Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN ; u THE ETHIC OF FREETHOUGHT A LECTURE DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE INSTITUTE ON Tuesday. March G, 1883 BY KAHL PBAHSOlSr^ ]M.A. FELLOW OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBKIUGE "Nunquam natura frangit sua jura." — Lucius in Cunaliih Christi. " The truth is that Nature is due to the statuting of Mind." — Hegel. LONDON: E. W. ALLEN, AVE MAEIA LANE PBICE THBEEPEJfCE THE ETHIC OE FREETHOUGHT. IT is not without considerable hesitation that I venture to address you to-night. There are periods of a mail's hfe when it is better for him to be silent — to listen to others rather than to preach himself. The world at the present time is very full of prophets ; they crowd the human market-place — they set their stools at every possible corner, and perched thereon, they cry out the merits of their several wares to as large a crowd of folk as their enthusiasm can attract, or their tongue reach. Philosophers, scientists, orthodox Christians, freethinkers^-rwise men, fools, and fanatics, are all shouting on the market-place, teaching, creating", and destroying — perhaps working, through their very antagonism to some greater truth of whose existence they and we are alike scarce conscious. Amidst such a hubbub and clatter of truth and of falsehood, of dogma and of doubt — what right has any chance individual to set up his stool and teach his doctrine ? Were it not far better for him, in the language of Uncle Bcmus, to " lie low " ? Or if he do chance to mount, that a kindly friend should pull his stool from under him ? I feel that no man has a right to address his fellows on one of what Carlyle would have termed the " Infinities " or "Eternities" unless he feels some special call to the task — unless he is deeply conscious of some truth which he m7ist communicate to others, some falsehood which he vmst sweep away. The power of speech is scarce to be used in private without a holy fear ; in public it becomes a most sacred trust which ought to be used by few of us, and only on the rarest occasions. Hence my hesitation in addressing you this evening. I have no new truth to propound, no old falsehood to sweep away— what I can tell you, you have all probably heard before in truer and clearer words from those who may rank as prophets of our modern thought. I came here to learn rather than to teach, and my excuse for being here at all is the dis- cussion which usually follows these papers. I am egotistical enough to hope that that discussion will be rather a sifting ot your views than a criticism of mine — that it should take rather the form of debate than of mere question and answer. With this end in view I shall endeavour to avoid all controversy. I do not understand by a discussion on Freethought an attack SRLF on orthodox Christianity ; — the emancipated intelligence of our age ought to have advanced m the consciousness of its own strength far beyond such attacks ; its mission is rather to teach than to quarrel — to create rather than to destroy. I shall assume therefore that the majority of my audience are freethinkers — that they do not accept Christianity as a divine and miraculous revelation ; and I would ask all, who holding other views -may chance to be here to-night, to accept for a time our assumption, to follow us whither it leads, and mark its results. For only by such sympathy can they discover the altimate truth or falsehood of our relative standpoints ; only such sympathy distinguishes the thinker from the bigot. In order to explain the somewhat criticized title of my lecture I am going to ask you to accept for the present my definitions of Religion, Freethought, and Dogmatism. I do not ask you to accept these definitions as binding, but only to adopt them for the pui^Dose of following my meaning. I shall begin with an axiom — which is I fear a dogmatic proceeding — yet I think the majority of you will be inclined to accept it ; my axiom runs as follows: " Tlic wliole is not identical ■with a part.'" This axiom leads us at once to a problem: What relation has the part to the whole? Applying this to a particular case, we state : The individual is not identical with the universe ; and we ask : What relation has the individual to the universe ? Now I shall not venture to assert that there is any aim or end in the universe whatever ; all I would ask you to grant is that its configuration alters, whether that alteration be the result of mere chance, or of a material law, or of a superior cogitative being — is for my present purpose indifferent. I simply assert that the universe alters, is "be- coming; " iDliat it is becoming I will not venture to say. Next I will ask you to grant that the individual too is altering, is not only a "being" but also a "becoming." These alterations, whatever their nature, be it physical or spiritual (if there is any distinction) I shall — merely for convenience — term life. We may then state our problem as follows : Wliat relation has the life of the individual to the life of the universe? — Now without committing ourselves to any definite dogma I think we may recognize the enormous disparity of those two expressions, the "life of the individual" and the "life of the universe." The former is absolutely subordinate, inconceivably infini- tesimal compared with the latter. The "becoming" of the latter bears not the slightest apparent reference to the "be- coming " of the former. In other words the life of the universe appears not to have the slightest ratio to the life of the indi- vidual. The one seems finite, limited, temporal, the other by comparison infinite, boundless, eternal. This disparity has forced itself upon the attention of man ever since his first childlike attempts at thought. The " Eternal Why " begins ta> haunt his mind ; " Wliy, eternally why am I here ? " he asks.. What relation do I, a part, bear to the whole^he sum of all things material and spiritual ? WQiat connection has the finite with the infinite ? the temporal with the eternal ? Primitive man endeavours to answer this question off hand._ He finds a power within himself capable apparently of reviewing the whole ; he rushes to the satisfactory conclusion that that power must be itself infinite ; that he, man, is not altogether finite, and so he constructs a doctrine of the soul and its im- mortality. Then he builds up myths, superstitions, primitive religions, dogmas, whereby the infinite is made subject to the finite — floating on this huge bladder of man's supposed im- mortality. The universe is given a purpose, and that purpose is man — the whole is made subordinate to the part. That is. the first solution of the problem, the keystone of most concrete religions. I do not intend to discuss the validity of this solu- tion. I have advanced so far merely to arrive at a definition, and that is as follows : Bcligion is the relation of the finite to the infinite. Note that I say religion is the relation. You will mark at once that as there is only one relation, there can be only one religion. Any given concrete system of religionis only so far true as it actually explains the relation of the finite to the infinite. In so far as it builds up an imaginary relation between finite and infinite it is false. Hence, since no existing religion lays out before us fully the relation of finite and infinite, all systems of religion are of necessity but /^a// truths. I say half truths, not %vhole falsehoods, for many religions may have made some, if small advance towards the solution of the problem. The great danger of most existing systems lies in this — • that not content with our real knowledge of the relation of the finite to the infinite, they slur over our vast ignorance by the help of the imagination. Myth supplies the place_ of; true knowledge where we are ignorant of the connection between finite and infinite. Hence we may say that most concrete systems of religion present us with a certain amount of knowledge but a great deal of myth. Now our knowledge of the relation of finite to infinite, small as it may be, is still continually increasing — science and philosophy _ are continally presenting us with broader views of the relation of man to nature and of individual thought to abstract thought. It follows at once therefore that since our knowledge of the rela- tion between the finite and infinite, that is our acquaintance with the one true religion is ever increasing by however small degrees ; that in every concrete religion the knowledge element ought to increase and the myth element decrease, or as we might express it, every concrete religion ought to be in a state; of development. Is this a fact? To a certain small extent it is — Christianity for example to-day is a very different matter to what it was 1800 3^ears ago. But small as oiu' increase in knowledge may be, concrete systems of religion have not kept pace with it. They persist in explaining by nujth, portions of the relation of the finite to the infinite, concerning which we have true knowledge. Hence we see the danger, if not the absolute evil of any myth at all. An imaginary explanation of the relation of finite to infinite too often impedes the true explanation when man has attained it. This gives rise to the so-called contests of religion and science or of religion and philosophy — the unintelligible conflicts of "faith"' and "reason"' which can only arise in the minds of those, who cannot perceive clearly the distinction between myth and knowledge. The holding of a myth explanation of any problem whereon mankind has attained true knowledge is what I term enslaved thought or dogmatism. Owing to the slow rate of development of most concrete religions, they are all more or less dogmatic. The rejection of all myth explanation, the reception of all ascertained truths with regard to the relation of the finite to the infinite is what I term freethougJit or true religious laiowledge. In other words, the freethinker, in my sense of the term possesses more real religion, more of the relation of the finite to the infinite than any mere believer in myth ; his very knowledge makes him in the highest sense of the word a religious man. I hope you will note at once the extreme difficulty according to this definition of obtaining freedom of thought. The free- thinker is rather an ideal than an actuality ; it is, too, a pro- gressive ideal, one advancing with every advance of positive knowledge. The freethinker is not one who thinks things as Jie will, but one who thinks them as they must be. To become a freethinker it is not sufticient to throw off all forms of dog- matism, still less to attack them with coarse satire ; this is but negative action ; the true freethinker must be in the possession of the highest knowledge of his day ; he must stand on the slope of his centuiy and mark what the past has achieved, what the present is achie\dng — still better if he hiin- self is working for the increase of human knowledge or for its spread among his fellows — -such a man may truly he termed a high priest of freethought. You will see at once what a positive, creative task the freethinker has before him. To reject Christianity or to scoff" at all concrete religion by no means constitutes freethought, nay, is too often sheer dog- matism. The true freethinker must not only be aware of the points wherein he has truth, but must recognize the points wherein he is still ignorant. Like the true man of science he must never be ashamed to say, here I am ignorant, this I 6 cannot explain. Such a confession draws the attention of thought, of research to the dark points of our knowledge, it is- not a confession of weakness but really of strength. To slur over such points with an assumed knowledge is the dogmatism of philosophy or the dogmatism of science, or rather of false philosophy and false science — just as dangerous as the dog- matism of a concrete religion. Were I to come here and tell you that certain forces were inherent in matter, that these forces sufficed to explain the union of atoms into molecules, the formation out of molecules of chemical compounds, that certain chemical compounds were identical with protoplasm, and hence build up life from a primitive cell even to man, — were I to tell you all this and not put down my finger every here and there and say, this is an assumption, here we are really ignorant ; this is probable, but we have yet on this point no exact knowledge ; were I not to do this I should be no true scientist — it would be dogmatism of false science, of false freethought — every bit as dangerous as that religious dogma- tism which would explain all things by the existence ot a personal god or a triune deity. Hence, materialism in so far as by dogmatism it slurs over scientific ignorance; atheism in so far as it is merely destructive ; positivism w4iile it declares the relation of the finite to the infinite to be beyond solution ; agnosticism as the apotheosis of ignorance ; and j)cssi??iis))i which declaring the problem beyond solution, yet replaces it by no system of enthusiastic human morality — these one and all are not identical with freethought. True freethought never slurs over ignorance by dogmatism ; it is not only destructive but creative ; it believes the problem of life to be in gradual process of solution ; it is not the apotheosis of ignorance, but rather of knowledge. Thus I can- not help thinking that no true man of science was ever a materialist, a positi^ast or a pessimist. If he were the first, he were a dogmatist ; if either of the latter he must hold his task impossible or useless. I do not by this identify freethought with science ; far from it. Freethought, as we have seen, is knowledge of the relation of the finite to the infinite, and science in so far as it explains the position of the individual with regard to the whole, is a very important element, but not the totality of such knowledge. I trust' you will pardon the length at which I have discussed these matters, if I have succeeded in conveying to you what I imderstand by Beligion, Freethought, and Dogmatism. Beligion I have defined as the relation of the finite to the infinite ; Free- thought as our wecessarily partial knowledge of this one true religion, and Dogmatism as replacing the known by_ the mythical, or supplementing it by the imagination, that is in any way impeding the gTowth of freethought. You will say at once that it is an extremely difficult, if not impossible task to be a freethinker. I cannot deny it. It is extremely difficult to approach closely any religious ideal. How many perfect Christians have there been in the last nineteen hundred years? Answer tliat, and judge how many perfect fr'eethinkers fall to the lot of a century ! No more than baptism makes a man a real Christian, does shaking off dog- matism make a man a fr-eethinker. It is the result of long thought, of patient study, the labour of a life, — it is the single-eyed devotion to truth, even though its acquirement may destroy a previously cherished conviction. There must be no interested motive, no workiiig to support a party, an individual, or a theory, such but leads to the distortion of knowledge, and those who do not seek truth from an unbiassed standpoint are, in the theologj^ of fr'eethought, ministers in the devil's synagogue. The attainment of perfect freethought may be impossible, for all mortals are subject to prejudice, are more or less dogmatic, yet the approach towards this ideal is open to all of us. In this sense our greatest poets, philosophers, and scientists, men such as Goethe, Spinoza, and Darwin, have all been fr'eethinkers ; they strove, regard- less of dogmatic belief, and armed with the highest knowledge and thought of their time, to cast light on the one great problem of life. AVe, who painfully struggle in their foot- steps, can well look to them as to the high priests of freethought. Having noted what I consider the essence of freethought, and suggested the difficulty of its attainment, I wish, belbr(> passing to what I may term its " mission," to make a remark on my definition of religion. Some of you maj' feel inclined to ask, — " If you assert the existence of religion, surely you must believe in the existence of a god, and probably of the so-called innnortality of the soul? " Now I must request you to notice that I have made no assertion on these points whatever. By defining religion as the relation of the finite to the infinite, I have not asserted the existence of a deity. In fact, while that definition makes religion a necessary logical category, it only gives God a contingent existence. My meaning will be perhaps better explained by reference to a concrete religion even, which places entirely on one side the existence of God and the hope of immortalitv. I refer to Buddhism, and take the followin"" quotations fr'om lihys Davids' lectui'es : — " Try to get as near to wisdom and goodness as you can in this life. Trouble not yourselves about the gods. Disturb yourself not by curiosities or desires about any future existence. Seek only after the fr-uit of the noble path of self-culture and self-control." The discussion of the future of the soul is called the " walking in delusion," the "jungle," the "puppet-show,"' and the " wil- 8 derness." " Of sentient beings," we are told, " nothing will sui-vive save the result of their actions ; and he who believes, who hopes in anything else, will be blinded, hindered, ham- pered in his religious growth by the most fatal of delusions." . Such notions render Buddhism perhaps the most valuable study among concrete religious systems to the modern free- thinker. I shall now proceed to consider what I hold to be the mission of the fi-eethought I have just defined. In the begin- ning of my lecture I endeavoured to point out how the_ dis- parity between the finite and the infinite, — between the indi- vidual and the universe, — forces itself upon the attention of man. Struggle against it as he may, the " Eternal Why" will haunt his mind. If he sees no answer to this question, or rather if he discovers no method by which he may attempt its solution, he is not seldom driven to despair, to pessimism, to absolute spiritual misery. Note, too, that this spiritual misery is some- thing quite distinct from that physical misery, that want_ of bread and liutter, which, though unregarded, is yearly crying out louder and louder in this London of ours ; yet though distinct, it is none the less real. The relief of physical misery is a question of morality, of the relation of man to man— an urgent question just nov.