ilissus, bending o'er thy classic urn ! 
 Mourn, and lament for him whose spirit dreads 
 Your once sweet memory, studious walks and shades !" 
 
 No history is more tragic than that commemorated in these noble lines. 
 Dion was surely the noblest pupil of Plato, and the attempt to establish a 
 righteous government at Syracuse, in which he incurred the hatred of those 
 whose welfare was his supreme aim, and fell a victim to their wrath, must have 
 seemed to his master almost like a great experiment exhibiting the futility of his 
 loftiest hopes. 
 
 1 M. Antoninus, x. 31 ; iv. 15 ; v. 23. 
 
 2 M. Antoninus, xii. 5 : — Et -yap oUaLov ^v^ rjv &v Koi Zvva76v.
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 213 
 
 who belongs to the past as he does to the future. To 
 Plutarch the fact that it was right became a witness that 
 it was possible. The mere spectacle of Life shut oft' 
 from a hereafter was self-refuting ; so deep down in his 
 heart was the conception of Divine purpose, that the con- 
 templation of high aims, far-reaching hopes, became to 
 him the pledge of a future large enough to contain them ; 
 and the narrow limits of this life shrivelled away under 
 the mere view of all that this life held of capacity and 
 aspiration. " If God," he says, " make so much of crea- 
 tures in whom there is nothing permanent. He is like 
 women who sow the seeds of plants within the soil 
 enclosed in an oyster-shell." ^ In that quaint metaphor 
 is conve3^ed perhaps almost all that the intellect can 
 decipher of the heart's confidence in a larger future 
 for the aspirations of instincts cramped in this earthly 
 life, and seeking a deeper soil. It seems strange that 
 Plutarch should have felt these hopes — Plutarch, the 
 reviewer of the past — and that Marcus, whose heart 
 throbbed with the life of the future, should be without 
 them. But perhaps, as Plutarch studied the lives of 
 the great men of the past and vividly realized their 
 influence, he felt that they had not quitted existence 
 altogether, that God was not the God of the dead, but 
 of the living."^ Surely there is nothing more pathetic in 
 literature than the words in which the Emperor silences 
 his yearning for the faith of the Historian, and feeling 
 all the emptiness and poverty of life far more keenly, 
 yet teaches himself to acquiesce in its narrow limits, 
 since they were imposed by God. 
 
 Two ideas upheld him in this dreary and jo3'less 
 
 1 Plutarch, " Dehis qui scro a Niimine puniantur," c. 17. 
 
 - It is interesting to n.'niember tliat one of those to whom Marcus records 
 his obligations was the grandson of Plutarch — Sextus of Cliosronea. See the 
 pleasing character of him, M. Antoninus, i. 9.
 
 214 ^^^^ MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 resignation — the sense of an Order of Nature, and the 
 sense of a constant invisible companionship. The 
 second was the nearest his heart, but both were near. 
 It is a deeply rooted thought in him that all sin is 
 schism, that we are called upon to be one with the order 
 in which we live, and one in an organic sense, "a member, 
 not merely a portion ; " ^ and the idea of an organic whole,''^ 
 a unity of Law, in which the human member may co- 
 operate, and in which we may learn to regard disastrous 
 events as parts of an orderly system, no less than the 
 rose in summer and the harvest in autumn,^ is latent in 
 all his thought. He paints with all the associations of 
 horror familiar to a soldier the wretched condition of 
 the severed limb,'* and reminds himself of the possibility 
 that each one of us may enter on this condition at any 
 moment — that we may choose, each one for himself, that 
 separateness which is death for every being that is made 
 to be part of a larger whole. In the constant disappoint- 
 ment provided for regal beneficence by the neighbour- 
 hood of ingratitude, stupidity, and treachery,^ the thought 
 of the vast order in which an inhabitant of the Roman 
 world could, for the first time, recognize himself as a 
 fellow-citizen of all men, seems to have been a perpetual 
 source of religious thankfulness to him ; he returns 
 again and again to the thought of this great Order in 
 which he finds a place,*^ and seems, from the mere 
 spectacle of its vastness and its unity, to derive some 
 tranquilizing power, which we should imagine the ex- 
 clusive result of being consciously in subjection to a 
 
 1 M. Antoninus, vii. 13. ^ ii,id_^ jii. n ; iv. 29 ; v. 8. 
 
 3 Ibid., iv. 44. * Ibid., viii. 34. 
 
 ^ eK TOLOVTov piov aTripxopi-ai, iv i5 avTol ol kolpj^voI, vTrkp &v ra Tocravra 
 riyuvKTafXTji', rjv^dfxi]!', e<pp6vTi<xa, avTol CKeivoi ideXovji f.'.e vTriytiv (x. 36). 
 Perhaps he was thinking of his son. 
 
 ® e.g., iii. 11: — Tov avdpuiTo-, ttoA/tt;.'' cVra wiXcus rvjs d:wrc£r7;s ^s ai 
 Xociral TToXeis dairtp oiKiai. elff.v.
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 215 
 
 loving Will. Of that belief we can scarcely say that we 
 find a trace in him ; he seems to know neither a Father 
 in heaven nor a brother on earth ; but the Order of 
 Nature, in its new and unexplored impressiveness, 
 filled all that vacuum, and almost satisfied him with 
 its realm of majestic Law. 
 
 It is not inconsistent to speak of its new impressive- 
 ness, although when Antoninus lived this idea was set 
 forth in a poem rather older for him than "Paradise 
 Lost " is for us.'^ It was new if we measure it by the life 
 of an idea, and remember that we are speaking of ideas 
 as they are felt apart from genius. We have seen, in 
 Lucretius, the rise of a reverence for Nature that may 
 be called modern, the sense of a calm permanent swa}^, 
 contrasted with that "fitful fever" of personal dominion 
 which raged so furiously in the lifetime of the poet ; 
 contrasted, too, when a high enough standpoint was 
 taken, and the course of the ages was unrolled before 
 the eye of the observer, with the steady but temporary 
 rule of the cities of the past. We have seen in Virgil 
 how the rise of the Empire harmonized this idea with 
 that of political dominion, which originally seemed its 
 ineffaceable contrast. The progress of national life, it 
 seemed, was towards a unity that almost lost itself in the 
 Unity of Nature ; the Laws of Imperial Rome, so far as 
 they approached their ideal, were the laws of Nature. 
 If we consider the majestic system of Roman Law, and 
 trace its connection with all the thought and life of 
 Europe, we shall see nothing surprising in the approxi- 
 mation. All the philosophy of Rome, such as it was, 
 was poured into its law. Perhaps without Roman Law 
 we might never have known the expression, "a law of 
 nature." Whether we should be any poorer for the 
 
 1 The poem of Lucretius was published about 57 B.C. Marcus Aurelius 
 died 180 A.ij.
 
 2i6 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 loss is another question ; some may think that the 
 meaning of Law would be clearer if the same word were 
 not used to express orders of sequence which impose 
 themselves and cannot be broken, and claims which 
 may, but ought not to be, rejected. All positive law is 
 indeed in some sense a protest against the belief that 
 the whole moral world is included within the realm of 
 Nature, inasmuch as it is of its very essence to assume 
 that man can know the right and do the wrong. Never- 
 theless when for the first time a single law regulated the 
 known world, the two conceptions of Law and Nature 
 almost coalesced in their close approach. The subordi- 
 nation of the whole known world to a single ruler and 
 a single law gave a certain religious significance to the 
 idea of Nature ; the outward world seemed to combine in 
 a single majestic order, a fit object for the reverence and 
 the submission of the most religious of mankind. " The 
 world is a polity, for men have the same law," ^ is one 
 of the many sentences which remind us of the expansion 
 now taken by the very word law, at the same time that 
 the words are true in their narrowest sense. Under the 
 Antonines there was only one law in the world. The 
 Roman Law, with its long vista into the past, with its 
 magnificent embrace for all the nationalities of the 
 known world, seemed to the men of the new age a 
 stately bridge between the realm of Morals and of Nature, 
 a bridge which the pilgrim might cross in either direc- 
 tion, finding himself on both sides within the same realm 
 of order, and among inhabitants who, if they occasionally 
 used a diff'erent dialect, sought to express by it the same 
 desires, the same fears, and the same convictions. 
 
 But this religion of Nature was not the deepest feeling 
 in this Pascal of the second century ; his spirit finds the 
 deepest satisfaction in a belief not entirely in harmony 
 
 ^ M. Antoninus, iv. 4.
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. . 217 
 
 with it, though both were real to him. We have seen 
 that his yearnings after an Eternal hfe were unable to 
 transform themselves into hopes, but they found another 
 refuge in the conviction of a permanent relation to an 
 Eternal Being — a truth, indeed, which, when it is fully 
 apprehended, is seen to be inseparable from the hope he 
 could not attain. Men approach a great truth by diffe- 
 rent paths, and fail to discern the common goal towards 
 which they are led. Marcus Aurelius saw something 
 in man which virtually implies his immortality, though 
 he could not follow out its teaching. He seems to have 
 been much impressed by the belief of the wisest man of 
 antiquity in special supernatural guardianship ; and in 
 his own age all privilege naturally melted into universal 
 endowment. It had seemed natural that to Socrates a 
 special guide should be appointed, but now men were 
 ready to acknowledge that the best gifts of Heaven were 
 least special ; the " divine sign " ^ with which Socrates 
 was familiar was recognized as the voice of an indwelling 
 spirit given as a comrade and guide to every son of man. 
 The change from the Daemon of Socrates to the Daemon 
 of Marcus Aurelius gathers up the whole moral evolution 
 of the ages ; we interpret best the meaning of the earlier 
 and the later epoch when we remember that in the first 
 it was the wisest of men who believed that a peculiar 
 guidance was vouchsafed him by God ; and in the 
 second this guidance was felt as no special endowment 
 of wisdom or virtue, but an inheritance of commonplace 
 humanity. 
 
 P^or, indeed, it was the great distinctive characteristic 
 of this time that the exceptional became the universal. 
 This was the very meaning of the new sense of Iluma- 
 
 ^ It is rather misleading to speak of the daimon of Socrates, as lie always 
 alludes to it in this impersonal form. The daemon of Marcus is always 
 personal, e.g., viii. 13 ; iii. 5, &c.
 
 I 
 
 2i8 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 nity that was come into the world. The spirit of anti- 
 quity is one of the narrowest aristocracy. There was 
 no more of a hberal spirit in great men than in the 
 insignificant vulgar ; the association of all excellence with 
 I what is exceptional was just as strong in the noblest as 
 in the basest of the sons of Greece and Rome. The 
 citizen who was to-day a man, to-morrow a chattel, kept 
 before the mind of every human being the standard of 
 privilege. No one could ask why this man should have 
 some good thing lacked by his neighbour without ques- 
 tioning the foundation and structure of society ; for what 
 good could be greater or more absolutely limited than 
 Freedom ? That recognition of a Divine voice, therefore, 
 which seems to have had much influence in the condem- 
 nation of Socrates, as the introducer of new gods,^ was 
 not in him or his contemporaries an expansive influence. 
 There was nothing strange, to Socrates, in believing 
 that a Divine influence should be real and exceptional. 
 But the lapse of six hundred years brought men to a 
 different view of the Divine education of humanity ; 
 the insignificant nature of that which does not belong 
 to all was the characteristic moral discovery (so we 
 may call it) of the day ; it was held with the passionate 
 fervour and the inevitable exaggeration that belongs to 
 new truth. And none could feel this truth with more 
 depth and fervour of conviction than the lonely Emperor, 
 he who found in the exceptional position he occupied 
 no satisfaction, no immunity from sorrow and care — 
 only added causes of both, added difficulties, added 
 vexations. " Even in a palace life may be lived well ! " 
 The man who wrote those words on a page intended 
 for no eye but his own- was one to feel vividly, that if 
 God gave guidance to any one, then it must be the 
 inheritance of every son of man. 
 
 1 Plato, Apol. of Socrates, 24. Cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia, i. i.
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 219 
 
 We are accustomed to speak of the so-called Athana- 
 sian creed as a mass of absurd contradictions. The 
 assertion that there are three persons in one God, it is 
 supposed, is one that can convey no meaning to any 
 mind anxious to find appropriate meaning in all words. 
 And yet it must be felt by all who have been accustomed 
 to look within, who have in any form accepted the idea 
 of an unseen world, that something very like this in- 
 credible description of God is true of man. No one can 
 feel that anything within himself is sacred if he believe 
 only in himself, and probably there are moments in the 
 life of almost all v.'hen it has been felt that each one, if 
 he stand alone, is incomplete ; that what we need to 
 give us fulness of personality is union with another. 
 We know the meaning of Self for the first time when 
 we know the meaning of another than Self; each is a 
 fragment till he cease to be a mere unit. And this is 
 felt here and there by many an ordinary man with regard 
 to a companionship which is not human. In entire 
 solitude he becomes sensible of the presence of that 
 which may be best described as an ideal Self; some close 
 neighbourhood makes itself discernible through remon- 
 strance for what he is, or seems to hover above his will 
 with some pattern of that which he feels himself called 
 upon to become. The sense of Tightness is something 
 deeper, more authoritative, than anything can be that is 
 wholly contained within his own personality. Conscience, 
 that " knowledge with another," which awakes at the 
 approach of evil, is but one aspect of this unseen com- 
 panionship ; it is felt in regions where the dividing-line 
 of right and wrong is hardly discernible. It is to those, 
 who have ever known it, the central reality of the moral 
 life ; nevertheless it is easily ignored, and there is much 
 experience besides that of wrongdoing in which it is 
 hidden. The whole life of the outward conceals this
 
 220 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 unseen companionship, and most of all that satisfying 
 life of the outward, in which a man enters into relation 
 with the State. It is most known probably to the lonely ; 
 to the loneliest of men it took the aspect of an influence 
 so subtle, so penetrating, that it was impossible to describe 
 without falling into contradiction.-^ Sometimes on his page 
 it appears as the protector, sometimes as the protected ; it 
 is a being that at once commands and obeys, both guards 
 man and is guarded by him. It is nearer to him than 
 any other human being is, but it is distinct from himself, 
 and may be an object of reverence to a man who feels 
 himself utterly poor and feeble. It belongs to such an 
 order as is commemorated in the Mysteries — something 
 intimate, mysterious, and separate from the rest of 
 nature, to the whole of which it is infinitely to be 
 preferred. It is strange, when we read the passages 
 in which Marcus Aurelius speaks of it, to think of him 
 as a persecutor of the Christians, for the thought of a 
 mediator between God and man comes out as distinctly 
 in his Meditations as in any Christian writings. He is 
 a preacher of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost. ^ 
 
 This newly discerned sacredness in individual life was 
 no privilege of the good and the pure-minded ; it could 
 not be forfeited by the worst of criminals. The doom 
 which the State inflicted on its enemy was no longer to 
 be regarded as the mere rejection of something vile, but 
 as a concession to the necessities of the criminal himself. 
 The State could not take the life of the worst of her 
 sons, even for the good of all the rest, if it were not 
 also good for him. " Thy soul " — Seneca addresses an 
 imaginary criminal — " is incurable ; it has woven itself a 
 warp and woof of crime. Sin has become its own motive. 
 
 1 Compare, for instance, ii. 17 : — . . . TTjpelv rbv evoov dalfiova av^^piffTOv, 
 KoL affiVTJ, with such passages as iii. 5 ; v. 27. 
 
 2 See also Epictetus, Diss, ab Arr., i. 14, and elsewhere.
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 221 
 
 All we can do for thee is to give thee that which for 
 thee is the sole good — death." ^ It is the claim of the 
 individual which is considered here, even when the 
 individual is a public enemy. How completely is the 
 ideal of antiquity left behind ! The city could not have 
 allowed that anything was sacred in an individual life 
 when it was a question of asserting her majesty against 
 a traitor. The criminal was a mere invader ; his welfare 
 was no more to be considered than that of a wolf in the 
 fold ; all that was sacred lay in that which he was doing 
 his best to destroy. But as we read these words of 
 Seneca we feel that a change has in this respect come 
 over the world. The State exists in order to guard 
 something which may conceivably survive it. The in- 
 tegral unity of moral thought was new. The city had 
 demanded lo3^alty in word and deed, but men now 
 became conscious of belonging to one whose demand 
 included the hidden things of the heart. " God enters 
 into our inmost thoughts ; nay, he never departs from 
 them." ^ No individual endowment was needed to 
 confer a priceless value on every human soul ; each was 
 the work of one whose care for his workmanship was 
 but faintly typified by the affectionate brooding of the 
 artist over his work ; ^ every man was sacred, for every 
 man was the work of God. 
 
 Men's aspirations contain an inverted history of their 
 lives ; whatever has been missed from earth is pro- 
 jected on to the Heavens. The age of slavery was the 
 age when all that men desire and hope was gathered up 
 in the one word Freedom. It was a word which had 
 always expressed " our being's end and aim " more fully 
 and definitely than that aim has ever been expressed by 
 
 1 Seneca, De Iril., i. 16, 3. 2 Seneca, Epist., 83. 
 
 » This idea of the Ariist as the type of God is found more than once in the 
 dissertations of lOpictetus ; e.^., Diss, ab Arr., i. 6.
 
 2 22 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 the word Happiness. Even now it is not possible to 
 differ so much about what constitutes Freedom as about 
 what constitutes Happiness, though when every one is 
 more or less free the idea of Freedom is always vague. 
 But to the Greek and Roman the meaning of Freedom 
 was kept definite by the neighbourhood of its opposite ; 
 with us the criminal does not so clearly exhibit its 
 absence as with them the slave. There is no distinction 
 in the modern world so definite and so universal as the 
 distinction between liberty and bondage in antiquity. 
 Freedom occupied the desires of mankind, through the 
 ages of the classical world, as no equally definite object 
 has ever occupied them since then, and when the 
 classical world came to an end its ideal was only in- 
 tensified in being spiritualized. When the Cit}' perished, 
 the deep and vivid yearnings it had nourished could not 
 develop into that desire for constitutional government 
 and uncorrupt representation, which the men of that day 
 would have needed the spirit of prophecy even to con- 
 ceive, and which would have seemed to them a very 
 poor thing if they could have conceived it. It took 
 a richer field — it turned from the world without, where 
 all was wintry and full of decay, to that inner life 
 which men had for the first time leisure to observe, and 
 vv'hich in comparison seemed to burgeon with the promise 
 of spring. 
 
 An age which exhibited on a gigantic scale the vices 
 of slavery in men just delivered from slavery was one 
 fitted to bring out by contrast, as never before or since, 
 the meaning of inward liberty. When the Stoic poet de- 
 clares, "Our one need is Freedom, but not such freedom 
 as belongs to any enfranchised slave whom the ceremony 
 of manumission has elevated to the rank of a Roman 
 citizen," ^ he is alluding to an event of daily occurrence. 
 1 Persius, Sat., v. 73-80 (paraphrased).
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 223 
 
 When he adds, " No mere ceremony can change a menial 
 to a true Freeman ; there are other masters than those 
 from whom the praetor's rod sets free,"^ he was preaching 
 a truth that none of his readers could ignore. One who 
 desires to realize what that slavery was from w'hich the 
 praetor's rod did set free should turn to the records of 
 a Roman trial, and read of men and women given up 
 to tortures which seem to have roused much less remon- 
 strance from the best of men than do the pangs of ani- 
 mals in our day ; and remember that this was not as a 
 penalty for an^^thing they had done (their innocence was 
 admitted by all), but as a supposed security for the 
 truth of the evidence thus wrung from them. But from 
 such records, also, we may learn what the true Freedom 
 was, which man can neither give nor take away ; the 
 martyrs of loyalty, we have seen, teach that lesson no 
 less than the martyrs of faith. By their endurance and 
 their virtue men must have been reminded that the free- 
 dom which was the object of such passionate and reason- 
 able desire, was not the only freedom. To those who 
 for the first time confronted the other it seemed not to 
 be the true Freedom. The great chasm which separated 
 the human world into persons and things shrank to 
 nothing when compared with that abyss which separated 
 those who realized the freedom of the spirit, and those 
 in bondage to low desires. The bondage of the freedman 
 taught the lesson no less decidedly, and, of course, far 
 more frequently, than the spiritual emancipation of the 
 slave. The crowds pressing across the boundar}^ that 
 separated bond and free exhibited in every variety of 
 distinctness the temper of bondage ; the demeanour of 
 the frccdmen taught the spectator that "Avarice and 
 Luxury enforce a harder toil than the most severe master, 
 
 1 I'crsius, Sat., v. qo, 130. "An doniimini i{;norris, nisi quem vindicta 
 relaxal," seems Ihe central idea, often obscured by his oddity.
 
 224 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 and add to it the distraction of their own discord. The 
 load imposed by Ambition, the continual restraints and 
 fears which belong to the dominion of Superstition, alike 
 declare to us that the true enfranchisement we need is 
 within." ^ But it was by an enfranchised slave that the 
 lesson was formulated for all time. Here and there, at 
 many a Roman trial, some spectator must have felt that 
 such a thing might be ; but when Stoicism gained a voice 
 in a Phrygian bondsman, the message took a resonance 
 that preserved it for the ears of posterity. 
 
 There is something very impressive in the fact that 
 the best representative of this new morality was an 
 Emperor, and the next best was a slave. It tells forcibly 
 for the wide-reaching influence of the new spirit of per- 
 sonality which was coming upon the world, that we 
 should find it hard to decide which of two men occupying 
 the extremes of society was its typical exponent. On 
 the whole, that position must be assigned to Marcus 
 Aurelius. But the most t3'pical is not necessarily the 
 most original expression ; we may find all the ideas of 
 the Emperor on the page of his predecessor," from whom, 
 indeed, he sometimes cites them. His Meditations are 
 far more coloured by the feelings, desires, and aspirations 
 of an individual mind than the record of the teaching 
 of Epictetus ; but the presentment of a religion (so we 
 must regard their common belief) which has lifted the 
 speaker himself above the degradation and sufferings of 
 bondage must in some respects stand alone. 
 
 In turning from the writings of the Emperor to those 
 of the slave, it is striking to find that profound sad- 
 ness has given way to a bright and steadfast cheerful- 
 ness. Partly we have to remember that Marcus Aurelius 
 wrote for himself, and Epictetus addressed disciples ; but 
 
 1 Persius, Sat., v. 131-157, 180-188 (paraphrased). 
 
 2 By about a century.
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 225 
 
 the difference is no mere accident of method. The sense 
 of pettiness, of worthlessness in life, which oppressed the 
 ruler of the Roman world had no place in the thoughts 
 of the slave. He too felt life a sojourn in a strange 
 land,^ but the sense of exile was lost in the sense of 
 freedom. This was the keynote of all his thought ; to 
 this he returns with a somewhat monotonous recurrence ; 
 but the reader can never forget that what he preached 
 with his lips he taught by his life. Freedom, in the 
 outward world the associate of the spirit that refuses to 
 submit, he recognized in the world within as inseparable 
 from the spirit that refuses to rebel.- It is not more 
 separate from Law in one region than in the other; the 
 citizen had accepted Law as the basis of Liberty ; the 
 philosopher could do no more.^ But in the inward 
 realm in which he learned to find a home, the law which 
 gives perfect freedom is that of renunciation ; the great 
 achievement is to withdraw all energy from that spirit 
 of preference which would impress the idiosyncrasies of 
 the Self on the world of Nature ; to bestow this energy 
 rather on a recognition of Law producing that receptive 
 attitude by which character receives its stamp.* His own 
 life was a demonstration of such possibility. His emanci- 
 pation could have been no crisis in his spiritual career ; ^ 
 he was as free when a master could kill or torture his 
 body as when he knew no master, for the emancipation 
 from the tyrants of the soul was in him complete. The 
 saying of Socrates, " Anytus and Meletus can kill me, 
 but cannot hurt mc,"^ is the constant text of his dis- 
 
 1 Life, he says (Enchiridion, 5), should be like the saunter near port of a 
 passenger who has landed for an hour or two. 
 
 2 Ep., Diss, ab Arr., ii. .]. 3 /^/^., ij. n. 4 /^/^/.^ ,. 12. 
 
 5 /itd., ii. 23, 24, where he almost repeats the passapjc in Pcrsius quoted 
 above, and shows how much more impressive the thought is when expressed 
 more simply. 
 
 « /iid., ii. 2, 5. 
 
 P
 
 226 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 course ; in those words Socrates had proclaimed the 
 freedom of the slave. " Let us be imitators of Socrates, 
 who sang paeans in his dungeon," ^ was in him no mere 
 sermonizing; it was the exhortation of one who knew that 
 what he exhorted was possible. He had taken his start 
 from that complete surrender which he was urging on 
 his disciples ; he had been detached by the decree of 
 Fate from all those possessions from which the soul 
 should always be detached by a sense of their insig- 
 nificance ; he had been shut off from the realm of the 
 indifferent by circumstance, and had thus no choice but 
 to find his good elsewhere, if he were to find any good 
 at all. 
 
 Epictetus was thus set apart by the discipline of life 
 to proclaim what we may call the inverted Freedom of 
 the invisible. His experience of bondage exhibited to 
 him the true character of bondage — he saw its limitations, 
 he saw that within the man which it could not touch. 
 Or, rather, he enormously exaggerated that within the man 
 which it could not touch."' He and his spiritual brethren 
 represent a phase, in regard to the Will, very similar 
 to that which we find in Plato with regard to the in- 
 tellect. They saw the faculty on which they bent their 
 attentive gaze enlarged through the mists of dawning 
 thought. Epictetus believed in the omnipotence of Will, 
 as Plato in the omnipotence of Knowledge ; perhaps it 
 was the only way in which the scope of either faculty 
 could be adequately discerned by him whose mission it 
 was to impress its meaning upon the world. We see 
 that Moral Freedom is, as it has been called,^ the freedom 
 
 1 Ep. , Diss, ab Arr., ii. 6. 
 
 2 See especially ii. 23, where he seems to take the power to dose the eyes as 
 a typical specimen of the relation of Will over Sense. We may, he seems to 
 think, in like manner shut off all impression from without, if we will but make 
 the resolve to do so. 
 
 3 By Professor Clerk Maxwell.
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 227 
 
 of a bird in its cage ; that what a man can be depends, 
 to a certain extent, on what he can do. We cannot but 
 allow that some part of Character is the inevitable result 
 of Circumstance. And yet, as we listen to the teaching 
 of Epictetus, we may feel his truth the deeper one ; we 
 may recognize its limitations as belonging to a tempo- 
 rary^ order of things in comparison with that to which 
 he leads us. We may believe that what strikes us as 
 exaggeration after seventeen hundred years of an in- 
 dividual morality was, in the first freshness of that new 
 life, a literal possibility — a moral miracle, worked by the 
 preacher of a new Faith. 
 
 The contrast between persons and things forms the 
 whole subject-matter of the philosophy of Epictetus. 
 There is in it no wealth of thought, no varied paths of 
 wide-reaching investigation, only a single idea repeated 
 again and again. Good and evil, he says, are both to 
 be sought in the realm of choice ; the involuntary and 
 the indifferent begin together.^ The clue to a true order 
 in our moral being, he felt, is a right understanding of 
 the contrasted worlds of the necessary and the voluntary. 
 The necessary world is the outward world ; the world 
 where accident reigns, where many are stronger than 
 one, and this world, properly understood, must be re- 
 garded as the realm of indifference.^ External events 
 are important only so far as they afford the material for 
 disciplining the will, and bringing out the distinctness 
 of that personal element which can recognize itself only 
 in this struggle. In this region there is no true good 
 or evil. Here, according to the point of view, we may 
 say that everything is good, or that nothing is good. 
 
 ' Mod t6 iya06i> ; 'F,i> irpoaipicrei. llov t6 kukuv ; 'Ei/ npoaipiaei. IToO 
 rb ovS^Tepov ; 'Ev roti dTrpoaipirois (Epicteti, Diss, ab Arr., ii. 16). This is 
 the kernel of almost all he has to say. 
 
 2 ICxternal things should be to us no more than tessera with which we play 
 at dice (Diss. Arr., ii. 5).
 
 228 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 In the realm of the Vokmtary, on the other hand, every 
 step we take is towards good or evil. Not what hap- 
 pens to a man, but what he chooses, is the proper object 
 of desire or of fear. If his will has no part in any 
 event, that event is a pure object of indifference. 
 
 The work of Philosophy, therefore, is to effect a 
 complete inversion of the ordinary view of these two 
 regions. We are like stags,^ terrified by feathers and 
 driven into snares. We seek to escape fancied evil in 
 the realm of Necessity, and fly into real evil in the 
 realm of the Voluntary. We choose crime to escape 
 exile or death, though in exile or death there is nothing 
 evil, and crime is the greatest of evils. We mistake 
 the material of Virtue for the source of Vice. We turn 
 away blindly from the very threshold of Liberty. What 
 is Liberty ? Life in accordance with desire. Men 
 strive to gain this universal object by bending things to 
 their wishes, and they strive in vain. The world is so 
 made that it cannot be remoulded upon the tastes and 
 fancies of men ; as long as men persist in this effort 
 they are in bondage, they are subjected to the rule of 
 hard masters, forcing them to actions in which their 
 will has no part. From the fear of death, or from the 
 desire of luxury, they are subjected to a necessity which 
 constrains the Will, that one rightful ruler, that sole 
 legitimate cause. If they would remould desire to fit 
 the world they would find themselves secure upon the 
 territory of Freedom. The will is not the lord of the 
 outer world. When exerted here, it constantly finds 
 itself a slave, and not a ruler. But let it turn to its own 
 domain and it finds itself at once supreme. Though it 
 is not possible to bring facts into accordance with indi- 
 vidual desire, it is possible so to remould desire that it 
 shall never conflict with fact. He who has learnt to 
 
 1 Diss. Arr. , ii. ch. i, 8.
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 229 
 
 desire nothing that he may not choose has entered into 
 the region of perfect Freedom. 
 
 At the root of this idea of the contrasted worlds of 
 servitude and of freedom lies a deep religious reverence 
 for the Order of Nature, such as we have seen, on its 
 intellectual side, in the poem of Lucretius.'^ The outer 
 world is the world of necessity ; it is the unchangeable 
 world. But also it is the world which, if we rightly 
 understand it, we shall not wish to change.^ No expo- 
 nent of modern Science confronts the world of existing 
 reality with a more absolute conviction that in a know- 
 ledge of its laws lies a sure deliverance from all the ills 
 of life. Epictetus knew nothing of the powers with 
 which modern Science has equipped the will of man in 
 its dealings with the external world ; but his confidence 
 in the power of Truth to bring the mind to a condition 
 in which any modification of outward things should ap- 
 pear a matter of absolute indifference, gave it quite as 
 high a place as the modern view — perhaps higher. The 
 powers of Science, as revealed to our time, have done 
 almost all that magic had ever promised ; before its influ- 
 ence even the limitations of time and space seem to dis- 
 appear. But the weak and helpless creature, as Epictetus 
 imagined him, in face of the unchangeable, was more 
 invincible among the terrors of the outward world than 
 the inhabitant of a world renovated by Science, himself 
 undisciplined by Truth. The ideal Stoic could not trans- 
 form those dangers ; but none can transform them all, 
 and he did not need to transform any. To Epictetus all 
 the dangers and necessities of the material universe were 
 but as the discomforts of the palestra,'^ leading up to 
 
 1 It is interesting to remark that in the marginal annotations with which 
 P.entley has enriched a copy^of Epictetus now in the I^ritish Museum, the only 
 comparison is with Lucretius. 
 
 ' Diss, ah Arr. , ii. ch. 2. ' /iiJ., i. ch. 24.
 
 230 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 the disciplined strength which was to equip the victor 
 for the contest of a nobler Olympia. He loves to sur- 
 round the trials and struggles of life with associations 
 of dignity and charm borrowed from the Greek games — 
 associations very difficult for a modern reader to appre- 
 ciate, even with all the aid afforded by St. Paul. These 
 majestic and venerable institutions, the concentrated 
 reminiscence and type of the dignity, the beauty, the 
 grandeur, dear to the pride of Greece, appeared to 
 the Phrygian slave but as a parable symbolizing that 
 which God had intended the whole outward world to 
 be to man, and the actions of other men to be to each 
 individual. To the meanest slave the circumstances amid 
 which he was placed were an Olympia, where Divine 
 spectators looked on at the struggle, and applauded the 
 conquest which nothing could prevent but the choice 
 of the combatant. He had but to wi7l in order to quit 
 that short contest a triumphant conqueror. No outward 
 impediment could affect the result, for the victory lay 
 within a region to which outward influences could not 
 penetrate. They brought the mere apparatus for pre- 
 paring him for the contest ; for that contest itself nothing 
 was necessary but his choice. 
 
 But the choice itself was one needing that discipline 
 which comes from the knowledge of Law. To Epictetus 
 the fact that man's will should be a disorderly, unscien- 
 tific influence seem.ed a part of that strange dislocation 
 which it is the business of Philosophy to set right. 
 While the outward world is under the influence of some 
 fixed law, so that we know, for instance, the weight of 
 anything, not by holding it in our hands and consulting 
 our sensations, but by weighing it in scales, how is it, 
 he asks, that in the most important matter of all, the 
 preferences and desires of men, we can form no judg- 
 ment, but can only watch in each individual case the
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 231 
 
 varying, accidental response of chance preference, as if 
 in every case of contested weight we could only ask the 
 opinion of a bystander whether a particular object were 
 light or heavy ? Perhaps we might gather up all of 
 value that Epictetus has to teach when we say that he 
 regarded it as the business of Philosophy to set up a 
 standard of weight for the moral world. ^ The moral 
 world is no more subject to chance than the material 
 world ; indeed, in the view of Epictetus, for whom 
 chance had a real meaning, it was far less so. A pound 
 weight is a pound weight in the hand of a child or a 
 man, however different the sensations caused by it. So 
 in this Stoic philosophy motives have their absolute 
 value, whether they appeal to the mind of a Socrates or 
 of some base courtier of Nero. Socrates knows that it 
 is better to die than to be false to the highest that is 
 discerned as truth ; the cowardly sycophant thinks that 
 death is worse ; but the intrinsic merit of the alterna- 
 tives remains the same in either case. The scale is not 
 altered when it is overlooked. The Order of Nature is 
 beyond the reach of our choice ; we have only to con- 
 form ourselves to it, or to suffer the consequences. 
 
 We may say, in an important sense, that Epictetus 
 was the first to preach this truth. Of course, no one 
 can have ever taught his fellows anything of real moral 
 value without assuming it ; but it is not so impressive 
 anywhere else as in the teaching of the enfranchised 
 slave. Epictetus had known all that men dread — blows, 
 ill-usage, tyranny, hard labour, need — and he proclaimed 
 that these were not evils. Who else had such a plat- 
 form for making that declaration ? Who else had, as 
 he expresses it forcibly, so entirely turned round the 
 
 1 Here again be closely approaches Persius, who uses even this very com- 
 parison of moral and physical weight (v. 100), and sets off, by his far-fetched 
 quaintness, the homeliness and simplicity of his successor.
 
 232 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 masks by which mankind are terrified, and seen whether 
 there was anything really terrible behind them ? Of 
 the words of such as him we may say, indeed, as one 
 Italian poet ^ said of another, *' Egli dice cose, e voi 
 parole." He showed forth the perfect freedom that is 
 bound up with the ideal of perfect resignation as it can 
 only be truly shown forth in the achievement of a life 
 and character. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus exhibit the strength 
 of this new morality. The Emperor, in a journal meant 
 for his own eye alone, shows the meaning of the new 
 doctrine of Personality — the sudden energy set free for 
 introspection, the sacredness transferred from national 
 to individual life. The slave, in his didactic utterances, 
 presents rather that aspect in which the new ideal 
 joins the old. He speaks as the heir of an inheritance 
 hitherto inadequately though deeply prized, of an estate 
 rich in unsuspected mineral wealth, a possession coveted 
 by all, in ignorance of its actual advantages. Freedom 
 had been the 3'earning of all hearts, and although none 
 had known the true Freedom to be that of the inward 
 life, yet the aspiration after the outer Freedom had kept 
 alive the inner. This, which from his platform of servi- 
 tude he proclaimed to be the only true Freedom, he also 
 declared to be the right of all. Heroic Greece and 
 triumphant Rome had looked on Freedom as the privilege 
 of the few ; by the Phrygian slave it was preached as 
 the inalienable inheritance of every son of man. 
 
 When w^e ponder the difference between the new and 
 old meaning of Freedom, we may be tempted to consider 
 it a mere accident that the name is the same. But we 
 blind ourselves to the meaning of History if we yield to 
 this temptation. Inheritance, in the world of the In- 
 visible, is secure ; no man can acquire that which he 
 
 1 Berni, of Michael Angelo.
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 233 
 
 does not in some form bequeath. The thoughts of one 
 generation, it has been well said,-^ form the feelings of 
 its successor. The fathers would not always recognize 
 their legacy in the wealth of the sons. The heroes 
 of the past might have disclaimed all parentage in 
 the conception of Freedom that glowed in the heart 
 of Epictetus ; but they would have erred ; he gave 
 their aspirations the only form possible to them in that 
 bereavement of civil life which they could not have con- 
 ceived possible. His ideal was the fruit of a different 
 soil and a different atmosphere from theirs, but it sprang 
 from the seed they had sown. 
 
 How, then, it may be asked, can we speak of this as 
 an age of general servility ? What more can protect an 
 age from servility than that the idea of Freedom should 
 enter the realm of the Invisible, that man should learn 
 to recognize his true Freedom ? If this was the com- 
 monplace of the age — if we find it on the page of 
 rhetoricians no less than on that of men who set it forth 
 in their lives — how could it be that the moral life of 
 man, as far as it is associated with manly aim, seems 
 then to have touched its nadir ? We have given the 
 answer to this question, but we must often repeat it. 
 J.Icn in this age were mere units. They awoke to per- 
 ceive two great ideas — the sacredness of Personality, and 
 the oneness of the race. But between these two ideas 
 there was no combining clement. The sense of human 
 Ijrotherhood knew no concentration ; nowhere through- 
 out the world of human relation could it find a focus. 
 And our moral life depends on gradation ; what we owe 
 equally to all mankind we shall be slow to recognize as 
 tlie claim of any one to whom we do not give it gladly. 
 A Marcus Aurclius or an Epictetus will no doubt be 
 
 ' By Mr. Joseph Jacobs, in an article on " The God of Israel," in the Nine- 
 teenth Century for September 1878.
 
 234 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 ready to give every human being the rights of a brother ; 
 the average man will rather let the rights of a brother 
 sink to the admitted claims of every human being, and 
 act only from selfishness or preference. 
 
 The expansion of the City to include the race was 
 to the men of that time a great idea. Earnest thinkers 
 were never tired of speaking of man as a part of the 
 universe ; it was one of their stock themes, that as in 
 the great ages of antiquity each one had felt himself the 
 member of a State, so now he was to feel himself a part 
 of that great whole, in which was included not only all 
 human society, but all the system of things which we 
 know by the name of Nature. He was to transfer his 
 loyalty from Athens or Rome to the Order of Nature, 
 and to find exercise for all the sentiments which had 
 formerly been known as patriotism, in the fact of mem- 
 bership in a great system of law which included the 
 human world and the world which was not human. 
 They were even fond of illustrating this idea by the com- 
 parison with a living organism which St. Paul has made 
 so familiar to Christendom ; the criminal, they felt, was 
 the schismatic ; his condition comparable to that of the 
 hand or foot which said to the rest of the body, " I have 
 no need of thee." Nevertheless it is true that they 
 were the strongest opponents of this idea, so far as it is 
 a vital, practical reality. They spoke much of man's 
 relation to the universe, they returned again and again 
 to his position of membership in a society of Gods and 
 men,^ but they made this a mere phrase, because they 
 recognized no other membership but this. 
 
 If a man's relationship to Humanity be his only 
 membership, it is a mere name. A human brotherhood, 
 
 ^ The seeker after righteousness is to be constantly reminding himself, 
 5ti ywAos eifxl rod e/c tGiv XoyiKQv <rvaTr]/j.aTOs. If he change /x^Xos to fJ-^pos, 
 he " does not love men from his heart" (M. Antoninus, vii. 13).
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 235 
 
 made up of mere individuals, is a rope of sand. When 
 a man has been moulded under the idea of an organic 
 corporate life, gradually developing from the duties of a 
 son to the responsibilities of a citizen, he is ready to 
 carry on the sense of kindred to a wider whole. When 
 this preliminary training is wanting, the unity of the 
 human race becomes a mere name, except so far as pre- 
 eminent goodness overleaps the mighty chasm between 
 the large thing and the small. 
 
 It is a hard thing to love the neighbour as the self, 
 but it is not impossible to make life a continual approach 
 towards this ideal. We have only to accept the teaching 
 of circumstance — to sec no pain we do not strive to 
 mitigate — and we are set on a path that leads us hourly 
 nearer to our goal ; we shall never pass by on the other 
 side when need makes its appeal, and thus the foreigner 
 will become the neighbour, and we shall pass the limit 
 in the very attempt to reach it. Or, rather, we shall 
 discern that the limit belongs only to the outward, and 
 that, in truth, the love of the neighbour is the love of 
 the needy. But the injunction to act as a member of 
 humanity supplies no beginning. Its effect, rather, is 
 negative. I am a member of humanity : why, then, should 
 my neighbour make any special claim upon me ? My 
 kinship is with the human race : why should my family 
 be specially dear? If we begin our moral progress 
 with a recognition of the bonds which unite us with 
 all men, we annihilate those which unite us with any. 
 Moral theory, on this basis, has no relation to life ; the 
 world of thought becomes its proper sphere ; the world 
 of action is a mere realm of indifference, a region given 
 up to disaster, a piece of waste ground, where chance 
 may take its course, and which we must make different 
 throughout, before any truly moral action is possible. 
 
 This combination of lofty theory and ignoble life is
 
 236 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 shown most distinctly in the philosopher Seneca. It 
 would be very easy to read from the pulpit, as a sermon, 
 a collection of extracts from his writings, and it might 
 be made a sermon deeply moving to the most earnest 
 Christian congregation. Perhaps we could not succeed in 
 this attempt with any other writer who either never heard, 
 or never cared to hear, the name of Christ.'^ No bio- 
 graphy more earnestly preaches the lesson of that little 
 understood warning — " If 3^e know these things, happy 
 are ye if ye do them." That knowledge may be actually 
 a barrier to action, and words no less earnest than noble 
 prove a screen for ignoble deeds, is a lesson taught by 
 many a preacher, but by none so forcibly as by one who 
 flattered the living and libelled the dead Claudius, and 
 apologized for the matricide of Nero. Still, the know- 
 ledge that words like his were sterile for all action should 
 never lead us to charge them with hypocrisy ; when 
 Seneca spoke of the God in every man, of the peace 
 which fortune neither gives nor takes away, he was 
 doubtless using expressions that corresponded to his 
 true feeling, for the moment. He mistook a kind of 
 moral taste which has, in fact, little more than an 
 aesthetic value, for that dynamic impulse which tells on 
 action. Or at least he only recognized the difference 
 by fleeting glimpses which never stirred his heart with 
 remorse or shame, as they would have done had he 
 ever compared the standard enforced by his preaching 
 and that suggested by his life. 
 
 But we do not need the spectacle of a moral teacher I 
 
 apologizing for hideous crime in order to teach us the t 
 
 weakness of a merely individual morality. We see that 
 weakness in the noblest specimens of Stoicism. " We 
 
 ^ A series of letters, purporting to be addressed by Seneca to St. Paul, is i 
 
 still extant, and though plainly a mere fiction, is not without interest as indi- ' 
 
 eating the associations naturally suggested by his teaching.
 
 THE AGE OF DEATH. 
 
 ^37 
 
 must leave the sins of other people alone," says Marcus 
 Aurelius. The ruler who accepted that axiom was in 
 some respects a worse Emperor than Nero. What an 
 illustration of its influence is afforded by the fact that 
 he was the father of Commodus ! ^ It was not for want 
 of the very noblest ideal of an individual morality ever 
 held by man that the Stoic Emperor left his throne to 
 a monster. And this ideal was the concentration, in a 
 beautiful soul, of aims that were characteristic of an age. 
 None more than the men of that time have said fine and 
 true things of the organic connection of man with man ; 
 they were fond of speaking of individuals as leaves of 
 a plant sharing a common life. But the actual tendency 
 of their teaching was rather to reduce men to the mere 
 contiguity of pebbles on the sea-shore. The hand or 
 foot need not, in the Stoic view, participate in the disease 
 of the bod3^ It need only feel its own ills. On its best 
 side we see this belief as a disintegrating, pulverizing 
 influence — an influence that could be accepted by the 
 best men only at a period of the world's history in 
 which the universal need and tendency was towards 
 a deep and long repose. 
 
 When the union with Humanity is the only union, 
 corporate responsibility is lost. The idea of Duty be- 
 comes narrowly individual ; there is no standard which 
 forms a moral union for the group. Men can never say, 
 " We ought." There is no place for indignation in the 
 world. When we see how often indignation is futile, 
 when we realize the narrow limits within which man can 
 judge his fellow, we are often tempted to believe that 
 Duty should never be recognized except in the sphere 
 
 1 Epictetus has some even more offensive assertions of a similar character, 
 e.g., i. 18 : — IJ.7) Oav/xaii'e rb kuWos t^j yvvaiKbs, Kal ry fJ^oix<? ov xoXeiraive/y, 
 a sentence whicli it is painfully interesting to compare witli tlic toleration of 
 Marcus for the vices of Faustina. But Epictetus was not sinning against his 
 special vocation as a ruler.
 
 238 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 which each man encloses when he says " I." The Age 
 of Death is a forcible refutation of that belief. If any- 
 one think that it is enough for each individual himself 
 to refrain from wrong actions, himself to press forward 
 to every noble aim, rigidly excluding from his endeavours 
 any judgment of others, no period of history could be 
 presented to him more full of instruction than the first 
 few centuries of our era. He will see in the teaching 
 of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and even in some 
 parts of Seneca, a standard of goodness that was not 
 surpassed in some directions by any moral teaching, and 
 that was at the same time perfectly sterile for an}' result 
 of which History can take account. The philosophers of 
 this age taught and sincerely believed a large part of 
 all that the teaching of Christ sets before man, a much 
 larger part than can be claimed as the practical exhibi- 
 tion of Christianity at any stage of its development ; and 
 the result of their teaching was to make sycophants 
 and cowards. Theirs was a mutilated ideal ; not in- 
 complete only in the sense that an ideal is the product 
 of fallible human aspirations and on every side capable of 
 expansion, but in the sense that on one side it has cut 
 itself off from expansion. It was not growth arrested 
 at an immature stage, but an organism that had 
 deprived itself of the means of growth. It con- 
 sidered man out of his natural condition, man as he 
 is cut off from the bonds of human societ}^, detached 
 from all ties of family and country, isolated as in some 
 spiritual Juan Fernandez. It regarded as a whole that 
 being of which it is one of the most important facts to 
 remember that he is part of a larger whole ; and thus 
 omitted from its content his most important relations, 
 and the most organic necessities of his being.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 
 
 That age which closes the history of the old world we 
 have called the Age of Death ; the title seems justified by 
 the exhibition of its strongest interests and its habitual 
 tendencies. But the death of one phase of life was the 
 birth of another. The Roman Empire, in truth, might 
 in some sense be called rather the beginning of modern 
 than the end of ancient history. From some points of 
 view, we may regard it as a presentation of that ideal 
 Unity to which the civilization of the modern world seems 
 continually to aspire ; it shows us the nations of Europe 
 bound in a corporate union which they have never actu- 
 ally possessed, but towards which their whole history 
 seems an indistinct and baffled progress. We under- 
 stand the Middle Ages best, when we keep as a clue to 
 their history the yearning in the great mind which may 
 be taken as the representative of mediaeval Faith after a 
 corporate union of which the Pope should be the heart, 
 and the Emperor the head. Dante feels the " Holy 
 Roman Empire " ^ a sacred ideal. He, the truest son 
 of Italy, wrote his treatise on Monarchy to celebrate 
 the arrival of a German Emperor in Italy. That the 
 book is " an epitaph instead of a prophecy " detracts 
 nothing from its significance. It is an epitaph which 
 implies a legacy ; the aspirations which it embodies pre- 
 figure a large part of the struggles of modern Europe, 
 
 1 See the valuable and interesting work with this title by Mr. Bryce, a little 
 volume which seems to me to contain the kernel of mcdiajval history.
 
 240 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 perhaps even of the struggles of the future. The 
 organization after which Dante yearned gave Europe a 
 certain imperfect but actual Unity until a new dividing- 
 line separated Protestant from Catholic ; it even lingered 
 on as an empty shade up to the cockcrow of the Revolu- 
 tion. That Holy Roman Empire, which was neither 
 Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, and yet perished only 
 yesterday, was the representative of a great idea; we 
 may say of it, as Cicero of Cato : " The influence of the 
 dead was undying." ^ Its influence is traceable in the 
 work of a thinker whom his followers regard as the 
 typical representative of modern thought. Comte, too, 
 dreams of a Holy Empire, and sees in the future some 
 kind of reflex of that national union of which Roman 
 law was the bond and expression. The Frenchman and 
 the Italian, wide as the poles asunder, agree in a belief 
 that a common civilization imphes a common faith, that 
 Europe shall at last find its soul. 
 
 The aspiration of Dante and of Comte was in some 
 sense the possession of those whose moral life we have 
 been endeavouring to follow. The Roman Stoics and 
 their contemporaries inhabited a united Europe, they 
 lived under a single law (perhaps the wisest the world 
 has ever known), and in its new expansion, including all 
 that they meant by the world, they felt a new meaning 
 given to law, a new faith to the heart of man. The 
 world without always gives, in some sense, a model to 
 the world within, and the world had never before been 
 a Unity ; nor, indeed, has it ever since been a Unity in 
 the same sense. The struggles of cities fill the record 
 of the ancient world ; the struggles of nations fill the 
 record of the modern ; between them intervenes a time in 
 which the scene of all previous and subsequent conflicts 
 was filled by one vast political organism, confronting all 
 
 1 " Etiam mortui valuit auctoritas."
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 241 
 
 opposition as mere revolt. Hence all endeavour in the 
 realm of thought took this ideal of Unit}^ as its goal. 
 As one dominion bound all the various races of the 
 known world into a single kingdom, acknowledging a 
 single head, so one aim was predominant in speculation ; 
 intellectual effort was bent to harmonize all existent 
 varieties of thought, to find in all something to assent 
 to, something to accept. As Greece, Africa, the East, 
 had each become a province of the Roman Empire, so 
 Hellenic, Alexandrian, Oriental speculation must all 
 become a part of the true faith. Everything that had 
 ever been declared with earnestness must in some sense 
 be true. 
 
 This new sense of the oneness of truth beneath the 
 variety of opinions must have been wonderfully quickened 
 by the mere fact that cultivation came, at the time of 
 which we speak, to include a knowledge of more 
 languages than one. When we compare any modern 
 thinker with Plato, we perceive that the most profound 
 philosopher of antiquity, or rather of any time, is in 
 some respects at a disadvantage in comparison with an 
 ordinary person who knows that his own language is 
 but one of many actual forms of speech. Plato could 
 not shake off the belief that to understand a word is to 
 discover the nature of a thing ; the mistake is impossible 
 for any modern. It was hardly possible for a subject 
 of the Roman Empire ; acquaintance with even two lan- 
 guages sufficiently confutes the error that language is a 
 photograph of existence. The Roman could not but know 
 that Latin was language in just the same sense that Greek 
 was. He must sometimes have suspected (as Plato never 
 did) that language is an imperfect vehicle of thought, and 
 that incomplete or even misleading expression need not be 
 erroneous statement.^ As we study the faded metaphor, 
 
 1 For instance, when Anthony wrote of ^rfKorvirla to Cicero (see the letter 
 
 Q
 
 242 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 the illogical associations, the misleading suggestions, em- 
 bodied in the history of words, we feel that a portion 
 of the search for truth consists in disentangling what a 
 writer means from what he is obliged to say. When 
 once men were taught this lesson of language, a new 
 light fell on religion. Mythology was assimilated to 
 this linguistic variety. While there was one language 
 and many barbaric dialects, men never realized that truth 
 might be subject to variety of expression, or conversely, 
 that varied expression might point to a single truth. Of 
 course, the Greek had always known that barbarians 
 could make themselves mutually intelligible ; but it was 
 impossible for him ever really to believe that any other 
 language stood in the same relation to thought as his own 
 did. When once a barbaric language enshrined the law 
 by which the world was governed, the exclusive race was 
 forced to recognize that it was a fragment of the human 
 race. We might almost say, that all which divided man 
 from man became transparent to that underlying reality 
 in which man was bound to man, when once it was dis- 
 cerned that beneath the variety of languages lay hid the 
 Unity of Thought. 
 
 The exponent of this new feeling of Catholic sympathy 
 with all human imagination and thought was also the 
 enthusiastic student of the heroic past. The new aim 
 of discovering unity beneath divergence occupies a pro- 
 portion of Plutarch's space quite equal to that study of 
 the great figures of the antique world to which he owes 
 his fame. He saw beneath the antagonistic aspect of 
 various creeds a single aspiration after the Divine, the 
 one ray of Divine light tinged by the varied colouring 
 
 enclosed to Atticus in Epist. ad Att., x. 8), each must have felt that there was 
 a feeling — jealousy — for which the Latin language provided no name, and for 
 which one was needed. Cicero's frequent recourse to scraps of Greek must 
 have been a continual reminder of this new idea to himself and his corre- 
 spondents.
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 243 
 
 of human imagination ; ^ and the refracted rays, he felt, 
 might be recombined ; the many was but a transparent 
 disguise for the one. The Gods, he urges, are not diffe- 
 rent in different places, they differ only as the names 
 for the sun in different languages. The races which 
 could not understand each other's names for the sun all 
 see the same sun. Osiris and Bacchus are not different 
 beings any more than the sun which shines in Egypt is 
 different from the sun which shines in Greece.^ And 
 then, further, Bacchus, Osiris, and all their kindred are 
 but var3ang aspects of the one Invisible God, who shall 
 become the Guide and King of men when they are deli- 
 vered from the prison of the body and migrate into the 
 distant land where He reigns alone.^ While men are 
 yet bound in the chains of material surroundings (he 
 felt) they can discern Him only under these various 
 aspects ; they must express the great truths which they 
 dimly perceive as to His nature under the guise of 
 fragmentary metaphor, which becomes mythology. Those 
 who take Bacchus for wine and Vulcan for flame, he 
 says, make the same mistake as those who confuse the 
 oar with the pilot, or the loom with the weaver ; and 
 those err also who see in nature so many separate agencies, 
 and do not discern that all are at bottom but various 
 aspects of one great primal unity.* The various allegories 
 by which men have accounted for the fictitious histories 
 that have sprung up concerning these separate beings arc 
 singly erroneous, but in their totality they are true. The 
 fragment is a fiction, the totality is a truth. Typho is not 
 the principle of darkness, of dryness, or of barrenness ; he 
 is generally the hurtful principle in Nature ; every specia- 
 lization of this truth is good as its illustration, and be- 
 comes false only when it is taken as complete in itself. 
 
 ^ See Plutarch, De Isidc cl Osiridc, c. 20. 
 ^ Ibid., c. 67. i Ibid.,Q.7Z. -i/iuL.c.Gs.
 
 244 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 The discernment that all the diversities which sepa- 
 rate human beings, are less important than that under- 
 lying unity which forms their bond, came home to the 
 men of that time as a religious truth. Mahomet did 
 not believe more emphatically that God was one than 
 did the thinkers of the first two centuries of our era 
 that Man was one. It was recognized that what was 
 common to the slave and the emperor was more im- 
 portant than what was special for each, and it is hardly 
 possible for us who see this as a truism to realize what 
 it was to those who hailed it as a great moral discovery. 
 The preciousness of man as man was felt more strongly 
 in this earliest age of the modern world than it was felt 
 again before the eighteenth century. It was opposed 
 by the spirit of chivalry, by mediaeval religion, and then 
 again by the spirit of the Renaissance ; each of these 
 laid stress on something exceptional ; that recognition of 
 the common as the uniting element was a prophecy of 
 all that is most advanced in modern democracy. Under 
 this new light the lesson of the Greek took a new mean- 
 ing. He had shown forth the exceptional elements of 
 human life — its beauty, its genius, its loftiest virtue ; 
 his language enshrined all that was most precious in 
 merely human thought ; his hands had fashioned all 
 that was most ideal in the representation of human 
 beauty. But under the new view of human oneness 
 all this became a " promise and potenc3'' " of human life 
 itself. The work of Phidias, of Homer, of Sophocles, 
 became a tribute to the dignity of Man. All that was 
 conspicuous in the man of exceptional gifts became a 
 measure of the value of that common humanity which 
 dwarfed its eminence. Thus the Greek sense of humanity 
 took a new meaning. It gained, as the fragmentary ex- 
 pression of a truth it had imperfectly contained, a depth 
 and pregnancy that it had lacked as a whole in itself
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 245 
 
 As the name of man became more precious than the 
 name of Greek, so even beyond that broad humanity 
 was discerned a deeper unity, and Humanity was seen 
 to contain a seed of something greater than itself. As 
 the human element had lain hidden within the Greek 
 element, so the Divine element had lain hidden within 
 the human element. The oneness latent beneath the 
 divergence of Greek and Barbarian was seen as a guide 
 to a deeper oneness ; the larger whole, which had re- 
 placed the smaller whole, became in its turn a fragment, 
 and craved its completion. This is the rhythm of all 
 thought. The one — the many — and then again the 
 one, deeper and wider than before, till we reach that 
 Unity which is the foundation of all others. God and 
 Man were seen to be one in a new sense ; it was felt 
 vaguely that all which was most precious in human 
 relation was a clue to and symbol of the relation by 
 which Man was bound to God. It was confusedly dis- 
 cerned that we must ascend to a level higher than 
 humanity before we can understand the laws of human 
 relation ; that the idea of Man in relation to something 
 beyond himself gains a luminous intelligibility for ever 
 absent from those speculations as to his nature and 
 development in which he is treated as a whole. It had 
 been the truth of the ancient world that he was a frag- 
 ment of the State, and as the states of the ancient world 
 perished individuality took a new meaning. But by the 
 same movement of thought, a new relation came in to 
 replace the old ; the Eternal succeeded the perennial ; 
 Man ceased to think of himself as a member of the State, 
 and discerned his position as a son of God. 
 
 This was felt vaguely by all who entered into the 
 deeper currents of thought. But the Jew had known 
 this always, so far as he was true to his own special 
 message; and in this age he was taught to recognize it
 
 246 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 afx^esh by discovering its harmony with all that had 
 appeared its most striking opposite. The great Anti- 
 thesis of all human thought is that of Judaism and 
 Hellenism. It is hardly possible for us to conceive 
 of another moral and intellectual contrast so striking, 
 so complete, so exhaustive of all the tendencies that 
 belong to human endeavour and interest. When we 
 have entered into the depth of Hebrew thought, have 
 felt its thrill of awe at the ineffable Name suggested 
 by all creation, and least inadequately associated with 
 that declaration " I am ; " — and then, returning from 
 that plunge into an abyss, have soared to a height from 
 which we may overlook the wide, varied, contrast-full 
 extent of Hellenic life and thought, we seem to have 
 left no region of human interest unvisited. Fresh from 
 Hebrew awe of God, and Hellenic interest in Man — 
 from the Hebrew sense of Righteousness and Iniquity 
 — the Hellenic sympathy with varied impulse and 
 elasticity of moral view — we have touched the extremes 
 of all moral life, and seem to have confronted the 
 blankest contradiction which can set human thoughts on 
 paths of hopeless divergence. 
 
 The Greek, with his harmony of opposites, his swift 
 inversion of sympathy, his delight in varied thought, his 
 elastic expansiveness of comprehension, had declared in 
 brilliant and enduring poetry and art that man is various ; 
 he saw everywhere the human even when he sought 
 the Divine. He enthroned Humanity in Heaven, and 
 saw there, not the pure white ray, but the rainbow into 
 which that ray was refracted by his prismatic genius. 
 The very opposite of all this describes the faith of the 
 Jew. In his abhorrence of all worship of the Visible, 
 his profound loyalty to the Unseen, he never ceased to 
 uphold his conviction that God is one, and more and 
 more came to feel that the true Man was the son of God.
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 247 
 
 The antagonism of the two races was unabated. Per- 
 haps it was increased. Their mutual opportunities of 
 intercourse revealed to each the depths of their diver- 
 gence. The worship of the Formless, the Unseen, pre- 
 sented itself to the classic mind as mere Pantheism, or 
 degrading superstition. The worshipper of the out- 
 ward Unity recoiled from the worshipper of the inward 
 as from a mere opponent to the Gods. Almost all 
 references to the Jews in Greek or Latin seem to ignore 
 their faith. The Jews,^ says a Greek historian, had 
 been taught that God was merely " what we call Heaven 
 and the universe and the nature of things." The Roman 
 satirist declares that they " pray to the clouds and the 
 power of Heaven."^ The Roman historian describes 
 them as " given over to superstition, but disinclined to 
 religion."" They, who saw God everywhere, seemed to 
 see Him nowhere. They did see Him nowhere in the 
 sense that he was there and not here. The Roman 
 General in the sacred shrine, where he found no image, 
 and where he must have deemed himself confronted with 
 a vacuum as much of faith as of imagination,^ is a type 
 of the mind formed on Greek culture, in presence of 
 a profound faith rooted in a depth to which he could 
 not penetrate ; as, in like manner, the Jewish Apostle, at 
 the centre of Greek art, indignant at the shapes of beauty 
 on every side, which he deemed objects of idolatry, is a 
 
 ' Strabo, xvi. 2. 
 
 2 " Nil praeter nubes, et coeli numen adorant" (Juvenal, xiv. 95). 
 
 ' " Gens superstitioni obnoxia, religionibus adversa" (Tacitus, Hist., v. 13). 
 
 * Pompey did in fact order the sanctuary to be purified and the sacrifices 
 continued, but respect for the religion of the conquered was a part of Roman 
 policy, and we may take the impression given in these citations as includin.:^ 
 that which he was the means of bringing to Rome. For the contempt and 
 hatred with which the Jews were regarded by the Romans see Cic. Pro Flacco, 
 28, and 'I'ac. Hist. v. 4, Frofana illic omnia qua; apud nos sacra : rursuni 
 conccssa apud illis quce nobis .incesta ; a mere calumny, vividly expressing 
 the detestation which gave it birth.
 
 248 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 type of the mind formed by Hebrew faith in presence of 
 that Greek worship of the beautiful which he could not 
 comprehend. We should think of Paul at Athens, side 
 by side with Pompey in the Holy of Holies, as showing 
 forth respectively the illusions which beset the wor- 
 shipper of the Unseen and the lover of the Beautiful 
 when they attempt to judge each other. Paul thought 
 that the citizens of Athens were superstitious — they who 
 probably had the least superstition of any men then on the 
 face of the earth. Pompe}'', or at all events those who 
 took their impressions through the medium of his con- 
 quest, thought that nation to be irreligious whose very 
 existence was grounded on an acknowledgment of the 
 One Invisible ground of Heaven and Earth, and all that 
 in them is. Athens superstitious and Jerusalem irre- 
 ligious ! The fact that such things were said is a warn- 
 ing for the critics of all time. 
 
 But the time w^as come when the thinker of each race 
 was to learn that the lesson of his own nation was in- 
 complete when standing alone. The testimony of Israel 
 to the Divine Unity mirrored itself in that humanity 
 which his Scriptures declared to be moulded in the image 
 of God, and which the spirit of the age discovered to 
 lie at the root of all divergences of national character. 
 And in the same way, though not by any means to the 
 same degree, the lesson of the Greek was mirrored back 
 on the lore of the Jew. He was beginning to read, 
 even into his Scriptures, the belief that the Divine nature 
 enfolds in its own oneness the variety of Man.-"^ He saw 
 that Unity was not uniformity, that God reveals Himself 
 in many ways to His creatures, that all the wealth of con- 
 trast discernible in His work must be first within His own 
 nature ; he felt dimly that there might be many persons 
 
 1 In the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, the Theophanies reveal 
 not the Supreme Himself, but some inferior manifestation of His will.
 
 ii 
 
 THE JE W AT A LEX A NDRIA . 249 
 
 in one God. But his sense of tiie Divine oneness was 
 not lost in this sense of the Divine multiformity ; rather 
 it was intensified. Man was at once Many and One, and 
 God must be more full of contrast and more entirely One 
 than His creature was. It is no fanciful view of the 
 varied and seething thought of this age to say that in 
 its combination of many elements in a single civilization 
 was prepared and prefigured the belief in the Trinity. 
 I\Ien saw that that was true of human nature which, in 
 the view of Man's relation to God then dawning upon 
 the world, they were to express in dogmas concerning 
 the Divine. At that point in the world's history, it was 
 felt, as never before, that the human race was at once 
 man}^ and one. Before that time there had been a cer- 
 tain ideal unity, typified on one side by the Greek, on 
 the other by the Jew, towards which all that called itself 
 Man was supposed to be in some sense aspiring ; but the 
 Barbarian was not really one with the Greek, nor the 
 Gentile with the Jew. Between each race and the outer 
 world there was a vast chasm which no aspirations could 
 bridge. Plato felt the imperfect logical character of the 
 division of Greeks and barbarians ; it was, he said, as if 
 cranes should divide the whole animal world into cranes 
 and not-cranes ; ■^ but morally he felt its influence, and 
 his countrymen probably never saw any flaw in it at 
 all. To the Jew at Alexandria both Greek exclusiveness 
 and Jewish exclusiveness were revealed to some extent 
 in their true character. He was forced to see that the 
 specially Jewish lesson entirely, and the special Greek 
 lesson to a great extent, was lost when the Greek or 
 the Jew refused to be a member of Humanity. They 
 had each, in their difTercnt languages, borne witness to 
 the oneness of humanity, and when the whole outward 
 structure of society proclaimed that humanity was one, a 
 
 1 Plato, Politicus, 263.
 
 250 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 new meaning was reflected back on their own teaching, 
 a new force was given to their own words. 
 
 To those who look back on this phase in the evolution 
 of moral life from a stage of much fuller development, it 
 may appear that this trinity of earth, soon to be mirrored 
 in the Trinity of Heaven, was a mere accident. It can- 
 not be said that the stream of Christian thought is com- 
 plete when it is enriched by the tributaries of Greece, 
 of Judaea, and of Rome ; it has yet to accept the deep 
 waters of Teutonic influence, the element on which the 
 very life of modern Europe depends. But, in truth, this 
 human trinity is independent of a particular historic 
 phase ; it is an expression of a law of thought repeated 
 again and again in the most various quarters. It has 
 never again been expressed with the same colossal im- 
 pressiveness and deep pregnant force of expansion which 
 it found, when the nation which declared the Divine 
 Unity stood face to face with the nation which illustrated 
 and enfolded the human variety, under the harsh dominion 
 and the wise law of that nation whose call was to the 
 Mediatorship of all nations. But it is more or less 
 expressed in the history of all thought so far as any 
 moral evolution can be discerned there. The collision 
 of opposites — the presence of a Mediator — this is the 
 universal rhythm of human development. And that 
 theological dogma which finds the Divine Father, the 
 Eternal Son, and the Holy Spirit to constitute " not 
 three Gods, but One God," does but translate this 
 rhythmic human law into that Divine expression which 
 every moral law requires if it is to be felt an enduring 
 reality. The trinity of the Athanasian Creed is the 
 expression of human development, as it was exhibited 
 to the eyes of the world, when the two races who'\ 
 severally have done most for the spiritual and intellectual i 
 development of mankind, met under the rule of that race
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 251 
 
 who has done most for its government. It would pro- 
 bably not be possible at any other crisis of history to 
 point out three nations thus related to each other ; but 
 their relation expresses the law of history ; it has been 
 felt again and again in individual development and recog- 
 nized in philosophy, and the age in which it was seen, as 
 it were, in its naked simplicit}^, will always be felt in 
 some sense the key to the history of the human race. 
 
 The t3^pical representative of this new sense of a 
 Unity underlying all difference is Philo, the Alexandrian 
 Jew.^ On the soil of Alexandria it had become impos- 
 sible for the son of Israel to perpetuate the exclusive- 
 ness either of his own race or of the race by whose 
 culture his mind had been formed. Escaping from the 
 narrow horizon of both, he saw their several histories as 
 each a chapter in the history of humanity, but in one 
 the typical chapter — the clue to all the volume. He felt, 
 as only the select few of his countr3'men had ever felt 
 before, that the message of his nation was a message to 
 the human race. " In thy seed shall all the families of 
 the earth be blessed," was a promise that came home to 
 him with new meaning ; he saw all that had separated 
 his countrymen from the Gentiles as a promise of their 
 beneficent union with the Gentiles. An intimate know- 
 ledge of all that is most precious in Gentile lore prepared 
 him to discover its readiness to enrich and to be enriched 
 by a yet higher lore ; to feel that its most characteristic 
 lessons were incomplete until they were combined with 
 the doctrine of which they might on a narrow view 
 appear almost the denial, and that they first found their 
 deepest meaning when they met their antithetic belief. 
 He shows us how close may be the relation of convic- 
 
 1 Philo takes the same place with regard to Judaism that Plutarch docs with 
 regard to Hellenism, They each represent the spirit that prizes the traditions 
 of a race, and awakens to a unity in which it is a mere fragment.
 
 253 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 tions separated by the fiercest intellectual opposition, and 
 how men, who seem to meet in blank antagonism, may 
 but illustrate, complete, and expand each other's thought. 
 
 It was not by any endowment of exceptional genius 
 that a Jew, steeped in the religious conviction of his 
 race, welcomed and assimilated the convictions diametri- 
 cally opposed to it, discerned the nearness of the most 
 fundamental opposites, and blended the lesson of those 
 who would have had nothing for each other but indiffer- 
 ence or denunciation. His was no soaring spirit, ready 
 to spring to heights from which the great outlines of 
 the moral world take a new aspect ; he was but an 
 attentive traveller along its highway, studious of all 
 that was revealed to the eye of average power. What 
 he saw, all could see who would look around with 
 any earnest care ; the lesson he taught was one that 
 all could learn. If he, first of those whose recorded 
 thought has reached the modern world, saw that the 
 Greek and the Hebrew corresponded each to each, 
 as the human corresponded to the Divine, it must have 
 been because the time was come for all to see this. 
 The Hebrew Scriptures revealed the only true Being, 
 the Invisible One, lying beyond and behind all pheno- 
 mena. Greek literature revealed Man, the various, the 
 diverse, the divergent, the being who found his very 
 meaning in conflict. When Philo lived, these two re- 
 velations converged ; it needed no penetrating gaze to 
 pursue their paths to a common goal, only a patient 
 attention to the external circumstances of the world. 
 Greece and Judaea bowed beneath a single law. The 
 teacher of Righteousness, the lover of Beauty, were 
 taught their oneness in their common relation to a 
 government which brought both into a single framework, 
 and forced them to feel some kind of mutual relation. 
 
 Philo brought to this great truth, not the distinct-
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 253 
 
 ness of genius, but the confusion of ordinary prejudice ; 
 on his page we find prefigured the theological confusion 
 which has always obscured the meaning of inspiration 
 to the eyes of mankind. He saw that Greek and 
 Hebrew wisdom were ready to unite ; but he blurred 
 that truth by mistaking antithesis for resemblance, and 
 insisting that a harmony was a unison.^ He turned 
 the convergence into a union in which the distinctness 
 was lost in one sense, and yet in another exaggerated. 
 The Old Testament, he urges continually, does not 
 mean what it says ; its actual meaning is a kernel 
 within a husk, which many have taken for the fruit, 
 and either thus fed on the husks, or else trampled under 
 foot the precious grain. At Alexandria probably he 
 knew most of the last, and is always trying to prepare 
 his readers to bear Greek raillery. It is very easy, 
 he tells those Greeks who must have sharpened their 
 wits on the Septuagint,^ to make merry with the sacred 
 writings, if we regard them as a narrative of events. 
 But the wise man does not regard Hebrew history as 
 a record of event. The history, which merely informs 
 a careless reader that the serpent tempted Eve, and 
 that she tempted Adam, teaches the seeker after truth \ 
 that Pleasure, the tempter, appeals first to sense, and 
 sense to mind.' In narrating the destruction of the 
 
 1 See, e.g., Quis Rerum Divinarum Hasres, Mangey, vol. iv. 92-94, where he 
 seems to suppose that the harmony of opposites taught by Ileracleitus was 
 plagiarized from the Pentateuch, being suggested apparently by so simple a 
 passage as Genesis xv. 10 :— "EXXt?^^? rbv ni-^av Kal aoldifiov irap avroh 
 Hp&icKiiTov, Ke^d\aiou rrj^ avroO irpodTT^aafievov (pi\oao(f)ias, avxeif w i(p' 
 evp^jfi Kaivij ; iroKaibv yap (Dpepia Mwa^us icrl. This citation, and most 
 of those which follow, are from the Erlangen edition of iVIangey's Philo, in 
 four vols., 1785-92. 
 
 - u) KarayiXaaToi Kal \iai> ii'xfpeh, he answers an imaginary objection, /li/i/., 
 p. 36, He seems to have been irritated by very minute and pedantic criticism, 
 if that to which he here replies be a fair specimen. 
 
 3 De Mundi Opificio, Mangey, i. 112-114. Q^- Leg. AUegor. , [[., puisim, 
 same vol.
 
 254 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 old world b}' a flood, it really sets forth the awful cala- 
 mity of permission to sin, of that oneness of impulse 
 from which the distraction of wrong is removed,^ and the 
 whole nature is turned to evil, when the moral order is, 
 as it were, submerged beneath instincts from which God 
 has withdrawn His protest ; and even from the Heavens 
 above the destroying influence pours down to meet the 
 rising tide below. Nor is it only in the vast events of 
 History that this mystic wisdom is discernible ; we can 
 learn from the minutest details, as from the grandest out- 
 lines of the sacred record, some principle of the divine 
 teaching of humanity. When we read in the account 
 of the mysterious sacrifice of Abraham, " The birds he 
 did not divide," " we may learn, if we truly receive what 
 is there conveyed to us, the great lesson of unity of 
 mind, the bird being an emblem of that spiritual prin- 
 ciple in every man which makes him one. The Hebrew 
 writings take the form of narrative, because that is the 
 only form in which the deepest truths can be presented ' 
 to man; but those truths are not to be conceived of/ 
 under the time-relations of history ; they are the express 
 sions, necessarily imperfect, and to the superficial reader 
 misleading, of that which is eternal. It is not that these 
 things might not have happened — Philo takes so very 
 little interest in that question that it is not always easy to 
 say which way he answered it — but that wJiich happened 
 is not their meaning for iis? We have to seek out that 
 meaning as ore in a mine, not take it ready made as 
 
 1 Ue Confessione Linguarum, Mangey, iii. 327: — Tou ira^T^/iaros rovio [i.e., 
 permission to sin) 6 fxkyas dpaypacpets wapa ti^ vcfiod^rrj Ka.TaKXvc/j.os eari. 
 
 2 Quis Rerum, &c., Mangey, iv. 100, 102. 
 
 3 Sometimes he must have regarded the narrative as literally false ; he says 
 this definitely of the sacrifice of Isaac. Tdre yap Kai tov ayairj^Tov xilbv 
 Upiovpyj]ff€i, ovxj. dvOpwirov. ov yap TeKvSKrovos 6 co(pbs (De Migratione 
 Abrahami, Mangey, iii. 474). But he says elsewhere things quite incon- 
 sistent with this, and I suppose he never really made up his own mind on 
 the point.
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 255 
 
 coins from the Mint. We have, in a certain sense, to 
 be fellow-workers with the writer ; we hardly need less 
 mental activity to decipher than he to compose his nar- 
 rative. It is true only to those who can thus decipher it. 
 Philo is here the ancestor of an important section of 
 the Church, lasting from its first existence to our own 
 da3^ Perhaps none is more fundamentally hostile to the 
 spirit of Science. When the seeker after Truth, asking, 
 " What happened at a particular time ? " or " What was 
 meant by a particular writer ? " is answered, " This and 
 this is the lesson we are meant to learn from the words 
 you are striving to interpret," he feels that a serious 
 investigation is transformed into a game of cross-ques- 
 tions. Nothing can be more unsatisfactory, from the 
 scientific point of view, than a mode of exegesis which 
 insists that a seeming narrative is an actual sermon ; 
 which forbids us to compare dates, when the histor}^ is 
 elaborately chronological ; which treats as impiety the 
 analysis of numbers, when our text is full of statistics ; 
 which ignores a historic aim elaborately insisted on, 
 and thrusts in a homiletic aim nowhere hinted at. 
 This view of Inspiration puts a moral premium on an 
 intellectual attitude in which the ignorance of fact is 
 deliberately cultivated. It represents, therefore, all that 
 the scientific mind abhors. Nevertheless, we shall not 
 understand history unless we are prepared to make 
 a certain place in our intellectual sympathy for those 
 who have cherished it in the past. God speaks 
 through the deeds of men no less than through their 
 words; history is the Divine language. It is indeed 
 a language hard to understand, easy to misinterpret ; 
 we shall never discover in its sentences that exact and 
 accurate justice after which human law is continually 
 but vainly aspiring ; we shall sometimes be forced to read 
 there verdicts which seem to outrage the very concep-
 
 256 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 tion of Divine law. Yet still we must recognize that 
 the purpose of Heaven lies hid in the events of the 
 past, we may, here and there, be enabled to discover 
 that purpose. Perhaps the superstitious reverence for 
 the letter of Scripture which we are fast outgrowing 
 was the withering husk to a seed of truth — the belief 
 that principles applicable to all history are applicable to 
 one history in a special sense.^ As the seventh day 
 was hallowed to the Lord in order that all days might 
 be recognized as holy, so the elect race was set apart 
 as the ideal Son of God, in order that all races might 
 be recognized as actual sons of God. The inner mean- 
 ing of the Jewish history once deciphered, a " Rosetta 
 stone " was set up for all the hieroglyphics of human 
 history, however remote from that of Israel. In carrying 
 out this principle, in seeking for the symbolism of fact, 
 Philo betrays a more than ordinary lack of the historic 
 sense ; it is the characteristic error of the theologian 
 that he hurries on to the principle, before making sure 
 of the event, and blames carefulness concerning accuracy 
 of fact as indifference to the principle which facts involve. 
 But this is an error of very different importance at dif- 
 ferent periods in the development of thought. In hurry- 
 ing on to the symbolic meaning of a story before deciding 
 whether it was true or false, Philo was not opposing any 
 obvious principle, as he would have been in a generation 
 familiarized with a long course of historical investigation 
 and with the accuracy that is bred of physical science. 
 He may, indeed, have read one or two histories whose 
 authors sought for accuracy as much as do the great 
 historians of our own day, but that aim was wholly alien 
 
 1 " The history of Israel," it was once said to me, in answer to a question 
 regarding the Divine mission of the Jewish race, "is the type of an individual 
 history in a sense that no other history is.'' I have never known any one who 
 more prized that history than the speaker — Thomas Erskine of Linlathen.
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 257 
 
 to the spirit of his time on the whole. He was not defy- 
 ing, as his theological successors have defied, the univer- 
 sally accepted tests of his intellectual world. In another 
 respect also he may be favourably compared with them 
 — he never set up a date, or a geographical boundary, at 
 which inspiration ceased ; it was the condition of all direct 
 influence from God to man, at all times. He speaks of 
 it quite simply from his own experience.^ Man under 
 this influence hears a voice which is not his own, and 
 feels that his personality becomes in a special sense 
 what the very word person would seem to witness that it 
 is always in some sense, a channel through which comes 
 an utterance he accepts, but does not originate. The 
 subjective element of inspiration was in his view common 
 to humanity. As history was the language of God, so 
 the ear to hear it might be opened in every son of man. 
 The lesson appointed for that multitude of races 
 brought into unity as subjects of the Roman Empire 
 may be described, on one side, as the transformation 
 of the part into the whole. Man as an individual had 
 been a fragment, and was, in the age we have reached, 
 discovered to be a Unity. But the lesson is quite as 
 true in an inverted form ; what the Jew at Alexandria 
 had to learn was, that human history became intelligible 
 when the former Unity was treated as a fragment ; that, 
 for Jew and Greek alike, love for the nation led to the 
 discernment that the nation was a mere fragment of 
 humanity. The antithesis of Hellenic and Hebrew 
 thought was felt as a convergence pointing to a funda- 
 mental unity. From Judaea came that vision of the Divine 
 in which the Human was on one side transfigured with 
 its glory ; on the other, seen in black shadow against 
 that daz/Jing radiance. On that ground was no other 
 interest in the history of Man but his relation to God ; 
 the creature and Creator stood face to face ; this one anti- 
 
 1 Dc Migralione Abrahanii, c. 7. 
 
 R
 
 258 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 thesis filled the world of thought. What could be more 
 unlike Greek love of variety, Greek feeling of dramatic 
 sympathy with all impulse, and the bright, fearless irre- 
 verence which marked the Greek attitude towards the 
 supernatural? But an impartial inexorable dominion over 
 each brought them into relation with each other. The 
 monotonous receptivity of Rome, attentive, unsympa- 
 thizing, yet in a certain sense respectful, full of recog- 
 nition for all that could make out for itself the claim 
 of tradition, ready to give space and legitimacy to 
 everything that would own Roman authority in the 
 political sphere, supplied all opposites with a plan of 
 mediation. That impartial wide-reaching Law came in 
 as the harmonizing element, beneficent to all, recog- 
 nized as the power " through whom we enjoy very 
 great quietness," ^ felt as a refuge even from the tyranny 
 of those who administered it, and a protector even from 
 the enormities that were perpetrated in its name. 
 
 The place of Rome, at that stage of the world, would 
 be more intelligible to modern Christendom if it were 
 less familiar. Who could peruse, for the first time, 
 those four accounts of the great tragedy of the world's 
 history which we know too well as a narrative to un- 
 derstand as a fact, without seeing that the victory of 
 fanaticism was the defeat of Rome ? " He that delivered 
 me unto thee hath the greater sin." How expressive of 
 the influence of Roman law is it that from the moment 
 of hearing those words Pilate sought to release his 
 captive ! He recognized his vocation at that strange 
 excuse for his failure in fulfilling it ; he felt that the 
 Roman governor was called on to teach the peoples 
 committed to his charge the common element of Law. 
 " We have a law, and by this law he ought to die ; " he 
 was not to ignore this Jewish law, if this particular Jew 
 
 1 Acts xxiv. 2. The address is to an individual Governor, but might have 
 been made general.
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 259 
 
 was liable to its infliction. It was no part of his com- 
 mission to revise the law of the Jew, but where appeal 
 was made to the law of the Roman, there he was called 
 on to give that judgment which was applicable to 
 humanity. He was to take cognizance of all that was 
 peculiar in Law, but he was never to leave hold of what 
 was universal. When the cry of the rabble, " If thou 
 let this man go thou art not Caesar's friend," overcame 
 the loyalty of the Judge, an example was set up for all 
 time of that obliteration of the justice of Rome by the 
 weakness or vice of Romans, which doubtless was the 
 most familiar aspect of its legal system to its subjects ; 
 but in that concession the Roman law had no part ; it 
 was defied, not distorted. And we see, in the specu- 
 lations of Philo's contemporary, Paul, how deep into the 
 heart of the sons of Israel sank that new conception of 
 Law as something universal, which it was the mission of 
 Roman law to bring home to the heart of the nations. 
 *' The law was our pedagogue to bring us to Christ," is no 
 more than a statement of a single aspect of that character 
 in Law which Roman law most perfectly realized and 
 embodied. It was the Mediator of the Nations ; and 
 whether or not Philo was consciously remembering it 
 when he wrote of the Logos, certainly it was an actual 
 influence on his thoughts. 
 