^ pressing for immediate attention ._ yet beyond the limits of our present subject. The relief of spiritual misery, also very prevalent now-a-days, owing tp the rapid cohapse of so many concrete religious systems, that is the mission of freethought. I do not think I am assuming anything very extravagant in asserting that it is the duty of humanity to lessen in every possible way the misery of humanity ; it is really only a truer expression of the foundation of utilitarianism. Hence the mission of freethought to relieve spiritual misery is the connecting link between freethought as concrete religion and freethought as morality. Let us examine a little more closely the meaning of this mission. The individual freethinker, except in very rare cases, can advance but little our partial knowledge of the relation between the finite and the infinite. He must content himself with assimilating so far as in him lies the already ascertained truth. Now, although the already ascertained be but an in- finitesimal part of the truth yet undiscovered, nevertheless the amount of truth added to our stock in any generation is in itself insignificant compared with what has been received from the past. In other words, the greater portion of our know- ledge is handed down to us from the past, it is our heritage — the birthright of each one of us as man. Every freethinker, then, owes an intense debt of gratitude to the past ; he is necessarily full of reverence for the men who have preceded him ; their struggles, their failures, and their successes, taken 9 as a whole, have given him the gi-eat mass of his knowledge. Hence it is that he feels sympathy even with the veiy failures, the false steps of the men of the past. He never forgets what he owes to every stage of past mental development. He can with no greater reason jeer at or abuse such a stage than he can jeer at or abuse his ancestors or the anthropoidal apes. Even when he finds his neighbour still halting in such a past stage of mental development, he has no right to abuse, he can only endeavour to teach. The freethinker then, treats the past with the deepest sympathy and reverence. Herein lies, I think, a crucial test of much that calls itself freethought. A tendency to mock stages of past development, to jeer at neigh- bours still in the bondage of dogmatic faith has cast an odium over the name freethinker which it will be difficult to shake off. Such mocking and such jeering never can be the mission of true freethought. Let us suppose now our ideal fi'eethinker has educated him- self. By that I mean that he has assimilated the results of the highest scientific and philosophical knowledge of his day. It is not impossible that even then you may turn round upon me and say he has not solved the problem of life. I admit it. Yet in so far as he is in possession of real knowledge — that is, of truth — he has made a heginning of his solution. For the very word truth itself denotes some absolute, fixed, unchange- able law, and therefore a connection between the finite and the infinite. But not only has he made a beginning of his solution ; he has started himself also in the true direction, wherein he must continue to work out the problem. No myth, no dogmatism can lead him astray ; the freethinker of to-day has this advantage over the past, that where he is igno- rant, he confesses it, and this in itself increases the rate at which the problem of life will be worked out. At every step there will not be an ever recurring myth to be swept away ; at every turn his oum dogmatism will not act as a drag upon his forward progress. Hence it seems to me that the true freethinker can relieve a vast amount of spiritual misery ; he can point out how much of the problem, albeit little, has been solved ; he can point out the direction in which further solution is to be sought. Thus we may determine his mission — the spread of actually acquired truth — the destruction of dogmatism beneath the irresistible logic of fact. It is an educational, creative, not merely a destructive mission. Do not think this mission a light one ; it is simply appalling how the mass of truth already acquired remains in the minds of a few ; it is not spread broadcast among the people. I do not speak so much of the so-called lower classes, who, so far as in them lies, are beginning to inquire and think for themselves, but rather of those who 10 are curiously termed the "educated." Take the average clergyman of whatever denouiination, the church or chapel going lawyer, merchant, or tradesman, as a rule you will find absolute ignorance of the real bearings of inodern philosophy and modern science. Here freethought has an infinite task of education. A remedy scarce seems possible till science and philosophy are made necessary parts of the curriculum of all our schools and universities. The mission of freethought, however, lies not only in the propagation of existing, but the discovery of new truth. Here it finds its noblest function, its holiest meaning. This pursuit of knowledge is the true worship of man — the union between finite and infinite, the highest pleasure of which the human mind is capable. It is hard to conceive the intense delight which must follow upon the discovery of some great truth. Keppler, after years of observation, deducing the laws which govern the planetary system ; Newton, after long puzzling, hitting upon the principle of gravitation ; or Sir William Hamilton, as the conclusion of complicated analysis, finding the existence of conical refraction and verifying the wave theory of light — in all these and many other cases the convic- tion of truth must have brought endless pleasure. Even as Spinoza has said — "He who has a true idea is aware at the same time that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt of the thing." So with truth comes conviction and the consequent pleasure. Yet this is no self-complacency, but an enthusiastic desire to convey the newly-acquired truth to others — the in- tense wish to spread the new knowledge, to scatter its light into dark corners, to sweep away error and all the cobwebs of myth and ignorance. Hence it is that those from whom free- thought has received the greatest ser\'ices have been, as a rule, either philosophers or scientists, for such men have done most to extend the limits of existing knowledge ; it is to them that freethought must look for its leaders and teachers. Here note, too, a very remarkable difference between freethought and the older concrete religions ; the priest of freethought must be fully acquainted with the most advanced knowledge of his- day; it will be no longer possible to send "the duffer of the family " to make a living in the church ; the thinker only can appeal to the reasons of men, though the semi-educated has too often served to influence their undisciplined emotions. But I have wandered rather fi'om my point, that portion of the mission of freethought which relates to the discovery of new truth. It is in this aspect that the essentially religious character of freethought appears. It is not a stagnant religious- system with a crystallized and unchangeable creed, forced to reject all new truth which is not in keeping with its dogma, but one which actually demands new truth, whose sole end is- 11 the growth and spread of human knowledge, and which must perforce adopt every great discovery as essentially a j^ortion of itself. From this pursuit of religious truth ought to arise the enthusiasm of freetllought ; from this source it ought to find a continuous supply of fuel w4iich no dogmatic faith can draw upon. If freethought once gi^asped this notion of its functions,. I cannot help thinking the consequent enthusiasm would soon carry it as the mastering religious system through all grades of society. So long as freethought is merely the cynical ant- agonism of individuals towards dogma, so long as it is merely negative and destructive, it will never become a great living force. To do so, it must become strong in the con\-iction of its own truth, creative, sympathetic with the past, assured of the future, above all enthusiastic. No world movement ever spread without enthusiasm. In the words of the greatest of living German poets — " Throu.^li the soul of tlie enthusiast rushes the wind of the eternal spirit ; All the great deeds of earth — are they not the enthusiast's work ? " It is no little future which I would paint for this new religious movement, yet it is perhaps the only one which has a future ; all others are of the past. It will have to shake itself free of many faults, of many debasing influences, to take a broader and truer view of its mission and of itself. Yet the day I believe will come when its evangelists will spread through the country, be heard in every house, and be seen on every street preaching and teaching the only faith which is consonant with the reason, with the dignity of man. Not by myth, not by guesses of the imagination is the problem of life to be solved ; but by earnest application, by downright hard work of the brain, spread over the lifetime of many men — nay, of many centuries of men, extending even to the lifetime of the world ; for the solution of the problem is identical with the mental development of humanity, and who can say where that shall end ? Such then seems to me the mission of freethought, and the fi'eethinker w4io is conscious of this mission may say proudly in the words of the prophet of Galilee, " I come not to destrov, but to fulfil." There still remains a point in which, perhaps, above all others, my ethic of freethought may seem to you vague and unmeaning. I refer to the nature of that truth, that know- ledge of the relation between the finite and infinite, which it is the principal duty of freethought to seek after. If we were able to assert that all things happen by chance, that there was no definite relation between one finite thing and another finite thing ; that precisely the same set of circmnstances results to-day in a different effect from yes- terday ; that ruins of worlds and of nations, of phases of 12 being and of civilization were ever passing without apparent beginning or end into nothingness ; that everywhere huge upheavals of chance were eternally starting, eternally ceasing without meaning and as the mocking playwork of chaos — were this the case, all hope of connecting the finite and the infinite would be impossible. Not only the recorded experience of our own and all past ages tell us that this is not the case, but I venture to assert that it is absolutely impossible it should be the case ; for the very simple reason that no man can conceive it. The very fact of such chance, of such chaos, would render all thought impossible — conception itself must cease in such a world. Once obtain a clear conception of any finite thing, say water, and another clear coiiception of any other finite thing, say wine — then if one day these conceptions may be different and the next day the same — it is obvious that all clear concep- tions will be at an end, and if this chance confusion reigns between all finite things, it will be impossible for man to form any conceptions at all, impossible for him to think. The very fact that man does think seems to me sufficient to show that there is a definite relation, a fixed order between one finite thing and another. This definite relation, this finite order is what w^e term Laic, and hence follows that axiom without which it is impossible for any knowledge, any thought to exist, namely, " The same set of causes always produces precisely the same effect." That is the very essence of the creed of fi'eethought, and the rule by which every man prac- tically guides his conduct. What is the nature of this Law, this outcome of cause in effect ? Ob%dously it is not a finite changeable thing, it is absolute, infinite, independent of all conception of time or change, or particular groups of finite things. Hence it is what we have been seeking as the relation between finite and infinite. It is that which binds together the individual and the universe, giving him a necessary place in its life. Law makes his "becoming" a necessary part of the " becoming " of the universe ; neither could exist without the other. Knowledge therefore of the relation of the finite to the infinite is a knowledge of law. Religion according to the definition I have given you to-night is law,* and the mission of h'eethought is to spread acquired knowledge and gain new knowledge of this law. Let me strive to explain my meaning more cleary by an example. Supposing you wxre to grant me the truth of the principle of gi'avitation and the theory of heat as applied to the planetary system. Then I should be able to tell you, almost to the fraction of a second, the exact rate of motion and the position at a given time of each and all the planetary bodies. Nay, I might go further, and describe the " becoming " of each * A fact partially grasped by the Jews. 13 individual planet, its loss of external motion, motion of position and rotation ; then, too, its loss of internal motion, motion of vibration, or heat, &c. All this would follow necessarily from the laws you had granted me, and the complicated work of mathe- matical analysis would all be verified by observation. Now note, every step of that mathematical analysis follows a definite law of thought ; one step does not follow another from chance, but of absolute necessity. I can think the succession in one way only, and that one way is what '? Why the very method in which the facts are occurring in so-called nature ! This enables me to draw your attention then to another phase of law — namely, the only possible way in which you can think things is precisely identical with the actual wa}^ in which they do occur. When the thought-relation does not agi'ee with the fact-relation the incongruity is always the result of unclear thinking, or unclear facts — false thought or false conception of facts. Let me explain more clearly my meaning. When we say that two and two make four, we recognize at once a law which, if contradicted, would render all thinking impossible. Now it is precisely this aspect of the so-called laws of nature which I wish to bring into prominence. Take, for example, Keppler's laws of planetary motion ; these he discovered as results of the comparison of a long series of observations. At first sight they might appear as certain laws inherent in the planetary system — empirical laws which chanced to regulate that parti- cular portion