 None could be better prepared for a true apprehension 
 of the meaning of law than a son of Israel. The deep 
 and passionate devotion of Jews to the oppressive system 
 of precepts which they had inherited from the past per- 
 plexed even the Romans. A people who allowed their 
 enem}' to prepare on the Sabbath the ruin of their city 
 unhindered by them, rather than violate the command 
 which only on the narrowest literalism could seem to 
 prohibit their defence of their native land,^ had learned 
 
 ^ It is said that the Jews allowed their city to be taken by the General of
 
 26o THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 at least what it was to escape from the " unchartered 
 freedom " of individual desire into the repose of obed- 
 ience, had come to feel this obedience the very object 
 of life. In this strange fanaticism for a code to which 
 most would think it much to yield a reluctant obedience, 
 they learned the stability, the strength, the oneness that 
 is given a people who keep a law — almost any law. 
 Even if it be unreasonable and fantastic, it still impresses 
 on the Many the unity of a single ideal ; and the Jew in 
 face of the Roman — suffering any torture rather than 
 violate the Mosaic commands,^ watching in passivity the 
 approaches of the hated invader, rather than clutch on 
 the Sabbath the sword after which his hands must 
 have always yearned — formed a magnificent tribute to 
 the irresistible attraction of that which was but the 
 casket and framework of Duty. As far as we know, 
 this fanaticism impressed the Roman with mere con- 
 tempt ; and the feeling was mutual, except so far as on 
 the other side it was diluted with fear. Nevertheless 
 the fanaticism of the Jew was a preparation for that 
 citizenship of Rome against which it was also, in its 
 external aspect, the strongest barrier. The law was his 
 pedagogue to bring him, not only to Christ, but to Rome. 
 
 Ptolemy Soter, 320 B.C., rather than pollute its sanctity by any attempt at 
 self-defence ; and Josepluis cites the reproach of a historian (hardly known 
 elsewhere), that " they submitted to be under a hard master by reason of 
 their unseasonable superstition." There is some doubt whether they would 
 have resisted in any case, and Josephus is anxious to defend them from the 
 imputation (as he seems to consider it) of this rigorous adherence to the letter 
 of the law (see "Antiquities of the Jews," xii. i. i). There is no doubt as 
 to their abstinence', from action during the siege under Pompey, when they 
 allowed the Roman engineers to carry on their siege- works unmolested on 
 the Sabbath [Ibid., xiv. 4, 2, 3); and Dio Cassius (xxxvii. 16) says that 
 without this abstinence the Temple would never have been taken. A century 
 earlier, at the outbreak of the Maccabean revolt, they let themselves be 
 slaughtered like sheep rather than draw the sword on the sacred day. We 
 see from the allusions in Juvenal and Horace how much impression their 
 observance of the day made on the Romans. 
 
 1 See Josephus contra Apion, ii. 33. The whole book is an important testi- 
 mony to the influence of the Mosaic legislation.
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 261 
 
 Hence it was that at this time the sense of a Mediator 
 filled the world of thought. Philo finds in the history of 
 Israel a continual type of a Divine Being, intermediate 
 between God and man, an ambassador to man from God, 
 a suppliant to God from man,-^ partaking in the character 
 of both, and thus a bond between the two extremes of 
 Being. The ideal Israel, the ideal Man, is in truth such 
 a mediator ; he is " indeed an embodiment and incarna- 
 tion of Divine Law. " God our Saviour extends His 
 all-healing medicine to His suppliants through the just 
 man." ^ Man thus rises, by a perfect harmony with God's 
 will, into a position above humanity. The just man is 
 the ideal Law. We see here the side on which Philo 
 approaches Rome. " Abraham went as the Lord com- 
 manded him," he says, " means the same thing as when 
 it is said by Philosophers ' to follow Nature.' . . . The 
 words of God are the actions of the wise man," and the 
 IVord of God is the Law of Nature.* Abraham was the 
 ideal Stoic. The Jewish sense of a Mediator melts into 
 the Roman sense of Law. It is a personal conception 
 on this side of the barrier, on that an impersonal ; but 
 essentially the two conceptions are one. 
 
 The significance of this single Roman creation was 
 brought out by the very barrenness and poverty of 
 the Roman character. It had no other qualifications 
 for its task than legal impartialit3^ Of itself Roman 
 feeling'' merely echoed and emphasized with its own 
 
 ' e.g., Quis Rerum Divinarum H.Teres, Mangcy, iv. 90. 
 ' pdfios aiirbs Civ, Kal d^crfioi iiypacpos (De Abrah., last sentence). 
 s Hid. , 22. The wise take God for their teacher ; the less perfect take the 
 •wise man (Quis Rerum Divinarum H?eres, 5). 
 * De Mig. Ab., c. 23. 
 5 Lucan (I'harsalia, i. 52, 3) seems to me wxll to bring out true Roman 
 
 feeling : — 
 
 "Omnibus hostes 
 Reddite nos populis, civile avertilc bellum " — 
 
 " Make us the foes of all, so wc be one."
 
 262 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 hardness the exclusiveness of Greece. It was avowedly 
 second hand ; it judged everything by a Greek standard ; 
 it met the deep spiritual intuition of the Jew with the 
 protest of Greek ideahsm, intensified by its own super- 
 stition, and narrowed by its own hardness. There was 
 no touch of original genius in the Roman ; his work was 
 to organize, to arrange, to combine — never to create. 
 The Roman poet sings no heroic deeds, warms into life 
 no dim legend, creates no character, bids no memory 
 glow with the brilliancy of dramatic power. His theme 
 is the Nature of Things ; his genius is devoted to the 
 subject least stimulating to genius of any that has ever 
 been set to the music of noble verse. Yet the result 
 is imperishable, because here the positive genius of 
 Rome finds its true work, the lawgiver of the nations 
 interprets the law of the universe. No matter that its 
 interpretation is childish if we look at it in the light 
 of full scientific development ; its errors are only in detail, 
 the spirit of law is there. 
 
 The spirit of reverence for things that are was deeper 
 than the deadly hatred that separated Rome and Judaea. 
 That spirit was, in truth, akin to the deep religious 
 genius which those who felt it could not comprehend. 
 It prepared the way for a reverence of the Divine Law- 
 giver, and for all the moral influence which invaded the 
 world with the Jewish belief in a Divine Law. But the 
 whole tendency of the classic world was towards the 
 impersonal character of Law. Although the lawgiver 
 formed an imposing figure in the legendary history both 
 of Greece and Rome, the deeper feeling of the ancient 
 world towards Law outside of Palestine is expressed in 
 the line of Sophocles — • 
 
 " None knoweth the "fountain of Eternal Law." 
 "Within the Hebrew horizon this was exactly the know-
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 263 
 
 ledge which belonged of right to every true Son of Man. 
 It is the change from the idea of Law to that of a 
 Lawgiver which constitutes the transition from Rome 
 to Judaea. All Law was for the Jew the Will of a Holy 
 God ; and the Holy Man was this Law set forth in 
 action and endurance. For Divine Will lay at the root 
 of all being ; it was a Divine command which had called 
 into existence all that meets eye and ear and touch, and 
 by a Divine decision, therefore, every change in their 
 order must be regulated. The object of worship to 
 the Jew was not a Zeus, son of Time, not a vague 
 principle of oneness to which the word He should 
 be inapplicable, but the Maker of Heaven and Earth, 
 and all that in them is. God was the Creator. He 
 who made Man, and made all that surrounds him, was 
 able to enter into relations with the being that His 
 hands had fashioned ; He who had created could also 
 guide and judge. 
 
 Deeply penetrating, widely reaching, was the influence 
 that poured upon the world through this Hebrew belief 
 in Creation. We may to some extent measure the 
 positive effect of this belief by the extent of change in 
 the moral aspect of the world taking place at its eclipse. 
 We see before our eyes. In our own day, the converse 
 of that great moral revolution which came upon the 
 world when the Greek learned from the Jew to believe 
 in a Creator. Centuries must pass before the inherited 
 influence of that belief can wear out in the hearts of men ; 
 but already we may discern that the intellectual abandon- 
 ment of a conviction rooted in the moral structure of our 
 race, tells to some extent on all debatable moral ground. 
 But modern Europe has been moulded by a long inheri- 
 tance of belief in Divine Will : it cannot, when it throws 
 off that belief, return to the position of those to whom the 
 conception of a personal Creator was unknown. The Will
 
 264 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 of God — familiar as the words are to us — is a concep- 
 tion wholly wanting to classic antiquity. There was will 
 enough in the superhuman beings who hovered above 
 the world of mortal effort with benign or hostile influence, 
 but it was not the source of Destiny, only an eddy on its 
 stream ; it brought the mind into no contact with Origin, 
 Human Will takes a new meaning when men believe in 
 Divine Will ; when it is recognized that all that we see 
 and touch takes its source in the decision of a Divine 
 Mind, it loses much of that meaning with the belief. Man 
 is for ever being made in the image of God, and the 
 generation which regards the Divine Being rather as a 
 spectator or a product than as author and director of 
 the development of the Universe, cannot regard it as 
 the business of Man to control and shape the world of 
 humanity ; a strong impulse becomes a command Man 
 dare not disobey ; an indication of general tendency 
 claims all the loyalty, all the resignation, that was for- 
 merl}^ given to an expression of Divine purpose. The 
 fatalism which has in our time invaded the world of 
 politics in a conspicuous form is latent everywhere, 
 and forces on the attention of all who look below the 
 surface of life the lesson that all Man's endeavours are 
 affected by his belief or disbelief of the world in which 
 he finds himself being the work of God. 
 
 When the Jew first taught the world this belief, its 
 influence was seen more clearly than it ever could be 
 seen again. However certain it may appear to the 
 logical intellect that that w^hich is meant by virtue can 
 have no place in the Divine nature, some instinct deeper 
 than logic craves and discovers a Divine t3'pe of all 
 human excellence ; and all that Man seeks to be, he 
 must see in God, as long as he sees God at all. 
 
 We may say, with not more exaggeration than on 
 such a subject we need for distinctness, that human will
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 265 
 
 •was first conceived of with fulness of meaning when 
 Divine will first shone upon the world in that belief. 
 The conception of a Divine Creator gave the active 
 powers of humanity a new glory, and also a new respon- 
 sibility. The shadow of scorn passed from industry ; the 
 toil of the slave gained a Divine type. This shadow had 
 never reached the soil of Judaea. " My Father worketh 
 hitherto, and I work," said a Jew contemporary with 
 Philo, and the words gather up the life of Israel. 
 Labour, Philo tells us more than once, is the root of 
 every other excellence.^ That scorn for toil which is 
 bred of slaverj'- never could utterly pervert a son of 
 Israel. The corrupt Roman might scoff" at his reverence 
 for the Sabbath as a varnish of superstition over sloth," 
 but the truth was, that to revere the Sabbath was to 
 revere labour. No one can find rest who avoids toil. 
 " Six days shalt thou labour, and do all that thou hast 
 to do," is a part of the command that bade the Jew do 
 no manner of work on the seventh day. If observance 
 of that law was exaggerated into superstition when the 
 Jew watched, in his Sabbatic repose, the advance of the 
 Roman siege-works rather than draw his sword on the 
 day of rest, what stored-up force of patience and will is 
 not expressed in that act of obedience ! And who can 
 doubt that the energy for toil as much as for combat was 
 reinforced by that rhythmic abstinence ? Philo only 
 translated the law of the Sabbath into the language 
 of ethics when he declared that " labour was the root 
 of every other excellence." He brought the wisdom of 
 the Jew into a form in which it could be intelligible to 
 the Greek. It never would be acceptable to the Greek. 
 
 ' nrd-vra oCv op^i to. dyaOa ^k irbvov KaOdirtp iK /itS? ^ffijx (KTre(pvKbTa. 
 Dc Sac. Ahelis et Caini, see also De I'osterilatc Caini, 46. I'hilo's feeling for 
 the Sabbath is vividly expressed in the treatise " Dc Mundi Opificis." 
 
 - Juvenal, Sat., xiv. 105.
 
 266 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 The city life, so dear to his heart, was inextricably 
 entangled with slavery, and slavery out of Judaea made 
 the command, " Six days shalt thou labour," unnecessary 
 and hateful. But a race which looked around on the 
 earth and sky, and felt at every throb of joyous life 
 that God was the maker of man, could never put hand 
 to the plough or spade without some dim sense of 
 partnership in the Divine work. Labour was Divine, 
 and therefore it was in the deepest sense of the word 
 truly human. 
 
 Then, too, on the other side, this importance given 
 to the conception of Human Will came in to solve the 
 very problem which the conception of Divine Will had 
 evolved. If God made the world, why is it full of evil ? 
 It can be only because Man has re-made it. God saw 
 it, and it was very good. Man must have refused the 
 position of a creature and chosen to be an independent 
 Creator. This is not so much the doctrine of the Jew 
 as that which the Gentile learnt from the fusion of their 
 several creeds. We indeed find it in our Bible, but we 
 might take it away and leave no hiatus ; in many re- 
 spects the Book of Genesis would be more coherent if we 
 could withdraw from it that account " of Man's first dis- 
 obedience," which we too much remember in its extended 
 form on the page of Milton when we read it on that 
 which has been attributed to Moses. To the question, 
 as it presents itself to a logical mind — " Being the work 
 of God, why is man no better that he is ? " the Hebrew 
 has no answer. He does not really attempt to answer 
 it. He finds that the consciousness of this relation of 
 Creature and Creator sets right all the difficulty he 
 needs to have solved ; that so far as Man remembers 
 himself to be the work of God, so far as he refrains 
 from seeking to make a God which shall be his work, 
 these difficulties vanish away, and that is enough for him.
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 267 
 
 To the Jewish mind the only evil was Sin. And Sin 
 is schism — the cutting off the member from the organism, 
 the substitution of the Many for the One. So far all are 
 agreed who believe in anything that may be called sin ; 
 the only difference is as to that Oneness which claims 
 man's loyalty. Is it the nation, the family, the caste, or 
 is it a still deeper Unity, which includes all other, and 
 which man knows as God ? Between this Unity and 
 that which each man means when he says I, there is a 
 profound and hidden connection. The Indian creed, we 
 have seen, confused the two ; the division line between 
 the human and the Divine was indistinct. The Indian 
 name of the Divine is the Self It is a wonderful illus- 
 tration of the nearness of opposites that in Hebrew 
 thought the name for that which hides the Divine is 
 the Self^ That which to the Indian reveals God 
 conceals Him from the Jew ; the telescope hinders 
 vision when it is not needed. God was so close to 
 the human soul that the Self was a veil between it 
 and Him. " If any yearning come upon thee, O soul, 
 to inherit the Divine possessions, quit not only thy 
 country — that is, the body — thy kindred — that is, sense 
 — and thy father's house — that is, speech " (all of which 
 are symbolized in the migration of Abraham), " but put 
 off thyself, and depart out of thyself" ""' It is the Indian 
 feeling, renewed and revivified by a sense of that dis- 
 tinctness of God and Man, which comes with the develop- 
 ment of the life of the Conscience and the belief in 
 
 1 Philo says that it is only in remembering the nothingness of self that we 
 can remember the greatness of God. It seems to me that he would have ex- 
 pressed his meaning better if he had said it is only m forgetting, &c. Surely 
 to remember the nothingness of anything is to forget it. De Sac. Ab. et Caini, 
 Mangey, ii. 96-98. 
 
 2 Quis Rcrum Divinarum I Lxres, Mangey's Philo, iv. 32 : — ffeavrriv airLopaOi, 
 KoX ^KffTrjOi aeavTTJs KaOdirep oi KopyfiavTiQiirres, &c. Perhaps in these words 
 I'hilo was remembering the last words of Socrates in the " Crito," quoted 
 above, p. 196.
 
 268 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 creation. God is the only true Being ; the Creature is 
 for ever distinguished from the Creator, the Being whose 
 centre hes within from the Being whose centre lies 
 without. Self for the Jew was that independent claim, 
 that rejection of the attitude of a creature, in which 
 the Creator becomes invisible. The lesson of the Jew 
 is blurred for Christian ears by extreme familiarity, and 
 perhaps it may come home to us more forcibly from 
 Alexandria than from Jerusalem. We have become 
 accustomed to the ideal of Self-denial in the withered 
 form which any ideal must take that is adopted con- 
 ventionally as part of a creed ; we have lost the full 
 import of those words, " If any man will come after 
 me, let him deny himself" It is not, " This and that 
 pleasant thing must be put away ; " it is, " The self- 
 assertion of the Creature is the denial of the Creator." 
 Man is the work of God ; his whole vocation lies in the 
 understanding of this relation to his Creator ; he stands 
 face to face with a great Unity, before which no pro- 
 portionate recognition of the Self is possible ; its impe- 
 rious claim must be met by a denial before it can enter 
 into that which is its true and abiding life. Here is 
 the eternal paradox, insoluble to logic, incontrovertible 
 to every soul that has felt its import. Man cannot 
 discern God till he has denied Self; but it will be 
 found, also, in the deepest sense, that he cannot discern 
 Self till he has acknowledged God. For none can know 
 an3'thing till he knows something else ; and we first 
 know the Self when we know that which is to every 
 man the eternal Other of the human soul. 
 
 It is just because Man and God, in the Jewish con- 
 ception, stand opposite to each other as Creature and 
 Creator (instead of both being equally creatures in one 
 sense, and both equally creators in another), that the 
 Jew felt himself near God in a sense the Greek never
 
 I 
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 269 
 
 could share. " Thou wilt have a desire io the work of 
 thine own hands" That confidence breathes through 
 every line of the Jewish Scriptures, and its reflection on 
 the page of Philo is much stronger than any ray from 
 Greek wisdom which reaches his broad mirror. ''We 
 have the uncreated, the eternal Father, who hears the 
 silent and sees the hidden" he makes Joseph say to 
 his brethren when reassuring them after their father's 
 death ; and this sense of tJie Father can never, to the 
 Jewish mind, be swallowed up in the idea of the King. 
 God is more awful than the most awful earthly monarch, 
 but no earthly monarch would permit that boldness of 
 remonstrance which the Hebrew Scriptures give as the 
 utterance of His trusted servant. No parts of the Old 
 Testament seem to have laid more hold on Philo's 
 imagination than those which record the appeals of 
 Abraham and of Moses to a Divine Righteousness 
 with which Divine appointment appeared inconsistent. 
 " Shall not the judge of all the earth do right ? " seems 
 to gather up for him the fearless confidence which 
 mingled with boundless awe of the Creator.-^ Philo, the 
 ambassador to Caligula, vividly realized the contrast 
 between that bond which united the Jew to his unseen 
 Lord and that which kept a nation of slaves trembling 
 at the foot of their tyrant. The son of Israel was more 
 akin to the unseen Unity, could use a greater freedom 
 in that intercourse, than the Roman with the Emperor of 
 Rome. Philo seems to return to this sense of confidence 
 and boldness with a sort of relief, feeling vividly that 
 the earthly Lord was not in any sense the image of 
 the heavenly Lord ; that the least inadequate type of 
 His absolute dominion was the Fatherly dominion, in 
 
 ^ ravra yap {i.e., the complaints of Moses, as Numb. xi. ir, Exod. v. 22, 
 &c. ) . . . Idcicref hv Tis Kal wpbs iva tCjv iv iiipn ^acnXtuf uirdy (Quis 
 Rerum Divinarum Hatres, Mangcy's I'liilo, iv. 11).
 
 270 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 which, at its best, dominion was less prominent than 
 love. 
 
 All such types were inadequate ; the relation between 
 Creator and Creature was one too deep, too intimate, to 
 be fully expressed even by this close bond ; all that was 
 most organic in human relation was but its shadow. 
 The well-known words of Andromache to Hector seem 
 to haunt him as its least inadequate expression. The 
 wise man finds this world an exile, but he may say, 
 " Lord, Thou art to me fatherland, kindred, and paternal 
 hearth." ^ And, indeed, the relation of sex lies very 
 near all his views of the relation of God and man. 
 The distinction of the passive and the active, suggested 
 by the two halves of humanity, is ideally complete in the 
 relation of humanity to That which lies above it. Israel 
 was the spouse of the Lord ; the ideal Humanity needed 
 the Divine for its counterpart, as a bride her bridegroom. 
 And thus the religion of the Jew held in germ all that 
 elevation of woman which is most characteristic of modern, 
 and most unlike classic thought. The race which 
 realized the true oneness between God and man, realized 
 for the first time the true oneness between man and 
 woman. Modern scholarship indeed looks with scorn 
 on the view which sees a hidden allegory in the little 
 love-poem included in the Hebrew Scriptures ; but this 
 mystic interpretation is no more than a refraction, 
 through the mists of an exclusive worship, of that deep 
 sense of the infinite in human passion, which, though 
 it be constantly the rival of all sense of the Divine, is 
 yet intimately akin to a sense of the antithesis of the 
 Divine and human. The Song of Solomon may bear 
 witness to its intelligent readers far more distinctly 
 than to those who put an unreal meaning into every 
 
 ^ Quis Reram Divinarum Hseres, Man gey 's Philo, iv. p. 14 : — av not, 
 SiairoTa, i) Trarpls, &c.
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 271 
 
 word, that the feeling which prostrates man before God 
 has a deep and hidden connection with that in which 
 man and woman find, each in each, the completion and 
 explanation of their being. The tenderest love known 
 to human beings takes a fresh dimension when it is 
 felt as an illustration and type of the Faith in that 
 which engulfs and overshadows them — beyond, beneath, 
 above, in every way transcending human vision and 
 explaining it. 
 
 Humanity becomes a different thing when it is thus 
 regarded as the spouse of the Divine. The fierce 
 Hebrew was the first to recognize Humility as the 
 characteristic human attitude ; it was impossible for him 
 ever to forget that Presence in face of which no other 
 attitude seemed tolerable to him. " The meek shall in- 
 herit the earth " is (we often forget) a quotation from a 
 psalm. If Greek dread of arrogance, Greek reverence 
 for proportion, has left us many expressions outwardly 
 resembling that text, the resemblance is merely outward. 
 The envy of the Gods is widely remote from that Divine 
 jealousy which guards the command, " Thou shalt not 
 make to thyself any graven image ; " they have almost 
 nothing in common. Greek religion grew out of the 
 self-assertion of Man ; it knew nothing of the antithesis 
 of Creator and Creature. God and Man to the Greek 
 were not even contrasted as the perfect and imperfect, for 
 Olympus repeats and exaggerates all the sins of earth. 
 A God was merely an intensified, not a purified Man. 
 This, at least, was true of the characteristically Greek 
 element in Greek religion ; and if by its side was what 
 we may, in contrast with it, call a Jewish element — if the 
 religion of the Mysteries ^ held the seed of a conception 
 
 J See, for this affinity to tlic Mysteries, De Gi^'antibus, 12. Mwucr^s . . . 
 (h rbv yu6<pov, tov auor) x^pov da^Xduv, , . . ylvcrai ov fJL6vov /iuoTTjj dXXa 
 Kal Upo(f)6.VTi\% dpylwv.
 
 272 THE MORAL IDEAL, 
 
 of the Divine less remote from Hebrew awe — yet still, 
 on the whole, the Hebrew ideal was altogether opposite 
 to one which in all its most vivid manifestations was 
 a glorification of humanity — humanity with all its con- 
 trasts, all its diversities, all its sins. " The nothingness 
 of the Creature " is an idea inconceivable to a Greek. 
 Man was himself a Creator. All that most interested 
 the Greek mind was created by man. The very name 
 oi poet, signifying creator, has passed into our language, 
 indicating that which we feel the immortal work of 
 the most exalted human intellect ; and while attention 
 is concentrated on the poet and the artist, the contrast 
 of Creator and Creature grows dim. And then, too — 
 for the Greek God was in some sense a creature — the 
 Divine beings had their genealogy, their parentage ; there 
 had been a time when they were not. All the vicissitude 
 that made a human being interesting applied to Zeus ; 
 there was nothing in him to oppose the idea of a Self. 
 But to the Hebrew the property of God was to go 
 out of Self. He was the giver of Existence. He, the 
 absolute Being, sought always to bestow that which 
 could be given of true Being. He calls into existence 
 the things that are not. He is known to Man as a 
 perpetual Becoming ; Nature is a ceaseless stream from 
 the " I am." The idea of Self is wholly alien from such 
 a Being ; he is known in the action which, if we are 
 to describe it in the language of human analogy, is a 
 perpetual quitting of Self God has thus for ever set 
 the pattern for Man. He denies Himself in a mysterious 
 but deeply important sense when He bids this varied 
 Creation arise in which Man may find objects of wor- 
 ship and forget the Creator ; and the claim on Man, 
 "Go thou and do likewise," is enforced by His ex- 
 ample no less than by His authority. The Creation 
 is in a certain sense an act of Self-denial in God ; His
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 373 
 
 Creature is called on to copy when he seeks to obey his 
 Maker. 
 
 For that which divides man from God divides man 
 also from man. Self is the separating, the isolating 
 influence ; we must deny ourselves to become one with 
 our kind no less than with our Creator. The word 
 gathers up the whole problem of Morality ; it seems at 
 times the most positive reality in the world, at times a 
 mere negation. How vivid is the sympathy, how pro- 
 found the compassion, how active the benevolence, which 
 has to confess itself overmastered by this tremendous 
 gravitation ! Only some centrifugal influence can measure 
 that central pull ; only he who best loves his neighbours 
 knows that he does not love them as himself. Yet there 
 are points of view from which this intense reality — the 
 most real thing in the experience of many — is seen as 
 a mere limit. All physical experience brings us back 
 to this limit ; but the impulses which quicken and elevate 
 our being reveal to us that Self is only an aspect of our 
 life ; we are members one of another ; we have not to 
 bring about that membership. In all those moments 
 which reveal to us our true being we feel that the 
 We is a reality as much as the /, in some sense 
 as much deeper as it is a wider reality, and at such 
 moments we are aware that we touch on the solution of 
 all morality, that we need no more, in order to satisfy 
 the utmost claim of Duty, than to understand the sense 
 in which the We swallows up the /. The Hebrew 
 reached this solution in his vision of an / which is the 
 ground and basis of all that we shadow forth when we 
 say We — a Unity which is the measure of our multi- 
 plicity, an absolute Being from whom our derived Being 
 takes all its meaning. He is One in the sense in 
 which there is no other One, and in sharing his one- 
 ness we arc united with each other. Self — the limit, 
 
 S
 
 274 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 the separating influence — is that which divides us from 
 Man as well as from God. 
 
 It is first on the page of Philo that we come upon the 
 idea of Selfishness. We search in vain through all the 
 ethical wealth of Greece for any germ of belief which 
 could develop into such a sentiment ; we should have 
 vainl3^ endeavoured, probably, to make the feeling which 
 condemns it intelligible to the thinkers who have made 
 the Greek tongue a casket of imperishable moral trea- 
 sures. The very word by which Philo describes it is 
 almost unknown to classical Greek.^ Self-love would 
 be to the Hellenic imagination a mere accompaniment 
 of consciousness, or, so far as it partook of any moral 
 quality at all, it would be an element in virtue. " Know 
 thyself," is the watchword of Hellenic wisdom, as " Deny 
 thyself" is of Hebrew faith ; the goal of thought for the 
 Greek was for the Jew a point of departure. All that 
 affiliates itself with Greek teaching enforces reverence 
 for the Self; only the Jew discerned the peril that lay 
 close to the prize, and reminded himself, and all whom 
 his voice could reach, that " Man should not regard the 
 world as an appendage to himself, but himself as an 
 appendage to the world." " In that strangely temperate 
 injunction we have the note of a new morality. It 
 breathes a spirit which apart from Judaism belongs wholly 
 to the modern world. Selfishness is a word of yester- 
 day. When first the thought dawned upon the world 
 it was expressed by the same word which it bears on 
 
 1 It is characteristic of Plutarch's latent sympathy with the vein of thought 
 we have been tracing that we find tpiXavria also in his writings. The passage 
 in which Plato comes nearest the idea is in the Leges, 731, 732, to 5^ tikriddq. 'ye 
 TrdvTCov afiapTTjiiaTuu Sto. Ti]v crcpo^pa eavrov (piXlav airiov e/cdcrry yLyverai 
 eKaaroTe. Any one who studies the awkward involved passage of which this 
 is the kernel, and compares it with that given in the text, will see clearly how 
 Plato was groping after a new idea, while Philo was expressing one which he 
 held in common with the modern world. 
 
 2 Quod Deus Sit Immut., 4.
 
 THE JEW AT ALEXANDRIA. 275 
 
 the page of Philo ; ^ our Saxon compound belongs to 
 Protestant England. Its need was felt with that post- 
 Reformation morality which corresponded to the right of 
 private judgment and justification by Faith. It expresses 
 the moral dangers incident to the complete development 
 of modern individuality ; it lay beyond all the abundant 
 wealth of Shakespearian thought ; the word does not 
 occur on his page. When he comes nearest it, he sees 
 it as Anibitio7t; if we seek for a Shakespearian parallel 
 to the warning of Philo, we may find it best in the warn- 
 ing of Wolse^' to Cromwell. The Jew devoid of genius 
 saw farther into the moral world in the dawn of modern 
 thought than did in its full noon the greatest genius that 
 England has ever produced. The Hebrew vision of God 
 threw a gleam on the whole history of Man, and lit up 
 its moral development with a meaning which was bor- 
 rowed from a higher sphere. 
 
 It is the rise into a dimension above morality which 
 has made the Jew the moral lawgiver of our race. The 
 most exclusive, the most un-Catholic of nations has 
 given modern life not only its belief but its moral 
 standard. The influence is visible in those to whom 
 it is most obnoxious ; to this day the dialect of men 
 who deem it an obsolete error to connect humanity 
 with aught beyond itself is stamped indelibly with 
 the ideas and beliefs of those who felt all its value 
 to lie in such a connection ; the protest against Scrip- 
 tural teaching, which is the form in which many in 
 our day know most of the Scriptures, records their 
 
 1 The oldest author who used this rare English word seems to be Ilolinshed, 
 in his account of the reign of Henry II., published 1577: — " Here we see I'hil- 
 autie, or Self-love, which rageth in men so prcposlcrouslic " (mark the appro- 
 priateness of this adverb, which puis last thai which should be first) "that 
 even naturall affection and dutie [are] quite forgotten." It was used as late as 
 1648 by the kcv. Joseph I'eaumont, Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, in his 
 " Psyche," an allegorical religious poem published in that year, some parts of 
 which may have given suggestions to Milton for his " Paradise Regained."
 
 276 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 influence in inverted outlines, ready to be restored to 
 their original form when mirrored in a sympathetic 
 mind. Hebrew thought has given its bias to all moral 
 speculation, not because the Hebrew mind was itself 
 specially interested in moral questions, but because it 
 sprang at its initial movement to a point above them, 
 and came upon them from a higher view. And for ever 
 afterwards Man is reminded, in all speculations on his 
 destiny and character, how imperfect is that attention 
 that sets up limits around its object, and in how deep 
 a sense " the half exceeds the whole." The Jew bears 
 witness to the human race that Man is but the half of 
 that which Humanity implies and involves ; and that 
 unless we look beyond the boundaries of its history 
 and the limits of its nature we shall find its deepest 
 problems unintelligible. 

 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 
 
 Those thinkers who have imagined themselves to sim- 
 phfy the problems of life by explaining Virtue as a means 
 of Pleasure, have surely too readily taken for granted 
 that people are any more agreed as to what Pleasure is 
 than they are as to what Virtue is. If you mean by 
 pleasure Ihe end of pain, you do indeed point out by the 
 word a goal of common human desire, indeed the goal 
 of common sentient desire ; but if you accept a neutral 
 starting-point, if you refuse at starting to presuppose 
 suffering, you open just as many controversies in asking, 
 " What is Pleasure ? " as in asking, " What is Virtue ? " 
 " Are not the aims of the intellect higher than the aims 
 of the heart ? " asks the great Francis Bacon : his hum- 
 blest reader may answer with a confident negative. 
 Most persons desire love, many persons desire power, 
 some desire knowledge, but you cannot say that the 
 wish for any one of these things is absolutely universal. 
 If we want general consent, we must ask not what men 
 desire, but what they fear. He who thinks that the 
 aims of the intellect take precedence of the aims of the 
 heart, and he who thinks that the aims of the heart take 
 precedence of the aims of the intellect, both escape from 
 a fire with equal eagerness ; and the travellers whom 
 no possible intelligence could inspire with a common 
 hope feel, on the verge of a precipice, a common fear. 
 It needs only the intensifying of physical pain to anguish,
 
 278 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 or else the prolongation of it to monotonous pressure on 
 the whole of life, to make every one recognize that there 
 is a negative wish stronger for the moment than an}' 
 positive desire ; that while Pleasure is a vague word, 
 meaning something different for every individual, the 
 word Pain points to something more definite, more 
 simple, than any other that is familiar to men. 
 
 The problem of evil is inadequately conceived when- 
 ever men forget this dislocation of antithesis between 
 good and evil. To the heart of the everyday man, 
 roughing it in the world, it is not the existence of what 
 is evil, but its apparent victory, that is oppressive and 
 bewildering. It is indeed impossible for the logical in- 
 tellect to reconcile the existence of God and evil, apart 
 from any question as to proportion. But let no one 
 think, if a problem be insoluble, that its manner of state- 
 ment is unimportant. What men need is not to have 
 this question answered, but to have it rightly asked. 
 The whole moral grouping of mankind will be found 
 to depend on those answers which may quite truly be 
 described as a mere translation of it into various dialects. 
 It is not the scientific instinct in Man, alone or chiefly, 
 which seeks to penetrate the origin of the system in 
 which he finds himself. Men are led to ask how the 
 world arose by the lurking desire to know wJiy it is as 
 it is ; and the answers arrange themselves according to 
 the antagonism of two impulses often combined, yet 
 always divergent ; that in which the why predominates, 
 and that which conceives every statement in mere time 
 relations, and is satisfied with knowing the sequence of 
 events, without seeking to understand their aim. The 
 whole antithesis known to our generation as that of 
 Religion and Science is involved here. On the one hand 
 the why gives a keynote to theory, and the narrative 
 of Man's origin takes its start with a Fall. Things once
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 279 
 
 were good and fair, but there was a descent, variously 
 explained, but always conceived in terms of will and aim. 
 But men discern that the explanation which would ac- 
 count for evil really implies evil. Adam fell because 
 the serpent tempted him ; but why did God admit the 
 serpent into Eden ? The difficulty is moved a very 
 little way farther back. Logic pursues it. Thought is 
 wearied, and reverts from Why to How. Is not what 
 we call Evil the mere stimulus to effort, without which 
 Man could never have existed ? Is not failure of 
 balance the reminiscence in the human world of that 
 " origin of species by natural selection," which means, 
 when we put it into non-scientific language, that dispro- 
 portion between need and the means of its satisfaction 
 which fills so large a part of life with suffering and 
 struggle ? The ascent of Man states the facts of life 
 in one way, the fall of Man another ; there is no more 
 explanation in the one case than in the other. But 
 the two answers gather up the contrasts between two 
 moral worlds, and when we contemplate them we stand 
 at the parting of the ways, and see where travellers 
 turn to the right and the left to meet no more. 
 
 What hypothesis men take up as to the beginning of 
 things depends on what they want explained in things, 
 not on any superior logical cogency on either hand. 
 Logic begins to work after the choice is made. Expe- 
 rience is impartial in the matter. We are every day 
 familiarized with the two forms of production which 
 have become the models of the origin of the universe. 
 We are familiar with growth, and we are familiar with 
 works of art. Wc sit under the shade of a lofty oak, 
 and we know that it came from an acorn, such as it 
 drops at our feet. We say that the oak was once an 
 acorn, and we mean something definite by the words, 
 though it would be possible to find fault with them.
 
 28o THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 The processes of Nature are constantly reminding us of 
 a change by which the simple becomes the manifold ; 
 and when we try to account for the origin of Nature, 
 the processes of Nature itself may be thought to pro- 
 vide us with the most plausible analogy. But we watch 
 the building of a house more consciously than the growth 
 of a tree ; and Will is a cause of which we know more 
 than of any other. It is, indeed, the only cause which, in 
 the true sense of the word, we can be said to know. A 
 man who feels within him that ivJiich originates — who is 
 conscious of something which begins in his own nature 
 — will recognize in this, whatever he call it, the true 
 analogy to the origin of all things. If Will be a word 
 of any significance — if we feel that it is a cause in a 
 more complete and typical sense than anything else is a 
 cause — then, with whatever intellectual obstacles, we shall 
 believe that God created the world. We may feel that 
 the account in Genesis belongs to mythology, the account 
 in modern scientific works to history ; we may look to the 
 latter for all in what we call Creation that can be nar- 
 rated, all that belongs to the relations of time. But we 
 shall feel that in a deep sense the assertion, " In the 
 beginning God created the heavens and the earth," even 
 when connected with any amount of erroneous illustra- 
 tion, still remains as an expression of the deepest truth 
 which, on this subject, it is possible for us to attain. 
 
 This divergence is seen clearly by all logical thinkers, 
 whether they consider the belief in Creation important 
 truth or important error. The two sides might not 
 accept even the description of their issue in the same 
 words, but both would allow it to be extra-logical. One 
 who holds that this world was created sees that his 
 belief is a moral one. He does not mean that every one 
 who believes it is good, and every one who disbelieves it is 
 bad ; he means that it is a belief which depends on some
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 281 
 
 difference in the moral structure, and that those who have it 
 will use the words good and bad in a dififerent sense from 
 those who have it not. A man who holds Evolution to 
 be an adequate and exhaustive account of the origin of 
 this world, would not, perhaps, be so ready to concede 
 that his was a moral belief, because from his point of 
 view what is moral is opposed to what is immoral, rather 
 than to what is intellectual ; he supposes a moral belief 
 to be the belief of a good man, and hardly anybody would 
 accept what he would describe as the belief of a bad man. 
 But he would concede, or indeed urge, that those who 
 accepted and those who rejected this belief in Creation 
 had different views of most important subjects ; and this 
 is all we mean in calling it a moral belief 
 
 These views are indeed so different that it is difficult 
 to say that they are dissimilar. They are incomparable, 
 they stand out of relation to each other ; those who hold 
 them are mutually unintelligible, and all the worst con- 
 fusion of the world has come from their tendency to trans- 
 late each other's assertions into their own dialect. We 
 might say, roughly, that growth excludes the idea of Evil, 
 and Will suggests it. Whenever we contempjate growth 
 we see no evil but disease. Whenever we contemplate 
 Will our thought touches the world of Evil at every 
 moment. God made the world ; why, then, is the world 
 no better than it is ? The man who thinks that the 
 doctrine of Evolution tells us all there is to know about 
 the world can hardly understand this question enough to 
 dissent from the answers to it. The world is, according 
 to his view, growing better every day ; its existence is 
 a continual approach towards the better. To him the 
 better takes the place of the good, and there are no two 
 ideas more irreconcilable. 
 
 This primal antithesis has various aspects for different 
 stages of the world's histor}'. Our generation knows it
 
 283 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 as the antithesis of Religion and Science; when we 
 trace it back in History we may discover it as the 
 antagonism of the Jew and the Greek. Our children, 
 perhaps, will see it under some aspect so different that 
 they will find it hard to associate it with either of these 
 earlier forms ; but through all runs this recurrent diver- 
 gence of How and Why, of Growth and Will, of the 
 spirit that is satisfied with the order of time-relations, 
 and one that seeks a deeper order, disturbing to the very 
 idea of before and after, because it tends to use those 
 words in a different sense. Perhaps it is a part of the 
 dislocation of our nature that the antithesis should have 
 been recorded in controversy ; it may be that what we 
 need to harmonize all our thought is the discernment that 
 the Wh}^ concerns one part of our being, and the How 
 another. The world, it is true, cannot have been created 
 twice ; when we are considering its origin as a question 
 of time we must take our choice between different hypo- 
 theses ; no possible view can bring the account in the 
 Book of Genesis into one framework with the " Origin 
 of Species." But may not the translation of a belief 
 in initiative Will into time-relations be the error on one 
 side, while the description of Growth as exhausting the 
 whole question is the error on the other ? One who 
 aims at following the history of moral thought cannot do 
 less than approach the question, or more than suggest it. 
 Art, even more than Science, leads away from the 
 Eternal. There is a deep mysterious connection between 
 all that belongs to the region of the painter and the poet 
 and that which is transient — that which is vanishing 
 away. The artist people less than any other is inclined 
 to quit the conditions of before and after. For the 
 Greek the supreme Artist was himself the product of 
 something that in modern language we may term evolu- 
 tion. He needed accounting for as much as the world did.
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 283 
 
 The governor of the world is a son of Time. They 
 who have bequeathed to the world all the human work 
 that it has most loved, and the name by which the 
 Creator is identified with the Poet in all modern lan- 
 guages, could neither conceive of what a Jew meant by 
 Creation, nor see in it the difficulties which the Jew 
 sought by moments to explain. For the Greek there 
 was neither an evil world to be accounted for, nor a 
 Holy Will to cause it ; the creation was not bad ; the 
 Creator was not what the Jew meant by good. The 
 History of Greece is a brief and concentrated tragedy, 
 and its art is proportionately rich in tragic elements. 
 The great figures of the Athenian stage pass before 
 us in solemn procession as we think of life's deepest 
 sorrows. (Edipus, Antigone, Electra, rise before the 
 mind's eye to confute the notion that grief in the Greek 
 world threw no shadow on Art ; but then this very 
 shadow is indispensable to Art ; and that it should give 
 rise, in the feeling of the Artist, to anything of the nature 
 of perplexity is impossible. And, further, God is not 
 good any more than the world is bad. Perhaps we ma}' 
 say it would even more misrepresent Greek 'thought to 
 speak of a good Creator than of a bad Creation. The 
 Greek awarded a prize to those creations which he felt 
 so typical of the Creation as to keep the name for them ; 
 he meant by a good Creator a good poet. That Creation 
 in which Sophocles had borne the prize from .^schylus 
 and Euripides from Sophocles, that work which was good 
 according as it was rich in harmony, and therefore in a 
 certain contrast, must give a type of Creation in which 
 the idea of Holiness was inaccessible. The Creator 
 could be good only in the sense in which iEschylus was 
 a good poet, and from this point of view the evil in his 
 work was one of its most important elements. 
 
 The problem which was non-existent for the Greek
 
 284 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 was practically solved for the Jew. No nation is more 
 remote from what we have come to call Pessimism than 
 Israel. It is true that no literature presents specimens of 
 a more profound melancholy than the Hebrew Scriptures. 
 But what the Jew in his most despairing moment laments 
 is, that man has chosen evil rather than good. He 
 never feels that good is not there to choose. " O Lord, 
 how excellent are Thy works ; in wisdom hast Thou made 
 them all," is the deepest utterance of his faith ; and when 
 he has added, " An unwise man doth not well under- 
 stand this," he has made his utmost concession to the 
 opposite feeling. He could pour forth the acknowledg- 
 ment from a heart overflowing with reverent delight, 
 because, in the first place, the works of God never 
 included for man his own errors and imperfections, or 
 anything that resulted from them ; and, in the second 
 place, God was still more intelligibly and practically the 
 Redeemer than even the Creator. The assertion " I am 
 the Lord thy God, who brought thee up out of the 
 land of Egypt," stands as the permanent aspect of the 
 Divine Unity to the chosen race ; and the deliverance 
 from Egypt foreshadows more than a deliverance from 
 Babylon, from Syria, from Rome ; it is the first word 
 of a promise, whose full scope the Jew needed the 
 education of the ages to take in, and which he sees, as 
 he dimly discerns it, to be for ever beyond the reach 
 of all but a continually expanding grasp. From a 
 logical point of view this celestial hope should have 
 left the previous condition from which deliverance was 
 promised under a black shadow. Redemption should 
 have darkened Creation, but it never did so ; between 
 Creation and Redemption, both the work of God, the 
 Fall of Man lay in shadow sufficiently deep to bring out 
 their brightness and conceal its own outline. The Jew 
 never exactly knew what he meant by the Fall of Man ;
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 285 
 
 his accents, when he speaks of it, are always hesitating ; 
 he returns to it afresh, in oblivion that he has dealt 
 with it before ; he forgets whether, after all, it be the 
 fall of Man he is speaking of, and his Adam becomes an 
 angel.^ But still he meant something by it, and some- 
 thing that was adequate to explain all he wanted. He 
 felt that the will of God was good and the will of Man 
 was evil continually, and that was enough for him. His 
 God had called Man's spirit into being, and was its 
 rightful Lord. He also had redeemed it from its evil, 
 and was its Saviour. Man's own rebellion supplied 
 the intellectual link between these ideas, and the Jew 
 needed no other. 
 
 Neither for the Jew nor the Greek apart, therefore, 
 was the problem of Evil a haunting perplexity ; in dif- 
 ferent ways each answered or avoided it. But effects 
 which result from neither of two substances in any pos- 
 sible condition apart, may be inseparable from the union 
 of the two. The fusion of Greek and Jewish thought 
 produced an effervescence in which this problem became 
 one of the most seething elements in human thought. 
 For it was in this fusion that the Gentile world contem- 
 plated for the first time the idea of Almighty Will at 
 the world's origin. We cannot imagine power so great 
 that the change to unlimited power tells as a question 
 of degree. When the Creator is Almighty instead of 
 Mighty the whole conception is altered. The funda- 
 mental divergence of Jewish and Greek feeling in this 
 respect is disguised by their likeness. They both know 
 
 1 It is evident, from Gen. iv. 3-12, that Cain and Abel do not start as the 
 members of a fallen race, but that something in- the conduct of each is the 
 ground of their difference. " If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? 
 And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door," could not be interpreted, 
 except by the advocate of a theological system, as an address to one who 
 inherits a legacy of guilt. Note especially ver. 12, "The ground shall not 
 henceforth yield to thee her fruit ; " hitherto, then, it has done so. See also Gen. 
 vi. 2, and the Book of Enoch.
 
 286 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 of a Creation, but the two ideas are only confused by 
 being seen in the same line. The Hebrew Creator looks 
 on His work, and behold it is very good. The Greek 
 Creator looks on his work, and knows that he has made 
 it, " as far as possible, the fairest and best, out of things 
 which were not good." ^ " Out of things which were 
 not good ; there is no getting behind that. He was 
 hampered by pre-existing conditions, and has done the 
 best he could under the circumstances. It is the Origin 
 of Species by natural selection from a different point of 
 view, and under a different dialect. It has no real con- 
 nection with the first chapters of Genesis. 
 
 When the attempt is made to bring the two into one 
 framework, that which for each separately was a narra- 
 tive becomes a problem for both. " Whence, under a 
 Holy and Omnipotent Creator, come the things that are 
 not good ? " The new dignity of Creation implied a 
 new attention given to the dark side of the world. Evil 
 emerged into a distinctness for the thinker,^ which has 
 led historians into imagining it as occupying an excep- 
 tional proportion in the life of ordinary men. Students 
 of this age have explained its tendency to sombre feeling 
 and speculation by supposing it to be one of special 
 disaster. The period on which we have been dwelling 
 would not suggest such predominance of misfortune to 
 an impartial observer, any more than our own time does. 
 The world is so constituted that we may find peculiar 
 suffering, if we look for it, in any time ; but the age 
 of the Antonines has always been reckoned one of the 
 
 ^ TO 6e Tj ^vvarhv ws KciWiffTa dpiara re tf ovx ovtws exovruiv (Plato, 
 Timasus, 53). 
 
 2 See Gfrorer, " Urchristenthum," vol. i. , a work of which much that follows 
 is a transcript. He says of these times that they " gehcirten zu den traurigsten, 
 welche die Weltgeschichte kennt." This he means of the time of Philo, i.e., 
 about the time of Christ. I cannot but think that there must have been much 
 more cause for suffering at an earlier period.
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 287 
 
 halcyon epochs in the stormy voyage of History ; and 
 if it does not exactly coincide with that of which we 
 speak, ^ the same conditions were common to both. 
 The happiness of the world under the Antonines cannot 
 be wholly explained by the character of its rulers. It 
 is impossible to remember what war is, to imagine what 
 it was, and to suppose that when it ceased the nations 
 were not better off. Experience does not require us to 
 believe in anything so improbable ; it is not in lives 
 crushed with misery that we shall find much perplexity 
 as to the existence of suffering ; such perplexity rarely, 
 indeed, exists except in the minds of those whom the 
 world would call prosperous. But amid great prosperity 
 we may feel the imperious pressure of the problem of 
 Evil ; and though the age of Death was not one of pecu- 
 liar suffering, it was one of special suggestion for this 
 side of life. 
 
 Probably we have all felt, when an individual human 
 life has ended, distress quite out of proportion to any 
 vacancy caused by the departure. It is not that the lost 
 presence was so specially prized (though the feeling does 
 not arise without love) ; it is rather the reflection origi- 
 nating in tender memory, " With large result so little 
 rife ! " Our inmost being craves achievement far more 
 persistently than enjoyment, and as long as life hurries 
 on to some goal its bitterness does not pass into per- 
 plexity. It is when the movement of life is at an end, 
 when the vague possibilities of the future are cut off, 
 that we are led to the question. Is it worth while ? Few 
 lives bear the question ; perhaps few ages would, if the 
 end of an age were as definite as the end of a life. 
 
 When for the first time in the world's histor}' men 
 
 1 The second century is the epoch of Gnostic development, and also of the 
 reign of the Antonines ; but the remarks in tlie text take in a somewhat widei- 
 period.
 
 288 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 confronted a dead past, they could not avoid this question. 
 Life for the toiling millions was not then harder than it 
 had been, but to the thinking hundreds it was darker. 
 They saw it under an aspect that revealed its nothing- 
 ness. A pause in all action left them leisure to brood over 
 the problem, Why did the world ever originate ? The 
 word Almighty, to most of us so familiar as to have lost 
 its meaning, represented a new conception to the men 
 of that da}^, and the contradiction which we drop out of 
 sight emerged for them with the distinctness of novelty. 
 As the first rays of the rising sun even less obviously 
 bathe the landscape in light than they streak it with 
 shadow, so when the belief in many gods deepened and 
 concentrated itself into a belief in God, the world, in its 
 new character of a Divine woj'k, showed forth, as never 
 before, the flaws and misfits which removed it from being 
 a satisfactory exhibition of Divine perfection. As a back- 
 ground to the varied movement of human and Divine 
 activity the world was well enough ; call it the product 
 of Almight}^ Will, and it became filled with evil.^ 
 
 Hence it is that from this time two lines of theory 
 on the origin of Evil are traceable throughout all moral 
 speculation. On the one hand, the Greek antithesis of 
 Spirit and Matter presented itself as a symbolic expression 
 of the contrast of good and evil, which precluded the 
 need of its being regarded as a problem ; on the other, 
 to a race for which Sin was the only evil, the Jewish 
 antithesis of Creator and Creature appeared to offer 
 some real solution of the problem. Evil to the Greek 
 
 1 A sentence constantly quoted from Euseb. (Hist. Eccl. , v. 27), 7ro\v6pvXKriToy 
 irapa. toIs alpeanorais i^rjT7j/j.a to irddev r/ Kanla, gives the keynote of all the 
 theological and theosophical discussion of this time. See also Arnobius adv. 
 Gentes, ii. 54, 55, 65 ; — " Mala ergo dicetis unde sunt hasc omnia? " this being 
 evidently the continual Heathen objection, and also the heretical objection. 
 The book, which is a vindication of Christianity from the charge of being re- 
 sponsible for the calamities of the time, was written early in the fourth century.
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 289 
 
 was what marble was to the sculptor, at once the source 
 of his labour and the indispensable material of his work- 
 manship ; from one point of view it veiled his creation, 
 from the other that creation was expressed by it. His 
 ideal lay within the rock ; arduous toil was needed to 
 smite away the disguising material that surrounded it. 
 But then, from another point of view, the rock lay 
 within his ideal, his ideal was no more than that which 
 gave it form. It is the view of a race which looked on 
 Morahty as in the truest sense of the word a subordi- 
 nate province to Art. Some learned men have imagined 
 themselves to find a concession to this view in the first 
 verses of Genesis. " The earth was without form and 
 void " implies, they think, that the Creator had an 
 uncreated material for His energy, and therefore an im- 
 personal sharer of His eternity. If it were so, it would 
 always be possible to a logical mind to see in this 
 antithesis to God the source of Evil. But it is difficult 
 even to allow that a Jew saw in this doctrine a con- 
 ceivable intellectual hypothesis ; it is impossible to 
 concede that Jews felt in it a moral view, explanatory 
 of the nature of Evil. They had a simpler, not really a 
 deeper, but perhaps a more natural explanation ; Evil, 
 to their view, was the very opposite of a thing ; there 
 was no possible evil, except in a choice. If to be good 
 means to choose goodness, it must be also possible to 
 choose evil, and evil must be there to choose. The 
 answer will generally be felt an inadequate one by those 
 who can see the need of any answer. But the Jew found 
 no difficulty in this belief, and there must be many who 
 find none ; for the Jewish answer has lasted ever since, 
 is incorporated in immortal poetry, and is for ever pre- 
 senting itself to some minds as an original answer to 
 the ever-recurrent problem of humanity. We find it, 
 again and again, urged as a great moral discovery that 
 
 T
 
 290 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 human free will relieves a Divine Creator of responsi- 
 bility for the evil of the world ; we are continually being 
 led to feel that this thought must have some tranquillizing 
 influence on the heart of man, which cannot be translated 
 into intellectual cogency, and must point to some deep 
 truth which man has not yet learned to express in 
 language impregnable to some objections that are both 
 obvious and forcible. 
 
 To the Hellenic spirit this view was inconceivable. 
 Only slightly, and as it were by an intermittent light, 
 did the Greek ever contemplate that which we sum up 
 in the words " human responsibility." All that we mean 
 by human freedom was conceived by his race more 
 vividly than by any other people of the earth. But a 
 variation of dialect may cover a chasm deep as the very 
 roots of human thought. Human responsibility is human 
 freedom contemplated from the point of view of one who 
 believes in Righteousness, who sees Evil as Sin. Some 
 gleams of such an explanation, as of almost every thought 
 that has ever entered the heart of man, may be found 
 in Greek literature ; but all its characteristic expression 
 leads us in a different direction. For the Artist, Sin is 
 no more than the throb of life's pulsation, the warp of 
 its woof, the condition and prelude of all that is desirable 
 and excellent. The evil of Sin cannot indeed be entirely 
 hidden from any race or any individual ; and in a race 
 whose every utterance has the resonance of genius, it 
 will always be possible to find in some undertone a 
 definite protest against a view that excludes a deep part 
 of our nature. But that swift inversion of sympathies 
 which is essential to dramatic genius precludes any 
 deliberate concession that impulses, which fill life with 
 meaning, have no fitting place anywhere. When the 
 Greek had to explain Evil he could not find refuge in 
 human Will. There could be no Evil in Freedom ; Evil
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 291 
 
 lay in that which opposes itself to Freedom — the world 
 of Necessity, the absolute antithesis to and negation of 
 Will, the blind world of Matter. The two theories meet 
 in sharp, distinct contrast ; the one is the exact contrary 
 of the other. " Evil begins where Spirit ceases its free 
 play," says the Greek. " No," says the Jew, when he is 
 forced to see what the Greek meant ; " it does not begin, 
 but ends there. Evil can exist only in the choice of a 
 Mind. Man is created to take the attitude of a Crea- 
 ture, and when he chooses that of an independent 
 Creator, the result is that which we call Evil." 
 
 But let us begin where the Jew began, and under- 
 stand first the theory which he rejected. When we have 
 allowed that the fact of man's material organization and 
 environment is the cause of a large part of what is wrong, 
 and of a still larger part of what is painful, we appear 
 to have made the utmost concession possible, from the 
 modern point of view, towards that identification of 
 matter with evil which the Greek almost took for granted. 
 If we were obliged to have any theory on the connection 
 of the two things, we should be inclined to the very 
 opposite one. The very sense of necessity involved in 
 our material environment, which may be called evil, is 
 to modern feeling a dilution of the fact of wrong. A 
 starving man steals a loaf; for the good of society we 
 may think some penalty should be inflicted on the 
 act, but hunger is allowed to be a palliation of theft ; 
 and translated from legal into moral language, this 
 means that guilt slackens as physical impulse becomes 
 overpowering. We cannot confine our ideas of wrong 
 to the region of physical temptation. Hatred is an 
 emotion as purely spiritual as love. Happily it is far 
 less common. But it is not a feeling that can be left 
 out of account when we are considering the character of 
 good and evil. What we call pain of body, which we
 
 292 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 should rather call pain from body (since all pain is in a 
 mind), is considered by many to be, when very severe, 
 the worst of all pain ; but it is not considered so by 
 every one, and it is certainly not the only pain. The 
 Greek thought that the spirit should rule the body as 
 the master the slave. We can see that that is another 
 way of saying that the body should not be a part of 
 the material world. There are some forms of inversion 
 of this rightful rule which of themselves we condemn as 
 abnormal ; they should not have been allowed to begin. 
 But so far as any feeling is natural, a certain allowance 
 is made for it which is quite incompatible with such 
 condemnation as we give to that which in theological 
 language we term sin. 
 
 Yet there must be some meaning in the belief of the 
 greatest thinkers of the old world. The human race is 
 not more human at one time than another. Its relation 
 to truth is a permanent one. It is a futile and sterile 
 method of study (though it be a common one) to fix 
 a date at which thought begins to be either true or false. 
 In some sense all earnest thought must be true ; that 
 which was meant by earnest thinkers must be true ; and 
 we may generally discover some part of experience which 
 affords a clue even to the opinions we are furthest from 
 accepting. It is an important fact, that so far as human 
 beings dwell within the realm of sense, they are to a 
 certain extent necessarily rivals. Envy, says Virgil to 
 Dante, in the " Purgatory," arises — 
 
 " Because men set their wishes upon that 
 Wherein companionship^is one with loss." 
 
 To some degree this is what no one can help doing. 
 One mouthful of bread will fill only one mouth. While 
 all beauty, all delight of eye or ear, is common possession 
 to those who are within its reach, the food and garments
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 293 
 
 which form the lowest degree in the scale of need cannot 
 be shared without being lessened. This holds good for 
 saint and for sinner, for genius and for idiot, for crimi- 
 nal and philanthropist. All, so far as they are animals, 
 want something that none other can have at the same 
 time ; and all are animals to some extent throughout the 
 whole of their being, and through its earlier stages, when 
 first impressions are received, not much besides, as far 
 as man can see. An animal, so far as it is merely an 
 animal, can do neither right nor wrong ; and the not- 
 right may appear wrong as readily as the not-wrong 
 appear right. The animal nature, like some planet 
 which from different parts of our orbit we may visua- 
 lize in constellations severed by distances imagination 
 fails to compute, may be identified, according to our 
 point of view, with either good or evil. Nor is man 
 an animal only throughout the earlier stages of his 
 life on earth ; he is liable to re-enter this circuit of 
 animal necessity with a hundred accidents to which the 
 best of men is just as liable as the worst is. Whole 
 classes pass their lives in that region " wherein com- 
 panionship is one with loss," and only under the most 
 favoured circumstances does any one pass through life 
 and never feel he must do without something he needs 
 because there is not enough of it for two. The mere 
 fact of man's bodily environment thus becomes a source 
 of separation between man and man, which is perfectly 
 inevitable, and for which no man is responsible ; and 
 while we contemplate that fact and nothing besides, we 
 may call this bodily organization evil. 
 
 This connection of the bodily organism with evil 
 is equally evident in experience which has no obvious 
 connection with the external world. It is not the 
 experience of ordinary human beings that sorrow sepa- 
 rates us from our kind to tlic same extent as docs
 
 294 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 extreme pain of body. The frame that is racked with 
 rheumatism or neuralgia is a prison to the spirit in a 
 sense that no unsatisfied desire of the heart is. In all 
 the desolation of bereavement a hungry man is glad of 
 food, and a half-frozen man of fire ; in a paroxysm of 
 bodily pain he can be glad of nothing. From within 
 and without the lesson is repeated. As the statesman 
 knows that hunger is a potent factor in a nation's fife, 
 the invalid feels that even a little pain is imperious, if it 
 goes on. We are all forced to feel, sooner or later, that 
 in man's bodily environment there is an element not only 
 of necessity, but in some sense even of what appears 
 like falsehood. It is as if, with regard to pain, we were 
 all forced to re-enter that sphere of illusion in which the 
 vine-leaf is greater than the star which it hides ; and 
 with regard to pain of body, as ii we lost that power of 
 movement which enables us to catch a glimpse of it to 
 the right and the left of the obstacle which hides it. 
 We are obliged to feel for the moment as if some sharp 
 pain which we have to endure for a few seconds were 
 a great thing, and some large change affecting the per- 
 manent fate of millions were a small thing. It is not 
 wrong which creates this illusion, it is only the very 
 nature of our physical organization. 
 
 In the grasp on the perennial truth that the world of 
 matter is the world of necessity we gain a clue to the 
 temporary belief that the world of Matter is the world of 
 Evil. Necessity divorced from Law is Evil. We can- 
 not sufficiently shake off the influence of scientific thought 
 even to imagine a physical world of Necessity divorced 
 from Law. We should first need not only to put away 
 all scientific conceptions, but also to strip our minds 
 of all the associations that our commercial and indus- 
 trial development have interwoven with the very warp 
 and woof of our intellectual structure. Human will has
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 295 
 
 gained a control over the field of Matter of which the 
 ancients knew nothing. Nature is now rather the field 
 where Will finds its exercise than the barrier which 
 forms its limit. We confide an important message to 
 the electric telegraph, and know that it will be trans- 
 mitted at least to the end of the wire. If we had 
 intrusted it to our best friend he might have forgotten 
 to deliver it. Every time that we cross the barrier 
 between things and persons we are reminded that it 
 is only on the ground of things that we can make 
 our reckoning with absolute security ; our antithesis 
 between the two is between the world of safe anticipa- 
 tion and the world of what we call accident. People 
 are whirled thousands of miles without anxiety or 
 effort, because steam never fails to move what impedes 
 its expansion ; and if they are mutilated or killed on the 
 journey, it is generally because some human being has not 
 done the thing he was expected to do. The lesson that 
 this is not necessarily the condition of human beings 
 with regard to the outward world is enforced b}'' the 
 contrast of ancient and modern thought. A Greek 
 knew no large, familiar every-day illustration of what 
 we may call the convenience of dealing with things. 
 Where we turn to machinery, he turned to the reluctant 
 service of some captive, torn from his home or brought 
 up under the degradation of bondage. All the con- 
 venient certainty that we associate with man's control 
 over the forces of nature he associated with the con- 
 trol of one class over the will of another. 
 
 This change has revolutionized man's view of the out- 
 ward world. To modern thinkers Matter is the incarna- 
 tion of Force ; to ancient thinkers it was the contrary of 
 Spirit. Of the wonderful cycle of laws which it has 
 revealed to us, the only one which they knew (and which 
 no one can help knowing) — gravitation — was supposed
 
 296 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 by them to be a peculiarity of the only region of space 
 subject to disorder and imperfection. Those silent, 
 ceaseless movements which for our eyes inscribe the 
 midnight sky with testimony to the universal domain of 
 gravitation, exhibited to theirs its narrow limits and 
 eternal opposite. The movements that end and the move- 
 ments that continue had to their conception nothing in 
 common. Their knowledge was as misleading as their 
 ignorance ; the laws of Space, as they become confused 
 the moment they are illustrated in any material sub- 
 stance, encourage the belief that Matter knows no law. 
 Our modern investigators of Nature would have ap- 
 peared to the Greek to make exactly the same mistake 
 as a man who cut triangles in chalk to test the pro- 
 blems of Euclid. The world of Matter was the world 
 of multiplicity, of confusion ; truth, if attained here, was 
 attained only by accident. 
 
 The Greek had studied the personal to far more 
 purpose than the material world, but his view even of 
 this is different from ours. John Mill has observed — f 
 
 and the observation is important as coming from him, 
 because he would be inclined rather to underrate rather 
 than overrate the truth he there expresses — that we 
 must never think of the cruelties of antiquit}^ as if those 
 who inflicted them were as bad as ive should be if we 
 did anything of the kind. Napoleon's was a far more 
 cruel nature than Caesar's, but Napoleon could not have 
 cut off the hands of a whole garrison and left them in 
 that miserable condition, as Caesar did. He durst not 
 have raised against himself the indignation of the civilized 
 world, which such an action from Caesar did not raise. 
 The whole moral standard of our day is formed under 
 an attention to individual need that necessarily changes 
 the very character of duty, and affects what men wish to 
 seem, even when it has no influence on what they wish
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 297 
 
 to be. The State — the unit of the classical world — is 
 an unseen being ; the individual — the unit of the modern 
 world — is closely connected with the bodily organiza- 
 tion ; and as the Self becomes more prominent, the body 
 becomes more sacred. Asceticism is no more than this 
 sense of sacredness allied with a desire for sacrifice, and 
 its prevalence in the mediaeval as compared with the 
 classical world is an illustration of the new importance 
 of pain. A keen sense of its horror readily passes into 
 a keen sense of its blessing. The nature to which it is 
 comparatively insignificant is equally remote from both. 
 
 We can understand that those who saw in the material 
 world all that we see in it of danger, of compulsion, of 
 necessity, and saw in it nothing of law ; who felt, as 
 every human being must feel, its wonderful alliance 
 with pain and did not feel the sanctity of the frame- 
 work which enshrines the Self; — we can understand 
 that to them this formless negative entity became a sort 
 of antithesis to God, a blind sharer of His eternity and 
 a limit to His Will. But why give form to what is evil? 
 Why enter on the work of Creation ? It was not a 
 question natural to a race of Artists. Why carve a 
 statue ? The question answered itself. And yet it re- 
 curred again and again. Plato returns to the suspicion 
 that Creation, in some sense, implies degeneracy. His 
 indifference to the whole physical universe is but the 
 intellectual expression of this doubt. If this world had 
 been, in the full sense of the word, a creation of God, it 
 would have been, as in his view it was not, a worthy 
 object of attention to Man. We sum up his whole view 
 of what we should call Nature when wc remind the 
 reader that his account of the material world and its 
 origin is the only work in which lie docs not take his 
 beloved master as a guide. Socrates appears in the 
 *' Timoeus," not, as in every other dialogue, as the critical
 
 298 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 investigator, but merely as the attentive listener. To 
 use his own homely metaphor, he ceases to practise his 
 mother's trade ; he delivers no pregnant mind of nascent 
 truth ; he greets mature opinion ; he does not look for 
 infant knowledge. From the time that Timaeus begins 
 his exposition Socrates remains as silent as some 
 modern man of science beneath the pulpit of an eloquent 
 preacher ; there is no occasion for him to bring his 
 elenchiis to bear on an exposition which expressly abdi- 
 cates all pretension to bring the mind into contact with 
 knowledge ; which is content with a probable and plau- 
 sible set of guesses on a subject respecting which nothing 
 can be known. Man cannot know what God has not, 
 in the fullest sense of the word, created. God did the 
 best possible with matter ; He found a Chaos and He 
 left a Cosmos, but the disorder is latent in the order ; 
 ever and anon it recurs, and with it the thought that in 
 some deep sense the world where it reigns, is not the 
 true home of Man. 
 
 The very inconsistencies apparent in the various forms 
 taken by this belief in a Fall attest its strong hold on 
 the mind of Plato. Perhaps the work of Creation was 
 given up, at the moment when Man was to be called into 
 existence, into the hands of inferior deities ; or perhaps 
 it is in the course of history that we must trace this 
 degeneracy ; the Creator guided the world at first, but 
 when He let it go, its course was reversed, and it soon 
 forgot His guidance. Or else (and this version of the 
 belief would appear to express his deepest thought) the 
 birth of every human being is a repetition of the Fall ; 
 each soul, as it clothes itself in flesh, descends from 
 Heaven.'^ " Perchance in truth the dead are happiest," 
 
 1 Compare the account of the Creation in the "Timaeus," and of what we may- 
 call the Fall in the " Pohticus ; " the first makes the last unnecessary. For the 
 sense of an individual degeneracy, see the myth at the end of the " Republic," 
 and in the " Phaedrus."
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 299 
 
 he concedes to a scornful antagonist who has made the 
 statement as a jeer ; " truly thou sayest that life is an 
 awful thing." ^ The suspicion led towards a feeling 
 the very opposite of the Greek sense of life ; but for 
 that very reason it was familiar to the race whose 
 whole life knew the rhythm of pulsation. Inversion, 
 says Plato," is the least change of movement possible. 
 None recognized as the Greek did that the opposite 
 swing was natural — that to feel the brightness of life 
 was but one step from giving a welcome to Death. 
 " The Divinity thus gave a token that it is better to die 
 than to live," says Herodotus, when he has told a bright 
 child-like legend quoted above.^ 
 
 " Who shall declare if seeming Life be Death, 
 If seemincr Death be but the dawnin? Life ? " 
 
 •o 
 
 asks Euripides,'* in hardly more poetic words. He may 
 here have been thinking of the verse of an earlier poet,^ 
 who, in describing earth, uses himself the very words 
 applied by Homer to the "joyless abodes " in which 
 Agamemnon sighed ^ for the life of a slave on earth. 
 Life and death, Empedocles thinks, have been inverted ; 
 it is the world of the shades that we inhabit here ; 
 our home is elsewhere. Earth, in truth, is Hades ; this 
 is the world below ; life and light are to be sought 
 in other realms, " Our birth is but a sleep and a for- 
 getting ; " it is by a fall that we enter on this realm of 
 death, and that which we call birth, in truth, is dying to 
 the splendour of our original home, and awakening to 
 a dreary exile, to an existence " subject to mad strife," 
 Life in this world is but banishment, and banishment 
 
 1 Gorgias, 492, 2 Politicus, 2G9, ^ Sec p. 122. 
 
 * In a Fragment quoted by Plato in the " Gorgias." 
 
 5 Empedocles. 
 
 " ijXvOcs, 6<ppa ioji vlKvas koX arcpiria X'^pov (Od. xi. 94),
 
 300 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 must have been earned by crime. What sin did the 
 Spirit commit in its mysterious Paradise that it should 
 be hurled downwards to Earth ? The poet answers this 
 question indistinctly, or at least the fragments we possess 
 of his poem bring us the answer in an indistinct form. 
 It must have been some awful guilt which took the place 
 of Man's first disobedience, and most readers will feel 
 it the more impressive that its character is mysterious. 
 Yet, though more awful than the sin of Adam, its con- 
 sequences are less dark. The Heaven of which life has 
 deprived the poet is one to which death shall restore 
 him, if the intermediate world of Purgatory be rightly 
 used. " The amplitude of bliss," from which he has been 
 hurled earthwards, lies before him as well as behind him ; 
 he is separated from his past Heaven by a long period 
 of evolution, during which he has traversed the course 
 of animated existence, and has reached the pinnacle of 
 humanity, whence he may take his Heavenward flight. 
 The dream is one of those which haunt poetry in every 
 age, and it is difficult for readers to whom it is familiar 
 in this form to say how much more than poetry it may 
 have been in the early ages when all deep thought 
 naturally took a poetic form. 
 
 The Fall of Man thus must be accepted as a Greek 
 idea, in the sense that Greek thought again and again 
 returned to it, and that the deepest minds of the Nation 
 were the most haunted by it. But it is not a charac- 
 teristic Greek idea. Man a fallen being ! We cannot look 
 at a Greek statue and believe that. He is perfectly 
 beautiful ; he is perfectly satisfied. He seems to need 
 nothing, to remember nothing ; a creature of the Present, 
 at home in the bright world around him, and asking 
 nothing but that it might continue. Even the limitations 
 of Greek art bear witness to this sense of completeness, 
 this satisfaction in the finite. How extraordinary it is to
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 301 
 
 turn to the productions where the sense of beauty breathes 
 through mutilated fragments of long-buried marble, where 
 manhood and womanhood appear before us in a perfec- 
 tion which has given the standard of all time, and to 
 see no trace of enjoyment in the beauty of childhood ! 
 Their men and women were children once ; to our con- 
 ceptions they must have been lovelier then than ever ; for 
 what beauty, to our eyes, equals that of a little child ? 
 It was a beauty, however, of which Greek sculpture, at 
 its best period, records as little appreciation as does Greek 
 poetry of mountain scenery. All that the Greek seemed 
 to remember about the child was, that he was smaller than 
 a man, or when individual affection brought in more 
 definite feeling, that the curves of the face are rounder ; 
 an inattentive, clumsy chubbiness is the nearest approach 
 the Greek chisel can give to the portraiture of a beloved 
 daughter lost in infancy.-'- Why were the Artist people 
 blind to the beauty of infancy ? Because they had no 
 interest in anything incomplete. They lived in the 
 absolute, the finite, the full daylight of life ; its dawn 
 and its twilight alike were to them uninteresting. They 
 seem to record, for all time, the pride and glory of 
 youth. The Greek, as his sculptured records show him, 
 meets all the perils and disasters of life with a smile — 
 sometimes a pathetic smile, but a smile always. They 
 could not, except in rare moments reached by a few of 
 their deepest minds, contemplate that side of life which 
 approaches the idea of a Fall. They could not be 
 sufficiently interested in the Imperfect to conceive of 
 a higher perfection than that which man had attained 
 already. 
 
 1 This must be brought home to all who have enjoyed tlic beautiful Atlicnian 
 sepulchral remains, lately made accessible through the photograph. There is 
 a touching relief of a little girl caressing her pet dog, where one is astonished 
 to see the execution of what was evidently a task imposed by loving regret, so 
 clumsy and almost ugly in its result.
 
 302 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 When the world, moulded by Greek thought, accepted 
 the faith of Judaea, and the two were blended in a 
 mystic system which we know as Gnosticism, it was 
 in the Fall of God rather than of Man, that an answer 
 was sought to the problem by which the heart of the 
 Greek had never been tormented, and his brain but 
 slightly exercised. But, in truth, it is with Man's 
 relation to the Divine world under the progress of 
 Religion, as with Man's relation to the animal world 
 under the progress of Science. The barrier seems in 
 both cases to disappear. He descends from the Divine 
 on one hand ; he ascends from the animal on the other. 
 The endeavour to trace his history on either side shows 
 signs of hesitation as it speaks of origin. We see, when 
 we pursue any moral behef through the course of the 
 ages, that it crosses and recrosses the boundary sepa- 
 rating the Divine and human worlds, or rather that it 
 is seen now on this side, now on that, according to the 
 position of the mind that reflects it. Was it a man 
 who fell, or a God ? The fact seems more definite than 
 the person. In some mysterious way the Creation was 
 connected with the Fall, and it constantly appears as 
 though the Fall were the earlier event of the two, as 
 if all things earthly had their origin in disaster. 
 
 The message of the Jew bearing witness to an 
 Almighty One had come into an atmosphere charged 
 with this deep sense of futility in all things earthl}^ ; 
 the old order of things had passed away ; no stately 
 civic life awakened enthusiasm, no great ideas kept 
 the mental circulation vigorous. It was just when 
 men were feeling as if the best thing was death, that 
 they were taught that Life was the gift of God. The 
 world was a ruin, and yet the world was a unity. The 
 nations were united in a single whole, but in this vast 
 organism there was no life. It was as if a man had 
 
 \
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 303 
 
 succeeded in unlocking a carefully guarded casket, and 
 found it empty. It was not that the world was then 
 specially bad, but men were taught for the first time to 
 wonder why it was not good. The idea of Unity had 
 never before been brought home to European thinkers ; 
 from within and without alike the lesson was now pressed 
 upon them. They saw the world arranged round one 
 centre ; they heard of one invisible Author. They saw 
 it for the first time as a whole, and they saw that it was 
 not good. 
 
 It is no temporary belief dependent on circumstance 
 which leads men to associate Unity with all perfection. 
 It is a result of principles that lie within the most pro- 
 found depths that human nature can penetrate. When- 
 ever man turns to the Eternal he turns to the One. 
 Evil is by its very nature multitudinous, and all that is 
 good is convergent. All good unites, confers on him 
 who turns towards it, its own distinctness and purity. 
 All evil distracts, reveals divergence from that which 
 should be the centre of unity, shows will and nature, 
 which should combine in harmony, somehow at strife. 
 Men must have felt this always ; when they felt it in 
 connection with the new revelation of one God, and the 
 near recollection of many Gods, they felt it in the clue 
 to the whole meaning of good and evil. 
 
 When men were first taught by the rule of the govern- 
 ing race to realize that humanity was one, and by the 
 message of the prophetic race to believe that God was 
 one, while they at the same time looked round on the 
 world with a sense of its evil, they came to feel that 
 Creation was the desertion of the region of Unity for 
 the region of Multiplicity. They identified the Creation 
 and the Fall, The sanction given by Divine, or at least 
 supernatural activity, to the evil world of Matter, took 
 to the imagination of this age the aspect of the Fall of
 
 304 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 God, We cannot better suggest to the reader the ima- 
 ginative effect of this view than by describing it as the 
 first sketch for Milton's magnificent picture, the super- 
 natural figures crowding out the natural. In truth, all 
 that is merely human in " Paradise Lost " is matter of 
 secondaryi nterest, " I beheld Satan fall from Heaven," 
 almost the only words in the Bible which give any 
 groundwork for the poem, indicate its true scope. Satan 
 is its hero; his fate forms the focus of interest. His 
 abode is the real world ; it is called Hell, but it is not, 
 like Dante's Hell, a place of actual torment ; we feel it a 
 world of exile, but also of grand possibilities of loyal 
 devotion and of varied aims. Its inhabitants, though de- 
 feated, are still Gods ; and even in their crime there is 
 something that is majestic and impressive. Satan is a 
 kindred figure with Prometheus ; we may even believe 
 that the poet was unconsciously attracted towards his 
 theme by the latent sympathy with insurrection which 
 makes itself felt through his theology ; we feel that his 
 heart is with the rebels, even while his judgment approves 
 their fate. The world itself is in some sense the result 
 of their sin ; a human race is called into existence to re- 
 place a fallen Divine race ; a vast calamity is commemo- 
 rated in the very existence of this framework of Being in 
 which man finds his home. Thus man's very existence 
 is the memorial of a Fall ; his own lapse is but the echo 
 and consequence of one of vaster proportions. The 
 Spirit who has himself decided it to be " better to reign 
 in Hell than serve in Heaven," inspires the creatures who 
 may almost be said in an indirect way to owe their 
 existence to him, with vague spiritual ambition, and 
 throughout the whole poem we feel that the keynote lies 
 in the ambition and the conquest — for such, in truth, 
 the world is — of the mighty Tempter. 
 
 The myth of Eden holds a perennial truth. The
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 305 
 
 Tempter said to Adam and Eve, " Ye shall be as Gods, 
 knowing good and evil," and still speaks thus to every 
 son of man. In the endeavour to know good and evil 
 as God knows them, lies the prelude to a fall. He 
 knows both. Man should only know one ; and therefore, 
 in the sense in which we can know nothing till we know 
 its contrary, he should not know even that one. And 
 again, from the Fall comes Redemption ; from the know- 
 ledge of Evil springs the knowledge of a higher good. 
 We seem to know God and sin together. Here is the 
 perennial paradox of the moral life, ignored or inverted 
 by Science and by Art ; but to him who seeks moral 
 rightness above knowledge and above beauty, a perma- 
 nent high-water-mark of human thought, a limit to its 
 restless ebb and flow, testifying to a vast Beyond, which 
 it confesses while it abjures its right to penetrate. The 
 temptation to know sin ts sin ; yet how can man love 
 Truth and not desire to know ? And then, by a strange, 
 sudden, inevitable inversion, the seeker seems to discover 
 that the temptation to know sin is the opportunity to 
 know God, or, at all events, that it is the prelude to the 
 deepest knowledge of God which man is fitted to attain. 
 In the evolution of Christianity this idea expanded, trans- 
 cending the limits of humanity, and projected itself on 
 a superhuman background. The human temptation in 
 this view reaches to that depth of humanity which seems 
 to need more than a merely human representative. The 
 ideal man, it seemed, must be more than man ; if human 
 aspirations have their Divine prototype, so have human 
 temptations. The Fall of man, as it was conceived by 
 human thinkers, was first the fall of a God. 
 
 We have already seen how, as the shadow of Greek 
 intellect falls on the faith of Judaea, the awful image of 
 the Divine grows dim ; how in this new atmosphere the 
 Absolute Being, as it were, retires, and the Divine agency 
 
 u
 
 3o6 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 is carried on by those personifications of the Divine 
 Powers which clustered round and centred in the Media- 
 tor, the Divine ideal of Israel. We have here the germ 
 of what may be called a new faith; though, for the 
 most part, its professors repudiated the name ; their 
 watchword was Knowledge. Of their teaching we pos- 
 sess only such fragments as their opponents have left 
 in tearing it to pieces ; we hardly know more of it than 
 would be known of the science of thirty years ago by 
 one who judged it from quotations made by the clerical 
 opponents of scientific men.^ But one who has followed 
 the convergent lines of Greek and Jewish thought to 
 their common ground finds these broken fragments safe 
 stepping-stones between the mythology of the Old world 
 and the beliefs of the New. We see the ideas of Philo 
 blend with the memories of Hesiod ; we watch the Powers 
 of the Invisible and Formless One take shape in a new 
 mythology, shutting off the awful abyss of Deity from 
 any contact with the base world of matter, interposing 
 an intermediate emanation s^^stem whereby the One 
 should be screened, as it were, from direct responsibility 
 for the realm of multiplicity, of evil. We see these 
 strange abstractions hover on the edge of personifica- 
 tion, and sometimes pass it ; we have to do with beings 
 so faintly personal that we may at any moment re-trans- 
 late them into the language of allegory. If we say that 
 Wisdom, seeking to comprehend the Absolute, sinks 
 into a region of confusion, and propagates error, we 
 speak metaphysics ; if we say that Sophia, presuming to 
 
 1 The authorities for the following sketch of Gnosticism are mainly the 
 polemic citations in the works of the Fathers, especially Irenaeus adv. Haereses, 
 Tertullian adv. Marcionem, adv. Valentinianos, de Praescriptionibus HsEreti- 
 corum, contra Gnosticos Scorpiacum ; Clemens Ale.xandrinus, Stromata ; 
 Plotinus, Ennead, ii. 9. The last gives a very interesting picture of Gnosticism 
 from a Neo-Platonic point of view, showing how large a part of its moral 
 ground was common to Christianity.
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 307 
 
 approach the Supreme God, fell from Heaven, and gave 
 birth to a daughter in the region of darkness into which 
 she sank, we describe a chapter in the new mythology 
 of this age, but we have hardly done more than translate 
 an English word into Greek. According to this mytho- 
 logy the Creator is the son of this lower Sophia. The 
 Wisdom, even indirectly manifest in the Creation of the 
 world, is a lower wisdom, inheriting the memor}"- of a 
 Fall, separated from the region of celestial repose by a 
 long struggle, and the degradation of an existence begun 
 in a fallen state, and bearing in its very nature the marks 
 of disorder and imperfection. 
 