of the material universe. But mark what happens : Newton discovers the law of gi-avitation ; then thought can only conceive the planets as moving in the manner prescribed by Keppler's laws. In other words, the planets move in the only way thought can conceive them as moving. Keppler's laws cease to be empirical, they become a necessary law of thought. The law of gra^^tation being granted, the mind must consider the planets to move precisely as they do, even as it must consider that two and two make four. You may perhaps object : "But at least the law of gravitation is an empirical law, a mere description of a blind force inherent in matter — it might have varied as the inverse cube or any other power, just as well as the inverse square." Not at all ! It is not my j^ur- pose to explain to you to-night, how the physicists seem on the point of proving the absolute thought necessity of the law of gravitation — what wondrous conceptions the very existence of an universal fluid medium forces upon them. Yet so far I may hint, that if we suppose matter to consist ultimately of spherical atoms capable of vibrating — and there is much to confirm such a supposition — then, owing to their mere exist- ence in the fluid medium, thought can conceive them only, and is compelled to conceive them only as acting upon each other in a certain definite manner, and as a result of analysis this 14 luanner turns out to be soinething very akin to the so-called law of gravitation. Thus the law of gravitation itself would become as necessary a law of thought as that two and two make four ! At present our positive knowledge is far too small to allow us to piece together the whole of the universe in this fashion. Many of our so-called laws are merely empirical laws, the result of observation ; but the progress of knowledge seems to me to point to a time when all the finite things of the universe shall be shown to be united by law, and that law itself to be the only possible law which thought can conceive. Suppose the highly developed reason of some future man to start, say with clear conceptions of the lifeless chaotic mass of 60,000,000 years ago, which now forms our planetary system, then from those conceptions alone he wdll be able to think out the 60,000,000 years' history of the world, with every finite being that has been upon it ; each will have its necessary place, its necessary course in this thought system — and this total history he has thought out ? — will be identical with the actual history of the world ; for that history has evolved in the one only way conceivable. The universe is what it is, because that is the only conceivable fashion in which it could be, — in which it could be thought. Every finite thing in it, is what it is, because that is the only possible way in which it could be. It is absurd to ask why things are not other than they are, because were our ideas sufficiently clear, we should see that they exist in the only way in which they are thinkable. Equally absurd is it to ask why any finite thing or any finite individual exists — its existence is a logical necessity — a necessary step or element in the complete thought analysis of the universe, and without that step our thought analysis, the universe itself, could have no existence. There is another point fr'om which we may view this rela- tion of law to the individual thinker. There has long been apparent antagonism between two schools of philosophy — the Materialists and the Idealists. The latter in their latest deve- lopment have made the individual "I" the only objective entity in existence. The "I" knows nought but its own sensations, whence it forms the subjective notions, which we may term the idea of the "I" and the idea of the universe. The relation of these two ideas is, as in all systems of philosophy, the great problem. But in this idealism the idea of the "I" and the idea of the universe are, as it were, absolutely under the thumb of the individual " I," — it is objective, they subjective : it proudly dictates the laws, which they must obey. It is the pure thought law of the "I" which determines the relation between the idea of the " I " and the idea of the universe. On the other hand the materialist finds in nature certain unchangeable laws, which 15 he supposes in some iiiaiiiier inherent in his indefinable reahty matter ; these laws do not appear in any way the outcome of the individual " I," but something outside it, with regard to which the "I" is subjective, — which, regardless of the thought of the "I," dictates its relation to the universe. Is the ant- ao-onism between these two methods of considering the " I " and the universe so great as it at first sight appears ? Or rather, is not the distinction an idle one of the schools ? Let us return to our idealist. Having made his thought the proud ruler of the relation between the idea of the "I" and the idea of the universe, he is compelled, in order to grasp his own position, to regulate his own conduct in life, to place himself — his " I" — in the subjective attitude of the idea of the " I ;" to identify himself with the idea of the "I." This act is the abnegation of his objectivity, he becomes subjective, and the objective entity w^hich rules his relation to the universe is an abstract " I," — pure thought, that is w4iat determines the connection be- tween the " I" and all other finite things, — between finite and infinite. In other words, idealism forces upon us the concep- tion that the law which binds the finite to the infinite is a pure law of thought, that the only existing objectivity is the "logic of pure thought." But this is precisely the result to which materialism, as based on physical science, seems to point — namely, that all so-called material or natural laws v/ill ulti- mately be found to be the only laws thought can conceive — that so-called natural laws are but steps in the " logic of pure thought." Thus, with growth of scientific knowledge, all chs- tinction of Idealism and Materialism seems destined to vanish. Eeligion, then, or the relation of the finite to the infinite, must be looked upon as matter of law — not a blind law of apparent chance, but a law of thought — even as two and two make four*. We have to look upon the universe, as it were, as one vast intellect, every fact as a thought, and every succession of facts as a succession of thoughts ; as thought only progresses in logical order of intellect, so only does fact. The law of the one is identical with the law of the other. To assert, therefore, that a law of the universe may be interfered with or altered, is to assert that it is possible to conceive a thing otherwise than in the only conceivable way. Hence arises the indifference of the true freethinker to the question of the existence or non- existence of a personal God. Such a being can stand in no relation whatever of active interference to the law of the universe ; in other words, so far as man is concerned, his existence cannot be a matter of the least importance. To repeat Buddha's words, "Trouble yourselves not about the gods ! " If, like the fr^ogs or the Jews, who would have a king, you insist upon having a god, — then call the universe with its vast system of iinchan^^1^, By MOXCUEE D. CONWAY, M.A. Being Discourses delivered before South Place Eeligious Society, Fiusbury. Voliunc I., consistin;/ of the first 26 numbers, Now Rcadi/. Price 3s., neatly bound in cloth. E. W. All::x, Ave Maria Lane, and all Booksellers. ^mttl] Mm ^eligioHs ^0mtj FINSBURY, E.G. ♦*- "WHAT IS RELIGION?" -♦♦- A DISCOURSE DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.G. Oh SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1884, BY DR, ANDREW WILSON, F.R.S.E.. &c. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. LONDON : Waterlow and Sons Limited London Wall. "WHAT IS RELIGION?" THE question which forms the topic of this morning's dis- course, has had no lack of replies. It was tacitly answered in the by-gone ages when man, looking skywards, beheld in the sun the great object of his adoration, and, when in a spirit of thankfulness for light and heat and all other good gifts, his heart worshipped the great orb of day. It had its reply when the spirit of human development formulated the creeds of the mystic beliefs of the east. Wherever and however the prompt- ings of human hearts have led men to look for the daystar of their existence, the reply to the question, " What is Religion ? " has practically been afforded. Not indeed, " which religion is true?" or "which belief is most in accord with the spirit of the age ? " These arc secondary and not universal matters. You are dealing in this question with a matter which asks for no definition of creed, and for no statement of policy. You are pressing to the foundation of things when you put the question as it stands before us to-day, and when }'Ou insist on a rcpl}'. Not whether Christianity or Buddhism is true ; not whether this sect is right and that sect wrong ; not whether an eastward position is necessary for devout worship, or a black gown more pleasing to God than a white one ; not whether hell-fire, well drummed into the heads of the masses, is the best incentive to salvation, or whether the eternal hope of universalism is to be believed — these, I repeat are the mere straws borne in the current, and not the river itself — these are mere questions of petty detail, of ritual, of theological practice — they are not the grand and solemn matter which faces the world now, as it has ever presented itself to view since human brains first awoke to the consciousness that the riddle of the universe was not an easy one to solve. "What is Religion?" is a question, too, which this very day is being brought anew to the thresholds of our intel- lectual dwelling-places, with a fervour and a force, such as have rarely been matched in all the history of the past. You stand to-day, in the presence of an argument which is trebly instructive to humanity at large. The lesson of the day is one which, in the pages of magazines and in the columns of news- papers, is being debated, often with perfervid eloquence, always with the deepest zeal. What, let me ask you, would the last generation have thought of such a spectacle as that of which you have been spectators within the last few months ? The scientific basis of faith argued at length in the full blaze of noonday ; questions the most solemn man can discuss, openly threshed out to conclusions widely at variance with all established ideas of what is commonly called " Religion." There is ample food for reflection in the very existence of such a controversy as that in which Mr. Spencer and Mr. Harrison have for some time been engaged. We may rejoice, I think, in all sincerity, that such things are possible to-day, and that matters which the past regarded as the inviolate property of the Churches, should have come to be recognized as more truly the belonging of humanity. For " Religion," after all, is not now an affair of the priest, but of the man. There are no oracles left in Delphi, and the mystic voices which threatened or encouraged man of old, have been silenced for ever. The function of the temple has disappeared, and the church no longer serves to teach the only great and saving truth to the multitude. This is the day when wisdom cries aloud in the streets and in the market-place ; and with the wise man of old, we may add, ' happy are they who hear her voice and follow in her footsteps.' The revolution in thought, of which the recent controversy is but a symptom, is greater and grander than we are apt to imagine. The thinker to-day has passed the apologetic stage of things. He has neither need nor desire to apologise for the statement of the truths with which he defends his cause. There is no fear of either stake or banish- ment for the thinkers who write to-day freely and fully of beliefs, which, whatever their divergencies from orthodox lines, have won their right to be heard as replies to the question " What is Religion ? " Men are not, now, really concerned in arguing how much of this gospel is true ; whether that miracle is false and this one real ; or whether the resurrection was a reality or a myth. They have passed beyond that stage of argument, and have emerged into a freer atmosphere, and a wider field of culture. For them, the pressing question of the day is far more vital than such matters as the authenticity of the gospels, or the accurate translation of texts. Religion has passed into the domain of the higher culture of the age. Like the history of mankind it has become the subject of scientific inquiry. Like society itself, religion has become a matter of comparative science and study, and a subject whereof the historic treatment has much and indeed everything to say. We are in the higher atmosphere of culture, to which the spirit of the age has led us in the inevitable progress which underlies all vital action, and which rules the destinies of all human affairs. The controversy which has of late been waged around us is instructive beyond measure, not only on the grounds I have specified, but on account also of the attitude in which two foremost thinkers of our age stand towards the great question I have chosen as the subject of this discourse. The world has been following with deep interest the discussion in which Mr. Spencer and Mr. Harrison appear as the chief actors. Tacitly, each has made an endeavour to frame a philosophical reply to the question, " What is Religion ? " This has been the real point at issue between them. It has not been so much a question of Comte versus " the Unknowable," as what is, after all, the most satisfactory object of worship ? Beginning with the discussion of the Ghost-idea as a historic basis of religion, the argument has really merged into one of the worthiest object of reverence. Mr. Spencer finds his system of thought to lead him towards an Eternal and Unknowable, which is the source of all things. Mr. Harrison finds in the idea of Humanity a satis- factory object of worship. Mr. Spencer's is an unlimited and illimitable ideal, while Mr. Harrison's is a circumscribed and well-defined object of religious faith. The former looks over earth and sky in a gaze which is co-extensive with matter and coeval with force. The latter narrows his concepts in the issue he has to face, to the sphere of the highest life the world knows. It is with Mr. Spencer as though he has roamed high and low in search of an object of worship and of a finite thought which shall satisfy the soul of man. To his quest the words of the Psalmist might well be applied. " Whither can he go that he may llee from its presence ? If he ascends into heaven it is there, if, on the wings of tlie morning, he dwells in the uttermost parts of the sea, it is there also." lie cannot escape from this Eternal Power that everywhere besets him. He sees it in the atoms that dance in the sunbeam ; he beholds it equally in the sun- light, and in the faint mist which melts away into apparent nothingness, as the day dawns and the night shadows flee away. He notes its presence in the jelly-speck that moves through the water-drop. He sees it at work in the opening of the bud, in the expanding of the flower, in the growth of the tree. He faces it again when he looks to the tribes of animals ; and again encounters it when he regards the lower life that moves abroad, and when he bethinks himself of the human estate. If he applies to churches and to creeds, to human testimony, and to the wisdom of all the ages, he can learn nothing of its nature, nothing of its source, of its beginning or its end. Wherever and whenever man has tried to face the problems of life, he has met with this same mysterious force which everywhere besets his working life — which now, as of old, seizes upon his own elements when he dies, and resolves them into new combinations. Man- kind, for Mr. Spencer, has been always face to face with this mystery of things. Sometimes he has called it God, sometimes the power that makes for righteousness ; now he has sacrificed animals before its shrine, and now his own kith and kin, by way of propitiating its anger, or of imploring its mercy. Sometimes, too, he has folded his hands in the vain attempt to solve the mystery or penetrate the gloom. The altar at Athens which bore the inscription " to the Unknown God," may have carried in its legend a far higher concept of things than even Paul could dream of or understand. And so, in the face of this ultimate problem of the world and all its affairs Mr. Spencer folds his hands, no less in wonder than in reverence, before the mystery the ages have not even touched, and before these things which no science can weigh or measure, and no thought formulate. It is in such an attitude — call it by what name you will — that the mind, rejecting the petty conceptions which theologies in their anthropomorphism have devised, rests on its oars in its sea of doubt, and maintains that while God it knows not, it yet remains in the presence of an Eternal and Unknowable — an Infinite and Eternal Energy— from which all things proceed. With Mr. Harrison, the case is altogether different. You have to endeavour to denude yourself as completely as you can of the Spencerian attitude, ere you may realize the standpoint from which the Positivist surveys the universe. The hopelessness of attempting to define the Unknowable, strikes the Positivist's mind with remarkable force. Its belief may be fairly described, I think, as a revulsion from the view to which the Spencerian and Agnostic philosophy has committed itself. There is a great deal to be said, in such a controversy, for the influence which a man's point of view exerts on his acceptance or rejection of a given belief. That which appears to one mind absolutely fascinating in Mr. Spencer's view, will seem utterly hopeless and unreal, if not illogical, to a mind of another order. The Infinite and Eternal Energy may seem to one the highest realization of the thoughts which are capable of being framed regarding the mystery of things. To another, this phrase is full of hollow emptiness. Nor can you well reconcile the divergent views. One human heart will rest satisfied that it can know nothing of the ultimate mystery of things ; while another longs for, cries for, and demands that you shall give it something tangible in the way of a religious faith. The one rests content with a subjective universe, the nature of which no man can know. The other clamours for objective realities, and refuses to bow the knee to the shadowless subjectivity which is believed to be the cause of all things. You cannot find a common ground of reconciliation between these conflicting moods of thought ; but you are bound to allow for the demands of each all the same. I conceive it is to minds of the objective type to which l\Ir. Harrison will appeal with force and power. The Spencerian " Unknowable " these minds will not, because often they cannot, grasp. They demand something nearer home than this far-off eternal entity which perpetually eludes their mental grasp. They desire something akin to themselves — an object which shall give some token of response to their efforts. They ask no wonder, but they demand some sign, that the universe is not bare and destitute of sympathy and love. True, they have cast themselves as far adrift from the theologies of gods and devils, sinners and saints, as have the Agnostics and Materialists. For them, the Avhole Christian scheme is as unreal and as unsatisfying, as it is to the Agnostic himself. But the end of thought, for them must be something 8 less shadowy, and more tangible than the all -pervading power of Spencer; and it is under such circumstances that Positivism — the Religion of Humanity — seems to strike a note that seems well fitted to become the dominant tone of a life. Here, in the region of Humanity, you are told, you need not wander far in search of a satisfying ideal, which, in its love of man shall out- rival Christianity itself, and which in its rejection of superstitions and dreams, shall accord with all the advancing tides of thought which have freed the human mind from intellectual thraldom and theological chains. Here, you can cultivate science, art, literature, fearless of the gaol to which your thinking may lead you. If you thirst for love and sympathy, fidelity and truth, you have but to realize what a perfect humanity should be, and may be, in order to obtain your ideal state. You have no need to go skywards in search of Unknowables and Eternals, when a more satisfying object of worship or of life's devotion — call it what you will — is spread before you in the great sea of human life that swells and roars around you, — a sea with whose tides and currents, moreover, you yourself are identified. The whole course of history and evolution, the Positivist will declare to you, has had man for its pivot, and human development towards the highest and best as its aim and its end. The very course of the search after the highest good, as outlined in the history of the world, has been one which, the Positivist contends, shows how real are the objects of his life's interest. You begin in every movement with institutions, you pass thence to the Utopias of your race, and )'ou see the Utopias in time, fade away into the myths, superstitions, heavens, and eternities of the race. Rome begins with institutions, but Carthage falls and shatters them all. She advances with Augustus to the Golden Age, which closes with the Gracchi ; and later on, in the spirituality of Dante, you see the hopes of the race fade away into the waste deserts of specu- lation and dream. And the same will possibly be true of every nation, and of all systems of thought. But, beyond these things, says the Positivist, you have Humanity — always emerging, puri- fied and ennobled from his bath of fire and trial, you find the JMan, The humanity lasts while the ages pass ; the man re- mains, while your creeds and systems decay, and your churches crumble. The man evolves, upwards, onwards, while the eternal round of things whirls ceaselessly through the spheres, and human aims grow larger ^' with the process of the suns." Here, then, is the hope of the race and its reHgion. In no skies or heavens — not awa}' in the cold, starHt space, need you seek for your eternal good — -around you, at your feet, encompassing you on every side, heard in the laughter of the child, and in the groan of the multitude, are the articles of )'our creed. This great Humanity demands your aid, your sympathy, your worship if need be, says Mr. Harrison and his friends. You can employ your talents and your time, nowhere so well or so profitably as in the advancement of your race. " Except ye believe in Humanity, ye shall in no wise reach the high development at which you aim," may be said to be the cry of the Positivist to- day ; and there is no denying that the creed contains much that is noble, much that is good, and pure, and thus all worthy the following of the race. I have contrasted these two contending ideas that we may the more readily extract from them the common ideas in which, I think, the solution, whole or partial, of the question " What is Religion ? " may bs said to lie. I do not think that solution rests so much in the Positivist philosophy as in that of Mr, Spencer. This is only an individual expression it is true ; but it may com- mend itself to your minds, if I can succeed in establishing my preference by an examination of the excellencies and defects of each system. Let us firstly allow for the special attitude of the individuals w ho concern themselves with each system. Let us keep in mind that what fully satisfies one, may, and does, appear wholly unsatisfactory to another. Remembering that we are bound to allow something for personal and mental bias in the selection of a belief, let us endeavour to see wherein the idea of the unknowable may perchance claim a preference for the mind over that of humanity ; and how, from the comparative merits of the two systems, the answer to the question " What is Religion ? " may be legitimately evolved. The attempt to analyse out the feelings which animate Agnostic and Positivist alike, in seeking for an object worthy their deepest respect, or in the endeavour to discover the ideal of life, is by no means a difficult one. Nay, it may be urged, such an attempt is common to every earnest mind that has, in some fashion or another, tried to solve the problem of the world and its way. Mankind early begins in awe and wonderment to lO ask itself the meaning of life, and of the powers which are presumed to rule its destinies. Mysticism besets humanity in its first attempts to read the riddle of time ; and from amongst the dreams and doubts, the ghosts and spectres of these early days, the first beginnings of the primitive theology slowly emerge to view. Here, there is the idea of worship — the intent through fear, rather than through love or thankfulness, to propitiate, to revere, and to worship. But it is at first, and indeed all through, a worship of the unknown. No man hath at any time beheld the Father ; and prophet and priest, Moses and Christ, arise in due time to reveal the ways of God to man. It is always the same in the history of religions. You have the spirit of inquiry, the faint glimmerings of reason, and the restless, irresistible cause- seeking propulsion of human forces, all prompting the search into the reasons of things. This is the spirit of science, of free- thought, of unfettered truth-seeking. Allowed to go freely in one direction this spirit evolves the Aristotles and Platos, the Newtons and Herschels, the Tyndalls and the Darwins of every age. Prompted to pass into other channels, and guided by the hand of priestcraft — pioneered and piloted by the survival of the old mystery of things — this same spirit, in another phase, evolves the Pauls and Peters, the Mahomets and the Christs, of the theologies and religions which the world knows. Sooner or later, man finds himself in one attitude or the other toward the powers he conceives have made the world and all that world owns. Humanity either prostrates itself before the shrine of churches and faiths which represent the survivals of the old mysteries of the race, or finds itself face to face with the altars of nature and the great world which owns science alone as their high priest, interpreter, and friend. This, then, in a broad sense, is the reply to the question, ' how has the religious instinct been evolved ? ' It arises out of man's desire to solve the mystery of things, and to formulate a theory of the universe wherein he dwells. All other features are merely the appendages of this main thought. Goodness and morality, the thankful heart, the kindly word, truth and trust, rewards and punishments, are only the outcomes of the primitive religious spirit — they are in no sense religion itself. And if this is so, what, it may be asked, is the attitude in a religion which shall best entitle its followers to hope for the fullest life and the happiest existence to which man II can aspire ? These things, I reply, will depend simply on the relation in which your religion places you with the best culture of your day. It is here that the comparison between the Agnostic Philosophy and the Positivist Creed becomes inevitable. Beautiful as is the idea of a perfect humanity, let me ask you if it comprises all to v.-hich your mind may, as a matter of pure intelligence, aspire? Suppose that the world devoted itself to-morrow, and all the days of its life, to the culture of a supreme and perfect science of man — to the evolution of a high and lofty anthropology — would such a culture satisfy every aspiration and put an end to the speculations in which science, literature, and art of all kinds find their life and existence ? If you are to begin and end your religion with the best that humanity can be or become, it seems you must possess a somewhat limited field of devotion after all ? When we are asked if we can really pretend to worship the unknownable ? we may rationally retort by asking if we can reasonably expect to find a satisfactory object of devotion in man ? While there may remain the still more pertinent question of Sir James Stephen, whether we should re- tain this idea of worship and religion as in any sense necessary or advantageous for the liberal mind ? Mr, Harrison, in his latest utterance declaims his willingness both to spell humanity with a small "h " and to give up the word worship if that is a stumbling block.* He will substitute for worship the terms "affection and reverence," but it is hard to see that he gains or loses by the substitution. He cannot rid himself of the fundamental idea wdiich animates all the creeds and faiths. His is the nature which demands a something higher, better, purer, than itself, but still a reflex of itself, to love, to reverence, and to adore. Divest the name 'religion' of all its ordinary associations ; strip away from the term every commonplace thought ; rend in pieces once and for all, equally the blind homage of the peasant to the Romish image and its gew-gaws, and the more cultured worship of the ideal presence man maybe content to call his "god," and you still find the Positivist demand for something whereon that feeling of worship can be exercised. Call this something Humanity, or speak of it with Mr. Harrison, as the intelligent love and respect for our human brotherhood, * "Nineteenth Century," September, 1884, page 369. 12 or term it in plain language the ideal man, and you are still found, I think, bowing the knee in a temple of Rimmon, when a far clearer atmosphere awaits you outside. What is there in Positivism after all, that differs so much from the broader Unitarianism of the times? Dilute the latter faith with a dash of liberalism, widen out its bounds to recognise no deity such as the common ideas have evolved ; and when you have, lastly, eschewed the Bible, thrown tradition to the winds, and adopted a free rendering of Comte as a substitute for the Scriptures, you shall find in the ideal humanity, the object you may adore. This is only reversed anthropomorphism after all. Instead of projecting man outwards to form on the face of the skies the ideal god, you simply invert the god-idea over humanity, and find in such a combination the ideal man. Travel away from this unsatisfying concept of religion to the wider, freer sphere of which the Spencerian philosophy is only one and a convenient form of illustration. Here, you have passed the rubicon which asks you to see in Man — the elevated, highly- evolved brute — a fit end to every thought which longs and bounds to pierce the grandeur of matter, the far-reaching nature of force, and the infinity of space. For you, there is no ending in the human domain. You do not find the conclusion of the whole matter at the topmost twig of the animal kingdom, nor do you found your religious faith on the mental, moral, and general endowments and practices of the highest mammal we know. You will not bear any such circumscribing of the thoughts that lead you to survey the mighty universe of glittering suns and stupendous orbs. You refuse to curb your intellectuality, as }'ou deny the right of your own species to give you the intellectual kingdoms of the earth if you will but fall down and worship what is, at the best, an ideal and often impossible self. Taking your stand once again in Mr. Spencer's position, you begin to realize that there is a wider sphere for the mind's play than mere attention to human virtues, all excellent as these may be. There is an outer universe amidst which you are much more likely to find at once your mental limits and your mind's satisfaction than in the territory of an idealized humanity. Science tells you there can be set no limitation to her powers — her motto is "onward, onward," whatever be her failures and her disappointments ; and she will submit to no curtailment of her 13 powers or accept the human domain alone, as the focus of all her attempts to bring light into the dark places of inquiry and research. Rest content, if you will, with your possibilities of humanity — if you can remain satisfied with the great "to be" of your race ; but do not complain if bolder spirits fail to find your satisfaction in the contemplation of man, and refuse to shut their eyes to the grander problems that wait for solution outside the world which claims human interests as its only aim. Mr. Harrison strikes, for the freer thinker, the knell of his own creed when he says that while " Divinities, and Absolute Goodnesses, and Absolute Powers have ended for us," "the relative goodness and power of our race remain a solid reality." " Solid," I re-echo — Yes, but so miserably concrete, limited, and circumscribed, that there need be offered no excuse for the mind which finds in the inscrutable power of the universe, in matter and force, aye ! even in the " godless deep " of the poet, a far more satisfying creed. Positivist and Agnostic alike stand avowedly before the ultimate mystery of things ; but it is