 Nothing more marks the difference of Jewish and 
 Greek feeling than a comparison of this Gnostic Sophia 
 with the Sophia of the Proverbs : " While as yet He- 
 had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest 
 part of the dust of the world. When He prepared the 
 heavens, I was there : when He set a compass upon 
 the face of the depth : when He established the clouds 
 above : . . . when He gave to the sea His decree, that 
 the waters should not pass His commandment : when 
 He appointed the foundations of the earth : then I was by 
 Him, as one brought up with Him : and I was daily His 
 delight, rejoicing in the habitable part of the earth ; and 
 my delights were with the sons of men." ^ It is almost 
 as if the Gnostic Sophia grew out of a distinct protest 
 against Hebrew reverence for the Creator. The Wisdom 
 manifest in Creation was a spirit dating its very existence 
 from a world of disorder, and inheriting a tradition of 
 struggle and failure. The Mother of the Creator is already 
 the inhabitant of a fallen world ; so far must the blunder 
 of Creation be removed from the Majesty of Heaven. He 
 inherits unconscious reminiscences of presumptuous aim, 
 of defeat and despair; these he incorporates in a Creation 
 
 1 Proverbs viii. 26-31.
 
 I 
 
 308 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 which reflects them — not, indeed, them alone, for a divine 
 spark is fallen into the dark world, and the Creation is 
 higher than the Creator. But still it is his work, the 
 work of a Fallen Deity. The divine Mother has sought 
 to know God — a presumptuous aim. In her son, this 
 presumption is heightened into the disastrous ambition 
 of creating Man. 
 
 This new mythology provided for the instincts of 
 Hellenism and Judaism alike. It gave, however faintly, 
 the Many to imagination; it preserved, however illogically, 
 the One for thought. Pallid abstractions as were its 
 deities, they did yet satisfy, to some extent, the instinct 
 that craves the Many. The tinge of Greek colouring is 
 indistinct, to our eyes almost invisible ; it lingers as the 
 traces of colour discovered by archaeologists in buried 
 sculpture ; yet still it gave some shadow of satisfaction 
 to minds steeped in Hellenic feeling and yearning after 
 variety in the Heavens so recently emptied of their 
 bright inhabitants. It has been called " La derniere 
 apparition du monde ancien, venant combattre son suc- 
 cesseur, avant de lui ceder le genre humain." ^ The 
 shadowy and sublimated Polytheism which we learn with 
 effort and immediately forget does indeed seem a pallid 
 ghost of that which still glows in immortal poetry and 
 sculpture ; 3^et it doubtless had its attraction for many a 
 spirit hesitating on the borders of the new creed, and 
 sending looks of backward longing towards the varied 
 play, the endless dramatic interest of the old. It was 
 prevalent during the dawn of the modern world, when 
 the lights of Paganism were growing dim and the light 
 of Christianity growing strong, and its " endless genea- 
 logies," carrying on the world of Paganism, doubtless 
 found acceptance with many minds as a harmonizing 
 medium between the Heathenism which they had aban- 
 1 By J. Matter, Hist. Critique du Gnosticisme.
 
 ,THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 309 
 
 doned, and on which so many of their tendencies had 
 been formed, and the simple, perhaps it seemed to them 
 the meagre, creed which had succeeded it. With the 
 reluctance with which we sometimes greet the morning 
 light that dispels a fanciful dream, many half Christians 
 must have looked up to a Divine world that had sud- 
 denly become (as it would seem to them) almost empty, 
 and sighed for the rich plastic variety of an Olympus 
 that mirrored the passions, the instincts, the hopes and 
 fears, that quicken our human world. The strange beings 
 who figure in Gnostic legends formed an intermediate 
 mythology, coming between the worship of the Gods and 
 the worship of the Saints, and to men craving after the 
 fulness of a Heaven from which its bright inhabitants 
 were lately banished almost any successors must have 
 been welcome to fill the blank. 
 
 But Jewish feeling found a like shadow of satisfaction 
 in this mythology. What the new teachers meant by 
 calling themselves Gnostics was, that they were initiated 
 into the hidden knowledge of the One beyond the Many. 
 That God was One was being taught on all sides ; they 
 inculcated the lesson that, being One, He is hidden in 
 remote inaccessibility ; that the divine world from which 
 this human world has issued is the world of multitude, 
 of division, of plurality, and hence its evil.^ Nothing 
 can seem more hostile to the spirit of the Hebrew belief, 
 yet it was by a true Jew that this belief had been read 
 into his Scriptures. Philo had discovered, in the first 
 chapters of Genesis, indications that the creation of the 
 
 1 Jehovah, the God of the Jews, being identified with the blundering Demi- 
 urgus, they were supposed to stand in a special relation towards him. Heathen 
 religions, in like manner, belonged to the dark realm of Matter, while Chris- 
 lianily was a revelation from the Supreme God. Thus the three ideas of 
 Gnosticism corresponded to the three religions of the world at the dawn of our 
 era. Several references in the New Testament suggest Gnostical ideas, t:£,, 
 John xii. 31, xiv. 30 ; 2 Cor. v. 4 ; Gal. iii. 19; i Cor. ii. 6, 7; Eph. iii. 10.
 
 310 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 world was the work of a manifold group, that God was 
 only partially the Maker of so imperfect a being as 
 man. This seemed to him manifest in the expression in 
 which the Hebrew Scripture narrates man's creation.^ 
 " Rightly is God represented as saying to His sub- 
 ordinates, to whom He deputed the formation of the 
 mortal part of the soul, ' Let us make man in order 
 that the blessings of the soul might be referred to him, 
 its evils to others.' " Something within man, he thought, I 
 
 was created by God, but it would not be true to say 
 that God created him. Man, as he lives in this world, 
 is connected with God only by intermediate emanations ; 
 the Divine influence is weakened when it reaches him as 
 that of a magnet through a succession of iron rings. ^ 
 His creator is connected with the Divine world, but 
 is not God. The very conception of creation implies 
 degeneracy — an un-Jewish thought, but yet the refuge 
 of a true Jew, confronted with the omnipotent seduction 
 of Greek culture, under the rule of Rome.^ 
 
 A creator belonging to the world not of the One but 
 
 1 Philo, Ue Confusione Linguarum. See also a passage in " De Profugis," 
 where he imitates a similar passage in the "Timasus" of Plato. Of the true 
 man God is the Creator, but not of man so far as he is evil. 
 
 - Ibid., De JMundi Opificio, 48. 
 
 3 The Gnostical idea of the Creation throws a vivid light on the meaning of 
 the Incarnation. Irenasus, summarizing the Gnostical view of man's creation, 
 says, 'Ore TjdeXrjaiv iiridel^at. avrbv (when God willed to reveal Himself), 
 rovTO avOpuiros iXexOe (Iren., i. 12, 3). The creation of man was effected 
 through the agency of the Demiurgus, who was not aware that he was copying 
 anything higher than himself, and who was, hke Pygmalion, seized with awe at 
 the result. Clement inverts the comparison, Kal ucrwep (po^os iirl tKelvov rod 
 irXdafxaros vTrrjp^e to7s dyyeXois, ore fxei^ova icpdey^aro rrjs irXdaews, did tov 
 dbparov iv avrui airepfxa deduKora, Tr]v avwOev ovaiav, &c. ; so works of art 
 strike their authors with a sort of awe (Strom., ii. 375). This element is sup- 
 posed to be present in Prophecy. The Demiurgus inspires the prophets of 
 Israel, but he unawares chooses out for this purpose men in whom is a seeti 
 of the spiritual life, and who therefore stand higher than himself. John the 
 Baptist " rejoiceth greatly at the Bridegroom's voice" as a representative of 
 the Demiurgus (Clem., Strom., ii. 409).
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 311 
 
 the Many, and therefore falhble and imperfect — a mate- 
 rial in which the germs of evil were inextricably mixed 
 — a seed of a loftier nature, divine and imperishable — 
 these are the three ideas out of which Gnosticism de- 
 vised a new mythology, satisfying to the needs of the 
 age. It branched out into a number of separate direc- 
 tions and gave rise to different groups of thought. But 
 difference between these theories was unimportant in 
 comparison with their resemblance. They all inter- 
 posed a long series of Emanations between God and 
 the Creator; they all assumed an eternal substratum of 
 creation, independent of the will of God, and an igno- 
 rant and blundering Creator, whose mischievous, restless 
 activity had bridged the gulf separating the world of 
 Unity or Spirit from the world of mere multiplicity 
 or matter ; and had thus conferred upon this realm a 
 principle of development which should never have 
 passed into union with it. And further, all recog- 
 nized that while Nature is the mere result of this 
 ignorant activity, in Man there is something higher. 
 He is the work of the Creator, so far as his bodily 
 organism, and what we should call his mind, is con- 
 cerned ; but a higher influence has been shed upon the 
 work, unconsciously to the worker ; it is as with those 
 creations of genius embodying inspiration which their 
 author dreamt not of, and expressing ideas which seem 
 to come rather through than from the mind that gives 
 them shape. The world is the mistake of a mighty 
 blunderer, but Man has a loftier origin. Like the royal 
 nursling of the wolf, he owns a lineage elevated far above 
 all that surrounds him, he dwells as an exile in the only 
 home he knows, and awaits a mysterious recall to regions 
 at once strange and yet in some sense familiar. The 
 Creator, so superior to Man in Power, is in the true 
 qualities of his inmost being distinctly his inferior. He
 
 312 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 is the author of Man so far as Man belongs to the realm 
 of Nature, of which the Demiurgus is indeed the type 
 and representative ; but a seed from a higher region is 
 hidden in the nature of Man, and so far he is a revelation 
 to the Spirit of Nature of that which lies beyond and 
 above him, a revelation perfected in the Divine Man — 
 complete only when the Redeemer is revealed to the 
 Creator.^ 
 
 " I feel that I am happier than I know," says Milton's 
 Adam. The Gnostical creator of Adam might have felt 
 that he was greater than he knew. He was the mag- 
 nified ideal of genius or inspiration, that magic power 
 by which the mind is enabled to transcend its own 
 boundaries, and become the expression and instrument 
 of an influence larger than itself. Its work may be 
 larger than itself, for a higher power is active within 
 it, often unconsciously to the agent. The Jew at 
 Alexandria had already been taught to look for an 
 inspiration in all his deepest utterance, which revealed 
 to him a world beyond himself. " Often," says Philo,^ 
 " I have found my mind entirely empty and barren when 
 I wished to write, and was obliged to retire without 
 leaving a finished sentence. And often, on the other 
 hand, coming quite empty, I have suddenly been full, 
 thoughts pouring upon me like rain, so that, as by a 
 divine inspiration, I prophesied, and became ignorant of 
 all things around me and of myself." What the Jew 
 felt of himself the Gnostic believed of the Creator. The 
 act of creation was in both cases the revelation of a 
 
 ^ A.VTOV Tov dpxovTa eTraKOijffai'Ta Tr}v <pa.<nv tov SiaKovovfievov irveilifiaTos, 
 eKirkayrival rq) Oed/xari Trap' iXirldas evayyeXia/uLhov (Clem., Strom., ii. p. 
 37S). The saying which produced this result is said to be that communicated 
 to Christ at the moment of the descent of the Holy Spirit ; and the Oedfia was 
 the glorified appearance of Christ, or perhaps the sight of the dove. The 
 mission of Christ was thus a Gospel for the Demiurgus, who thus hopes for 
 deliverance from the burdensome government of the world. ^ 
 
 2 De Migratione Abrahami.
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 313 
 
 Higher One. " Let there be light " was not a command, 
 but a prayer from this ignorant blunderer to a Supreme 
 Enlightener. " I am God, and there is none beside 
 me," was an empty boast or a passionate lament, calling 
 forth the revelation from a higher source — a consola- 
 tion or a rebuke, and perhaps both, as it relieved him 
 from responsibility for the world which he had made. 
 " Speak not falsely, for above thee is the Father of 
 all, and not him alone." How impressive is the dream 
 as a parable of all the highest human work, as a warn- 
 ing against that in man which seeks to be as God, and 
 an encouragement to all that within him which seeks 
 to discover the work of God ! A vision full of instruc- 
 tion for all time as to the meaning of the least imperfect 
 work of Man came to the generation which first con- 
 ceived it as a clue to all that was imperfect in the work 
 of God. 
 
 Nor are the dreams of these forgotten thinkers without 
 their message to our own age ; in some respects they are 
 specially worthy of the attention of our own generation. 
 In them, as they confronted their orthodox opponents, we 
 may discern the first collision of those ideas which we 
 know as Evolution and Creation. The question between 
 the two antagonists was. Is the world the result of an 
 act of Will, or of a process of development independent 
 of Will ? Is it Nature, or God, with whom man has 
 to do ? Beneath all difference of dialect, of illustration, 
 of assumption, the issue was fundamentally the same 
 then as now. They personified Nature, and called it 
 the Demiurgus. We leave it an abstraction ; but when 
 both conceptions are brought into contrast with Divine 
 Will, we sec that they are closely akin. The Demiur- 
 gus creates the world, but he works upon an existent 
 material ; he is ignorant of the true nature of his work. 
 Creation thus understood is indistinguisiiable fi'oni what
 
 314 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 we have learnt to call Evolution. " Speak not falsely, 
 for above Nature is the Father of all," seems the frag- 
 ment from some parable specially devised for a genera- 
 tion which has committed itself to the assertion that in 
 Nature is the Supreme. 
 
 When we come to realize the vast influence for evil 
 that lies in ignorant activity, we shall perhaps be sur- 
 prised, not that this explanation of Evil ever existed, but 
 that it was so much forgotten. It has been revived by 
 an isolated thinker, here and there ; and it is curious to 
 reflect that one of those who has seemed most ready for 
 such an ideal impressed his contemporaries as a typical 
 specimen of Atheism. James Mill ^ considered that the 
 aspect of the world was not hostile to one hypothesis of 
 creation ; the order of the Universe might, he thought, 
 be conceived as the work of a mighty, but not almighty 
 artist ; powers greater than those of man, but not dis- 
 similar to those of man, might be conceived as employed 
 in the construction of this world, and its disasters and 
 failures might conceivably be regarded with a certain 
 sympathy for the Being who was responsible for it, but 
 not wholly responsible for them. We only need to com- 
 bine such a notion with belief in the malignity of matter 
 to leave space for any amount of evil in the world. It 
 is true that we cannot combine it with that belief which 
 the Gnostics held and Mill rejected. We cannot make 
 room for God behind the blundering Creator, so as to 
 explain why he permitted the elaboration of the evil 
 thing that was to result in further evil. But it is not a 
 small thing that Divine rule should be relieved from 
 responsibility for evil in the same way as human rule is. 
 "An Analogy of Religion to the course of Nature" is 
 always an " Aid to Faith," Throughout the Roman 
 world men every day were accustomed to the ills which 
 
 ^ See the Autobiography of his son.
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 315 
 
 were due to the crimes of a subordinate ruler. Caesar 
 was guiltless of much that his ministers imposed on their 
 people. The Roman world in the first ages of Chris- 
 tianity gave just such a combination of the One and the 
 Many as the Gnostics imagined for the Divine world, 
 and satisfied the mind of the age with such a harmony 
 between its inward and outward circumstances as men 
 constantly mistake for an explanation of both. As a 
 matter of fact, the worst subordinate might be a ruler 
 preferable to Caesar ; but when we see how St. Paul 
 could speak of the dominion of Nero,^ we must feel that 
 oneness of rule is an ideal so favourable to all excellence 
 that it cannot be dissociated from it even by the follies 
 and crimes of the worst of mankind. And although to 
 us it is evident that if Ceesar had been omnipotent he 
 would have been guilty of all that was performed by his 
 agents, this inference did not trouble the contemporaries 
 of the Gnostics. Men are slow to perceive an ultimate 
 difficulty. They state their perplexities in many various 
 forms before they perceive that they are taking a para- 
 phrase for an answer. They build up long series of the 
 explanations that move a difficulty one step backwards 
 before they discover that this retrogression has left the 
 original difficulty undiminished. And long phases of the 
 life of thought are sometimes occupied with this trans- 
 lation of some problem into another dialect, under the 
 belief that it has thus found its solution. 
 
 The world began to believe in the Will of God eighteen 
 hundred years ago, when the nation which had always 
 believed in it gained an intelligible voice, and when for 
 the first time the world was one. But men began to 
 believe in it and to question it at once. The Creator 
 made the world as a product of Will, but he himself was 
 conceived of, again and again, as a product of a long 
 
 1 Romans xiii. 1-7.
 
 3i6 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 process of Evolution by which the Spirit approaches 
 Matter ; he was for the Gnostics what man was for the 
 modern Evolutionists ; he was no more than man on a 
 grander scale, modifying the conditions in which he finds 
 himself, but not in any true sense an originator of them. 
 He moulds, he produces, he manages, he creates as the 
 artist creates, but according to our idea of the word 
 creation when it is applied to the world, he creates 
 nothing. We have said that according to the Greek 
 view there was no more reason that the world should be 
 perfect than that the Iliad should be perfect, but in fact 
 there was less. The analogy for the Demiurgus was 
 rather with Phidias than Homer ; he had to use intract- 
 able material ; he worked, as it has been finely said of 
 the sculptor, with a material which hid his thought. 
 The Demiurgus, finding formless matter and a disorderly 
 movement, and leaving an organized Universe and a 
 set of Divine beings to whom he deputed the creation 
 of mortal man, left things better than he found them ; 
 he put order in the place of disorder; he reflected on 
 a colossal scale the work of man in face of a rude 
 nature, and converted that which was the mere nega- 
 tion of Spirit into an expression of his own artistic, 
 orderly, harmonious influence. He did as a man does 
 who, finding a shapeless block of stone, leaves a statue. 
 But he could only work upon what he found ; he did the 
 best with it ; but the best was necessarily tinged with 
 imperfection, and in the new light falling on the world, 
 imperfection deepened into evil. 
 
 This Graeco-Judaeic theory of the Origin of Evil would 
 appear an answer to the perplexities of the world only 
 to those who confront its perplexities for the first time. 
 We have been taught by a long series of vain efforts, 
 that when men seek to know why God made the world 
 as it is, they are seeking to get behind all the con-
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 317 
 
 ditions of knowledge. We see that all which explains 
 to us the reason for an earthly ruler choosing any evil 
 is that he must choose some evil, and that when this 
 explanation is cut off from us, there is nothing for it 
 but to confess that we confront the inexplicable. If we 
 start with disorder, we can account for evil. The mind 
 seeks cause only, not reason ; asks how the world was 
 developed, not why it was created as it is. We can 
 with difficulty represent to ourselves the condition of 
 those who /or the first time confronted the belief that the 
 seed of all things lies in the determination of a Mind. 
 We at the present day are familiar with the reasoning 
 of those who have rejected such a belief. But for some 
 purposes those who deny are nearer to those who assert 
 than they are to those who have never conceived of the 
 question at issue. The men of that age never really 
 conceived of what we mean by Creation ; the Greek in- 
 fluence was too strong. None who suppose the Creator 
 to have worked upon a pre-existing substratum can 
 believe in Omnipotence ; if God has alwa3^s confronted 
 a lifeless sharer of His own eternit}'-, if there is some- 
 thing that He cannot destroy, His power is bounded. 
 As long as Divine power was supposed to be thus 
 limited, the perplexity of Evil was hidden from the 
 minds of men ; and the lingering influence of this view 
 gave an illogical satisfaction to feeling, after it had lost 
 its legitimate hold on thought. 
 
 A view which, under the test of a severe Logic, 
 merely moves the difficulty a little backwards, may give 
 the spirit of man all the explanation that it is capable 
 of receiving. It is a deep instinct in the human heart 
 which welcomes any teaching implying, as Gnosticism 
 did, that man's existence in this world is by itself inexpli- 
 cable. Hope is ready to spring up in the heart on any 
 permission to regard the life of the world as a fragment.
 
 3i8 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 Whenever any form of religion has helped to the satis- 
 faction of that craving which seeks to be assured of the 
 existence of the Unknown — whenever suggestions are 
 brought forward which open vistas beyond the life of 
 man, representing the career either of the individual or 
 of humanity as an episode in some larger whole, there 
 Hope finds room to grow. No other promise so stirs 
 our human nature as that of Redemption. That pain is 
 sent and wrong permitted in order to teach the blessing 
 of healing and of forgiveness, is no answer to the child 
 who asks why Almighty God could not give the good 
 without the ill. But the discovery that some kinds of 
 blessedness are linked with evil provides a dynamic 
 impulse in dealing with the evils of the world. Those 
 can strive against them best who see some meaning in 
 them ; to think evils all evil is to feel them irresistible. 
 The paradox to logic is a victory for life, and as man 
 seeks to be a Redeemer, he ceases to ask why the world 
 needs redemption. 
 
 This is a truth for every age, and in a certain sense 
 and in a certain degree it comes fresh to every age. 
 But it came home to the age in which Christianity was 
 born with a force which it could possess for none later. 
 To that age Redemption was a new idea. The world 
 penetrated by Greek thought knew it not. We, look- 
 ing back on eighteen hundred years during which men 
 have professed to believe it, and to a great extent really 
 have believed and acted on it, have found that any such 
 embodiment of this ideal as this world presents must be 
 confessed to be disappointing ; its influence on character 
 has not given all it seemed to promise, or after eighteen 
 Christian centuries man would not be what he is. But 
 it arose to the contemporaries of the Gnostics as a new 
 hope ; and among the fragments of Gnostic writing pre- 
 served to us in the polemic refutation of the Orthodox,
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 319 
 
 we find thoughts strangely familiar to Christian ears, 
 expressed with the mingled awkwardness and freshness of 
 a new suggestion. The joy with which Dante describes 
 the souls in Purgatory as welcoming the cleansing pangs 
 of suflfering should be, they thought, the animating feeling 
 of all who suffered, even of those who from the world's 
 point of view seemed to suffer unjustly. The world is 
 our Purgatory, and all pain is a heavenly promise. The 
 most perplexing dispensation of earthly events is to be 
 explained really by the need of purification visible only 
 to God, who can call on no soul to suffer that He does not 
 seek to elevate and purify. The sufferings of the world 
 were a proof of redeeming energy, for they could have 
 no other meaning under the dominion of God. And this 
 faith in God implies a faith in man, who was made in 
 His image. The soul of man is invaded by an unseen 
 crowd, through whose lawless sojourn it is filled with 
 pollution, " being like a tavern where all is damaged and 
 defiled by the disorderly dealings of men who take no 
 care of what is not their own ; " but they come as mere 
 invaders ; and the soul polluted by them shall become 
 holy and resplendent through the influence of the One. 
 There will be a time, says a Gnostic teacher,^ when 
 those who oppose themselves to " that great and holy 
 Will " shall discover that they have resisted it not in 
 strength, but in weakness and error ; when the evil of 
 this world shall be brought to an end, the purpose of 
 purification for which it was created being fulfilled ; when 
 old things shall pass away, and all things become new. 
 " And at the establishment of that new world all evil 
 motions will cease, and all rebellions will be brought to 
 an end, and the foolish will be persuaded, and deficiencies 
 
 1 This is ascribed to Bardesanes, who may be regarded as the most Christian 
 of the Gnostics. The first quotation is from Valcntinus, in whom is expressed 
 the Platonic clement of Gnosticism.
 
 320 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 will be filled up, and there will be peace and safety by 
 the gift of Him who is Lord of all Natures." 
 
 Gnosticism, embodying as it does the new idea of 
 Redemption, must be regarded as an imperfect Dualism. 
 The conception of Nature personified in the Demiurgus, 
 intervening between Matter and Spirit, essentially em- 
 bodies a protest against the idea of a blank antagonism 
 of good and evil. We thus see all being under a three- 
 fold aspect, the good and the bad corresponding to the 
 realms of Spirit and Matter, and between them the in- 
 termediate world of Nature, which was associated with 
 either side according to the varying point of view. God 
 is the Fountain of Unity, and Spirit bears the impress 
 of that oneness which is complete alone in Him. His 
 complete antithesis is the world of dead Matter, in which 
 Unity is impossible, the world of mere multiplicity, of 
 confusion opposite to God. In the midst is the inter-^ 
 mediate world of physical life which we know as Nature. 
 Corresponding to this threefold division of the universe it 
 was believed there was a threefold division of humanity. 
 There were some spiritual men — men who belonged 
 wholly to the realm of Order, of Unity, whose transit 
 through the confusion of material existence was a mere 
 excursion into a foreign country ; there were also mate- 
 rial men, beings belonging wholly to this realm of Dis- 
 order, and incapable of ascending to the realm of Spirit ; 
 and there was an intermediate race, the natural men, 
 capable of sinking to the lower or rising to the higher 
 spheres — occupying, in fact, just that position of choice 
 which the ordinary view assigns to the whole human 
 race. Or, again, these three divisions were applied not 
 quantitatively to the human race, but qualitatively to 
 every individual ; in every man, it was said, there was a 
 spiritual man — a germ of life and principle of immortality, 
 a seed of God and spark of Divine fire given from the
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 321 
 
 realms above the Creator ; secondly, a physical or animal 
 man, i.e., the soul, the work of the Creator ; thirdly, mate- 
 rial man, the seat of passion, a nature doomed to perish. 
 Gnosticism is thus an incomplete dualism ; it is dualism 
 diluted by the Greek reluctance to confront Evil, soft- 
 ened by the Greek reverence for Nature, which it com- 
 memorates in its divine, though ignorant, impersonation 
 of Nature. As such it tends towards a more complete 
 dualism, in which the ignorant Creator, and that whole 
 natural region which is his domain, should disappear, 
 and the world of Spirit should stand face to face with 
 the world of Matter, as Good to Evil. 
 
 In truth, as soon as man felt the evil of the world an 
 oppressive perplexity, it was quite as difficult to con^ 
 ceive why a mighty being should have made the world 
 at all as why an almighty one should not have made it 
 better than it is. The act of Creation was the develop- 
 ment and organization of that which, if such a thing 
 were possible, had better have been destroyed ; from this 
 point of view the Creator is confused with the Adversary. 
 Here we pass from Greek soil to that of the ancient 
 foe of Greece ; we feel the influence of Persian dual- 
 ism stealing in be^'^ond the personality of the Platonic 
 Demiurgus ; ^ wc lose all Hellenic influence, and feel our- 
 selves overshadowed by some Oriental system in which 
 the keynote is no longer the danger of ignorant activity, 
 the imperfection of the world, but the inherent evil of 
 matter, the primal antagonism of good and evil. The 
 passage from Gnosticism to Manichasanism is tlic logi- 
 cal completion of this incomplete Dualism. The ancient 
 creed of Persia (at this time lately revived) " mingled its 
 
 1 The trace of Persian influence is also discernible in (jnosticism, but 
 more faintly. 
 
 * Mani began to teach about A.n. 270. Zoroastrianism had been revived 
 by Ardisheer 226 B.C. It is said to be the only real revival of an ancient 
 religion. 
 
 X
 
 322 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 influence with the new faith of Judaea. The antithesis 
 of Light and Darkness, with all the associations of its 
 earlier symbolism, pressed in as it were upon the anti- 
 thesis of spirit and matter, and relegated the material 
 world to the dominion of an evil being.^ The Creator 
 was no longer a Supreme Artist, reducing the imperfec- 
 tion of the world to its minimum ; he gave form and co- 
 herence to that which properly belongs to the dominion 
 of Ahriman. It is indeed a curious inconsequence, when 
 once the personal and the material realms are divided as 
 the realms respectively of good and evil, to blur this 
 antithesis by bringing in a personal representative of 
 evil ; but the inconsequence is full of instruction. The 
 explanation of Evil, it was urged sometimes even by 
 those who did not see that this plea rendered futile every 
 word of their argument, must necessarily partake in the 
 confusion of evil. This further development was neces- 
 sitated by the increased hold which Christianity had 
 gained upon all thought. Evil could no longer be ade- 
 quately symbolized, as in Platonic thought, by that which 
 dilutes and deadens good. Since Plato the idea of Re- 
 demption had arisen on the world. The Divine influence 
 had come into a new relation to evil ; men saw it not 
 as that which stood aloof from what was imperfect, but 
 as that which opposed itself to what was wrong. The 
 new idea suggested an antagonist, as the old had sug- 
 gested an obstacle. But this moral scheme embodied 
 old and new in an illogical compromise, keeping the 
 obstacle and adding the antagonist. The principle of 
 disorderly movement, which seemed dominant in the 
 material world until men knew that orderly movement 
 is dominant there, became incarnate in a dark indistinct 
 
 1 This account is taken mainly from two works, Beausobre, Hist. Critique de 
 Manich^e, a storehouse of learning on the subject ; " Mani," by Gustav Fliigel, 
 an account of a fragment from an Arabic manuscript of the tenth century.
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 323 
 
 being, and Satan appears as the animating spirit of the 
 world of matter, which thus becomes identified with the 
 world of sin. Thus Ormazd and Ahriman confront each 
 other once more, and the primal antithesis of light and 
 darkness returns with fresh associations, and with the 
 old meaning confused by them. 
 
 The strange uncouth religion which we know as 
 Manichaeanism was the consummation of that tendency 
 towards a Dualism diluted in the Gnostic systems, the 
 natural or psychical region having vanished, and the 
 worlds of good and evil confronting each other in a 
 confused symbolism, mixing up antagonism of light and 
 darkness with that of spirit and matter, so that the 
 contrasted worlds of spirit and matter both occupied 
 space, as the worlds of light and darkness might do. 
 Some internal confusion brought the race of darkness 
 near to the limits of the race of light, and with what 
 is surely a strange inconsistency — for is not the desire 
 of good itself good ? — they were filled with a desire 
 to possess this new world suddenly made known to 
 them. In the conflict which ensued Light, or Spirit, 
 was somehow mixed with Darkness, or Matter — it was, 
 says the grotesque allegory, swallowed by the evil race, 
 and the " primal man," called into existence to do battle 
 with these hosts of darkness, suffered a temporary 
 defeat, and was detained in this lower region till de- 
 livered by the intervention of a higher Being, the 
 " Living Spirit," or the " Friend of Light." Through 
 this mysterious warfare of the powers of good and 
 evil a seed of the higher life had fallen into the dark 
 world of Matter, and creation is an apparatus for re- 
 pairing this calamity and recovering the treasure robbed 
 by the evil powers ; creative energ}' is a kind of ransom 
 paid by the world of Spirit to the world of Matter, 
 and marks an episodic confusion in the eternity of dis-
 
 324 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 tinct dualism from which this mixed world began and 
 towards which it tends. Thus the Creation is here also 
 the result of the Fall. The world of Spirit was un- 
 contaminated by any contact with the world of Matter 
 at the beginning of the scheme which we call Nature, 
 and shall be so again at its end. Nature is the ceaseless 
 martyrdom of Soul, but its martyrdom is its deliverance. 
 Every seed that breaks from the bosom of the dark 
 Earth is an expression of the yearning after escape that 
 pervades the whole world of Growth ; the last sigh of 
 the dying is the consummation. The drama of Redemp- 
 tion is represented in a parable which reaches us through 
 the citation of scornful opponents, but even so does not 
 wholly lose its poetry. The waxing of the Moon painted 
 to the Manichaeans the gradual filling of a bark with the 
 souls of the departed ; when her load was full she bore 
 them to the Sun. And these stages of the departure 
 from the dark world are also stages of purification ; in 
 the Moon the death-freed soul undergoes a purification 
 by water, in the Sun by fire ; and this gradual trans- 
 ference of the heavenly freight to the region of light 
 repairs the original confusion of Matter and Spirit. 
 When at last this, the last particle of Soul, is disen- 
 tangled from the dark world into which it has fallen, a 
 vast conflagration is to burst forth, which will consume 
 this universe, now a mere husk from which the fruit 
 has been extracted. It endures only as a medium 
 between the dark world of Matter and the bright world 
 of Spirit ; when a medium is no longer needed it is 
 to be destroyed as useless lumber. The Creation is a 
 necessary misfortune ; it is, to use the metaphor of an 
 orthodox opponent, as it were, the amputation of a limb 
 — a disastrous measure taken only to avert a still greater 
 disaster. The final conflagration is to be the reversal of 
 the original confusion of good and evil. Life, as we see
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 325 
 
 it here, may be regarded as the hostage of a Divine race, 
 held by its deadly foe and ransomed at the price of all 
 this organization given to the material universe which 
 we know as Nature. 
 
 Nothing can be more unlike the active, cheerful, 
 hopeful spirit of Zoroastrianism than the timid, scrupu- 
 lous, pessimistic theory of the world's origin which here 
 appears as its progeny. In place of the energetic 
 spirit of the early belief, which gives honour to in- 
 dustry, which reverences marriage, which stirs every- 
 where a hopeful activity, we have a timid, scrupulous 
 quietism, a superstitious reverence for all lower forms 
 of life, a dread of all that tends to new life. A new 
 birth is a misfortune analogous to that primaeval blend- 
 ing of the worlds of Spirit and of Matter which led to 
 the act of Creation ; death commemorates the escape of 
 Spirit from the chains of Matter. The ideal life, there- 
 fore, must hold itself aloof from marriage ; all that tends 
 towards the act by which Man sanctions and perpetuates 
 the indwelling of Spirit in Matter is evil. This ideal 
 makes the centre of a new moral code ; it was soon to 
 disguise itself as Christianity, and in that shape to in- 
 fluence all thought, even down to our own day. But 
 whence its moral contrast to that creed of the past with 
 which it stands in a relation equally close and unques- 
 tionable ? Why is the new Dualism in spirit and feeling 
 so unlike the old ? 
 
 Because between the dawn of the Persian faith and 
 the attempt of Mani to harmonize it with Christianity a 
 world had come and gone. Zoroastrianism arose in the 
 fresh youth of the world. Manichaeanism was the pro- 
 duct of the Age of Deatli. The antithesis of light and 
 darkness, the most striking contrast of the natural world, 
 is in a dawning civilization the natural expression of 
 the contrast of good and evil. It passes easily into the
 
 326 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 antithesis of Spirit and Matter, and yet with that change 
 its whole meaning is gone. We have quitted the realm 
 of sense for the realm of metaphysics. Darkness to 
 these early races was evil, but Darkness disappeared 
 to make way for Light. Matter was a recondite symbol 
 for evil, and Matter never disappeared to make way for 
 Spirit. The change of symbolism corresponds to an 
 entire change of sentiment. Manichaeanism was Zoro- 
 astrianism remodelled as an answer to the question. 
 Whence comes Evil ? The spirit of that early religion 
 was opposed to anything which takes its starting-point 
 from such a question. But Christianity came into a 
 world overshadowed by the problem, and its struggle 
 with Manichaeanism was recorded partly by an accept- 
 ance, and partly by a vehement rejection of the Mani- 
 chaean solution. It was in this form that the vague 
 speculations whose history we are endeavouring to trace 
 were mirrored in the great mind of Augustine, and 
 through his genius they influenced the whole develop- 
 ment of religion, and we may add of irreligion. Augus- 
 tine was first an adherent and then a fierce enemy 
 of Manichaeanism, and in him are gathered up those ten- 
 dencies both of direct influence and of reaction which 
 Manichaeanism has left permanently stamped upon Chris- 
 tianity, 
 
 The spirit which opposes all natural impulse is a 
 mighty factor in the evolution of moral life. It does 
 more than any other to decide on the character of 
 Posterity. If Virtue mean resistance to Nature, its 
 home is in the cloister. The spiritual man refuses the 
 name of father, and those alone bear onwards the in- 
 heritance of humanity who turn from the ideal of Chris- 
 tian purity. The doctrine that Creation was but the 
 prelude to a Fall — even when it disentangled itself from 
 that elder view which made it the result of a fall — this
 
 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL. 327 
 
 doctrine was commemorated in a profound suspicion of > 
 all those impulses by which man becomes in his turn 
 Creator ; in an arduous effort after that life which knows 
 nothing of the blending of the spiritual and the material, 
 and endeavours to make man lead the life of spirit here 
 on earth, while it abandons the natural human life to 
 irreligious men, and leaves the world to be peopled by 
 their descendants. 
 
 And this, in fact, was the legacy of Manichaeanism to 
 its triumphant foe. Manichaeans were persecuted, but 
 Manichceanism prevailed. Christians would not allow 
 that the Fall was a superhuman event anterior to the 
 Creation, but they more and more transfigured the 
 simple story of Genesis with supernatural issues, and 
 made the actual constitution of things a consequence 
 of the Fall. What does it signify that God saw all 
 that He had made as very good, if this heavenly crea-__ 
 tion is relegated to some b3'gone phase of life, and ^ 
 the world now stands under the ban of God's reproba- / 
 tion. Men believed that God made the world, but they 
 behaved as if it were made by a blundering Demiur- 
 gus ; their aspirations, their condemnations, would have 
 gained coherence and justification if they had been allied 
 with an intellectual scheme w^hich recognized it as a 
 disaster that Spirits ever entered on their tenements 
 of clay. The wide remoteness, the eternal distinc- 
 tion, of spiritual men from all others was becoming 
 more and more a canon of Christian orthodoxy ; and 
 although it was a heresy to believe in an embodied 
 Spirit of Nature separate from God, and interposing 
 his organizing power between the sullying world of 
 Matter and the Divine purity, it was more and more the 
 teaching of Christian orthodoxy that all the instincts 
 of Nature were allied with evil. The new creed em-
 
 328 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 bodied for a time all that was darkest in the religion 
 of Duahsm, and when again the belief of a primal Unity 
 returned as the Spirit of Science, the two beliefs stood 
 face to face as deadly foes, and the battle cannot yet 
 be said to be ended.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 
 
 The science of our day has taught us to regard the fact 
 of balanced movement as a clue to the most important 
 laws of the visible world. " The imponderable agencies " 
 of an earlier generation ; light, heat, and electricity — the 
 metaph^'sic aspect of a fading polytheism — are for us 
 translated into the positive conception of the swing of 
 atoms ; we have exchanged the belief in mystic entities 
 for the idea of that change of place which is the only 
 change we can imagine in the material world. All the 
 most impressive forces of the material universe are ex- 
 plained, so far as they are explained at all, by the rhythm 
 of vibration ; ^ when Physical Science has brought us to 
 this point she has reached her Ultima Thule ; our next 
 step must be in the realm of metaphysics. 
 
 " What if earth 
 Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things in each 
 To other like ? " 
 
 asks the angel who in " Paradise Lost " expounds the 
 system of the world, and the question must often be 
 echoed by students seeking to follow in his track. If 
 there be a law common to the world without and the 
 world within — to the mysterious cause of sensation which 
 we term matter, and to the mind which feels sensation 
 
 1 This idea has been worked out by Sara S. Henncll in her " Present 
 Religion."
 
 330 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 and originates thought — it is this which in our day has 
 taken such wide extension, and shown us that which 
 makes all else visible as in itself the rush hither and 
 thither of invisible atoms, swaying in rhythmic balance. 
 The scientific interpretation of Light gives a clue to the 
 meaning of Truth, as it is mirrored in human minds. 
 The balanced swing, which gives us the vision of the 
 outward world, represents to us that mental attitude by 
 which we discern the world within ; pause, immobility, 
 is unknown to either region. The history of thought is 
 a continual exhibition of the incapacity of the human 
 intellect to express in any single statement more than half 
 of a truth. Every perplexity which has deeply stirred 
 the human heart seems to need two opposite answers ; 
 and for finite beings Truth means rhythmic movement. 
 The spirit which bids us pause at any single vision is that 
 which formerly promised Adam and Eve, " Ye shall be as 
 Gods, knowing good and evil." God knows ai once what 
 we can know only in successive glimpses at the world of 
 reality ; for us revelation itself implies change of attitude, 
 and there is no conviction that will not become error if, 
 in our attention to it, we stiffen into immobility and lose 
 the palpitating throb, which is indeed the very pulse of 
 mental life. 
 
 If this be true of all thought, it is more eminently 
 true of thought which deals with Evil. In this realm 
 of confusion, if nowhere else. Thought moves only by 
 oscillation. No single view can be called true. Wher- 
 ever we contemplate moral Evil we see something which 
 seems to contain within itself a contradiction, which de- 
 mands two statements, irreconcilable by logic. Perhaps 
 there never was a crime committed since the world 
 began which would not, to some mind, have taken the 
 aspect of disaster. Certainly there are very few crimes 
 in which the element of disaster can be forgotten without 
 
 il
 
 THE FALL OF xMAN. ^.-,i 
 
 OJ' 
 
 injustice. When we have said all about an action that 
 the Judge cares to hear, we have yet to tell all that, 
 for the ear of S3^mpathy, makes up the true description of 
 that action. The truth is not in either of these mental 
 points of view, nor in a pause at the intermediate point 
 of view, but in a free movement between them. Human 
 justice has no other meaning than a true apprehension 
 of the moment to remember both the inevitable and the 
 voluntary element in wrong ; what Divine justice is we 
 must wait to know. At times the idea of responsibility 
 must be discarded from the mind of those who have the 
 firmest belief in human responsibility ; attention must be 
 concentrated solely on the element of the inevitable in 
 human action. And again, no one will be just who can- 
 not forget this element. There are moments in which the 
 idea of responsibility flashes through the web of circum- 
 stance, and bursts on the intellectual vision of those who 
 have no belief in it ; nay, we may even say that at such 
 moments it is felt that s'// n'exi'slc pas, il faut Tinventer. 
 Wherever a man refuses to accept this change of aspect 
 in human guilt — wherever he stiffens into the contempla- 
 tion of either the circumstance or the choice in which it 
 has arisen — there, however consistent his actions may 
 be with a single point of view, the heart of his fellow- 
 men will fail to recognize justice. 
 