not the Agnostic, who, having once put his hand to the plough of thought, shall turn back from the contemplation of Infinity, and rest content in the vision of the limited humanity of which he is only a fractional part, when all is said and done. If thus, for minds of the freer type. Positivism sinks into insignificance beside the grander view of the unfettered soul, the question, What is religion ? still remains for exact reply. You can go no further in search of materials for an answer to this question than is afforded by the recent controversy which has formed the burden of this discourse. For, you have seen how minds of earnest type, having set before them ideals of different nature, present essentially to themselves the momentous question 'what, after all, is this religion, whereof mankind so persistently speaks ? ' Can mankind, as Sir James Stephen puts it, do very well without religion altogether ? Is not this term 'religion' some- what a bugbear after all ? In all our thoughts and discussions is it not like the shadow of a past fear, which hovers and twitters through human life, so long as that life remains in the twilight gloom ? and will it not disappear when, in the fuller light of reason, we have come face to face with the deeper realities of things of which the voice of nature speaks plainly enough to those who will hear ? Already we have separated religion from theology. The old H legends, mythF!, and traditions have gone by the board into the sea of oblivion, while the sweeter spirits of faith, hope and love have remained as the best of all the creeds which the world has ever known, as the practical religion which alone is worthy the following of man. And is this idea of religion itself — now divorced for ever from the theologies which enwrapped, obscured and con- cealed it — susceptible of further modification ? Having passed beyond the stage of theology, what is the idea in which ' religion' to-day should find its outcome in the life of man ? Not truly in fastings and prayer, for these are vanities — not in incense and garments, for these are relics of a priesthood we cannot own — not in churches and chapels, for these are mere survivals of the ancient altars whereon everything that was pure and good was often sacrificed to the blind idolater}' of the gods. Not in all these things can you find religion ; nor in redemption from sins for which you are not responsible, nor in salvation from faults whereof, indeed, )'ou have to bear the burden in this present world. You shall not find religion in churches and chapels, but in the market-place, in the countinghouse, in the busy teeming world, and in everything that advances human health and human happiness ; in ever}-thing that cheers, ennobles and prolongs human existence, relieves human pain, and soothes the sorrows which come to the human lot. Religion thus viewed, is the property of no one sect, of no one creed, of no one time or age. You see it exemplified whenever the laws of human progress have made life more pleasant ; whenever justice, mere}- and truth are found dwelling in peace ; whenever the spirit of the age makes for righteousness ; whenever duty and truth, each for its own sake, stand boldly defined in the character of individuals or nations. Not so lon^j asro, vou learned to associate religion with sanctions and laws, with promises of heaven or fears of its antipodes. Even now, you know of those who regard human life and duty as utterly vain, save for the idea of a God who rules this world, whose ways are inscrutable, who rains on just and unjust alike, and who despises the prayer of the poor, oppressed and needy, while the wicked flourish like a green bay tree. But you have learned to outgrow such childish thoughts, and have put on the whole armour of that intellectuality which leads you to face the Unknown and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed. The world is beinf^ i^choolcd year b}' year more firmly in the kno\\'ledge of this truth, that " religion," as the churches define it, is a thing of the past — that "religion," as defined by libera thought, is one with whatever increases the happiness of man Accept this doctrine, and sec how you gain everything that is excellent in Positivism and all the creeds, while your mind goes out from the world itself, to face the myster}- that is inscrutable and unknowable as things are. The sacrifices of this religion are the good things of human life, which have been growing surely and steadily as part and parcel of human evolution from the days v\'hen the world was }-oung. The kindness, love, and charity which soften and brighten the hard ways of existence from the practice of this religion — dut}- faithfully performed ; the soldier's loyalt}', the patriot's trust, the scientist's fearless- ness, the philosopher's truth-seeking — these are the props and bulwarks of the faith which will >'et animate the world through- out all its lands. For these things you require no sanctions or revelations. They are the heritage of your race which the ages have bequeathed to you, and they constitute all that you need to make life the period of happiness which you should desire it to be. And the items in this faith of yours which demand repression are no less clearly outlined. We need not imagine that because we stand before the great silence of the Universe that the evil that walks abroad by night and noonday alike requires sanctions any more than does the good. Cowardice and meanness of life, and anger, and hate, malice and untruth, cruelt}' and wrong, work out their results through the operation of law as inexorable and steadfast as do the acts and qualities that make life sweet and joyful. Your faith in nature leads you to study her laws — and this, also, is religion. You learn that good and evil are only comparative terms after all, and that as the evils of the past have been conquered, defeated, modified, or abolished, the evils that are present vrith us now, shall, in the advances of the future, be modified or banished as well. Thus, throughout the whole sphere of human life, that you call * religion,' resolves itself into the things which improve the chances of the race, which lessen disease, prolong life, and enlarge the knowledge to which we owe our present high estate. There are survivals amongst us, still strong, still potent, of the old ideas which for long terrorized i6 the race. You may not in a day or generation be able to shake off the wish for immortality, or divest yourself of the idea of prayer, or of the many allied phases of thought your ancestry has transmitted to you. But you are gaining intellectual strength as you walk in the broad paths that lead to the know- ledge of nature and of man. You see as you emerge from the former thraldom, that your religion is only life material, life physical, life mental, wisely used, carefully lived, and happily enjoyed, as becomes those who know that theirs is the day alone. It is something of this spirit, that, standing in the starlit night, and gazing forth with the space which made Emmanuel Kant's heart beat with awe and wonder, animates the mind, which, free from creeds and dogmas, has stepped forth into the true light. Above, below, around, the mind is encompassed with the sense that the power it sees mirrored in the sky is beyond its grasp, and transcends its thought. Vast, unthinkably grand, is this power, which, in its cold sublimity, would seem to mock and despise the puny insignificance of human things. There can be no religion, no hope, no love, in such a picture, silent, sublime, as it is, — such is the unspoken thought which may cross the vista of the waiting mind. But, repelling the accusation, and turning its gaze earthward, it reads at its feet, in worm and leaf, in monad and in man, the same story of the power inscrutable — it hears the same voice on earth that proclaims the glory of the sky. And facing thus the mystery of things, the mind rests contented in its knowledge of the good and freedom amid which its lot has been cast. Its religion becomes outlined to it in every act of life, its faith is that of the larger existence which awaits the race that obeys the laws written for its guidance in the history of the past. Creed, it needs not ; of gods, it knows nothing ; but with the poet it can sing : — " I slept and dreamed that life was beauty — I woke, and found that life was duty." And when the question of to-day, and of all days, ' What is thy religion ? what is thy faith ? ' comes borne in the breezes of the air, such a mind will send to the listening world, the clear and loud reply — ' Religion is to live happily, to deal mercifully, to act justly in all things ' — and the spirit of the ages will re-echo the cry, till the whole earth is filled with a harmony that is divine. mil} Mm ^eKgioiis ^mt^ FINSBURY, E.C. ♦♦ n THE HOPES OF LIBERALISM." A DISCOURSE DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C. On SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 188^, BY DR. ANDREW WILSON, F.R.S.E., &c. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARL\ LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. LONDON ; Waterlow and Sons Limited, London Wall. "THE HOPES OF LIBERALISM." "AT 7 HO, or what, is a Liberal?" is an inquiry, which, as V V things are, in these latter days, may be found to be more difficult of reply than is usually supposed. For under the name of liberalism, there are ranked creeds and classes, men and politics, of such widely divergent views that all hope of finding some common territory of agreement, of discovering some fundamental point of harmony, would seem to be v.-ellnigh impossible. Narrowness and bigotry are not absent from liberal ranks any more than they are wanting in those of the opposite faction in science, politics, and religion. Want of consideration for the feelings, Aveaknesses, or merits of others, is by no means unknown among even the broadest of those who may claim for themselves a freedom they tacitly deny to others. Prejudice blind and erratic, is not the sole monopoly of those who think 'liberalism' a name for anarchy, and the term 'liberal' a synonym for revolution. When there is much talking — as, indeed, there always is, of the motives which incite men to take up, in science, politics, or religion, one side in preference to another — the broad, say, in preference to the narrow side — advance, in preference to stereotyped existence — progress, as opposed to the dullness of fixed belief — a more accurate exam- ination of the attitude in question may fail to discern that liber- alism, of itself, has much or anything to do with the adoption of that way of thought. That which is apparently a danger of the age we live in, with its swift advancing tides, is the liability of having our characteristics swamped in the conflict of opinions that find themselves enrolled under one and the same banner- The age has been called a levelling one; but there may be levelling-down as well as levelling-up, and it is not by any means the least important part of a liberal thinker's creed and action, to see that he is not tempted to go lower than before, by the pressure of things that surround him. This is one of the special dangers which besets liberalism, even in the freest and best of its moods. Consider the condition of the mind which has become freed fiom tra lition in any sphere of thought. In science, it may be, the mind has liberated itself from the views of a past, which, however well it may have suited the intellectual develop- ment of the days that are gone, is unadapted to guide the thought of the present time. In politics, tradition and precedent have gone by the board for such a mind ; and schemes, which shall equalize wealth, confer rights of citizenship on those who by nature require and demand them, and diffuse an intelligent know- ledge of what true citizenship means, now receive the full assent of the individual. In religion, there is seen the same course of events. Once fettered, tied to mysticism and ritual ; bound to fixed and finite ideas of God, inspiration, prayer, miracles, and the shibboleths of the sects, the mind which has passed beyond these trivialities of its religious existence, now regards its former and weighty beliefs as things of microscopic importance in the guidance of life. All these changes, all this progress, all this widening of view, is, from the liberal standpoint, a thing of joy, and an emancipation from which we have the right to augur yet better things. But for the mass of minds, there are likewise special dangers at hand in this escape into liberal territory. Liberalism is a country of progress, freedom, and light ; but like every well- ordered state, it possesses its own laws whereby it regulates its advance, fosters its powers, and encourages its subjects in well- doing. The mind freed from its former thraldom, is apt to regard the liberal territory as an absolutely free one — apt to consider wholesome guidance an injury — apt to resent the interference and advice which are as necessary for the welfare of liberalism as for the safety of any other form of human organisation. " Liberty, not license," is the watchword of liberalism in every aspect ; and it is one of the sorest regrets of the liberal who desires to order his life aright, that the two terms are so frequently confused. Here it is, that the warning of the day seems to be conspicuously aft'orded to liberalism everywhere. What is the taunt that is daily flung at the liberalism of the day by its opponents and opposers ? Not that progress is bad, or freedom wrong ; but that liberah'sm favours, by its tendencies to-day. the abuse of both of these factors in human progress. You may be, and you are, tauntingly told, that a creed which favours, or at least makes possible, socialism as a political faith, and atheism or agnosticism as a phase of religious life, is no creed for the world's acceptance. You may be warned that while liberalism starts fairly enojgh, it is an avenue which leads logically to anarchy. You may be informed that your faith is so wide that it has left to it nothing save the ill-defined drift of human ideas, passions, prejudices. And so the true gist of what liberalism hopes for, and strives for, is left out in the cold, misconstrued and neglected, or, at the most, torn to tatters in the struggle of contending factions and broils. It is well we should see clearly the exact position in which the hydra-headed thing we call liberalism stands to the culture of the day — meaning by culture, the best that is known, thought out, and spoken by the world of intellectual life. If, as liberals, we wish to be secure in our position, we must see that we are neither tempted to drift onwards into anarchy, nor to lapse backwards into a conservatism that is practically dead, and whose tenets and ideas strangle all in us that makes for progress. You can only formulate the hopes of a movement, when you have become well acquainted with its tendencies, origin, and history. With liberalism in all things, with the advancing tides of thought, this dictum holds most true. You may only know what your hopes are, when you learn what your dangers may be ; and you shall the more clearly direct your footsteps towards the goals that loom ahead for your achievement, when you have scruti- nized and measured, as accurately as may be, the difficulties which are likely to impede your way. Why should mankind, in the highest development of the state, civil, political and religious, naturally appear to divide themselves into the two factions, liberal and conservative, whig and tory, narrow and broad, which the world knows ? How comes it, that out of the world's struggle, out of the human battle, the two sects or parties emerge with their distinctive features so plainly written on the pages of history in the past, and in those of the chronicles of to-day? Can we account for the origin of liberalism, or for that of conservatism, in any department of thought ? For it is not in politics 6 alone, that you see these diverging tendencies, nor in art alone, nor in religion alone, — for in every phase of life, you meet with the two spirits of the age. The one caressing the past, cherishing its institutions, fearing advance, distrustful of the quick, sharp progress of the times, looking with reverence on authorities and powers, fearing gods much and honouring kings more ; paying court to the Caesars of the day, and regarding with horror the levelling tendency of the modern age. Such is the spirit of the conservatism, which in politics teaches that the King can do no wrong, and which in religion regards the temples of a National Church as the very gates of heaven itself. No less in art, I say, than in religion do you see the same tendency. The mediaevalism of music and vestments, the attempts to return to the crudities of centuries ago in paint- ing, the idea that what is new must necessarily be vulgar and commonplace, are all signs and symptoms of the same spirit of preservation, of equilibrium, ifonemayso put it, which marks one current of human thought. Here, the priest finds his chief stay and support. Sacerdotalism, monarchical power, and the conservatism of politics and religion, have always been boon companions. The priest has mostly been found on the side of the " powers that be," and the gods have naturally been staunch supporters of the party which favoured the Church. It was only left for infidels and reformers to take an opposite course in their life's journey ; and when Caesar's power or Caesar's gods no longer commanded respect, the stake and the axe were at the command of those who desired to keep the world from being disturbed by the awkward plain-spokenness of free- thinkers who, it was agreed, were mostly fools as well. When the old gods began to die, and when men were beginning to awake from belief in mythologies and traditions, conservatism fought stoutly to save the oracles. But the temples fell, despite the efforts of their votaries to arrest the swift revenge time had brought round, and the world's stage was cleared awhile, for the next act of the cosmical play. And then comes the scientific era, when once again liberal thought has its battles to fight and its laurels to win. It is this same tendency of the human mind you call 'conservatism ' which bolsters up the dogmas of the earth's flatness, and of the sun's position as a mere satellite of the globe. For in this spirit, men are always prone to attach to themselves the importance of the universe, and to arrogate to their own ideas the monopoly of all the wisdom which can be known of the race. And so it comes to pass in the history of science, that we burn a Bruno, and force a Galileo to recant. So it happens that the conservatism of church and state votes Darwinism infidelity, flings the term 'atheistic' freely in the face of facts and laws it cannot comprehend, sends liberals back to their constituents because they will not mock their intel- lectuality or outrage the commonsense of life by subscription to an effete invocation to the gods, and commits them to prison for an expression of unbelief which, at the worst, is only an offence against good taste, and in no sense a crime in itself. You see clearly enough, how the conservative tendency in all things runs in a groove which is definite enough, in whatever sphere it is set. What, on the other hand, it may be asked, are the characteristics of the liberal spirit, what are its achieve- ments, and to what does it owe its origin, development, and advance ? To find the beginning of liberalism you must hark back to the same point at which you began your search after the conservatism which opposes and negatives it. Wherever the restless humanity struck out a new line of thought and pro- claimed that thought in the market-place, or announced it in forum or temple, the beginnings of liberalism were seen. I do not say you can fully account for this disposition to which you apply the term liberalism, any more than you can say why conservatism is a fact of to-day. But you can trace the appearance of liberalism through the whole course of history, as much by its spirit of dissatisfaction with what is, and by its aspirations of what may be, as by any other trait of its nature. Why is it that some men are given to rest content with the state of affairs into which they have been born ? Why is it, on the other hand, that others aspire, and would fain realize possibilities of advance, of which their fellows do not even dream ? Why should one man rest contented with the primitive plough, with the ruts of the roads, with the old coach or cart, and with few and faint means of communication with his fellows ? Why is his neighbour, on the other hand, eager to invent, to enlarge his sphere of ideas, to break down the barriers of time and space, to widen the s opportunities of life, and to increase the culture of his age? There is no explanation possible, save by an appeal to the tendencies of life, and these, we shall presently see, are part and parcel of the great scheme of nature outside ourselves. But it is thus that liberalism finds her children. She makes them discontented with wrong and oppression, and causes them to rise in rebellion when king or priest outrages humanity, and elevates himself to the assumed dignity of the gods. It is liberalism which sees possibilities of progress beyond the old order in science and literature, which breaks through the hard and fast rules of content with present things, and which anticipates a future of }'et higher and better kind. Liberalism is progress and advance — not always perfect progress, 1 admit ; not always satisfactory advance. For mankind stumble and grope for new truths, because there is no heaven-born inspira- tion which guides them to the light — and so liberalism is that spirit, which, availing itself of ever}' means of advance, scorn- ing content when there are better things to be sought, walks boldly forth inspiring humanit}- with the nobility that comes of work and of doing all that is calculated to benefit our race. As Lowell has it : — All things that mould the age begin Deep down within the primitive soul, And from the many slowly upward wm, To one who grasps the whole. In his wide brain the feeling deep That struggled on the many's tongue, Swells to a tide of thought, whose surges leap O'er the weak thrones of wrong. In such words is given the clue to the genesis and beginnings of liberalism — a clue, this, of the poet's finding, which history approves, and which the backward glance of science confirms. Why are liberalism and the conservative spirit the ruling forces of the social organism ? is a question which finds its best reply in the genesis of life at large. Lowell tells us that the tendency to progress began " deep down within the primitive soul : " and I se^ no reason to doubt the correctness of the poet's inspiration. What we call tendencies of thought, for want of a better name, arc often the signs and symptoms of the working of forces which 9 are one with life and life's ways. Progress and its opposition- force are really part and parcel of the human system of things. By way of a suggestive proof of this statement, that we may find liberalism and its beginnings foreshadowed and antityped in the living universe at large, let us glance for a moment at the ordinary existence of human beings, as that existence is de- monstrated for us by the observation of ages. You see the species of animals and plants apparently fixed and stable things. The offspring seem to resemble their parents ; and when the offspring in their turn have given origin to new forms of life, these latter appear to continue the species in the same accustomed lineaments and form. But beneath the apparently stable order of things, there is continual variety and change. Sometimes the living species remains tolerably stable, it is true ; but this is a rare phenomenon in the world of life. Only here and there, do you find the animal or the plant remaining unchanged — in a kind of vital equilibrium as it were. Far more commonly you see changes occurring in the vital domain. Either the species progresses in numbers and vitality, or sinks backwarks, retrogresses, and fails in the struggle to which it is subjected. Either it is progressive, extending, increasing — or it is backsliding in the scale. And so the living thing has a threefold destiny before it — one of progress, one of stable equilibrium, or one of retrogression and decay. This much science has made plain ; and this much is not disputed as the actual phases of the life which teems in earth, air, and sea. Is there then, let me ask, no foreshadowing here of the tendencies which you find animating that humanity which has sprung from lower life, and which represents the continuation onwards of the principle of progress we know to exist in the domain of living nature ? Why should we travel beyond the laws of life for an explanation of the origin of the liberal spirit, or of the conser- vatism which opposes it. Translate humanity into the terms of life at large ; for species, substitute men ; for purely material and physical things, substitute what I dare not deny are also largely material aims — I mean politics, science, religion, art and all the other aspirations of men — and you will not find that }^our quest in search of the origin of the liberal spirit, and of its opposing tendency has been in vain. In conservatism, you lO simply behold the tendency of the human species to remain in equilibrium in respect of all its mental, political, religious and social affairs. The inherited constitution of those units who profess conservatism in any one of these affairs, or the surroundings of the unit in question, favour the stable state. There is no inducement to change, no tendency to go forwards in the race. Like the happy monad, who for ages has lived content in his pool, troubling himself in no wise about the world which roars and moves outside his waterdrop, the conservative unit has no impulse for any fuller life. But it is otherwise with the liberalism that represents the progressive tendency of the human species. Here you witness the desire for advance. Surroundings, impulses, education— these and many other conditions, make the unit dissatisfied with things as they are, and impel him to seek a larger world. The monad who swims into another and wider sphere, whose organisation is stimulated by the change, whose powers are forced to greater activity by the new surroundings, finds itself moving upwards in the scale of being. With each new advance, it gathers energy, and feels impelled to yet better things. This is the liberal spirit which has filled the world with light and life, and which has gone from strength to strength unwearied, breasting the air and cleaving the wind with the ardour of progress, and the unfalter- ing wings of the eagle. This much, then, by way of suggesting an origin and genesis of the two contending phases of thought of the day. If we leave conservatism to take care of its own interests as best it may, we have still to inquire into the hopes of that liberalism in which we have found the environments of our lives. It is difficult perhaps to assign to any special phase of liberalism the most pertinent conditions of hope and successful life. We know that the multifarious aims of liberalism, as I have already re- marked, are of a kind which, in their diversity, are apt to con- stitute the scorn of its opponents. But there are certain broader conditions which are common to all shades of liberalism of reasonable type, and especially to those which offend against no principle of truth, justice, and rational progress which has ever aided in the reformation and advancement of the world. Such are the hopes which liberalism is entitled to found on science, 1 1 literature, sociology, politics, and education, pursued as these may be, and as they are sought after, by all who value the general progress of humanity towards its goal of freedom and light. Let us examine the conditions on which these hopes are founded, and note the prevailing tendencies which are to be encouraged or curtailed in the work of advance. Taking the scientific hope, first of all, we see in such advance of thought as has proceeded from the pioneers in scientific discovery, a strong hope of the best liberalism of our own and other times. Liberalism is always on the side of science. Your conservative is a distrustful mortal in the matter of scientific advances. He either disapproves of specu- lation, or sneers at what he dismisses with the casual name of "unfounded theorizing." He forgets that humanity must make guesses at truth before it can see its way to discover exact details. He declares that if he has to choose between an ape ancestry and an origin from the angels, he will be found on the side of the angels. This, I say, is the spirit of the typical con- servative. And when you enter the domain of evolution, when you present present proof after proof to his understanding, you can at the best wring from him a grudging assent that such things may be, but that he will not move from his position until they are proved to be realities of existence. He stakes nothing for progress ; he will only accept it when others have worked for it, or when he has been forced, nolens volens, to own its sway. The liberal mind on the other hand, fearing no result of inquiry, views all research with gladness, and is eager for proof and verification of discovery by way of stimulating further investi- gation. He has his own doubts, his own difficulties ; but he has confidence in the wider issues beyond his doubts, and so unf^rudgingly, he gives to science its meed of praise and reward. When we hear individuals or crowds declaring that science is too much with us, we learn something of the mental calibre of the speakers from such a declaration. We know they are on the side of the angels, and that their stolid stability of constitution is not at all likely to prove an aid to advance. But the liberal has no fears or qualms in this respect. If the earth is no longer flat, he learns to reject the myth which inculcated that belief, without hesitating, like his opponent, before accepting the fact. If he learns that the miracle is an impossibility, an anomaly, an 15 unnecessary item in his belief, then is the miracle thrown over- board for ever. If he is told that special creation is a tradition of mankind, dished up anew in every succeeding system of theology, he hesitates no more, but abandons his ancient creed. He is impelled to these things by his faith in the progress to which he has pledged himself, and it is sufficient for him that this progress has made such things plain to his understanding. So is it also, in the region of moral and ethical science. While his opponent demands sanctions, the liberal mind seeks no such frail props or stays. His training has given him a rooted faith in the fitness of things ; and if morals, after all, end in mere expediency, his bent of mind tells him that he can still find in such expediency another name for sanctions which the good of the race has impressed on the volume of human laws. Thus we find a sure hope of liberalism in its perfect accord with all the works and ways of science ; and there can be no approach to a perfect liberalism which does not lean on scientific advance, and make a close friend of the truth science gleans alike from the whispering wind, and the sunlight, the tree, the flower, and the man. Only those who are ignorant of the history of liberal victories can undervalue the scientific factor in the walk of advance. The whole record of recent struggles has had science for its pivot, and scientists for its best and bravest soldiers ; and it is because the liberal knows and recognises this truth that he regards science as his truest ally and his friend. Or turning to the sociology of the day, what has liberalism to say to the advances in thought which have marked this department of inquiry? I think such a question hardly requires answer here. Who are the pioneers in the move- ments of the social reform that moves around and about us ? from the inanities of socialism to the more sober struggles for equalization of wealth, for bettering the condition of the masses, for reform in the laws relating to marriage, and to the condition of women and children. What has the conservative spirit done for the masses, save, practically, in the language of orthodoxy, to bid them be contented with the sphere to which it has pleased Providence to call them ? A sure hope of liberalism is to be found in its continued attention to all the details of social life and to every means which can be brought to bear on T3 the conditions of happy healthy living. Whenever liberalism shall begin to think more of vested interests than of human happiness, to regard laws more than men and women, or to pay more attention to profits than to justice and fair dealing, its hopes will look gloomy in the extreme. The characteristic of the best and purest liberalism has always been that of caring for humanity's interests