 This is not less true for the view that humanity has 
 taken of Evil than for the view that a man takes of 
 wrong. But the race does not err as the individual 
 does ; that vibratory movement of attention which is 
 the duty of individuals makes up the history of moral 
 thought. We have seen how the Greek mind explained 
 the existence of Evil by the very fact of the existence of 
 things ; how it emphasized the involuntary, the excusable 
 in all human error and crime, by sa3'ing that Evil 
 resides in matter. When wc turn to the other moment
 
 332 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 of the vibration, and note how the Jew, and still more the 
 Gentile mind formed on Jewish belief, explained all evil 
 by the very fact of the existence of persons, we realize 
 afresh (what we have to remember in all controversy) that 
 the vibration is never simple. The antithesis is never 
 complete. What one man or one party asserts is not 
 exactly what the other denies ; men are divided not by 
 accepting ditferent answers to the same questions, but by 
 asking different questions. Still, we shall find that no 
 two theories are nearer being antithetic than that Greek 
 belief in the Evil resident in matter — the symbol of 
 necessity, the type of all Evil to the liberty-loving race 
 — and the belief evolved in the acceptance by the world 
 of the Hebrew account of Creation and the Hebrew 
 horror of sin, that the only evil was the choice of Evil. 
 
 The belief that the very constitution of our spiritual 
 nature implies the possibility of Evil, was a natural re- 
 action from the belief that the very constitution of our 
 material environment implies the existence of Evil. We 
 see how Personality was made an answer to the un- 
 answerable problem only when we see how the very 
 opposite of Personality had at first filled the place. We 
 understand best the theory that finds the origin of Evil 
 in a choice that may vary at any moment when we 
 compare it with the view against which it was a recoil 
 — that Evil was a definite tangible reality, a thing 
 of a certain fixed compass and amount, which might be 
 shut in within its own limits, and disentangled from its 
 opposite, but which even by Omnipotence could not be 
 destroyed. There can be no reaction more inevitable 
 than that from the spirit which sees in matter the source 
 of Evil, to that which sees the source of Evil in human 
 choice. It was a natural thing to see Evil as the 
 shadow of Liberty, when men had for long seen Evil 
 as the shadow of Necessity.
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 333 
 
 This belief was specially appropriate to a particular 
 age. But it is the natural refuge at all times for a mind 
 distracted by a view of the eternal opposites, Evil and 
 God. Men find in actual experience that Evil does 
 bring forth a good which, so far as they can see, could 
 never be brought forth without Evil. It is impossible to 
 conceive of courage being exhibited or developed in the 
 midst of safety, of honesty in the owner of boundless 
 wealth, of fortitude amid luxury, of generosity in one 
 who had no opportunity of self-sacrifice. If we are to 
 have any virtues, we must have danger, privation, hard- 
 ship, difficulty. "A brave man" is an expression that 
 implies peril ; we cannot say that any one has shown 
 great patience without also informing our hearer that he 
 or she has suffered great pain ; we could never call any 
 one unselfish who had never been in a position where 
 he might choose the unpleasant for himself in order that 
 he might leave the pleasant for his neighbour. Virtue 
 could no more exist without Evil than light without 
 shadow ; and if Virtue be the true end of Man's being, 
 it was worth the price of its opposite being called into 
 existence at the same time with itself We cannot 
 invest an angel with the attributes of a hero unless 
 we are prepared to see him converted to a Satan ; and 
 if we are to imagine a hero in the Garden of Eden, we 
 must find the Tempter there. 
 
 This belief has alwa^'s been the refuge of perplexity, 
 and probably it will still dawn upon many a troubled 
 spirit as a discovery that lightens the pressure of the 
 world's great mystery, and points to a possible solution. 
 But in the infancy of Christianity it emerged into a pre- 
 dominance it can surely never regain. We have seen 
 how large a part of the moral energy of men was occupied 
 in the contemplation of evil just at tlic time when the 
 message of the Jew proclaimed that " God saw all that
 
 I 
 
 334 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 He had made, and that it was very good." Evil being 
 the prominent reality to the mind of the age, they had 
 to make room for the behef in a primal excellence, not 
 only as the dim dream of a golden age such as alwa3's 
 haunted humanity, and most in its childhood, but in 
 that distinct and emphatic narration with which the Jew 
 described the world as the work of God ; and as the 
 belief in a Fall is the other half of the belief in a golden 
 age, this also came into a new distinctness and a much 
 greater prominence. We may say that the early Christian 
 believed in the Fall as the Jew believed in the Creation. 
 Both believed both, but the change of proportion made 
 the belief itself a different thing. From the collision of 
 Greek and Jewish thought an idea that on each side 
 separately was faint and dim took vast proportions and 
 clear-cut definiteness, and a whole system of theology 
 was elaborated, finding its centre and its form in the 
 belief of a primal degeneration. The Greek had believed 
 in a Fall ; the thought of Greece was haunted by the 
 view of this life on earth as the Purgatory of the soul, 
 the dream that each man who enters on it has fallen 
 from, a Paradise to which he may hope to return. The 
 history of the legendary Adam is reproduced in the vision 
 of Plato ^ by the life of every son of man who enters on 
 his earthly career shackled by a supernatural choice, 
 as every son of Adam, according to a later theology, by 
 original sin. Or else there has been a fall of humanity;^ 
 the race started aright, but either by a sudden change of 
 direction or by a gradual decay it has turned from good 
 to evil, and things are not as they were ; anyhow, man 
 now inhabits a fallen world. 
 
 Again, on the page of the Hebrew Scriptures we may 
 find this same varying narrative of degeneration. The 
 
 1 In the myth at the end of the " Republic." 
 
 2 In the " PoUticus."
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 335 
 
 Fall of Adam is but a faint adumbration of the apostasy 
 of Israel ; in varied forms we return upon it, for the 
 idea immediately grows dim, is forgotten, and needs to 
 be repeated.'^ The idea of an Omnipotent Holiness was 
 ever present to the Jew ; the idea of human guilt was 
 only now and then summoned to his mind as the evil 
 world demanded such a conception. A single page of 
 the Hebrew Scriptures contains the narrative of the 
 Fall ; the belief that there is no evil but in rebellion 
 against a Holy Will is stamped on every page. When 
 Evil became as real as God the proportion of these ideas 
 was inverted. The doctrine of human corruption was 
 the product of an age in which any theory that made it 
 possible to believe both in Evil and God was welcomed 
 as the satisfaction of its greatest need. The Greek 
 view, which had made some approach towards this re- 
 conciliation through the hypothesis of the eternity of 
 Matter, had become impossible ; and the natural recourse 
 was to its extreme opposite. Evil had been, as it were, 
 banished from the world of things by the Jewish belief 
 in Creation becoming the creed of the world, and could 
 find refuge only in the world of persons. If God made 
 the world, the evil in it must be the work of Man. 
 As the Gnostics thought that evil was inherent in the 
 nature which is purely unmoral, so their opponents 
 believed it to be potentially existent in the very nature 
 of a mora/ creature? Moral goodness, it was thought, 
 
 1 Apparently in Gen. vi. 1-5. 
 
 - A good specimen of this orthodox view, as against the Gnostics, is to 
 be found in the dialogue " De Libero Arbitrio," ascribed to Methodius. The 
 dialogue is between an orthodox Christian and a disciple of the Gnostic 
 Valcntinus. Lactantius, " De Ira Dei " (about A.D. 321), says that the answer 
 to the problem of Evil is very simple — "Nisi prius malum agnovcrimus, nee 
 bonum poterimus agnoscere." See also Clementina, Horn., xviii., xix., where 
 Peter confutes Simon Magus by this argument. One might multiiily these 
 citations almost indefinitely. Augustine, " De Libero Arbitrio," exhibits the 
 high-water-mark of this line of thought.
 
 336 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 means the choice of good, and the choice of good imphes 
 the existence of evil. The one side traced it to what 
 we might describe as tJiiugncss, that which we can only 
 conceive as the opposite of Personality ; the other dis- 
 covered it within the very core of Personality itself. 
 Will could have no meaning, it was thought, except as 
 the choice between good and evil. A man who could 
 not err would be a mere machine ; goodness, separated 
 from all effort, would lose its moral character. To 
 transfer virtue from Will to Nature would be to anni- 
 hilate it ; it means the choice of good, and if we suppose 
 it in the region behind choice it ceases to exist. In 
 Nature there was no evil ; Nature did not admit of evil. 
 Will was something of which the very essence was its 
 capacity of manufacturing evil. Man was created free 
 to choose between good and evil, though evil did not 
 exist till he called it into being, for the privilege of 
 remaining the voluntary subject of God implied the capa- 
 city of becoming a rebel against Him. 
 
 From various reasons this view has faded from the 
 vision of our day, and in endeavouring to set it forth 
 we naturally fall into the past tense. Those who re- 
 present the thought-life of our day do not confront the 
 problem which it aims at solving, and if the}^ did they 
 would not accept the solution. The idea of Omnipo- 
 tence has faded from the minds even of many who keep 
 a belief in God ; most persons have come to admit a 
 doubt whether the word be not altogether misleading. 
 They see neither of the two primal opposites ; God 
 is hidden behind Natural Law ; Evil is resolved into 
 disaster, mistake, confusion. They see no problem to 
 solve ; they feel no bewildering perplexity to prepare 
 the mind for an eager bound towards a possible explana- 
 tion. They see evils on every side, but in the progress 
 of that science which has made in our century such
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 337 
 
 gigantic strides they see also the remedy for these evils. 
 There is no attitude of mind more adverse to any specu- 
 lation on the origin of Evil. The Darwinian theory of 
 the origin of species by natural selection opens a view 
 of the whole working of Evil in the world of Nature 
 by which Evil is seen or supposed to bring forth good. 
 " The survival of the fittest " does not, indeed, mean 
 anything more than " the survival of the fittest to 
 survive ; " the resulting good is good merely from an 
 unmoral point of view. But to minds occupied with the 
 part that Evil has taken in fashioning the world as we 
 see it, it is impossible to enter into the perplexity to 
 which the early Christian view is an answer. They 
 cannot see any problem to solve, and the solution, there- 
 fore, is to them unmeaning. 
 
 And then, again, those who do feel the perplexity find 
 the answer no longer sufficient. It is possible to imagine 
 a world in which no sin and no wretchedness should 
 exist beyond what should be justified by the virtue and 
 the joy visible by its side, but to say that this world is 
 one which we can thus explain is merely to invite atten- 
 tion to its failures. If the world were arranged in order 
 that men might see evil and choose good, it has to be 
 explained why men do, on the whole, see good and choose 
 evil. He who arranges any scheme of probation or edu- 
 cation in the hope that those subject to his influence will 
 do one thing when in fact they do another, has made 
 a blunder ; and if it is only reverence for infinite wisdom 
 which is to check this criticism on a plan supposed Divine, 
 that reverence had better check the speculation at its 
 origin. 
 
 These difficulties were not felt at the dawn of Chris- 
 tianity as they are now. We have seen how, when 
 the City had perished, and before the Nation was born, 
 the individual life of man emerged into a distinctness 
 
 Y
 
 33S THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 that it never had possessed before, into a separateness 
 that it has not retained. It was not only discerned, its 
 independent capacity was enormously exaggerated. All 
 that belongs to the life of Self was for the moment 
 illuminated by the focal light of exclusive attention. In 
 the ancient world Man knew himself only in relation to 
 the State. In the modern world he knows himself in a 
 much richer variety of relations ; and though, for that 
 very reason, the word Self has more meaning as a 
 separate reality than it ever could have in the ancient 
 world, yet still the other elements in this relation are 
 objects exacting of attention. That which is not man 
 has a breadth, a distinctness, a stately set of associations 
 with all that is orderly and interesting which before the 
 rise of Physical Science it could not have. It was an 
 important chapter in the history of moral thought when 
 it paused between these two phases of development — 
 when between two continents a narrow isthmus shut in 
 the traveller, and leaving him cut off from all that was 
 external to himself, forced him, for the first time, to 
 study the world within. It was the starting-point of a 
 new phase of moral life. Much which then began has 
 lasted ever since. But also by the very fact that this 
 age was a starting-point, much which characterized it 
 has since passed away. The sense of the completeness 
 of the individual life v/hich we meet first in the writings 
 of the Stoics, and which was absorbed and intensified by 
 early Christianity, is not recognized as true by the mind 
 of our day. In looking back on it through the develop- 
 ment of subsequent ages we see it to be an illusion — 
 the inevitable illusion of the first embrace with which 
 men greet a new idea. Man is not free as the Stoic 
 thought him free. " The hand cannot say to the head, 
 ' I have no need of thee.' " That is the warning of the 
 first great man whom the world knows as a Christian,
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 339 
 
 but it was hardly realized in the age which followed the 
 preaching of Paul. 
 
 We can say of no other age known to historians as 
 we may of this, that whatever was moral in it was also 
 disintegrating. In subsequent ages Christianity has 
 been a strong influence, to bind or to divide, to weld men 
 into groups, often mutually hostile, but always strongly 
 coherent within themselves. But there was an inter- 
 val during which Christianity seems rather to blend 
 wnth the mystic, spiritual tendencies of the world than 
 to present any rallying-ground for a new army. A long 
 life in the second century after Christ might have been 
 occupied in watching vainly for any sign that Christi- 
 anit}'- was to remould the world. Everywhere something 
 like the new faith was prevalent, but perhaps for this 
 very reason that faith itself was stationary. The life of 
 Christ met an aspiration with a narrative, and translated 
 dim unspoken yearnings into a record of the past ; 
 these yearnings it found, and did not create. Every- 
 where in that day men were craving after the hope 
 of immortality. There must have been such a craving 
 always, but average men had been satisfied, in the ages 
 of the past, with a share in the perennial life of the 
 city ; they had hardly cared to ask themselves whether 
 their own life was to be perpetuated in any other way. 
 Whatever hopes were commemorated by the Mysteries, 
 whatever yearnings they half expressed, half satisfied, 
 the true immortality for the Athenian citizen lay in the 
 immortality (as it seemed) of Athens. As this member- 
 ship withered, a new vista opened, and men became con- 
 scious of an infinite possibility of hope and fear within 
 the sphere of their own individuality. They felt stir- 
 rings of something within to which this seventy years 
 of mortal life was as a flower-pot to a seedling oak.^ 
 ' A'noblc spirit, says a writer of this period, watches with satisfaction the
 
 340 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 They awoke to a fuller consciousness of instincts which 
 would have been cramped and baffled within such a span 
 of life magnified a hundred times. Men must have 
 felt this always, for it is the experience of humanity ; 
 but in the great ages of Greece they had no leisure to 
 attend to what, after all, was more or less of an interrup- 
 tion to the interests of political life. When this political 
 life shrivelled, they had leisure to listen to the whisper 
 that is as much a promise as a demand. They heard 
 the voice as something new, and yet as the explanation 
 of something familiar. Apart from Christianity, they 
 had come to recognize an infinite value in every human 
 soul, to suspect that in this was implied an infinite future. 
 Christianity committed itself to a declaration of this 
 infinite preciousness in a form which could be appre- 
 hended from the outside, and translated into a dialect 
 comprehensible to those who had no specially spiritual 
 sympathies. And thus, although it held the germ of 
 closer union and fiercer antagonism than any corporation 
 of antiquity, and was to weld men into groups more 
 strongly cohesive than the republics of Greece or the 
 oligarchy of Rome, its influence for the moment was 
 threatening to all corporate life. It gave the separate 
 life a new importance which must dwarf all else, for 
 a time. 
 
 The thoughts of men on the mysterious future beyond 
 the grave appear, in our modern world, to have less 
 influence than we should expect. But we cannot, in 
 comparing the different feelings of those who accept and 
 those who reject a tradition of man's immortality, form 
 any estimate of the difference which that belief made 
 when it was a new thing. We inherit a literature 
 
 decay of the body, as the crumbling of prison walls (Maximus of Tyre, Diss., 
 xiii. 5). A French translator (who dedicates his work to the First Consul, as 
 realizing the ideal of Plato) accuses St. John of plagiarizing from Maximus, 
 but no one has suspected Maximus of Christianity.
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 341 
 
 tinged throughout by this belief; we have absorbed 
 its influence, of which we cannot divest ourselves even 
 when we deliberately set aside all that it has taught 
 mankind to expect. When it first came to be preached 
 — not as a m3^stic doctrine to be apprehended by a few, 
 not as a truth for Philosophers, but as a hope which was 
 to bring comfort to the ignorant, the degraded, the en- 
 slaved — it translated a belief into an anticipation, a lofty 
 ideal, attainable here and there by an Epictetus or a 
 j\Iarcus Aurelius, into an announcement significant for 
 every one. However we may explain it, it remains a 
 fact that the greatest teacher of the Greeks, as he drank 
 the hemlock, did not believe so firmly that death opened 
 to him a boundless future as did the ordinary common- 
 place man or woman when Christianity was new. The 
 belief in Immortality, as it existed in the old world, was 
 an aristocratic influence. The classical passage in which 
 is recorded the high-water-mark of ancient hope in this 
 direction commemorates the belief that great souls cannot 
 perish with the body.^ When the hope for a few became 
 the certain conviction for all, it changed its character ; it 
 was no longer a conception of the destiny of genius or 
 heroism, but of every individual man and woman. The 
 heir of immortality gained what the member of the State 
 had lost — a share in a perennial life. The ephemeral 
 being had owed his moral dignity to his relation to that 
 which had seemed immortal. Immortality arose on the 
 horizon of the Man as its last glow faded from the City. 
 The Roman sailed round the Mediterranean, and recog- 
 nized that the cities of the past were not eternal, and with 
 the same waft of conviction came a compensatory belief, 
 that Eternity was the heritage of every son of man." 
 
 1 Tac, Life of Agricola, 46: — "Si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corporc 
 exstinguantur magna; anima.-. " 
 
 * See the letter of Scrvius Sulpicius to Cicero, (inolcd p. 205, ami coiniwrc 
 it with the letter of Cicero to Atticus, x. 8 : — " Tempus est, nos tie ill:\ perpetui\
 
 342 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 To men inheriting an unalterable conviction that 
 Liberty was the ultimate good for man and confronting 
 a world in which it could not continue to mean citizen- 
 ship in an independent State, the idea of Moral Liberty 
 came with a sudden and partially illusive splendour. 
 The orb just visible above the horizon looms larger than 
 in its mid- day career, and all new ideas are expanded in 
 an atmosphere of intellectual dawn. Man, considered as 
 a member of the State, had found Liberty in his rela- 
 tion to that organic whole which explained and justified 
 his existence. This ideal perished when the City was 
 swallowed up in the Empire ; but the aspirations which 
 it had nourished remained untouched. Liberty was still 
 the word of magic import, though the thing that was 
 meant by Liberty, on the old ground and in the old 
 meaning, had become impossible. Around this symbol 
 all associations of desire had gathered, and from this 
 they refused to be separated. And thus the idea of 
 Liberty, as it was banished from the domain of Politics, 
 invaded another region. It quitted an effete and almost 
 sterile soil to take root in one which was gathering to 
 itself all fertilizing influences. It detached itself from 
 political life just when political life was shedding its 
 leaves before its long winter, and grafted itself upon that 
 individual life which was to waken into fresh vigour 
 
 jam, non de hac exigua vita cogitare." The letter was written B.C. 50. I am 
 aware that some interpret the passage differently. But compare it with the follow- 
 ing extract from the " De Senectute," written five years earlier : — " Equidemnon 
 video, cur, quid ipse sentiam de morte, non audeam vobis dicere " (note the tone 
 of hesitation, as in the enunciation of a new truth). " Ego vestros patres . . . 
 vivere arbitror : et earn quidem vitam, qua: est sola vita 7iomifianda." The 
 strongly personal form of this expression of belief seems to me to justify what 
 may be called the Christian interpretation of the letter. See also the " Somnium 
 Scipionis." In another direction, the craving after immortality is well expressed 
 in a passage of that apocryphal literature which, in many ways, best expresses 
 the cravings of this age, and which was written about two centuries later — the 
 vivid description of the supposed Clemens Romanus, in the " Clementina," of 
 his yearning after a certainty of a future life, and the misery of doubt.
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 343 
 
 and fertility. In trying to account for the evil of the 
 world by what we mean by Liberty, we are bringing 
 together two conceptions which will not fit each other ; 
 the lesser thing shrinks and dwindles in the presence 
 of the larger. But Liberty, stood in these early ages 
 undwarfed by the neighbourhood of all that was might- 
 iest. There was nothing that it was not worth con- 
 fronting to make a Commonwealth free. Why should 
 it be otherwise for a world ? 
 
 This belief that Evil was the shadow of Liberty passed, 
 as Christianity changed from a hope to what must have 
 been felt by many a disappointing fulfilment, through 
 two stages, commensurate with the two stages of the 
 opposite belief that Evil was the shadow of Necessity. 
 The blundering Demiurgus of the Gnostics was an em- 
 bodiment of Nature, a principle of error confused with 
 Evil as the planet with the constellation immeasurably 
 remote from it. The antithesis of spirit (as good) and 
 matter (as evil) was thrown into the background by this 
 introduction of a spiritual being whose activity was pro- 
 ductive of Evil. Ignorant activity dealing with Evil is 
 enough to account, as we see daily, for any extension of 
 Evil, and whatever multiplies Evil will seem to cause it ; 
 but Evil must in truth be there first. The Creator of 
 this dark world was the actual cause of the Evil of the 
 world, but he was also an emanation from the Divine 
 Spirit, and could not represent Ahriman. That more 
 complete form of Dualism for which Gnosticism prepared 
 the way was more distinctly divided from Christianity, 
 no longer ranking itself among Christian heresies, but 
 rather an intermediate form between Christianity and 
 the lately renovated Persian faith, which seems to have 
 supplied all that was vital in it. Nevertheless, much 
 that many generations of men have called Christianity 
 is the descendant of this forgotten creed. It was an
 
 344 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 influence both in its direct infusion of belief, and also 
 in the reaction by which it provoked a new assertion 
 of human responsibility, and gave a new meaning to 
 the Fall. 
 
 When Manichaeanism began to be an influence in the 
 Christian world a change had taken place which had 
 given the problem of Evil a new significance.^ While 
 Christians were a despised sect, Redemption was of 
 necessity something that chose out the individual from 
 the world, and left the incorporation of the world in the 
 society of the Redeemed as a great future event which 
 should repeat, on a gigantic scale, the renewal of an 
 individual conversion. When this event had taken its 
 place in the past, and the world went on much as it had 
 done, the problem of Evil had to be re-stated in order to 
 adjust itself to a vast disappointment. Redemption, from 
 an experience, became a dogma ; from a hope for the 
 race, the privilege of a minority. The glorious promise 
 of " a new Heaven and a new Earth, wherein dwelleth 
 Righteousness," had to fade into a dim, distant Heaven, 
 attained but by few of those who deemed themselves, 
 and appeared to others, its true heirs. The problem of 
 Evil took a new magnitude ; it was not only Evil that 
 had to be explained, but triumphant Evil. 
 
 No hope that the world has ever known can have 
 been on a level with that which was felt by Christians 
 when first Christianity became the faith of the world. 
 Something faintly approaching it may possibly have 
 been inspired by the dawn of the French Revolution ; 
 perhaps something of the same kind is roused in the 
 minds of many by that triumph of Democracy in our 
 day which the French Revolution at once initiated and 
 
 1 The treatise of Clement, " Quis Dives Salvetur," seems to me an expression 
 of the new attitude of Christianity to a stable world, as compared with the 
 earlier spirit of waiting for the Lord.
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 345 
 
 delayed. But never since a despised and persecuted 
 faith was adopted by the ruler of the Western world 
 was it possible that a change should create such hope 
 as was felt b}^ the adherents of that faith, for no change, 
 since then, has been either so wide-reaching or so deeply 
 penetrating. We cannot say that at any particular point 
 of time Europe was Catholic and became Protestant, or 
 that it was aristocratic and became democratic ; but we 
 may say that at a particular time (though no doubt one 
 less narrowly limited than is usually supposed) Europe 
 was Pagan and became Christian. Christianity conquered 
 in a sense that Protestantism never conquered ; it was 
 always possible for Protestants to attribute the un- 
 satisfactoriness of Protestant Europe to the hostility of 
 Catholic Europe ; but Christian Europe had no Pagan 
 Europe to contend with. The miser}^, the disorder, the 
 baffling tumult of the last hours of Paganism must have 
 formed to the eyes of Christians a black background, 
 against which they were at last to behold the image 
 of triumphant righteousness. The Church was to rule 
 the world ; the reign of disorder and cruelty must be 
 past for ever. The disappointment which ensued is 
 the concentration and quintessence of a feeling that 
 Christians must share, to some extent, at all times. 
 A Christian thinker of our own time has expressed 
 the feeling in words which we may take as its classic 
 utterance for every time. " The world," says John 
 Henry Newman, " seems simply to give the lie to tliat 
 great truth of which my whole being is full, and the 
 effect upon me is in consequence as confusing as if 
 it denied that I am in existence myself If 1 looked 
 into a mirror and did not see my face, 1 should have 
 that sort of feeling which actually comes upon mc when 
 1 look into this living busy world and sec no trace of 
 the Creator." Man still needs a Saviour, though here
 
 346 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 and there men have found a Saviour. The redeemed 
 soul does not inhabit a redeemed world. Centuries of 
 familiarity almost take the place of explanation ; we are 
 so accustomed to contemplate life as it is and the hope 
 of the Church side by side that we sometimes feel as if 
 they were reconciled. But no such possibility was open 
 to men in whose time the Church and the world first 
 embraced. They saw a world farther even than ours 
 from the ideal of Redemption, and they looked to see 
 the ideal of Redemption triumphant. Hence the eclipse 
 of a great hope darkened all their thought, and the 
 theories which they bequeathed to posterity were coloured 
 by the need of explaining what seemed to them the de- 
 feat of God. 
 
 The Augustinian scheme incorporates a disappointment 
 without parallel in the world's history in a logical and 
 coherent system. The universe, on which God looked 
 and pronounced it very good, had no history but that of 
 disaster ; the very origin of all human activity was a re- 
 nunciation of loyalty to the Creator. All that man could 
 ever know of human activity was stamped with evil, for 
 the initial act of human activity had been to call evil into 
 existence, and from that moment man was in bondage 
 to his own Creation. Thus the Creation itself, if it were 
 judged as any work of human endeavour, must be en- 
 titled a gigantic mistake ; the creature was a rebel from 
 the moment of his existence. The belief which we may 
 thus describe has lasted almost to our own day. But 
 it could surely have arisen only in an epoch when 
 Christianity had just acceded to the government of the 
 world, and men had seen what it could not do. 
 
 Then it was that a great change came over the con- 
 ception of man's responsibility.^ While supplemented 
 
 1 There is an interesting passage in Augustine's treatise, ' ' De Libero 
 Arbitrio," i., xii. 24, wliere he seems to set his face for the first time towards
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 347 
 
 by all those vague anticipations which sprang from the 
 very existence of a world awaiting conversion, the moral 
 freedom of man bore the weight of the world's evil as 
 a mere fact of human consciousness. When the con- 
 version of civilized society, as it was known to the men 
 of that time, brought about no transformation of humanity, 
 a new dimension, as it were, was needed for human failure, 
 and then first it was that the shadow of the Fall, in all 
 its depth, was cast upon the path of Man. Men, it was 
 felt, were imprisoned in evil ; yet Man was made by God. 
 Individual choice was too small a thing to bear the 
 burden of a world's despair. It demanded some vast 
 retrospect of guilt, some Titanic exercise of will, some 
 gigantic overshadowing cloud, reaching far beyond the 
 limits of an individual life. Human beings, here and 
 now, were not free to choose righteousness ; every such 
 choice needed a miracle of Divine grace as its source 
 and explanation. But human Free Will disappeared 
 from the world of the present only to appear in gigantic 
 proportions on the dim cloud-land of a supernatural Past, 
 It was raised to a position of prominence and grandeur 
 which its strongest advocates never ventured to claim 
 for it, either before or since, but it was limited to a 
 mere moment in the infancy of the race. Man had been 
 created a free being — free in the wider sense of that 
 word which in classical thought was associated rather 
 with the idea of dominion than of the mere absence of 
 restraint. But Man had chosen to invade the preroga- 
 
 thc idea of inherited guilt, not in the aspect under which he was to formulate it 
 ultimately, as a corporate heritage of the race, hut rather as the dream which 
 I'lato seems to have borrowed from Empedoclcs, of a pre-natal fall from 
 Heaven to Karth. It is a question, he says, if the mind did not live elsewhere 
 before its junction with the body. He was then urging the moral liberty of 
 Man, against the Manichaians, as strenuously as he was afterwards to urge the 
 moral bondage of men against the Pelagians ; but his future path seems to 
 have suddenly opened before him, and this idea to have suggested itself as a 
 meeting-point b-jtwcen the two.
 
 348 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 tive of God. He had not been content to remain a 
 Creature ; he had chosen to be a Creator, and his Crea- 
 tion was the world of Evil. He had used his power to 
 sell himself, and of course his posterity, into slavery. 
 The typical Man had freedom in a sense that no one 
 has ever claimed freedom for the average Man, but the 
 result of his use of it was bondage for the human race, 
 throughout the whole course of history.-^ 
 
 This view of human history gathered up that element 
 which had been the strength of Stoicism, and joined it, 
 as no Stoic had done, to a rational view of human nature 
 as it is. As Plato had expounded the scope of human 
 Knowledge, ignoring its limitations and confusing its 
 boundaries, so had the Stoics expanded the scope 
 of human Will. Plato thought that the knowledge 
 of good involved the choice of good. The Stoics 
 thought that the choice of good involved the annihila- 
 tion of evil. Plato lived at a time when the drama 
 of 'history forbade men permanently to undervalue the 
 meaning of Will or overrate the importance of Thought. 
 When the time came for an analogous exaggeration, we 
 may almost say that history had paused. The Stoics 
 could say anything they liked about the grandeur of 
 human Will, because human Will had no platform on 
 which its actual exercise would be manifested to the eye 
 of the world. A world without politics is a world which 
 knows less than half the meaning of Will. Humanity, 
 as far as individual experience goes, must at all times be 
 familiar with that sense of failure which, far more than 
 
 1 This is the doctrine of all Augustine's anti- Pelagian treatises, and is brought 
 out most distinctly in his " Opus Imperfectum contra Julianum," the refutation 
 which he left unfinished, at his death, of the work of that Pelagian bishop 
 whose protest (though we know it only under this form) against all that was 
 hideous in the doctrine of Original Sin reveals a mind much in advance of his 
 age, and in some respects strikingly in harmony with ours. I wonder that we 
 do not know the movement of thought under his name rather than that of 
 Pelagius.
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 349 
 
 achievement, conveys true instruction as to the nature 
 and limits of human volition ; the mournful declaration 
 that " the things that I would, I do not," is the experience 
 of men and women in every age. But while it is a mere 
 individual experience, it can never impress on the human 
 imagination the inexorable limits of human capacity, the 
 shadow of necessity that falls on the very source of 
 liberty. To bring that home to us we need achievements, 
 disappointments, failures, all on a scale of national life. 
 The men who lived in the Age of Death were preparing 
 for the life of the cloister. Their aim was Resignation, 
 and they were free to imagine, therefore, that the realm 
 of Will was boundless. 
 
 But their theory of human Will, when it came to be 
 inherited by men who once more knew a corporate 
 interest, was felt to be a fragment. To be made con- 
 sistent with the aspect of the world, some addition 
 was necessary which should explain the paralysis of 
 that which had been elevated to such a height of sway ; 
 and this was exactly what Augustine supplied. We can 
 imagine him taking up a treatise of Epictetus, and mak- 
 ing it the text of a sermon. Nothing that the Stoics 
 had said of the dignity and scope of human Will was 
 exaggerated, as far as it applied to Man. Those only 
 could regard it as an over-statement who tried to discover 
 its applicability to Men. Man had been all that Epictetus 
 thought him, supreme ruler over this subordinate world 
 of good and evil, subject only to those laws of the outer 
 world which belonged to a realm of indifference ; in all 
 the region of desire, an absolute lord. Men, it is true, 
 were the exact opposite of this. They were in bondage 
 to that which should have been beneath them. So far 
 the Stoic and the Christian must be at one ; if any one 
 thought of humanity as Epictetus did, he must allow 
 that the men who surrounded Nero could hardly be
 
 J3^ 
 
 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 taken as average specimens of humanity. But there he 
 came to a stop. He had to recognize a chasm between 
 typical humanity and average humanity which he made 
 no effort to explain. His philosophy contemplated Man 
 as he is in blank despair, and could be justified only by 
 the hope of a marvellous transformation in which new 
 desires, new aims, new fears, should suddenly become 
 the property of the human race. 
 
 Christianity, as Augustine remodelled it, crossed this 
 chasm between the ideal and the real Man by a logical 
 bridge, so firm in its construction that it lasted for 
 centuries, and still remains as a picturesque ruin, a rich 
 memorial of the past. The Augustinian theory of the 
 Fall discovered the Stoic ideal man in Adam, and threw 
 on all his descendants the shadov/ of his rebellion, a 
 state of disaster from which a small minority were 
 selected to inhabit the City of God. No antique feeling 
 was hurt by this heritage of guilt ; all antique feeling 
 was satisfied by this exclusiveness of right. Turn to 
 the historian who gives his S3'mpathies to Stoicism. 
 Read (but it is difficult) the fate of the innocent child ^ 
 who owed her existence to Sejanus, and you will see 
 that the condemnation of individual innocence to Hell, 
 keenly as such a conception revolted the lofty antagonist 
 of Augustine,^ had nothing necessarily out of keeping 
 with the ideal of the past. On the other hand, his 
 system wedded Christianity to that ideal of the past. 
 He lived when, for good and for evil, all the distinctions 
 which had formed the pride of the old w^orld were 
 
 1 Tac. , Ann. , v. 9 : — " Crebro interrogaret quod ob delictum et quo traheretur 
 ticquefactiiram ultra." Perhaps the populace, as in the case of the massacre 
 of the four hundred slaves, may have been vainly indignant. But we have to 
 consider the feeling of the oligarchy. 
 
 2 Julian, the Pelagian, seems to me a Charles Kingsley born before his time. 
 But this estimate must be confessed to be singular. I have been astonished to 
 meet with no sympathy for him in any account of the controversy.
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 351 
 
 passing away. A disorderly mob vulgarized the proud 
 ideal of Roman citizenship, a humane philosophy soft- 
 ened the absolute subjection of the slave. But the 
 spirit which the distinctions of citizen and alien, of bond 
 and free, had expressed and encouraged was just as 
 strong as it had ever been. The City of God absorbed 
 all that had been exclusive in the spirit that defended 
 and enclosed the City of man. A State without a back- 
 ground of aliens would have seemed as impossible to the 
 men of that time as a river without banks. The whole 
 theory of ancient politics rested on national antagonism ; 
 if this attitude be changed to one of conciliation, the 
 fabric falls to pieces. The course of history had ex- 
 hibited just this very fact ; the instincts of a race had 
 been justified by the course of history. As the privi- 
 leges of citizenship had been cheapened, the life of civili- 
 zation, as it was understood by the ancient world, had 
 been imperilled. All the teaching of experience seemed 
 to emphasize the exclusive ideal of the old world ; ^ it 
 arose upon the horizon of the inner world as it dis- 
 appeared from that of the outer, and had hardly ceased 
 to buttress the privileges of the citizen before it was 
 seen in a new aspect, as the peculiar blessedness of the 
 believer. 
 
 But Augustinianism satisfied the spirit of the new 
 morality no less fully than the old. It allowed no con- 
 ception of individual human dignity, such as we have 
 seen in Marcus Aurclius or Epictetus, to surpass its 
 own. All that the slave had conceived of spiritual free- 
 dom, all that the monarch had conceived of spiritual 
 dominion, was true of its typical Man. The individual 
 soul had all that completeness which the Stoics had seen 
 
 1 The circumstances durinfj which Aiit^ustinc passed his life were of a nature 
 strongly to emphasize this warning. He died A.u. 430, during the siege of 
 Hippo, his episcopal city, by the Vandals.
 
 352 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 in it. It had been created by God in His own image, 
 that is, it had been created a Creator. It was endowed 
 with initial power, as real as the initial power to which 
 its own existence was owing. And it is involved in the 
 very conception that if this initial power be misused it 
 will be unchecked. God could, in this view, no more 
 create a being at once free and guarded from the dan- 
 gers of freedom than He could make two straight lines 
 enclose a space. It was no drawback on His Omni- 
 potence that it w^as impossible for Him to achieve what 
 in truth stood out of all relation to power. 
 
 The typical Adam of this scheme is, in fact, the 
 modern ideal of humanity transfigured and thrown back, 
 in gigantic outline, on an ideal past. Man, we have 
 been forced to repeat again and again, was to the 
 ancient world a part of the State. Man is to the 
 modern world primarily a whole within himself. We 
 do not get at a specimen of humanity by taking the 
 State to pieces ; Ave get at the State by multiplying 
 specimens of humanity. Now Adam, as he was re- 
 created by the genius of Augustine, stood on the thres- 
 hold of Christian thought ; and of all human beings 
 Adam alone stood out of relation to society. The modern 
 mind, it is true, does not contemplate Man apart from 
 society, any more than the Greek mind did, but it re- 
 cognizes in him something that social relations do not 
 exhaust ; from the modern point of view he is, x'i we 
 may borrow the language of philosophy, transcendent 
 with respect to the State ; from the ancient, he was im- 
 manent within it. And the Augustinian image of Adam 
 was no more than this idea detached and magnified. 
 He was the first creation of the new spirit, which dealt 
 no longer with Man, the fragment of the State, but with 
 Man the unit of morality, the molecule of all those 
 spiritual forces which make up the moral world, the inte- 
 
 J
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 353 
 
 gral object of moral attention, the starting-point at once 
 and goal of moral thought. 
 
 If the typical Man must be this, the actual Man must 
 be the very reverse. The depth of his fall must measure 
 the height of his origin. No conception that had been 
 hitherto entertained of Divine wrath and human re- 
 bellion could match that which should be raised by the 
 legend of Adam when once it was mirrored in a mind 
 that interpreted it, as Augustine did, by the light of a 
 vivid personal experience — by the intimate sense of that 
 need of redemption of which it was the logical counter- 
 part. Such glimmerings of the legend as show them- 
 selves in Greek mythology do no more than exhibit its 
 loss of all meaning when it is detached from the sense 
 of Sin. Prometheus on his rock is a memorial of the 
 wrath of offended Jove, but he is also a memorial of his 
 impotence, as against the dauntless spirit that dares to 
 defy him ; he is, in fact, like almost all the more charac- 
 teristic expressions of Greek genius, an expression of 
 the Greek demand for temperance and balance, its pro- 
 test against unbridled claim, its dread of the infinite. 
 Prometheus and Adam side by side exhibit in their 
 sharpest antagonism the contrast of the Greek spirit 
 with that which has given the legend of Adam its 
 significance and its grandeur. The Greek spirit takes 
 part with the rebel, or rather the antithesis lies between 
 gigantic might and dauntless liberty. We hear the 
 echoes of Salamis ; we are reminded that the poet was 
 also the warrior. But since iEschylus wrote, tlie whole 
 purport of history was changed. In place of the great 
 King, whose power overshadowed, as a blight, the 
 growing life of a young and vigorous race, was the 
 Emperor of Rome, whose shelter was synonymous with 
 the rule of law, and whose dominion included nothing 
 that had independent life. All cnnobh"ng associations 
 
 z
 
 354 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 had died away from resistance to domination. It had 
 been set to the sweetest melody of national life ; it now 
 recalled only the jarring discords of hopeless and life- 
 crushing rebellion. 
 
 Perhaps all that is most hurtful in the spiritual history 
 of mankind comes from the endeavour of great men 
 to exhibit the truth that has been felt in experience as 
 part of a logical scheme. If Augustine had been content 
 to utter the convictions of his spirit, untrammelled by 
 the activity of his intellect, he would never have dis- 
 torted the teaching of Christianity by adding to it the 
 Manichaean dream of a dark world for ever confronting 
 the world of light. He left as a hard dogma, crushing 
 to the spirits of men, and lacerating to their hearts, 
 that belief in a Fall which he felt as a clue to all 
 that was most vital in his own history, because he 
 thought he must complete the Divine message before 
 delivering it. That ambition, which is truly the last infir- 
 mity of noble minds, is the ambition of the systematizer. 
 " By that sin fell the angels ; " thereby vital truth is 
 associated with deadly error ; and the permanence of 
 conviction grounded in experience is shared by the 
 product of mere logical activity, unchecked by veri- 
 fication, or by the action of any faculty in man higher 
 than the understanding. 
 