over questions of wealth, and it will augur badly for our creed when we shall reverse this order of affairs and despise the common social history while we elevate class-prejudice to the rank of a glowing virtue. This then, is the social hope of the liberal creed. The opposing order of thought has never taken kindly to the people, because it was not born of them, and because it has recognised only the good of high estate and lofty dwelling-places. Progress, however, is not the monopoly of kings, or the vantage-ground of priests. It is in the attention, care, and love with which true liberalism has tended the interests of all classes, and has guarded the rights of the lower units, that its social hope has ever Iain. Of the political, literary, and educational hopes of liberalism I need not speak to-day. These topics have been dealt with from this platform in varied fashions of late, and one may not lose sight of the meaning and hope of liberal thought and action in any of these spheres, even were he so disposed. The signs of the times show us that in the political, as in the social atmosphere, there is no dwindling of the liberal hope. On the contrary, the prospects of the creed were never more distinctly bright than they are to-day. The nation is moving onwards towards a phase of thought in politics which accords perfectly with the social and the scientific phase. Confidence in progress, and belief in advance, are not limited to social life, but extend to the political atmosphere as well. That will be the surest hope of liberalism in politics, which is illustrated by the desire to reform abuses, to protect the weak, and to repel the enmities of class and race ; and these things are not wanting, but growing around us in power and excellence year by year. The religious hopes of liberalism form the final phase of our topic this morning. Here we approach ground which is more familiar to us as a liberal body, met to renew once again the intellectual life that is the heritage to be valued over all things else. The conservative element in religion is typically represented 14 by the priesthood under whatever guise it may be found. Thus the man claims for himself the custody of the revealed will of God, assumes power over the mind and body of his fellow-man, and holds tenaciously to the knowledge in which it is presumed the truths most vital to humanity repose. The apostolic succes- sion itself, is religious toryism of the purest type. The retention and transmission of the power to make priests, to forgive sins, and to secure the eternal safety of human beings, are examples of the conservative spirit which arrogates to itself the control of all that man is and has, and of all that man may become. There is no attempt at progress here. In such an organisation liberalism, which declares for advance, is, in itself, a gross impiety. The essence of the priestly power, consists in its stereotyped theory that it alone is the dispenser and disposer, on earth, of the things of heaven. The species here is in equilibrium at least, if it is not retrogressing ; and there is no sympathy with advance, no regard of knowledge, no love for science, no awakening to truth. Where can you find a religious conser- vatism of the purest type better exemplified than in the reten- tion of the letter of the Bible rather than a preservation of its spirit ? Where can you note a blinder devotion to the past than in the reliance placed on dogmas of creation, which, for all liberal minds and sensible souls alike, are dreams of the ignorant past? Where may you see that hardening of the heart to which liberalism is so strenuously opposed better exemplified than in the adherence to sacraments as essential parts of a religious scheme? These things show forth what we mean by conserva- tism in religion, just as, conversely, their opposites demonstrate what liberalism in religion implies. Not that I insist that every liberal mind must of necessity give up all that one personally may see fit to renounce. There are grades in liberalism as there exist degrees and stages in other things. We here, it seems to me, illustrate very forcibly this contention. I know that in this congregation there are repre- sented very many and divergent shades of opinion regarding religious convictions — or shall I better style them grounds of rational belief, conduct and duty ? That which one affirms as clear to his or her mind, a neighbour may deny. Some of us may still cling lovingly to hopes that for others are classed with the visions of the past. There are numbered among^us^here 15 those who have not ceased to think of immortality as a possi- bihty, nay, as perchance a probability, of the natural order of things — there are those also, who feel no longing for a continu- ance of life under conditions which, at the best, appear to them shadowy and unreal. We have amongst us, welcomed as liberal thinkers, those who may not altogether have rejected the God- idea, as there are brethren and sisters in thought, who class themselves with Spencer, or regard the religion of Humanity as the nearest and best approach they can make to the ideal of the inner life. Nay, I know of more than one, broad in the sense in which Dean Stanley was liberal, who finds the company of other truth-seekers here, more congenial than the neighbourhood of ritual, the presence of altar, the hearing of liturgy, or the absolution of the priestly intercessor. As it is in the character of the hymn-book we use in this place, so is it, my friends — so let me add, in the deepest sincerity, may it always be — with you in your relationships to the liberalism you profess. Beyond all our differences, let us ever realize there is the higher ground of the free liberalism as a common territory of agreement. Here it is not only permissible, but good, that one should say, " I am of Paul," and another, " I am of Apollos," or a third, " I am of Spencer," and a fourth, " I am of Comte." There are many paths to religious liberalism ; and such as I believe you pursue here, lead you all above the miserable narrowness of sect and dogma to the higher, purer ground on which alone unprejudiced truth-seekers can meet. For you, authority in religious liberalism, there is none, save the dictates of your reason and intellect. To you the words of an eminent Scottish theologian may, I think, well apply : — " It seems a very hopeless thing, now-a-days, to try to hold any minds by the mere bonds of authority. The intellectual air all around is too astir for this. There is no system of mental seclusion that can well shut out the young from experiences the most opposite to those to which they have been accustomed. The old safeguards which were wont to enclose the religious life as with a sacred chain no longer do so. Even those who rest within the shadow of authority do so in many cases from choice rather than from habit. They know not what else to do. They have gone in quest of truth and have not found it ; and so they have been glad to throw themselves into arms which profess an infallible shelter and seek repose there. i6 This is not remedy for doubt, but despair of reason. And no good can come in this way." Whatever wc may appear to the outer world, I think there is something unique to be found in a congregation which, year by year, has kept its place as a meeting of liberal thinkers, disinterested in their relationships, fearless of external prejudice or odium, and knit together in bonds of mutual respect, which the true liberalism, like the charity never faileth, begets, engenders and maintains. If we are to continue, not stable indeed, as in the past, but as that past itself has shown, progressive, active, always abounding in the work of liberalism, let us learn well the lesson that our success in this life of union in diversity, depends entirely on the culture of that spirit on which the liberal creed is founded, and which makes freedom of action and opinion the basis of its life. The hopes of liberalism are the hopes of this Society, which, in its progressive evolution, in its rise and advance, and still more in its proved possibility of gathering together thinkers of many and diverse thoughts in harmony and peaceful pursuit of truth and good, has, I feel proud to say and think, scarcely a parallel in the world of liberal life. The motto which faces you here each Sunday (" To thine own self be true ") is at once the polestar of our thoughts and the hope of liberal religion. Happy they who know the truth which makes them free, and thrice happy they who can realize of their intellectual liberalism that which has been sung : — Slow are the steps of Freedom ; but her feet Turn never backward ; hers no bloody glare ; Her light is calm, and innocent, and sweet, And where it enters there is no despair : Not first on palace and cathedral spire Quivers and gleams that unconsuming fire ; While these stand black against her morning skies, The peasant sees it leap from peak to peak Along his hills ; the craftsman's burning eyes Own with cool tears its influence mother-meek ; It lights the poet's heart up like a star ; Ah ! while the tyrant deems it still afar, And twined with golden threads his futile snare, That swift, convicting glow all round him ran ; 'Twas close beside him there, Sunrise ! whose Memnon is the Soul of man. FINSBURY, E.G. INHERITANCES A DISCOURSE DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL FINSBURY, E.G. BY DR. ANDREW \YILSON, F.R.S.E., &c. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON PRICE TWOPENCE W. King & Slll, Printcrs, 12, GocGH Square, Fleet Street, London, INHERITANCES. ONE of the most interesting features in the quaint old codes and social history of the Israelites, is found in the adaptation of their life to the environments under which their existence was passed. It has often been contended by commentators that a proof of the divine origin of the Biblical histories might be found in their correspondence with the natural laws of things, and in the transmitted truth with which the ISIosaic and other codes of laws have come down to our own day. But the remark is susceptible of another inter- pretation. The old codes and laws appeal to us to-day in cer- tain phases of their perpetuated wisdom, not because they are the offspring of the gods, but because they represent the refle(5tions of a human experience, that, in many of its aspedts, holds good for all time. If Mosaic sanitary laws and health-precautions stand before our eyes to-day, as embod3-ing in them anything which riper science has shown to be good and true in the pro- tection and prolonging of life, there is no need to bargain that the voices of Sinai were the originators of the code and its teachings. Moses and the lawgivers reaped, in their own day, the fruits of centuries of evolution and of concentrated experience. Humanity, long before Abraham and the prophets, had earned knowledge through suffering and sorrow. Long before Moses and Aaron, ages before Levites and the priesthood, there were lessons of worth taught to mankind by the stern experiences of life. Plague and pestilence had made them wonder and stand aghast; famine and tribulation had brought death to their doors, and had set them athinking of the causes of things. The bitter invasions of disease and of the accidents of life, had made them wary and cautious, and had evolved a moral code and a physical law, which, remaining unwritten for centuries, at length became formulated in the history of the race. The study of ancient codes, ethical and sanitar},. becomes intensely interesting from the standpoint which makes evolution its kev-note and foundation. You see how man is tutored by the stern necessities of life ; how nature, cold and uncompromising, teaches him the true way of life : how the rain and the tempest make him skilful in avoiding their fury ;; how winds and storms imbue him with the navigator's art ; how disease and plague evolve the art of healing ; how the- battle of might and right develops the germs of the higher law of love. Think, for a moment, of that grim, old, forbidding^, voice which declares that the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the helpless, feeble children, onwards to generations yet unborn. It sounds in 3'our ears like a grim curse. Proceeding from the theoretical orthodox deity, it seems like the utterance of a fiend. You, with your feeble humanity — you, with your powerless hand — }'ou, in your own weakness, would save the little ones from the effect of conditions in the development of which the}- had no part. If good there be, who made this law, it. is none of mine. It can only be the power of the hell and the torment that framed this precept, if intelligence of any kind gave it birth. But the " still small voice" of science comes to- our aid with more cheering words. There is a consolation, that appears on the scene, only when the gods have been swept awa\- like the visions of the night. The old, old humanity, which found out by bitter experience how the so-called "sin"' perpetuated its evil, and how the folly, the carelessness, the ignorance, and the crime of one age appeared, often with treble power in the next, speaks out to us from the clouds of Sinai. It is man who utters the fruits of his expe-- rience — not Jehovah ; it is the human declaration we hear — not the vengeful accents of deit}'. It is the story of law coming, forth from chaos and confusion to which we listen, as man speaks to man, and as the human voice rings out along all the-, ages since the first man stepped forth on creation's scene.. We hear the foundations of the great problem of inheritance,, when we listen to the story of humanity's struggles. The evil. 'Of to-day propagates itself, like the good. That which you •effect in reform to-day, buds forth under to-morrow's sun with Tiew vigour and increasing power. That which you neglect in this present hour, brings out its evil crop multiplied tenfold . as time and the days pass. So " like begets like,'' with varia- tion and evolution as modifying conditions, and sins and sorrows, -good deeds and just a(il;ions, bring in their harvest as the ages roll onwards in their magnificent array. There is no topic of deeper or more vital interest to us all, than this subject of " inheritances." Everywhere, it crops up in the lield of human histories. You come face to face with it when you begin to study how one form begets another, how race succeeds race in the world of life, how this being breeds true, and that less true to its parent stock. You see how inheritance works out its allotted destiny and plays its part in .all the ways and works of life; and you note how, equally in the lower deeps of the world, and in the highways of existence, the question of heritage, of mental and physical kind, obtrudes -itself on the observer's view. Take, first of all, the question of inheritance from the physical side. Study the great fad:s of 'heredity as viewed in man, and you may find in such fadts as your investigations will disclose, a sure basis for further applica- tions of the theme to the mental, social, and religious phases of life in all ages. The great law that living beings of all grades ■ of existence tend to repeat themselves — their bodily structure .and their fundtional history — in their descendants, is an assumed fadl of the nature we know. There is no firmer or surer deduction of common life, than that " like begets like." The son inherits the features either of parent diredtly, or of more remote . ancestor indire(5tly. The general features of the progenitor are re- produced in the offspring, and the likeness of the species or race -becomes thus perpetuated in time. Nor are physical structures .and the lineaments of form alone, continued in time. Mental traits, habits of mind, phases of intelligence, are reproduced in the succession of years and generations. The greatnesses and ^the littlenesses of life alike reappear generation after gene- ration. Special proclivities towards genius, or tendencies to • crime, are certainly propagated onwards, and often with startling exactitude. Inheritance, with the impartial law of natural .things, deak out its blessings or its curses unheeding of all human interests. Its results descend on just and unjust alike; they are, in truth, the makings either of the righteous man or of the criminal, the outcast, and the thief. Nor are the effects of inheritance limited to the propagation of normal and natural phases of life. Diseases are transmitted, often with increasing force and virulence, as generations are born into