 The groundwork of all Augustine's reasoning was 
 that experience which made him regard Redemption as 
 the central truth of the world. This was no logical 
 creation made in the interests of theory, this was a mere 
 gathering up the results of his inmost experience. He 
 passed from sin to holiness as suddenly and as irrevo- 
 cably as his ideal Adam had passed from holiness to sin. 
 So, at least, he imagined the transition, and for the 
 purpose of history it is his imagination which is the 
 fact. Redeeming power was the thing he was most
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 355 
 
 sure of in this world ; Heaven itself could not deepen 
 that absolute certainty ; he knew that it was a law of 
 the spiritual world as Faraday knew that electricity was 
 a law of the physical world. Had he been content 
 to proclaim that which he had himself experienced, no 
 man of science would have left less to grow obsolete 
 or unmeaning for subsequent generations. But he was 
 not thus content. He must incorporate his own experi- 
 ence in a scheme of the universe, and thereby he has 
 veiled its significance for all posterity. We have seen 
 how in the primitive Persian faith the world of Ormazd 
 is an actual transcript, on the moral consciousness, of 
 the Heaven of light above us ; while the world of 
 Ahriman is a creation of the logical intellect, seeking to 
 give balance and antithesis to the actual immensity of 
 light by an imaginary abyss of darkness. This process 
 is repeated again and again. The Fall was emphasized 
 to explain Redemption. The dark world was an imagined 
 necessity in order to explain the light world. If Adam 
 had not fallen, how could his descendant know a Saviour ? 
 Thus the fragment of experience was buried in a world of 
 reasoning, and the truth of one age, striving to complete 
 itself, became hurtful falsehood for all which followed. 
 
 The Fall of Man, as the readers of Milton have learnt 
 to think of it, dates from the age of Augustine. But we 
 have seen already that the sense of a Fall is common to 
 both those races whose antithetic feelings and tendencies 
 almost exhaust the range of moral influences which have 
 built up modern Europe. This feeling haunts Greek 
 thought from its dawn,^ recurring in various forms ; to 
 the Greek mind, the conception of Man's whole life on 
 earth as the result of some decadence from a condition 
 
 1 See the fragment of iMiipcrloclcs, quoted on p. 299. It seems to Iiavc much 
 impressed Clement of Alexandria, who twice refers to it (Strom., iii. 432, and 
 iv. 479).
 
 356 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 of previous splendour was perfectly familiar. And then 
 again we have seen how Jewish thought approached 
 this idea, and yet seemed borne away from it ; how 
 evanescent at once and yet vivid was the sense of human 
 failure in the mind that was possessed with the idea 
 of Divine Holiness. But before the complete fusion of 
 Greek and Jewish belief brought this common element 
 into a new activity it was stirred by another influence ; 
 Jewish thought, " cross-fertilized " by that of Persia, 
 developed a new phase of the belief in the Fall. It 
 passed beyond the limits of humanity into that world of 
 spiritual beings, which in this later Jewish conception 
 surrounds humanity as the atmosphere the earth. The 
 Fall of the Angels is more closely connected with the 
 system we have set forth than the Fall of Adam is. We 
 may speak of " the first man," but in truth the Adam of 
 Augustine is more than man, coming nearer to the Sons 
 of God, whose fall is narrated in the Book of Enoch, ^ 
 than with the father of mankind as he appears in the 
 Book of Genesis. The story must have taken a wide 
 popularity, since Shakespeare — the interpreter of the 
 vague diffused beliefs of the world — alludes to it before 
 " Paradise Lost " was written.^ But when he makes 
 
 1 The Book of Enoch was probably the work of a Jew writing in the early 
 part of the reign of Herod, i.e., about 40 B.C., and though so httle older than 
 the New Testament, was, as we see by its citation in the Epistle of Jude, sup- 
 posed to be the actual composition of the patriarch whose name it has retained. 
 It was quoted by Tertullian as inspired Scripture, and by Origen as an alle- 
 gorical descr ption of the descent of human souls into bodies, that being 
 symbolized by the " Fall of the Angels" which it narrates. It is allied to the 
 account of the Fall of Man in Genesis by a great stress being laid on the sin of 
 the Angels in betraying the secrets of Heaven to the women by whose love they 
 were seduced — " Durch dieses Geheimnisz richten die Manner und Weiber viel 
 Uebel auf Erden an" (Book of Enoch, translated by A. Dillman). The legend 
 is thus a link between that of Adam and Prometheus. 
 
 2 And long before Shakespeare or Milton it was dramatized by the monk at 
 Whitby, Csedmon (ob. 680). Milton indeed probably borrowed much from 
 liim, but there is some difficulty as to his being able to read Anglo-Sa.xon, and 
 the " Fall of Man " was not then translated.
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 357 
 
 Wolsey use it to point his warning against ambition, 
 he follows a different version of the legend from that 
 we find in the Jewish records open to us. The sin of 
 the Angels who fell from Heaven to Earth was indeed 
 the very opposite of ambition ; their offence was not 
 the desire to reign in Heaven, but the unwillingness 
 to remain there ; it was an incapacity to refrain from 
 desires unsuited to their spiritual condition, a readiness 
 to part with their birthright for temptations no less 
 material than Esau's. The life of spirit was insufficient 
 for them ; the seductions of carnal life brought them to 
 abdicate their place in Heaven and descend to life on 
 Earth — to life, and also to death. For it was indeed the 
 yearning of spiritual beings after sensual enjoyment 
 which " brought death into their world, and all our woe." 
 The actions which are innocent in mankind, because they 
 are necessary for the continued existence of mankind, 
 become a deadly sin in those whose eternal life ought 
 to have been enough for them, and in the day when 
 they entered on that lower life they entered on the 
 realm of death. 
 
 This legend repeats and varies the fall of Adam in a 
 form which gives us more of the true scope of that 
 event as the centre of a great mythologic system than 
 does the simple narrative which is its actual basis. It 
 shows us the associations of evil with the men of that 
 time ; it shows us what temptation was to them the type 
 of all temptation. Sin, if sin exist nt all, is surely 
 abdication, the willingness to enter a lower world, to 
 quit the highest plane of being on which existence is 
 possible and choose the good of one beneath it. This 
 is one aspect of sin, as the desire to be as God, know- 
 ing good and evi7, is the other. What we mean when 
 we say that God knows evil we cannot tell, but that 
 God docs know it in some sense must be believed by
 
 358 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 all who believe that God knows anything. What we 
 mean when we say that Man knows evil is that Man has 
 known temptation. He cannot strive to take the place of 
 that which is above him without descending to that which 
 is below him ; ambition, in the Angels, is abdication. 
 Wolsey could truly say, " By that sin fell the Angels ; " 
 the ambition by which he had fallen was but one form 
 of the sin by which they had fallen. And by a natural 
 parallax of human thought, the narrator of the Fall of the 
 Angels sees that same sin as the very reverse of ambi- 
 tion ; the desire to create new life was inseparable in 
 them from the desire to sink into lower life. There is 
 a deep meaning in the double sense of the verb to know 
 as we find it in the English preserved by our Authorized 
 Version of the Scripture ; through this we may perhaps 
 come to understand how the Fall of the Angels and the 
 Fall of Man are but two expressions of one dim, large 
 idea, hovering before the mind of men who pondered 
 over their dislocated condition here, and found one side 
 of the antithesis inadequate. 
 
 Adam in Paradise, it was supposed by some early 
 thinkers,^ was a purely spiritual being ; the consciousness 
 of his nakedness was his awaking to the need of that 
 covering which only to a perfectly sinless being could be 
 unnecessary. The clothing with skins was in truth (in 
 this earlier version of the legend) the creation of Man as 
 we know him now, inhabiting a body ; and all that went 
 before must be regarded as but another form of that 
 experience which hovered before the mind of the Greek 
 poet when he imagined himself " obedient to mad strife " 
 because in a mysterious pre-natal condition he had dis- 
 obeyed the law of his being, and was condemned in 
 consequence to sojourn on the Purgatory of this earth. 
 A faint allusion in the Old Testament and an exclama- 
 
 1 Especially Origen.
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 359 
 
 tion of Christ form the whole Scriptural authority for 
 the Fall of the Angels, but the legend would explain 
 the depravity of mankind in a manner more consistent 
 with subsequent orthodox speculation than does that by 
 which it has been obliterated — the Fall of Man. We are 
 more in harmony with that speculation when we repre- 
 sent to ourselves the original disaster "as caused by sen- 
 sual temptation rather than by ambition of intellectual 
 gain. 
 
 For Redemption was to the mind of that age above 
 all a deliverance from sensual temptation. Augustine is 
 an inverted Adam ; he shows by the measure of his own 
 miraculous gain what the ideal Man appeared to him 
 to have lost at the Fall. When we come to ask what 
 actually happened, we are, from a modern point of view, 
 inclined to think that there was as much wrong after 
 his conversion as before it. We have to take his own 
 point of view before we can regard it as an instance of 
 a soul turning from darkness to light. Nothing more 
 brings out the difference between his view and ours 
 than the fact that he initiated his Christian life not by 
 marriage with but repudiation of the woman who had 
 already borne him a son.^ Was there, the reader asks, 
 no pure domestic life in those days ? Doubtless there 
 is in all ages ; the pieties of the domestic hearth de- 
 pend on no rule and no religion. Augustine himself 
 was both a loving son and a loving father, and every 
 indication of personal feeling as well as of ideal standard 
 points to a high estimate of family claims, when once 
 they existed. His mother's love indeed seems to have 
 taken, to his mind, in a peculiar degree, the t3'pical aspect 
 of Divine mercy ; the fact that he had known a human 
 love not earned by merit, not alienated b}' great demerit, 
 
 ' Sec all that relates to her in the "Confessions." She appears cntin-ly to 
 have acquiesced in tlieir separation.
 
 36o THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 was always in his mind when he spoke of the love of 
 God. But though he knew, in its best form, parental love 
 from both sides, all that prepares the parental relation 
 was in his eyes associated with evil. Original sin has 
 become a mere vague synonym for the frailty of human 
 nature. In the dialect of Augustine it has a perfectly 
 definite and consistent meaning. He felt that the clue 
 to his whole history, and therefore to the history of 
 humanity, lay in his deliverance from that impulse apart 
 from which family life would hardly exist. It was only as 
 an impulse he thought it evil ; he would have had nothing 
 to say against it as a volition. That a man should choose 
 to be a father by an exercise of his free will, as he might 
 choose to be a physician or a traveller, presented nothing 
 evil to his mind ; but family life, as we do actually know 
 it, lay for him under a curse. The love of man to 
 woman was incurably associated with that instinct origi- 
 nating new life which he felt to be not only evil, but 
 the evil. All family life was a commemoration of the 
 original disaster whereby the body manifested its inde- 
 pendence of the spirit. And wherever a new human 
 life began, there was repeated that initial act of will by 
 which Man claimed to himself the prerogative of God, 
 and the creature became the creator. The creature was 
 in one sense to have been the creator in any case. The 
 human race was to have been continued through the 
 instrumentality of Man. But the act of insubordination 
 by which Adam refused the attitude of a subject and 
 became " as God, knowing good and evil " — this act 
 disturbed the whole hierarchy of being, and infused into 
 the originally innocent and legitimate decision to carry 
 on the race, and thus share the Divine work, an element 
 of the dark world known to ancient thought as the 
 opposite of Personality. As God was to have been 
 Supreme above all Spirits, so Spirit was to be supreme
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 361 
 
 above ever3'thing material ; but within the material 
 framework of ]\lan was something that commemorated 
 the disturbance of this order, and supplied a rebel to his 
 will, as his will had become a rebel to God. He had 
 stood midway between God and the material creation, 
 mysteriously related to both, as far above Matter as he 
 was below God. But Matter always kept its symbolic 
 alliance with Evil, and this alliance, under this line of 
 reasoning, was drawn closer. Man's fall was comme- 
 morated in sexual desire, and his regeneration was to be 
 manifested in sexual separateness. 
 
 We shall best understand this scheme if we consider 
 where modern sympathy breaks off from it. Animal 
 man, as we have said, is to us neither good nor bad. 
 To bear hunger and thirst is indeed noble, but to feel 
 hunger and thirst is perfectly innocent. It is the cause 
 of much that is wrong ; it could not otherwise give the 
 opportunity for anything that is right, but in itself it 
 is neither right nor wrong. Still it is a fact that does 
 inevitably tell upon the desires of man, and therefore, in 
 all but the most heroic natures, on his will. We may 
 account for all the vice and much of the crime of the 
 world by the activity of animal desires, and it is a natural 
 and slight distortion of that truth to say that animal 
 desire is itself of the nature of evil. Hunger and thirst 
 are not merely facts concerning the physical organization. 
 They are facts, and not the only ones, which concern the 
 mental condition of him whom they affect. Such facts 
 represent a certain dominion, so we might express it, of 
 the world of matter over the world of mind ; an inversion 
 which seemed to the men of that age the very essence of 
 evil. They could conceive no greater evil than that the 
 slave should rule. We have come to look on right or 
 wrong, good and evil, with difTcrent eyes from those of 
 Augustine and his contemporaries, and only by a great
 
 363 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 effort see any meaning in this view. We have gone to 
 the opposite pole from the aristocratic ideal of antiquity. 
 The idea that the slave should rule does not necessarily 
 suggest to us anything evil ; it is not the person but the 
 condition which is evil for us. It does not seem to us 
 so very much worse that the slave should rule than that 
 he should obey. 
 
 It is impossible for us to subtract in imagination the 
 influence of our environment, so as to conceive what we 
 should be in a universe of pure spiritual emotion, but 
 any approach to such a condition no longer rouses within 
 us an aspiration of desire. Life in Paradise, to the mind 
 of our day, represents itself as coloured by that tedium 
 which drove Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, to quit the 
 happy valley and seek the trials and difficulties of the 
 world. It took a different aspect to our fathers. Their 
 imaginations loved to dwell on that state of primaeval 
 innocence where all that gives life an object was lack- 
 ing. They were ready to fill up its details in a way 
 that astonishes us, when we compare the result with the 
 few verses of Scripture whence they took their material, 
 at the large amount of imaginative reasoning implied 
 by those pictures of a lost blessedness. Learned men 
 are not ready to answer, about tolerably familiar periods 
 of history, questions which the men of that time thought 
 any one might answer with respect to the condition of 
 our first parents before the Fall. They imagined know- 
 ledge because they felt desire. It was as the inheritance 
 of privileged humanity that they looked for a renewal 
 of the Eden life of the Past. 
 
 The Creation had been a failure, and all the varied 
 events in the life of man commemorated that failure. 
 All History was an interruption, a parenthesis, in the 
 far-off Golden Age. Thence human development took 
 its start downward in the Fall; thither human develop-
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 363 
 
 ment took its start upward in the regeneration of Christ's 
 new influence on humanity. The hght of Eden fell on 
 the path of man in the remote past, and lit up the 
 future of men, as they turned to the near, mysterious 
 Heaven. Between these kindred bursts of splendour 
 lay an interval of deep shadow, shrouding the hopes 
 and occupations that now make up the staple of human 
 interest, — a shadow concentrated upon those emotions 
 which modern reserve indeed shrouds in silence, but in 
 the silence of reverent and fearless sympathy. We may 
 find it difficult to conceive how all that makes up the inte- 
 rest of average secular life should ever have been regarded 
 as a mere interpolation in the sequence of all that is 
 truly significant for man. But we shall never understand 
 the moral life of the past unless we accept the fact that 
 there was a time when, as the refuge from life's ills was 
 actually found in the cloister, so the ideal of life's per- 
 fection lay in a projection of cloister life on the back- 
 ground of a fairy-like Paradise. 
 
 However strange it be to regard this new morality 
 as one claiming affiliation with the faith made known 
 to us in the Jewish Scriptures, however perplexing its 
 relation to a morality which set the highest honour on 
 family life, and gave a peculiar sanction to the desire for 
 posterity, the rise of such an ideal at such a point in the 
 world's history is clearly explicable. It is the morality 
 of the Age of Death, made logical by an intellectual 
 scheme, and religious by a new mythology. Augustine 
 claimed no greater detachment from all objects of human 
 desire than had been enjoined by Seneca, but the later 
 claim was at once more imaginative and more logical than 
 the earlier. lie called in God to enforce this detach- 
 ment ; he remodelled cosmogony in accordance with it. 
 He made the order of things in which we live take its 
 rise in a crime, the shadow of wiiich fell on all subse-
 
 364 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 quent exercise of human activity, and was commemo- 
 rated in every new life. That which was most intensely 
 original, that in which the whole man, soul and body, 
 put forth initial energy, was of the nature of sin. Life 
 was tainted with evil. Death was blessed. The literal 
 death by which we quit this world was blessed, remov- 
 ing us from a region of possible sin to one of necessary 
 holiness, from a world overshadowed by a vast initial 
 calamity to one where the pristine condition of a spiritual 
 nature should be restored and secured from all further 
 dislocation. And then the next best thing was to live 
 in this world as one dead, to give no need to its solicita- 
 tions, to take no interest in its business, to dwell here as 
 a Peregrinus whose city was elsewhere. The claims of 
 family life were all of the nature of temptation ; he was 
 happiest who avoided all those that could be avoided.^ 
 The act which made Man a parent, however innocent, 
 was a commemoration of sin. The higher life avoided 
 it ; the soul that had entered into union with God 
 needed no other union. 
 
 Here we have the disintegrating tendency of the new 
 morality, at its highest point. We are carried to the 
 extreme opposite of the citizen ideal of antiquity. While 
 that regarded Man as a part of the State, this regarded 
 him as — we are driven to the paradoxical expression — 
 a part of himself. It was not the whole man on which 
 the redeeming power, as here conceived, put forth its 
 influence. Man, as he was a part of Nature, was 
 accursed. Let him, if he would attain his true blessed- 
 ness, cease to belong to Nature; let him sever him- 
 self from all that owned her sway, let him renounce all 
 
 1 See, for instance, the letter of Augustine to Count Boniface, Ep., 220, in 
 Caillau's edition. Boniface had invited the Vandals to invade Africa, but 
 Augustine speaks with far greater horror of his second marriage, against a 
 vow of celibacy.
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 365 
 
 impulse centripetal within her orbit, then first would the 
 attraction of another centre act upon him unimpaired. So 
 that in the great shipwreck of humanity all was to be 
 cast to the waves except that which was distinctively 
 spiritual. Only a fraction of that which is most intensely 
 personal was to be hallowed with the conservative in- 
 fluence of a new life. Man had been a member of an 
 organism larger than himself, and so he was to continue. 
 But first he must sever his true self from a part of him- 
 self, must recognize as a mere accretion that which 
 had seemed the most vigorous outgrowth from his own 
 nature. First he must recognize that which had seemed 
 a part as more than the whole : then he should re- 
 cognize in the seeming fraction a link to the Infinite. 
 Men were atoms, but each atom was a world ; on the 
 stage of each man's Personality was worked out the 
 drama of Redemption. At the core of human individu- 
 ality Divine power exhibited its marvels, restoring the 
 order that was lost at the fall of corporate humanit}^, and 
 giving back to Man both his supreme and his subordinate 
 position. What were the rise and fall of States to a 
 drama in which God took part ? The soul was the scene 
 of conflicts too tremendous to leave much attention for 
 any struggle that was merely outward, and all tics were 
 outward, except that by which men were bound within 
 the folds of the Church. 
 
 The Augustinian scheme, therefore, forms a bridge 
 between the old world and the new, connecting the 
 great central ideas of the classic and the Christian 
 world. While it looked back, in the idea of Original 
 Sin, with a glance of S3'mpathctic retrospect to the 
 corporate morality of Greece and Rome, it gathered 
 up and prefigured in gigantic outline the new man 
 of Protestant ethics. Adam was a magnified image 
 of the new humanity which after a tliousand years
 
 366 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 was to blossom into rich and various development and 
 assert itself in the various conflicts of modern life. 
 This conflict has mirrored itself in the delineations of 
 modern art. The distinctive charm of modern literature, 
 felt first and most in Shakespeare, but more or less in 
 all modern fiction, as contrasted with the great works 
 of the ancient world, is the interest of individuality, the 
 representation of character, as an independent subject 
 of attention and investigation. Imaginative genius must, 
 no doubt, always express itself through character ; it 
 has no other language. But the interest in a character, 
 as a whole within itself — the interest that we feel in 
 Hamlet, in Macbeth, in the Baron of Bradwardine, in 
 Bailie Nicol Jarvie, in the best creations of Thackeray 
 and of George Eliot — this has no place in ancient 
 literature. OEdipus is as definite as Hamlet ; but the 
 crisis of the Greek drama turns on the fate, not the 
 character, of the hero. Achilles, in the tale of Troy 
 divine, is the typical Greek ; of Hamlet what can we 
 say but that he is Hamlet ? Now this idea of a whole 
 within itself — of Man as a complete being, not claimed 
 and dominated by the State, but independent and decid- 
 ing by his own will into what relations he will enter 
 with any other being — this ideal is in Adam presented 
 with all the exaggeration of a new conception. We 
 are speaking of the Augustinian Adam, the Adam of 
 " Paradise Lost ; " one who read the simple narrative 
 of Genesis for the first time would wonder that it had 
 been made to bear the weight of such significance, and 
 perhaps the reluctance of Augustine to use the name of 
 Adam is a witness to some undercurrent of conscious- 
 ness that the myth, on which he rested the actual 
 condition of the human race, was hardly suggested 
 in the records whence he had to gather all that he 
 could actually know of the first man. "The abysmal
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 367 
 
 depths of personality " are prefigured in Adam. All that 
 romance and essay have imagined of human capacity 
 is condensed in that ideal of tragic but not despicable 
 choice. IVi'll is exhibited, in that grand drama, as it 
 never could be again ; the ideal of the new world is 
 cast in lurid relief on the background of all that is 
 darkest in the actual condition of the old world. 
 
 The Augustinian scheme presents us with a new cx- 
 clusiveness in place of the old. We confront in it a new 
 application of the aristocratic principle of antiquity to 
 the grouping of human life. Apart from the Church men 
 were nothing, just as apart from the City men had been 
 nothing. Man was, indeed, older than the Church ; he 
 had known an ideal condition in which he had stood 
 alone, above Nature, beyond Society, and only subor- 
 dinate to God ; but in his actual condition he owed all 
 his value to his incorporation in a Society inheriting 
 from the past the boundless claims of the State, con- 
 ferring the same inestimable privileges, and therefore 
 repeating the same inevitable exclusions. And the new 
 exclusiveness was so much more inclusive than the old 
 that it seemed to include everything. The enclosure 
 which took in Greek and barbarian, bond and free, seemed 
 to those who had known these opposites as divided by an 
 impassable chasm, to be one which had practically no limit. 
 That which revolts us in what we know as Calvinism, 
 and what we should know, if we traced the exclusiveness 
 of Christianity to its true author, as Augustinianism, is 
 but a transference of the earthly city to the Heavens. 
 To the eager gaze of Augustine the earthly city had no 
 other object than a symbolism whereby it prefigured the 
 heavenly state. The Church everywhere inherited the 
 legacy of the City.^ The stately traditions of Rome had 
 
 1 See the whole treatise, " De Civiiate Dei." It should be compared wiili 
 the treatise of Plutarch cited above on the Fortune of Rome.
 
 368 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 no other object than to supply, with their pictures of 
 devotion to an earthly state, reproach or warning for the 
 less loyal citizen of the heavenly city. The unshaken 
 fidelity of Regulus, the stern simplicity of Cincinnatus, 
 the heroic fortitude which triumphed over parental fond- 
 ness and anticipated in the person of Torquatus or Brutus 
 the denunciation, " Whoever loveth son or daughter more 
 than me is unworthy of me " — all this was in parable the 
 ideal history of the Church. The narrative of what had 
 happened was an injunction as to what should happen. 
 Even details which suggest no such typical significance 
 to our minds, the " Asylum " of Romulus (where a few 
 robbers, secured by impunity, formed the origin of the 
 almost immortal state) prefigured that Divine mercy 
 which in Christ should deliver from the bondage of sin 
 to the hope of righteousness. " For our sakes this was 
 written ; " yes, and done also. In the eyes of Augustine, 
 the majesty of Rome had no value but as a mere sym- 
 bolic rehearsal of the victory of the Church. 
 
 The work which contained this fantastic exegesis of 
 Roman history was undertaken to refute an opinion 
 common at the time among Pagans, that the sack of 
 Rome by the Goths was the consequence of the abandon- 
 ment of the ancient religion for Christianity.^ The course 
 of history of itself so little tended to exhibit the Church 
 as the ideal State, that Augustine was reduced almost to 
 refine away the very existence of the actual State in 
 order to bring the two into relation. It was only by 
 making the history of Rome a type of the claims of 
 the Church that he could weld the two in a single 
 whole ; and when once a divine inner meaning had re- 
 placed the obvious significance of outer fact, the calamity, 
 vast as it was, which put the capital of the world at the 
 
 1 Compare it with the treatise of Salvian, " De Gubernatione Dei " — a far 
 tteeper and nobler view of the facts, to my mind.
 
 THE FALL OF MAN. 369 
 
 mercy of barbarians, took a different aspect, and was no 
 longer a break-up of all the hopes of civilized humanit3^ 
 The downfall of the State might mean the emergence of 
 the Church ; and just as Greek implied Barbarian, and 
 the empress city implied a population of slaves, so the 
 City of God must imply a world given over to the powers 
 of evil. Man, not adopted by Christ, must belong to 
 Satan. The corporate life in which he already partook 
 was an evil thing. It included the vast majority of the 
 descendants of Adam, and represented their natural con- 
 dition. It represented the confusion of evil as contrasted 
 with the distinctness and individuality of original and 
 sinless humanity. The antithesis carried on the one 
 great contrast of the ancient world between freedom and 
 slavery. Adam was the one freeman of the human race ; 
 humanity was in bondage. Christ was the liberator ; 
 but the deliverance was into an altogether exceptional 
 condition ; the natural condition was that of slavery to 
 evil. The first man stood apart from all his sons, as the 
 freeman from the slave. Whatever they were, it was 
 natural that he should jwi be. Hence the aristocratic 
 principle of antiquity passed into a worship of the excep- 
 tional that characterized modern thought (taking the epi- 
 thet in its largest sense), until by the natural process of 
 inversion it passed into its opposite — the worship of the 
 universal. The commonwealth was no longer sacred. 
 What was sacred was something taken out of it — some- 
 thing removed from the secular enclosure of national life, 
 and transferred, as it were, from the wreck to the life- 
 boat. All the arrogance, all the exclusiveness, all the 
 love of privilege, for which the city of man no longer 
 afforded any scope, found a refuge in the City of God. 
 
 In this system were thus combined the common ex- 
 clusiveness of the old Morality and of tlie new. The 
 Platonic Republic is the ancient state made logical, as 
 
 2 A
 
 370 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 the monastic life was the Augustinian ideal made logical. 
 Domestic life, with all that it implies, was equally to be 
 banished from both. From one it was to be banished 
 because the guardian was not to know his own children ; 
 from the other, because the monk was not to have any 
 children. In both cases equally the common mass of 
 humanity was to be indulged with the ordinary relations 
 that make up the home ; in both, the saints were called 
 upon to renounce them, to live a life superior to and ap- 
 parently poorer than that of the common herd. Augustine 
 and Plato coincided in throwing the shadow of inferiority 
 on all that is symbolized by the domestic hearth, on 
 all private relation, and all the virtues which it elicits 
 and implies. For centuries the holiest men of Europe 
 left no posterity. The holiest men in Plato's Republic 
 would have been obliged to leave a posterity, though 
 they would never have known their own children. 
 But in each case the love of man to woman, of parent 
 to child, was proscribed with equal rigour ; in each 
 the ties of kindred were to be stripped of the sanctities 
 of duty, and the object of entire devotion was to be 
 invisible. The Augustinian saint, an actual human 
 being, stood aside from the path of inheritance and 
 left it to the ruffian and the sot to bequeath his evil 
 tendency to his country for ever ; the Platonic guardian 
 never existed, but as far as he was a model, the result 
 was much the same. In the one case the man belonged 
 to the State, in the other to the Church ; in both cases 
 men ceased to belong to the family. The moral nature 
 was a mutilated one. That twofold life, in which man and 
 woman became one, was in both a mere concession to the 
 ordinary unblessed, animal desires of the common herd, 
 and all the affections and virtues which find their root on 
 this soil were smitten with the blight of moral neglect. 
 Man needs Divine sympathy in all his ideals. If the
 
 THE FALL OF MAN: 371 
 
 Divine act of Creation was a blunder ; if the Creation 
 was either the result of, or a mere prelude to, the fall of 
 spiritual beings, then all impulse in Man which tends 
 towards the continuance of Creation is mistaken likewise. 
 If God would have done better not to have created 
 Man, Man would do better not to create Man. Augus- 
 tine thought that all God's acts were holy, and that 
 therefore the Creation was holy. He believed this 
 firmly, but he did not teach it. His system exhibited 
 Creation as a vast blunder, an exercise of mischievous 
 activity far beyond that of any Gnostic Demiurgus. 
 This consequence of his theology was felt at first, by 
 honest thinkers who perished, as obscure rebels against 
 the truth, and were forgotten. But the idea lived, and 
 centuries afterwards it bore fruit in a renovated world. 
 
 In the meantime the sense of the mistake of Creation 
 tinged the whole ideal of Man's moral life. It darkened 
 Earth at once and Heaven ; as it lowered the earthly 
 father to a mere animal, it changed the Heavenly Father 
 to a being endowed with cruelty, such as we conceive of 
 in a devil. It gave up earthly love to lawless impulse; 
 it stamped heavenly love with the narrowest partiality, 
 and deprived it in imagination oP that expansive power 
 which is of the very essence of love. What we would 
 point out is the connection between these two things. 
 The ban on married love follows, in logical sequence, on 
 the disastrous issue of the Creation. If Creation was a 
 blunder. Procreation is a crime. 
 
 The repulsiveness of this whole range of thought, for 
 modern feeling, too much conceals from us a clue to 
 truth. Love is felt by every one to be the spring of all 
 that is excellent in human life. Perhaps it is but follow- 
 ing out that belief on its negative side to see that the 
 distortion of Love, which we know as Lust, is not only 
 one of the greatest evils in the human world, but the very
 
 372 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 focal centre of evil. That impulse, under the control of 
 which persons are treated as things, and human bonds 
 are as fugitive as human impulse, is the very antithesis 
 of all that binds humanity in groups, and forms the 
 school of duty. All that is evil in human relation is at 
 its height when man and woman seek the closest inti- 
 macy apart from the resolve, with all its latent self- 
 sacrifice, to make this an exclusive bond. Wherever 
 there is selfishness, wherever there is cruelty, wherever 
 there is falsehood, there is something that is at its 
 height in lust. If anything of the inevitable mingles in 
 this temptation to all that is worst — if the mere animal 
 nature, the very type of innocence, be found in alliance 
 with that in Man which tramples on the rights of his 
 kind, which desolates a life to satisfy an impulse, and 
 brings confusion into the very source of family life — may 
 we not say that there, it would seem, is the result of 
 some vast moral dislocation, far transcending the indi- 
 vidual life, and needing some redemption equally vast 
 before the life of Man can be purified ?
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 THE HERITAGE OF TO-DAY. 
 
 That which gives life its keynote is, not what men think 
 good, but what they think best. True, this is not the 
 part of belief which is embodied in conduct : the ordi- 
 nary man tries to avoid only what is obviously wrong ; J 
 the best of men does not always make us aware that he 
 is striving after what is right. We do not see people 
 growing into the resemblance of what they admire ; it is 
 much if we can see them growing into the unlikeness of 
 that which they condemn. But the dominant influence 
 of life lies ever in the unrealized. While all that we 
 discern is the negative aspect of a man's ideal, that ideal 
 itself lives by admiration which never clothes itself in 
 word or deed. In seeing what he avoids we judge only 
 the least important part of his standard ; it is that which 
 he never strives to realize in his own person which makes 
 him what he is. The average, secular man of to-day is 
 a different being because Christendom has hallowed the 
 precept to give the cloak to him who asks the coat ; it 
 would be easier to argue tiiat this claim for what most 
 would call an impossible virtue has been injurious than 
 that it has been impotent. Christianity has moulded ^ 
 character, where we should vainly seek to discern that it 
 had influenced conduct. Not the criminal code, but the 
 counsel of perfection shows us what a nation is becom- 
 ing ; and he who casts on any set of duties the shadow 
 of the second best, so far as he is successful, does more
 
 374 'THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 to influence the moral ideal than he who succeeds in 
 passing a new law. 
 
 Thus it was that while the mediaeval and the classi- 
 cal ideal of morality on one side were exact opposites, 
 they had this in common — that they threw discredit on 
 a large part of that which makes man what he is. In 
 neither was there a full sanction to the bond that makes 
 man and woman one. There was, in early Chris- 
 tianity, an emphatic declaration that the bond should 
 be exclusive, but there was an equally emphatic declara- 
 tion that it had better not exist. Vain is the effort to 
 render pure and orderly the life which is thrown 
 into shadow by the consciousness of an ideal towards 
 which it is not tending. The magistrate may regulate 
 such a life, the legislator may concern himself with 
 its details, but that in man which seeks rightness will 
 turn elsewhere. 
 
 Man is the member of a society to w^hich he is joined 
 by the principle of resemblance, and of a union to which 
 he is joined by the principle of difference. He has 
 fellow-citizens, to w^hom he is bound by common inte- 
 rests and duties ; he has a family, to which he is joined 
 by reciprocal and correlative duties. We cannot, indeed, 
 group any human relations in sharply antithetic divisions 
 — the citizen must recognize special claim (though less 
 and less with the progress of ages) ; the brother knows 
 common interests and the bond of resemblance. But 
 these are the exceptional elements respectively of civil 
 and family life. The duties of the father are not the 
 duties of the son, and the charm of conjugal happiness 
 would be gone if husband and wdfe received from each 
 other nothing that he or she was not prepared to return. 
 All that makes up the poetry of the mutual love of man 
 and woman is an expression of the fact that it contains 
 something which is not mutual, something which does
 
 THE HERITAGE OF TO-DAY. 37c 
 
 not merely invert all self-centred feeling and teach men 
 to turn the passive desire into the active exertion, but 
 which supplies self with a complement and teaches men 
 concession to needs they do not feel. Each of these 
 relations is incomplete without the other. In all human 
 relation, it is obvious, men need to treat each other from 
 some points of view as beings of similar nature and equal 
 claim ; this is true even in the mutual relation of adults 
 and children. But also in every human being as com- 
 pared with every other there is something of which the 
 duties of sex, the duties of differing age, are the true 
 type. In the most ordinar}', the most commonplace man ^ 
 is something that his brother man does not share and 
 cannot estimate. Civil life ignores this element. It was 
 not so in the ancient world. Status was a fact of which 
 ancient law took cognizance, of which modern law is only 
 at this hour ceasing to take cognizance. But the whole 
 development of modern life is towards that view of things 
 in which men recognize no duty that is not mutual, no 
 need that is not common. This was alwa3's to a great 
 extent the civil basis of life ; it is so now entirely. As a 
 citizen a man is blameless if he give his brother man 
 what he claims himself. This is justice on this plane 
 of being, and we must ascend to a higher if we would 
 understand any other justice. 
 
 But how poor, how meagre were our moral life if this 
 were all ! How poor were even the typical life of equality 
 if it caught no reflected lights from the life of inequality ! 
 It is the relations of family life which make up the 
 focus of rightness. Family life may no doubt, when 
 this principle is forgotten, become a mere magnified 
 selfishness. When two become one, and imagine that 
 they keep their original separatencss, their dual selfish- 
 ness far exceeds the worst selfishness of an individual. 
 For what keeps down the selfishness of an individual
 
 376 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 is surely the consciousness that every other man is a 
 " self; " and if those whose needs are identified with our 
 own are allowed to count as others, the double pull of 
 vicarious and natural selfishness locks up all attention. 
 When the most unselfish of men looks upon his care for 
 wife and children from this point of view, he multiplies 
 unawares his own claims, and flatters himself that he 
 has given much, when he has merely transferred some- 
 thing from his right hand to his left. The Family thus 
 becomes a disguise in which selfishness invades the army 
 of the virtues and paralyzes their movement. Neverthe- 
 less it is the non-mutual relations which call out the 
 larger part of man's moral nature, and give the Con- 
 science and the Will their fullest exercise. Where men 
 cease to speak of rights, there Right finds its centre. 
 While no service to the State can make him a good 
 citizen who bequeathes to his posterity the influence of 
 a bad father, the man who is faithful to one woman, 
 who has brought no children into the world without 
 endeavouring to ensure their welfare, who has paid back 
 to his parents that tribute of protection and care he has 
 received from them — such a man may be counted by the 
 State among her true sons, though he have contributed 
 no service beyond mere obedience to her laws. The 
 realm of civil right, contrasted with that of conjugal, 
 paternal, filial duty, shows how all that is most truly 
 moral in our nature demands the life of contrast, the 
 presence of that element in character which claims and 
 exercises Faith. 
 
 This life it was that fell into shadow, when Christian 
 faith was a vivid, dynamic reality, remoulding the world. 
 All lofty spiritual impulse passed it by, all fervent desire 
 for the Divine life hurried away from it ; its neighbour- 
 hood was drained of all that elevates, purifies, and spiri- 
 tualizes humanity. When a man sought to complete
 
 THE HERITAGE OF TO-DAY. 377 
 
 his life by that union which gives the world its true 
 moral unit, he was taught to regard himself as a mere 
 animal ; and that which should have been the school of 
 the Conscience was abandoned to lawless impulse and 
 unhallowed desire. 
 
 One tribe alone in our race has fully recognized the 
 place of the Family in the moral education of Man. We 
 are occupied, through perhaps the most interesting and 
 important stages of the history of Israel, with a mere 
 family narrative ; and the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and 
 Jacob take more space than many centuries of the later 
 history. The Jew could never ignore the bond of family 
 life. It lay at the root of his history. Where other 
 races traced their course backwards in a genealogy that, 
 ending in some deit}', threw a shadow of repudiation on 
 the bonds of mere human kindred, this people found 
 their national records occupied with the relations of a 
 husband and wife whose fears, jealousies, and affections 
 might be paralleled in the most insignificant of their 
 descendants ; and the last word of their Scriptures was 
 the promise that a representative of their nation should 
 turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the 
 children to the fathers. But Christendom, which should 
 have inherited the lesson, has been, in some sense, even 
 a loser by the lesson of Judaism. Refusing to recog- 
 nize that the object of its reverence, whatever else he 
 was, was a typical Jew, it has missed the meaning of a 
 teaching that has thus been violently dissevered from all 
 that it implied as its groundwork. A mournful declara- 
 tion of the inevitable has been interpreted as a precept,^ 
 a sense of the expansion needed to keep an ideal alive 
 has been taken for a rejection of that ideal, and that 
 
 1 Luke xiv. 26. Compare xii. 49-53, a passa,';i,' apparently spoken sliortly 
 before, and turn to the passage whicli our Lord is Irtc (piolinfj fioin Micali 
 vii. : " Woe is me ! for I am as when they have gathered the summer fruits . . . 
 the good man is perished out of the earth . . . 'I'rust ye not in a friend . . .
 
 378 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 consecration of all family bonds which was a part of the 
 religion of the Jew has been ignored or defied by what 
 should have been the expansion and fulfilment of Judaism. 
 To our generation Christianity seems associated with the 
 sanction of all the ties of kindred, especially the conjugal 
 bond ; but man}' generations would need to pass away 
 before the natural bonds which man at once finds and 
 chooses could be hallowed by a Christian association as 
 deeply rooted in the past as that which opposes it ; and 
 the protest thus stirred up, like all protest, must intensify 
 what it opposes. It is not the fierce recoil from asce- 
 ticism which brings us near the true union of the sexes ; 
 that, though a necessary preliminary in the history of the 
 race, of itself adds to the disorder which it finds. The 
 element of protest, inevitable in all moral evolution, is 
 always distorting, and no other phase of the moral life is 
 so much distorted by strain and stress as this, The 
 protest must die away and be forgotten before a true 
 ideal of marriage can spring up and ally itself with all 
 that is holiest in man. 
 
 The great teachers of the mediaeval and the classical 
 world left their descendants a mutilated ideal of humanity ; 
 not only an incomplete ideal, but one that was cut off 
 from its natural expansion. In that fractional ideal 
 which all are compelled to choose who refuse to regard 
 the bond which unites man and woman as sacred, 
 Augustine and Plato each took the ideal of a different 
 sex. Plato set his seal on the virtues of the man, 
 
 keep the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom ; for the son 
 dishonoureth the father, the daughter riseth up against her mother, the daughter- 
 in-law against her mother-in-law ; a man's enemies are the men of his own 
 house." Is it possible to doubt that the lament of the earlier prophet was 
 echoed by Him who saw that these ills were the inevitable result of His own 
 claim, knowing that human beings confuse the gradation of love with hatred? 
 See for a similar confusion Rom. ix. 13, and the passage itself which St. 
 Paul is there quoting, MaH. 2, 3, also Matt. vi. 24, which seems the quota- 
 tion of some familiar expression.
 
 THE HERITAGE OF TO-DAY. 379 
 
 Augustine on those of the woman. The guardian of 
 the RepubHc was to be courageous, patriotic, energetic, 
 resolute ; the monk in the cloister was to be chaste, 
 meek, obedient, self-den3'ing. It seems strange that 
 when a man traces all evil to the attraction of woman he 
 makes womanl}' virtue his ideal. And yet it is natural. 
 All that is moral in human nature finds its focus in the 
 relation of man to woman, and sooner or later we shall 
 exaggerate the scope of whatever we refuse to acknow- 
 ledge in its own proper place. The teacher of mediaeval 
 moralit}', seeking to dissever the influence of woman 
 from the character of man, did actually effect, so far as 
 he impressed his ideal on mankind, that the virtue of the 
 man should be none other than the virtue of the woman. 
 The worship of the Virgin is but the expression, on the 
 side of art, of this mediaeval ideal of humanity ; the love 
 of woman, denied its natural scope, avenged itself by 
 invading a foreign domain. Manly virtue was as much 
 lost to the aspiration of the age as womanh' virtue had 
 been to that of an earlier age, but never in any previous 
 age had human excellence been contracted within limits 
 so narrow. 
 
 How eagerly, after centuries of this frost, must the 
 human spirit have turned to the sunshine of Greece and 
 Rome, when it broke anew through the clouds ! All that 
 is extravagant in that revival is explained when we see 
 what had gone before. Men had been taught for hundreds 
 of years that a man's life was the lower life ; they suddenly 
 found themselves in contact with a literature which ex- 
 hibited it as the only life. They had been taught to look 
 upon nature as something evil ; they saw it suddenly rise 
 and expand to something Divine. All impulse had been 
 allied with sin ; all impulse was now shown as por- 
 tra^'cd in glorious art, and of itself the creator of a noble 
 world rich in beauty and variety, and needing no re-
 
 38o THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 demption. We think of science and literature as hostile, 
 but, though foes now, they were nursed in one cradle. 
 The release from one cramped, unnatural attitude set 
 free the spirit of man to enter for the first time into the 
 study of nature, in all its aspects — nature in man, and 
 nature in the world ; wearied with the keen knife-edge 
 antithesis of Truth and Error, it turned with rapture 
 to the gentle slope of gradation that severs Knowledge 
 from Ignorance. Men looked on the world with new 
 eyes, and for the first time they saw it as it was. "And 
 lo ! Creation widened to man's view." The universe 
 expanded. Earth lost her central place, but found her- 
 self one of many earths ; the sister worlds seemed 
 to inscribe the nightly skies with their lesson of the 
 heavenly in the earthly. For as Heaven disappeared 
 from the vault above, it reappeared, in some sense, on 
 earth. This dark earth became a star, taking its place 
 in the bright choir that had seemed the ideal home of 
 purified spirits. As this antithesis vanished — as earth 
 changed from the dark, motionless centre of the universe 
 to one of the host of Heaven — its own expanse widened, 
 new realms opened in the west, man's home became a 
 boundless estate for the expanding human race, and yet 
 was seen to be a mere speck in the universe. Man 
 entered on a double inheritance — new worlds in the 
 Heavens, new lands beyond the seas. A boundless uni- 
 verse opened upon him on every side, to explore with 
 eye or mind, and unexpected aid sprang up in every 
 quarter. Even the weapons of mutual slaughter afforded 
 patterns of the heavenly movements,^ while a new vehicle 
 
 1 Those speculations on the laws of motion which attained their culminating 
 point in the Newtonian astronomy appear to have received much stimulus from 
 the study of projectiles, which occupied many mechanicians of the seventeenth 
 century, as, e.g., Anderson, "Art of Gunnery" (1674), Blondel, " Art de Jeter les 
 Bombes," 1683. The true theory of projectiles was somewhat delayed by an ex- 
 cessive deference to Galileo, who had overrated the analogy of their movement 
 to that of the planets. SeeWhewell, " History of the Inductive Sciences," ii. 56.
 
 THE HERITAGE OF TO-DAY. 381 
 
 for the record of thought gave thought rapidity. Man 
 entered upon the rehabilitation of nature. His home 
 was no longer overshadowed by the recollection of a pris- 
 tine crime. It was a glorious palace, and its inhabitants 
 must be a regal race. 
 
 It is by no fanciful association that we may see in the 
 new astronomy a type of the development of thought by 
 which the life of Man became vivid, various, dramatic. 
 " Heaven and Earth " was originally a description of 
 the ideal Universe. When we turn to the poem of 
 Dante, and mark the prosaic, consistent literalness with 
 which he conceived the material framework of his ima- 
 ginative creation, we reahze that he was not building 
 up a new universe to suit his poetry, but merely giving 
 definiteness to the ordinary and familiar conceptions of 
 his contemporaries. The world was all, so to speak, 
 laid out to fit the drama of judgment. Heaven was 
 above our head ; Hell might well be below our feet ; the 
 earth itself, the centre of the universe, had nothing in 
 common with 
 
 " The wandering fires which moved 
 In mystic dance, not without song " 
 
 When once Galileo and Newton had forced the world to 
 recognize that Heaven, if it was anywhere, was every- 
 where, then morals took a new direction. The antithesis 
 of Heaven and Earth vanished from the inward as well 
 as from the outward world. Human nature became in- 
 teresting for its own sake. The stress and strain of 
 a conflict between the powers of darkness and of light 
 vanished, to make way for the development of various 
 aims, of many-sided feelings, of hopes in which there was 
 no edge of terror, of interests which, instead of merely 
 emphasizing the common attitude of different spirits to 
 the Eternal, brought out and stimulated their differences,
 
 382 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 and developed all that was individual, all that was 
 specific, in each. 
 
 " If any one doubt the connection of this new interest 
 in character with the new interest in science, let him turn 
 to Bacon's Essays. There he will find an attention to 
 the specific tendencies of the human mind, apart from all 
 preconceived ideas of what that inquiring glance should 
 discern, which is the true attitude for the investigator of 
 nature. " A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure." 
 " There is no passion in the mind of man so weak but 
 it mates and masters the fear of death." " Chaste women 
 are often proud and froward, as presuming on the merit 
 of their chastity." " Men of noble birth are noted to be 
 envious towards new men when they rise, for the distance 
 is altered, and it is like a deceit of the eye, that when 
 others come on they think themselves go back." " The 
 wiser sort of great persons bring in ever upon the stage 
 somebody upon whom to derive the envy that would 
 come upon themselves." That is criticism of character 
 in the spirit of the observer of nature. Men are re- 
 garded not as righteous or wicked, but as formed by 
 circumstance, as the result of natural law. We have 
 returned to the Greek sense of variety ; we have lost 
 all remembrance of a great division-line separating the 
 travellers to Heaven or Hell. We are already in the 
 modern world of secular, scientific interest ; we observ^e 
 moral tendencies as facts just like any other facts ; the}' 
 have lost their overwhelming significance as hints of 
 an eternal distinction. It is difficult for us to realize 
 that this ever came upon the world as a new thing. 
 It is the spirit of art at all periods of the world's 
 history, and it is also the spirit of science. But as a 
 broad, catholic influence it came upon the world in the 
 breath of the Renaissance, and buried germs of life felt 
 the influence and rushed into the genial air.
 
 THE HERITAGE OF TO-DAY. 383 
 
 In this sunshine of a new life sprang up the luxuriant 
 and various vegetation of modern literature — literature 
 as it is impressed with the revival of classical life, as it 
 bears still the character given it by the rebound from 
 a gloomy and mutilated theology. The modern drama 
 commemorates the reawakening of individual human 
 interests after their long sleep, the sudden influx of 
 sap into the withered boughs that had felt the frost 
 of the long winter. The love of woman changes from 
 the centre of human temptation to the centre of human 
 desire. A halo of romance succeeds a shadow of sin. 
 Human passion gathers up all the associations of poetry 
 and drama ; it appears in connection with whatever is 
 stately, whatever is vigorous, whatever is pure. Man's 
 spirit is no longer a battlefield for the contending forces 
 of Heaven and Hell. It is a rich and varied landscape, 
 full of beauty, full of interest ; its qualities cannot be 
 tabulated under antithetic heads of good and evil ; they 
 are various, and interesting for their own sake. Once 
 more, as to the Greek, Nature becomes sacred ; her laws 
 succeed her deities. Gravitation binds the world in a 
 golden chain, and in its completeness prepares men's 
 minds to be satisfied with all the wealth and variety 
 contained therein, and to cease from all striving towards 
 that which lies above and beyond it. 
 
 This line of development could not be followed out 
 unbroken to our own day ; if we were to keep it so we 
 should have to ignore the Reformation. Protestantism 
 is a revival of Augustinianism ; though Augustine was 
 the great Doctor of the Roman Church, his true suc- 
 cessor is Luther. That crisis in the history of a man 
 which we call Conversion — a crisis which we may find 
 in the lives of some men who care nothing for religion — 
 is not a natural, not at least an inevitable incident in the 
 life of the member of a Church. The fact of a relation
 
 384. THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 and the consciousness of a relation are indeed two 
 things, and the fact that when Augustine lived Baptism 
 was still an expression of individual conviction — that 
 the new member of the Church was not an unconscious 
 babe, but a man or woman desirous to enter its fold — 
 this fact prevented, at this time, any discernment of the 
 inchoate divergence between two systems which were 
 not logically irreconcilable. But the Church, which sets 
 her seal on every unconscious infant, demands no spiritual 
 crisis as the pledge of membership, and cannot emphasize 
 the emotion which testifies to a new perception. The 
 doctrine that man is justified by faith — that an inward 
 emotion sets each individual in his right place, and that 
 this is a transaction between the soul and God — this view 
 is not obviously harmonious with the ideal of a Catholic 
 Church. Catholicism had developed the corporate element 
 in Augustinianism ; Protestantism went back to its indivi- 
 dual element. These two were harmonious in the mind 
 of Augustine, but they diverged with the progress of the 
 asres, and the two divisions of Christendom have divided 
 the two elements between them. 
 
 Protestantism, therefore, which is often regarded as a 
 step forward in the progress from the age of undoubting 
 faith to the age of critical reason, was in reality a step 
 backwards. Or perhaps, rather, it was an excursion away 
 from the path. It gave new vitality to the doctrine of 
 the Fall. That doctrine, though accepted by the Catho- 
 lic Church, is not a distinctively Catholic belief. We 
 find scarcely a trace of it in the poem of Dante, where 
 our first father, with a few selected spirits alone of 
 those who knew not Christ, is to be found in Paradise. 
 The Catholic Church remembered only that man was 
 the member of an organism ; she never taught that man 
 must in his own history reverse the part of Adam. 
 Protestantism took up this lesson, and gave emphasis to
 
 THE HERITAGE OF TO-DAY. 385 
 
 the doctrine of the Fall by the doctrine of individual 
 Redemption. But Protestant and Catholic, deadly foes 
 as they were, might Lave joined hands against the Re- 
 naissance, if they could have understood the path of 
 Histor3\ The}^ were like Athens and Sparta, wasting their 
 strength in internecine combat, in presence of the grow- 
 ing power of Macedon ; their differences vanished before 
 their common interest, in the presence of a common foe. 
 A new epoch was at hand, in which the struggle should 
 be transferred to other issues than those which divided 
 Protestants from Catholics. The French Revolution 
 took up the lesson of the Renaissance. It received its 
 heritage, not from men who dethroned an infallible 
 Church to make way for an infallible book, but from men 
 who taught that nothing was infallible but the spirit of 
 universal humanity. It proclaimed the sanctity of nature. 
 It repudiated the doctrine of the Fall. The repudiation 
 was too complete to be conscious. But the ideal of Demo- 
 cracy, started by the American, and made emphatic by the 
 French Revolution — what is it but the doctrine of Origi- 
 nal Sin inverted ? Man's nature is corrupt, said Augus- 
 tine, education should be the victory over Nature. Man's 
 nature is holy, said Rousseau, education should be the 
 victory over all that is artificial. The strange hankering 
 after savage life which distinguished the eighteenth cen- 
 tury and found its interpreter in Rousseau, was the 
 reversal of the doctrine of the Fall. Those who most 
 dwelt on it may never have heard of the doctrine of the 
 Fall ; none the less the whole meaning of the second 
 doctrine depends on the meaning of the first. The 
 Rights of Man, the Goddess of Reason, the worship of 
 Humanity — all arc the sonorous, the emphatic, the pas- 
 sionate unsayin,']^ of ^hc doctrine of Original Sin, the Fall 
 of Man, the evil of Nature ; and, lastly, in our own day, 
 the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest and 
 
 2 u
 
 386 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 the origin of humanity by natural selection, has come to 
 bind the scientific and the moral members of this new- 
 development into a complete whole. Nature had been 
 the invading, disturbing influence in Creation : she is 
 now enthroned as the Creator. 
 
 We underrate the power of reaction in thought. We 
 seldom give an adequate place to that element in all 
 assertion which is truly denial. God, says an Indian 
 sage (and he repeats the phrase more than once), is only 
 to be described by No No. That is, so many of Man's 
 thoughts of God are unworthy, that the true doctrine 
 concerning Him is largely made up of protest. The 
 " No No " may be heard in every earnest doctrine. 
 How much of modern science is made up of it we 
 are hardly yet able to appreciate. The men who give 
 attention to Nature, as to something Divine, may be 
 even ignorant that there was a time when Nature was 
 traduced as something almost Satanic ; but they are 
 none the less protestants against that belief. The con- 
 scious participation in thought and feeling granted to 
 every son of man is but a small part of that which he 
 truly IS. Far below the stratum of consciousness in each 
 one of us lie the unsounded depths of a heritage we can 
 as little abjure as discern. In some mysterious thrill, 
 in some strange unintelligible foreboding, in some vague 
 unexplained ecstasy of hope, the struggles of our fathers 
 make themselves felt in our hearts. And what for a 
 thousand years men believed leaves its record for cen- 
 turies in a protest after it has ceased to exist as a creed. 
 The doctrine owes all its distinctness to what it has over- 
 thrown, even when that is, in the mind of the teacher, 
 utterly forgotten. 
 
 It is by a vain and shallow explanation of that great 
 reaction of thought against Christianity characteristic of 
 our day, that men would trace it to any discrepancy
 
 THE HERITAGE OF TO-DAY. ^Sj 
 
 between the account of the genesis of things contained 
 in the Hebrew Scriptures and that which is the result 
 of modern research. A divergence setting men's feet 
 in paths which increase their remoteness at every step 
 could never be removed by omitting a few lines from a 
 narrative. The men of our day turn away from Chris- 
 tianity not because it is committed to any assertions 
 about the beginning of things, but because the idea of 
 Evolution, as they hold it, implies a sanction on all desire 
 and choice, and bars the possibility of any relation 
 between Man and his acts in which he should stand out- 
 side them as the Creator from the Creation. All that 
 Man does is from this point of view but a part of Man, 
 and any demand that some part should be renounced, 
 that the true Self should be disentangled from elements 
 which yet are torn away with more sense of severance 
 than those in which the true Self is found — such an 
 attempt revolts the instincts that are bred of exclusive 
 attention to the external world. When a man thus 
 formed uses the old language and speaks of God, he 
 means something quite different from the God of Chris- 
 tians. He means the sum of things, and whatever that 
 principle is which lies at their root — that principle which 
 explains them as gravitation explains the movement of 
 the planets, and is exhausted by such manifestation. It 
 was possible, in former days, for Faith to slumber in 
 some closed chamber of the mind while the logical under- 
 standing seized on all present event as its exclusive 
 property, and felt that its negative conclusion could not 
 touch God. Now that we see every moment to be as 
 full of Him as any moment ever was, we must trust Him 
 infinitely more, or must cease to trust Him at all. 
 
 The Science of our day stands towards Time as the 
 Science of the Renaissance stood towards Space. As 
 the astronomers of the seventeenth century, in destroy-
 
 388 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 ing the old cosmogony of the earth below and the 
 heavens above, discovered a new star in this seeming 
 dark earth, so the men of Science of the nineteenth 
 have discovered in the seemingly undivine processes 
 of all growth the work of the Creator. The six days 
 of Creation have expanded to take in the course of 
 all the years, as the realm of Heaven expanded to 
 take in the orb that holds all that is known of life. 
 Yet the men of the seventeenth century recognized 
 with glad reverence that their discoveries were but an 
 enormous expansion of the Divine, and the men of 
 the nineteenth deem that their discoveries eliminate 
 the Divine from the realm of all that man can know. 
 Whence this vast difference of spirit in two revolutions 
 identical in principle ? Why was it easy to recognize 
 the Divine influence throughout all Space, while it seems 
 impossible to recognize that influence throughout all 
 Time without a degradation and dilution of the meaning 
 in what is Divine that practically leaves men, as far as 
 consciousness goes, superior to the force which they 
 know, while it cannot know them ? 
 
 Our aim is history, but if history land us on a pro- 
 blem, we cannot conclude our review without attempting 
 to suggest the direction in which the answer is to be 
 found. Such an attempt, made in face of a problem 
 so vast and so ancient, can be but little more than 
 an indication of tendencies inadequately recognized, and 
 truths obvious indeed, but not obviously connected with 
 the questions which give them their most important illus- 
 tration. The contrast between the earnest and devout 
 astronomy of the seventeenth century and the irreverent 
 and narrowing physiology of the nineteenth seems to us 
 explained, so far as it is explained at all, by the far 
 greater stress on Faith which is demanded by an exten- 
 sion of the Divine Agency to all Time than to all Space.
 
 THE HERITAGE OF TO-DAY. 389 
 
 Time is the common element of the inner and the outer 
 experience. Space belongs only to the last. We can- 
 not think, we cannot feel, we cannot dream, without some 
 change, imperceptible as it may be, and inadequate as it 
 may seem to its content, of the shadow on the dial. To 
 be told that the Divine working is nozv, is a far greater 
 revelation than to be told that the Divine Presence is 
 here. It forced men to a recognition, immensely and 
 immeasurably greater, of that distinction in the Divine 
 Agency which separates the manifestation of Divine Will 
 from the manifestation of Divine Character. It did not 
 introduce that distinction. When men believed that the 
 tiger's claws and the sensitive nerves which feel lacerated 
 flesh were the work of a moment in the sixth day of 
 Creation, they did not feel it impossible to say, " The 
 infliction of pain, apart from penal decision, must no 
 doubt be accepted as a decision of the Creator, but in- 
 dications of His character must be sought elsewhere." 
 They find it impossible to keep hold of this conviction 
 when the sharpening of the claw and the increased sensi- 
 tiveness of the nerve is exhibited as a gradual process, 
 part of the whole course of things which, as far as con- 
 cerns what we call Nature, was in the beginning, is now, 
 and ever shall be. Nothing is brought before them but 
 a change concerning time, but what seems to have hap- 
 pened is, that God has been dethroned to make way for 
 Nature. 
 
 The fervour of modern Democracy is explained, as 
 well as the fervour of modern Science, by their common 
 recoil from an abandoned creed. This doctrine we have 
 been studying, wliich called itself Christianity, was in its 
 whole political aspect a worship of the exceptional. The 
 ordinary course of tilings was unblessed ; salvation was 
 a setting aside the ordinary course of things, an escape 
 into some realm that was no inheritance of humanity.
 
 390 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 In our day, on the other hand, if any desire is widely 
 felt, that fact is supposed to establish its legitimacy. 
 We imagine ourselves to approach the ideal of govern- 
 ment in proportion as we give a larger number of indi- 
 viduals a chance of influencing government. The divine 
 right of kings has been succeeded by the divine right of 
 multitudes. There is a virtue, it is thought, in multi- 
 plication. If each individual wants something wrong, 
 they cannot all together want something wrong. Human 
 nature is elevated into a sort of Divine rule, regulating 
 the disorders of individual will. The worship of the 
 exceptional is changed into the worship of the universal, 
 even at times into the worship of the average. The 
 " worship of humanity " by a small but influential sect 
 among us is but the caricature of what is felt by all who 
 exercise an obvious and lively influence on our own 
 generation. 
 
 It may thus seem at times as if the epoch of indi- 
 vidualism, which began with the modern world, were at 
 last at an end. We are apparently returning towards the 
 ideal of antique life, according to which the unit of moral 
 thought was not the individual but the group. Modern 
 Democracy, with its bias towards Socialism, its deference 
 towards " the masses," appears to revive the classical 
 reverence for the State at the expense of the individual. 
 Modern Science, with its great idea of Evolution, opens 
 a backward vista in the history of every man which 
 exhibits his seventy years of individual life as an insig- 
 nificant fragment of all that makes up his true history, 
 and thus arresting all judgment until his moral bio- 
 graphy be completed by all its ancestral preface, returns 
 towards the Augustinian idea of Original Sin, seen 
 under the fainter light of a day which knows only evils 
 and not Evil. Yet all, probably, which is vital in this 
 revival of a past ideal, is of the hour. Never can a 
 
 11
 
 THE HERITAGE OF TO-DAY. 391 
 
 principle of incorporation which depended for its life on 
 repulsion widen to include the human race. And then 
 again never can the Individual lose the indefeasible claim 
 that Immortality has symbolised for mankind. Science, 
 explaining every man's life by a finite prelude, cannot 
 undo the work of belief in an infinite future ; it is not 
 anticipation alone which has been affected by that belief, 
 nor may its influence be banished when it is itself re- 
 jected. Men and women may refuse to regard them- 
 selves as heirs of immortalit}^, but they can neither 
 abdicate nor refuse to concede the claims which only 
 began to exist with that high anticipation. The words 
 " for ever," uttered by lips on which they were a hope or 
 a fear, do not lose their meaning as they fall on ears- 
 which receive them as a mere fiction. Those who deny 
 must explain them, and whatever the explanation, it 
 must involve a consciousness in man — were he cut ofT 
 from all political grouping, were he alone in Juan 
 Fernandez, never expecting to look on the face of a 
 fellow-man again — of something that seems eternal. 
 The eternal can never be subordinated to the perishable 
 — even though the eternity be but a hope, and the 
 transient far outlast the span of man's sojourn on earth. 
 The questions that concern the being in whom an 
 infinite hope has arisen can never again be subordi- 
 nated to those which concern the framework of his life 
 in this world, however inferior be the span of his own 
 life here, and however faint and dim the hope of any 
 other. 
 
 We have seen how the evolution of the moral life of 
 Humanity passes in throbs of antagonism from race to 
 race, and how yet this antagonism is never a mere recoil ; 
 so that, when the Persian Dualism arose to protest against 
 the confusion of Good and Evil in the Indian Pantheism, 
 this dualism held some hint of an ultimate Unity, which,
 
 392 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 as the goal of all existence, must also have been in some 
 sense its starting-point. And then, again, we have seen 
 how, when the process was reversed, and the rich variety 
 of the artist people was exchanged for the monotony of 
 the world's lawgivers, there was yet a sort of escape from 
 that monotony in the influence which made of Rome the 
 mediator of the nations, enclosing in its hard frame-work 
 the variety of the Greek world. No stage of thought, 
 in an individual life or in that of the world, can be a 
 mere unsaying of what has gone before. Yet thought 
 progresses by a continual turn towards such an unsay- 
 ing. When the consciousness of the race passed from 
 that conviction which was the groundwork of all ancient 
 morals, that the State was a unity, to the double con- 
 viction that the individual is a unity, and that the human 
 race is a unity, it made an advance which could never 
 again be lost, but which with the progress of the ages 
 withers into as exclusive a doctrine as that against which 
 it was a reaction. Man, to the old world, was a mere 
 fragment of the Republic. To the modern world the 
 starting-point of thought has been the individual man. 
 Perhaps no greater revolution ever moved the world of 
 thought than that which effected this change in its moral 
 unit; it has needed nearly two thousand years to work out 
 its consequences, and exhibit the morality of the "Self" 
 as the classic world exhibited the morality of the citizen. 
 And now, it would seem, a new epoch of expansion dawns 
 on the world. Science has given the word Self a new 
 meaning ; in the light of Evolution it is seen to contain 
 as a part of its very being a relation to the Past. We 
 need to carry on this expansion into a different direction. 
 What each man means when he says " I " is but a frag- 
 ment. The true I is made up of relation to something 
 larger than itself; its instincts are centrifugal as well as 
 centripetal ; it has not to create bonds with other per-
 
 THE HERITAGE OF TO-DAY. 393 
 
 sonalities ; it need but recognize those which make up a 
 part of its own being. Personality is the very source of 
 Unity ; but it has been the constant temptation of human 
 beings to impoverish this Unity, to refuse to recognize 
 its organic relational character, to ignore the multiplicity 
 which lies at its base. We shall discern this multi- 
 plicity when we discern the larger Unity which encloses 
 it. We shall see that Self means relation to Man when 
 we see that it means also relation to God. 
 
 All the strength of ancient life was wrought up witli 
 its exclusiveness. A few persons were welded into a 
 closer unity than that attained by any modern State, 
 because a number of persons, quite as necessary to its 
 existence as any of its members, were treated as things. 
 Towards this unity we can never return. We cannot 
 so unlearn the lessons that we inherit with our bodily 
 structure as ever to combine in a conscious unity which 
 is to shut out others of our kind. We have no antago- 
 nistic pressure to supply limits from without ; our one- 
 ness must come from a universally felt attraction towards 
 something within. Men think in our day that this 
 centre can be found in the ideal of Humanity. They 
 have yet to learn that no ideal is possible if that which 
 is idealized know no Beyond. These pages have been 
 occupied with an effort to illustrate from the history of 
 moral thought the belief that Man can strive towards no 
 virtue in which he does not feel the sympathy of God. 
 He must feel himself in some sense a fragment, if ever 
 he is to discover his true oneness. Virtue must be a 
 refracted ray from something above Virtue ; duty must 
 be the aspect, visible in our dense atmosphere, of a 
 higher excellence extending far beyond it. And they 
 who would deny this, they who feel that Nature ex- 
 hausts God, that the summits of human virtue arc the 
 summits of moral excellence, that reverence is the pro-
 
 394 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 vision for inferiority, and fades away before Man reaches 
 those heights towards which he is alwa3^s striving — they 
 can find in the moral thought of the Past Httle but a 
 collection of errors. Man, if we judge him by history, 
 knows himself only so far as he turns towards the eternal 
 Other of the human spirit ; he finds his true Unity only 
 as he finds a larger Unity which makes him one with 
 himself and with his brother man.
 
 Note to page i86. 
 
 [It has been pointed out to me, by a reader of the first 
 edition, while these sheets were passing through the press, 
 that the true analogue for the Venus of Virgil, as a type of 
 the Divine Mother, must be sought in Thetis rather than in 
 Aphrodite. I think any one who will compare the freakish 
 whimsical result of the appeal of Thetis to Zeus — the lying 
 dream sent to Agamemnon, the purposeless pretence at a 
 wish for a return, &c., — with the whole action of the /Eneid, 
 wherever Venus appears in it, will allow that the contrast 
 between Venus and Thetis illustrates the remarks in the text 
 almost as well as the contrast between Venus and Aphrodite, 
 No doubt Venus is just as partial as Thetis is, (and so is 
 the Mediaeval Virgin). But the difference in their dignity, and 
 their connection with the plan of the world's history, seems to 
 me immense.]
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Abraham, 254, 267, 269 
 
 Acvina, 13 n, 
 
 Adam, 253, 279, 305, 312, 350, 366 
 
 Aditya, 21 ?i. 
 
 *^neid, 179, 186, 2C7 
 
 .^schylus, 74, 89-94, 102, 283, 353 
 
 Agamemnon, 299 
 
 Agni, 5, 19, 21 71. 
 
 Ahab, 78 
 
 Ahriman, 19, 51-80, 322, 355 
 
 Ahura, 18 n. 
 
 Alexander, 149 
 
 Alexandria, 251, 253, 268 
 
 Amos, 79 n. 
 
 Anderson (Art of Gunnery), 377 n, 
 
 Andra, 18 n. 
 
 Anthony, 241 n. 
 
 Antigone, 118, 283 
 
 Antonines, age of, 215, 286, 287 
 
 Anytus, 225 
 
 Apollo, 89, 94 
 
 Ardisheir, 321 n. 
 
 Aristides, 103 
 
 Aristotle, 85, 96 «. , 106 «., 142, 143 «. 
 
 Arjuna, 41 n. 
 
 Arnobius, 288 n. 
 
 Athens, 102, 114-119, 137, 248, 339 
 
 Athene, 87, 102 
 
 Augustine, 326-383 
 
 Augustus, 184 
 
 Kacchus, 243 
 Bacon, 277, 382 
 Bardesanes, 319 n. 
 Beaumont, Rev. Joseph, 275 n. 
 Beausobre, 322 n. 
 Bentley, 229 n. 
 Bi-rni, 232 //. 
 Bhagavadgita, 41 n, 
 Blceck, 59 n. 
 
 Blondcl, L'Art de jetcr les bonibc?, 
 377 «• 
 
 Bournouf, Emile, 10 «., 11 «. , 34 n., 
 
 36 «. 
 Brahmanism, 32-34 
 Buddhism, 34-40 
 Bulis, 105 
 
 Bundahis, 56 n., 73 «. 
 Busyacta, 59 
 
 C.^DMON, 356 71. 
 
 Caesar, Julius, 149, 296 
 Cain, 284 //. 
 Cakya-muni, 35, 36 
 Callicratidas, 140;?., 160 
 Caligula, 192 «., 269 
 Canus, Julius, 192 71. 
 Carthaginians, 153 
 Cato, 240 
 Charmides, 141 ti. 
 
 Cicero, 134, 1357/., 137 «•- i55. 156 «•. 
 158 71., 159 71., 188 «., 196-198, 203 
 
 «., 240, 241 71., 341 71. 
 
 Cicero, Quintus, 197 «. 
 
 Cincinnatus, 368 
 
 Clemens Alexandrinus, 306 «., 310 «., 
 
 312 71., 342 It. 
 Clementina, 335 «., 342 n. 
 Commodus, 237 
 Comte, 240 
 Corbulo, 192;/., 196 
 Corinthians, loi 
 Creon, 96, 98 
 Creusa, 181 
 Critias, 141 «. 
 Croesus, in, 121 
 Cyrus, 58, 77, 93 
 
 Dantk, 147, 180, 207, 240, 292, 319, 
 381, 384 
 
 Darius, 68 
 
 Uarmesteter, 18 71., 28 «., 49 //. , 51 
 
 71., 52 //. , 59 71., 66 //. 
 
 Darwin, 168 «., 337, 382
 
 398 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 David, 79 "' 
 Davies, John, 41 n. 
 Demosthenes, 102 n. 
 Dido, 178, 179, 182 
 Dillman, A., 356 n. 
 Dio Cassius, 260 ?i. 
 Dion, 211 
 
 Dhammapada, 35 n, 
 Djemschid, 70 
 Domitian, 194 n., 195 
 Druids, 207 
 
 Eden, 279, 304, 362 
 Elisha, servant of, 182, 183 
 Empedocles, 299, 347 n. 
 Enoch, 285 f?., 355 n. 
 Epicharis, 188 n. 
 Epictetus, 220-237, 349 
 Ephesians, 309 n. 
 Erinnys, 94 
 Eumenides, 89, 90 
 Euripides, 283, 299 n, 
 Eusebius, 288 «. 
 Eve ; see Adam. 
 Exodus, 269 n. 
 
 Faustina, 237 
 F^n^lon, 45 
 Feridun, 71 
 Firdusi, 124 
 Furies, 88, 90 n. 
 
 Gaius, 155 n. 
 Galatians, 309 n. 
 Gahleo, 381 
 Gaveh, 71 
 Georgics, 178 «. 
 Gfrorer, 286 n. 
 Goethe, 187 
 Gorgias, 299 ?!. 
 Gough, A. E., 19 
 Grote, 61 n., 69 ?i. 
 Guyon, 45 
 
 Hannah, 78 
 
 Hannibal, 148, 149 
 
 Haug, Dr. Martin, 12 n., 18 n. 
 
 Hector, 178 
 
 Helen, 99, 186 
 
 Heracleitus, 120, 253 n. 
 
 Hercules, 84 
 
 Herodotus, 61 n., 68, 69 «., 74, 75, 
 105 «., 108 n., 109 «., no n., HI 
 n., 113, 115 n., n6, 121 n., 299 
 
 Hesiod, 141, 306 
 
 Holinshed, 275 n. 
 
 Homer, 41 n., 62, 87, 116, 124, 125, 
 180, 186 
 
 Hovelacque, Abel, 52 n. , 72 n. 
 
 Iblis, 71 
 Indra, 14, 18 n., 
 Iranian race, 64, 
 Irenseus, 306 n., 
 Iridj, 64, 65 
 Isaac, 254 H, 
 Isaiah, 77 
 
 19. 51 
 65 
 310 w. 
 
 Jacob and Joseph, 269 
 
 Janet, Paul, 21 n. 
 
 Jeans, Rev. G. E. , 135 ». 
 
 Jebb, Prof., 91 «., 112 u. 
 
 Job, 78 «., 79«., 89 
 
 Jocasta, 99 
 
 John the Baptist, 310 n. 
 
 John, St., 309 n., 340 n. 
 
 Joseph, 269 
 
 Josephus, 260 n. 
 
 Jowett, Dr., 85 «., 127 ti. 
 
 Jove, 100 
 
 Jude, 356 n. 
 
 Julian the Pelagian, 350 n. 
 
 Juvenal, 247 n., 260 n. 
 
 Kant, 45, 46 
 
 Karsten, editor of Xenophanes, 108 n, 
 
 Khordah-Avesta, 59 fi. 
 
 Kings, 78 n., 183 n. 
 
 Kingsley, Chas., 350 n. 
 
 Kschatriyia, 41 «. 
 
 Labdacus, house of, 93 
 
 Lactantius, 335 n. 
 
 Laodamia, 181 
 
 Lassale, Ferdinand, 120 «., 121 n. 
 
 Latinus, 178 
 
 Leges, Plato, 85 n. 
 
 Lucan, 206, 207, 261 ;?. 
 
 I..ucretius, 90 n., 163-177, 215, 229 
 
 Ludwig, Alfred, 4-14 
 
 Luke, 79, 80, 377 
 
 Luther, 383 
 
 Lycurgus, 144 
 
 Lysander, 140 n. 
 
 Mahabharata, 24 n,, 51 
 
 Mani, 321 n. , 325 
 
 Mangey's Philo, 253 «., 269 n. 
 
 Marathon, 62 
 
 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, 202 ;;., 
 
 208-237 
 Martial, 194 n., 207 n. 
 Matter, J., 308 
 Matthew, 80 «., 377 n. 
 Maxwell, Clarke, 226 n. 
 Maximus of Tyre, 340 «. 
 Megasthenes, 42 «. 
 Meletus, 226 
 Melians, 126
 
 INDEX. 
 
 399 
 
 Menu, 29, 33, 34 «., 37, 39, 40, 
 
 142 7/. 
 Merivale"s Romans under the Empire, 
 
 158;/. 
 Methodius, 335 «. 
 Mezentius, 179 
 Mill, James, 314 
 Mill, John, 62, 202, 296 
 Milton, 312, 356 >/. 
 Miltiades, 102, 103 
 Mithra, 66-68, 87 
 Mitra, 13 ?t. 
 
 Mohl, Jules, 62, 63 u., 64 7/., 71 n. 
 Muir, John, 2, 32 
 Mure, William, 128 
 Miiller, Max, 2 u., j 11., 10 n., 19 n., 
 
 27 n. , 30 
 
 Nero, 191, 194 n., 195, 196, 315 
 Newman, John Henry, 345 
 Nicias, 113 
 Nirvana, 34-36 
 Numbers, 269 n. 
 
 OEDIPUS, 90-99, 112 ti., 201 7/., 366 
 Orestes, 93, 95 
 Origen, 35672., 358 n. 
 Ormazd ; see Ahriman. 
 Osiris, 243 
 
 Pascal, 210, 216 
 
 Pastor, a Roman knight, 192 n. 
 
 Paul, St., 47, loi, 230, 234, 248, 259, 
 
 315. 339 
 Pausanias, the traveller, 90 
 Pausanias, the general, 103 
 Pelagians, 347 n., 350 n. 
 Pelagius, 348 n. 
 Persius, 222, 223, 231 n. 
 Peter, St., 335 7/, 
 Pharsalia, Lucan, 194, 195 »., 207 n., 
 
 261 n. 
 Phsedrus, 136, 298 n. 
 Phcebus, 90, 91 
 Philo, 251-275, 310 
 Pilate, 257 
 Pilia, 197 n. 
 Pindar, 122 
 Piso, 155 n. 
 Plataea, battle of, 60 
 Plato, 85, 86 71., 87, 104, 108, 128, 
 
 132. 133. 139. 140, 141 «•. 142-144. 
 
 ig6n., 200, 211, 218 n., 226, 241, 
 
 249. 297-299, 322, 334. 347, 370, 
 
 378 
 Plolinus, 306 n. 
 Plutarch, 149, 213, 242, 2^)3, 251, 
 
 274 «.. 367 n. 
 Polilicus, 249, 299 n., 334 n. 
 
 Polybius, 148 7?. , 150 77. , 153 
 Polycrates, 121 
 Polyphemus, 180 
 Pompey, 247 ?/. , 24S 
 Priam, 99, 178 
 Prometheus, 304, 353, 356 n. 
 Protagoras, 128 //. 
 Proverbs, 307 
 Ptolemy Soter, 260 
 
 QuiNET, Edgar, 66 n. 
 
 Rammohun Roy, 30 
 Rawlinson's Herodotus, 74 
 Renan, 209 
 Rigveda, 2-43 
 Romulus, 93, 368 
 Rousseau, 382, 385 
 Rubellius, Plautus, 192 n, 
 Rustem, 63 
 
 Satan, 78. 80, 88, 89, 304, 323, 333 
 
 Salvian, 368 n. 
 
 Schiller, 194 
 
 Schopenhauer, 19 n. 
 
 Scott, 122, 203 
 
 Sejanus, daughter of, 350 
 
 Seneca, 159, 192 ?:., 194 77., 203, 220, 
 
 236, 363 
 Servius Sulpicius, 205 n., 341 n. 
 Septuagint, 253 
 Se.\tus of Chaeronea, 213 77. 
 Shah-rameh, 62-65, 7°' 124 
 Shakespeare, 113, 123, 275, 356, 366 
 Sicinnus, 69 77. 
 Simon Magus, 335 
 Smerdis, 68, 69 
 Socrates, 132, 136, 140, 142 77., 143, 
 
 144, 196, 217, 218, 225, 298 
 Sohrab ; see Rustem. 
 Solon, 121 
 Soma, 9 
 
 Sophocles, 90, 93-112, 122, 262, 283 
 Spencer, Herbert, 20 77. 
 Sperthias ; see Bulis. 
 Spiegel's translation of Khordah- 
 
 Avesta, 59 77. 
 St. Hilaire, 30 
 Strabo, 42 77., 247 n. 
 Sudra, 32-34 
 
 . 15s «• 
 192 77., 
 
 158 n. 
 206 n.. 
 
 Tacitus, 90 n. 
 188 77., 191 7/., 
 Tchandala, 36 77 
 TcrtuUian, 306 n. 
 'I'hemistoclcs, 102, 103 
 Thucydidcs, 113 117, 125-128 
 Tiberius, 155, 210 
 
 . 159. 
 247
 
 400 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 TirriDeus, 286 «., 298 n., 310 «. 
 Tiro, 158 n. 
 Tullia, 198, 205 n. 
 Tur, 64, 65 
 Turnus, 179 
 
 Ulysses, 105 
 
 Upanishads, 19 «. , 25-27, 31, 32, 
 
 44 
 Ushas, 5, 6, 19 
 
 Valentinus, 335 n. 
 Varuna, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 56 
 Vendidad, 53 «. 
 
 Virgil, 176-187, 193, 200 n., 207, 215 
 Vritra, 51 
 
 West, E. W. , 12, 56 
 Wordsworth, 175, 176, 181 
 
 Xenophanes, 108, 140 «. 
 
 Xenophon, 58 
 
 Xerxes, 60, 62, 69, 74, 75, 109, no, in 
 
 Zendavesta, 49«., 52, 59, 67, 68, 70 
 Zervanites, 57 «. 
 Zoiiak, 64, 71, 124 
 Zoroaster, 52, 54 
 
 THE END. 
 
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 THE MORAL IDEAL. 
 
 A HISTORIC STUDY. 
 By JULIA WEDGWOOD. 
 
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 "Miss Wedgwood's subject is much more than 'the Moral 
 Ideal,' and she treats it in a masculine fashion which shows us 
 the large intellectual background without which moral ideals could 
 never have grown to any fulness of maturity. . . . Masterly essays 
 . . . shot through and through with fine criticisms." — Spectator. 
 
 "The work is worthy of study, being gracefully, sometimes 
 eloquently, written, and containing much earnest thought." — 
 Morning Post. 
 
 "The attentive reader will not fail to find in it the choice fruit 
 not only of much reading, but of much acute and original thought 
 on the great questions of morals and religion. ... It describes, 
 often with deep insight and great delicacy of touch, not a few of 
 'those throljs and pulsations which make up the true life of man.' 
 . . . Woman has undoubtedly played a noble part in the develop- 
 ment of the moral ideal, and the sympathetic reader of Miss Julia 
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 the aspirations of mankind in successive ages, and then to place 
 those feelings, those aspirations, beside the picture of human 
 action as it has developed itself throughout history. . . . Careful 
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 facts and illustrations." — Scotsman. 
 
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 than twenty years of historic study, and the result is a singularly 
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 mines the reader as to the real significance of all history. . . . 
 Manifestly one can do little more in a work of such scope and of 
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 histoiy. . . . We had noted numerous passages for special refer- 
 ence in this brief survey, but already too much has been written to 
 no purpose if sufficient has not been said to awaken in the reader 
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 antiquity as it is exceptional in the poetic beauty of its diction." — 
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 covered is very wide, and the observations and criticisms are not 
 culled from other writers, but are original. The book is in no 
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 "The secondary title which the authoress had thought of giving 
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 errors circling round the belief that was the life of a former age." 
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