the world. There is no more forcible means which nature possesses of consigning a race to the oblivion of extindliion, than that of perpetuating its ailments, and of fostering its physical degeneracy. Year by year, the ailment grows in intensity. The phases of disease advance and evolve with rapid stride. The legacy bequeathed to one generation is received with accumulated interest by the next ; and thus the old idea of the sins of the fathers and their consequence, finds its justification in the perpetuation, by natural law, of the products of unwise living or mistaken existence. Theology here, as elsewhere, has merely seized upon a human con- ception, and transmuted it in the crucible of crude thought into the half-developed conceptions of deity, working out, as. by deputy, the order of the world. But there is a wider thought still, which underlies the law of inheritance. To rest content with the phrase that " like begets like,"" is to comprehend only half a truth. Inheritance, in this broad view of matters to which I refer, is only a name for a tendency that works out a larger law of nature. It is true that the features of parent are trans- mitted to offspring. It is undeniable that the traits of charadter seen in one generation, are found reproduced, with greater or less exaftitude, in the next. But this is only part of the truth about inheritances after all. We light upon an equally im- portant truth in the statement that there is an evolution to be accounted for, as well as a mere repetition — there is. variation, as well as transmission — change, as well as same- ness, in the ways and works of life. Sow half-a-dozen seeds- obtained from the one plant, and you will find no two of the six plants that spring up to be exadl;ly alike. Look at the diverse phases you witness in animal life. There are no two animals born of one stock that are precisely the same. There is a pro- cess of mysterious leavening always at work among the children of life, modifying them for better or worse ; sometimes turning an advantage to good account in their histon' ; often bringing a disadvantag'e to the front in their development, and sending them downward and backward, instead of favouring their advance. There exist two tendencies which we must recognize as permeating Hfe of all kinds, and operating in every phase of existence — one tendenc\- -which seeks to tie the offspring to the inheritance to which it has fallen heir ; which makes the child resemble its parent, and perpetuates the old stock in the new generation. The other, a tendency which seeks to pass away from this inheritance and its lines, which evolves new depar- tures ; alters the growth ; advances or retards the race ; and favours change in one direction or another. The individual is born into the world having his destiny outlined by inheritance, but subject, likewise, to those circumstances which may fill in the pidlure of his being, in hues and tones different from those of his parent's life. If it be true that the sour grapes eaten of old by the parents, set the children's teeth on edge, it is no less true that alteration and change might modify the sourness, and bring sweeter things into the lot of the new race. But for this tendency to modify the fruits of inheritance, progress would be an impossibility. You can have no advance where each succes- sive age slavishly repeats the ways of its predecessors. Human character is not stereotyped beyond possibility of alteration- Inheritance is, after all, the servant, not the master, of evolu- tion. That is the true criterion of human advance which takes what is good from our heritage, and uses it as the means to further progress. That is the equal!}- certain condition for retrogression and decay, when evolution finds the tendencies of evil and sorrow more ready to its hand than those of hope ; and when the perpetuation of what is bad becomes intensified over that which is good in the inevitable struggle which each generation sees. Again, let us keep in view the great truth that inheritance of good or evil is a cumulative feature of life. The child reaps the whirlwind, whereof its parent has but sown the wind. You deal, in the case of the child, w-ith the accumulated effects of past inheritances, waiting their own special development and evolution. The human being who, in his childhood, awaits ex- pansion of his powers, is a storehouse of latent facfts and tenden- cies from which the years draw material for the evolution of the 8 individual. There are hidden, but inherited, ways and means of life that await the call to activity, or that are left to slumber unheeded in the life of the man. The child is not a clean slate whereon the world may write whatever and however it pleases. There are lines of development along which human nature, like the form of the animal or plant, has to pass, and which cannot be wholly expunged or erased, however powerful the educative effort may be. Humanity, like every other living item, has a basis which is made for it by inheritance, and not by itself. When it keeps towards such basis, it repeats the history of its forefathers, and " like begets like" in the record of its race. But when the laws of its evolution find in its inheritance the materials for change and variation, new features and traits are developed from the basis laid in its nature by its heritage. It undergoes new modifications; it tends to evolve in new direc- tions; and it speeds, either onwards and upwards towards a higher level of life, or sinks downwards into the lower existence which heralds the decay of its kind. The topic of inheritances presents itself for our ready consideration in the threefold aspeft of physical, social, and religious subject. These three phases of the theme appear to me to include the most important of the features which we may find it useful to bear in mind in dealing with the tendencies of our age. And, firstly, the physical side, let us note, is the all-important condition, which, in the matter of inheritance, really determines, wdiolly or chiefly, all other phases of life. In considering the causes which retard the social progress ot humanity, and which place human units among the slums and alleys of our great centres, to waste and to decay amid the festering and sweltering atmosphere of lower life, we must deal first with physical things. We can never lay too great stress on the importance of recognizing that the causes of poverty are primarily causes of physical kind, and that the cures for pauperism, crime, and degradation are similarly to be drawn from the resources of sanitary and social science, and not from the ethereal regions presided over by bishops and ministered unto by archdeacons and priests. To our aid in understanding more fully the great fulcrum which gives support to the lever of thought and adlion in dealing with the elevation of the poor and needy — with the socially lost and the moral pariahs of the race — comes the topic of inheritance. What inheritance means to the outcast races and to the swelter- ing throngs of our cities, the sanitarian and the reformer alone vcan fully realize. Wlien we refleft upon the fearful heritage •of accumulated degeneracy that descends with increased force to each generation upon the crowded masses, we may under- stand something of the fearful odds against which poor humanity Jias to contend. " Nettle seed needs no digging," says George Eliot in one of those pungent sayings that are founded upon the clear conception of a great, but often neglec^ted truth. And the conditions under which our poor live and move require no -elaboration, no strengthening, to produce on human bodies, all "the effects which make for degeneracy, for decay, and, finall}', for death itself. Foul air breeds in one generation the germs •of disease, which, in the next, kindle up into vitality, and in the third or fourth send their vidlims to the early grave in the days of their youth. Insufficient food, producing the weakly bodies of this generation, shows with increased effe(5t; in the next, and, in two or three decades more, wipes out the record of a \\hole series of lives. Unwise marriages, and improvidence in the to-days of life, produce the stunted or •diseased bodies of life's to-morrows, and send onwards the units concerned with headlong speed towards the extinction that looms with foreboding aspeft over their kind. Intempe- rance and excess repeat their effe(5ts in geometrical increase as the years roll on, induce premature decay, and shorten lives that contain the possibilities of better things. '' The sins of the fathers " become intensified through no unknown or mystic condition, but by means of the ordinary operation of inheritance — of the laws which declare that " like begets like," and which teach that the evolution of low and degraded conditions takes place with intense rapidity when favoured by the unhealthy surroundings we know so well. If we turn to the records of science, we shall find these general axioms illustrated in countless ways and in all varieties of men. The history of criminal families shows us how the passions increase in intensity, favoured by inheritance. We read of three and four generations, which, starting from a criminal ancestor, have produced an increasing ratio of male- facftors. We hear of drunkenness perpetuated unfailingly in lO the children of inebriates; and of the failure of education^ moral training, and all other means, to evolve the higher part of humanity from the lower stock with which, and in which, such a history begins. We see insanity appear in the descendants of those who start their career with a moral twist,, and whose life has not been regulated wisely and well. Every- where, indeed, the story of science is the same. Humanity appears only to require the taking of the first step on the downward path, in order that it may travel with lightning speed on the road to degradation and decay — so terribly real and potent in their working are the laws of that inheritance which propagates the conditions of physical backsliding and of a bodily deterioration that saps the foundations of every aspiration of human life. The reverse side of matters to that which points the way in the matter of physical decay, is however no less worthy our attention. If degeneracy is a produ(5l of inheritance, so no less is that evolution of higher life and of healthy existence which is the foundation of all happiness. Science does not leave us either hopeless or comfortless in face of the grave and serious catastrophes of life. As with unilinching hand she paints the intensity of inherited evil, she depicTis with equal force the collective power which the good attained by one generation effects in the advance of the next. There is no better illustration of the innate truth of the proverb concerning the fate of "bread cast upon the waters," than the advance and progress which wisely-guarded inheritance brings in its train. A slight gain for the good in one generation in health- science becomes intensified in the next ; and as by a process of stria accumulation, results that appear literally marvellous, accrue to our race in the course of even a few decades of careful living. Those who are given to pessimistic views of life and living, and who find apparent justification for their theories in the facT: of the ready propagation of evil as life passes onwards from one period to another, neglect the reverse side of things, and forget that transmitted good is just as readily made the legacy which one generation hands down to the next. What, after all, do we not owe to the inheritance of good our age has received from the past ? Every advance in science and the arts is really part and parcel II of our heritage, which is undergoing the evolution that per- tains to its powers to-day. In turn we are handing on tO' the succeeding times — let us hope, with accumulated good — the inheritance which will blossom into yet nobler things. Each age, then, as to its physical side, hands down good and evil to its successor. Is there no squaring of accounts, however, between the good and the evil of life which are thus transmitted ? You will find the reply to such an inquiry in the tale science has to tell of the end of lives whose existence has been prolonged through times of unhealthy living. The story of transmitted evil is one of decay and death. You notice how the enfeebled race of one day becomes prematurely old in the next ; and how the succeeding generation in its turn is worn out by the conditions which have made the heritage of evil the continuous and increasing possession of the fading tribe. To inherit physical evils — disease, enfeeblement, physical weakness — to take no steps or measures to reinforce the weakened frames — to neglect to foster the powers of life — to live under insanitary conditions — to scoff at the laws of healthy life, — are the sure ways and means of sending either individuals or races to the grave. Thus it is that inheritances of ill aft as the grim executioners of nature's decrees. Inheri- tance in this light is the avenging angel of the nature which is being outraged ; and the people that dwell in the darkness of ignorance and in the shadow of unhealthy surroundings — rich and poor alike — sooner or later die out under the influence of conditions they have taken no pains or care to obviate or repress. Such are the lessons which " inheritances " from their physical side teach all who will listen to the tale they tell. The social phases of our theme of to-day, founded as they are on a physical basis, yet present studies interesting enough from their own point of view. Men inherit social instincts as they receive a physical organization from the past. It is an old story how society with all its intricate and complex relation- ships began with tribal interests and family ties ; and how as time passed inheritance increased and strengthened the idea of safety, pleasure, and advantage which the social union of men thus conferred upon all the units of such a combination. There is not a phase of family life that does not owe all its 12 .tenderness to "inheritances" propagated through the years -of Hfe — from the influence of the long and helpless infancy of mankind, through the period of youth, and onward to the decline of life itself. The heritage of love and trust we 'bequeath to those who come after us, will bear its fruit with increased force and plenty when we are no longer present to witness its growth. There is not a trait of the social life which is not handed onwards, in an equally rigid fashion to .the peculiarities of face or figure that mark this man or that. Social life— the influences of home — the character of parents — the opinions of friends — -the general conditions which mould ■our own characler — are all inheritances that pass onwards from one generation to another, working, in the inevitable development of things, for good or for evil in the subsequent histories they affe(5t and determine. Why is it, that we do not jnore frequently think of this great social problem ? Why is it, while we are so careful of the breeding of our cattle and -our sheep, of seeing that the strain of our horses and our dogs lis kept clear and pure, of determining the purity of our plant- productions and of the flowers we prize, that we so tacitly neglecl: to think more deeply of the great laws of inheritance that use our own race as the means of making lives happy or the reverse, in the future of the world ? Every good deed possesses a cumulative value as an inheritance, influencing both the doer and him to whom the aft is done. Education in good or evil is only another name for inherited results, and the difficulties we experience to-day in the training of the young and in the formation of characters which may bear the mint-stamp of excellence, represent only the struggle between inheritances of evil and the tendencies which we know work for good in human lives. That which as a society, composed of interdependent units, living upon the love and trust and faith of one another .alike in the family and in the market-place, we ought more freely and fully to recognize, is the great truth that each day and hour bring to us the chances of influencing the future years of our kin and the lives that are growing up around us. If the "defects •of doubt and taints of blood " of the poet, are ever to be wiped away, we know that we must work out our own salvation, not with fear and trembling, but with the hope that is born of the knowledge that with our own hands and wills we make the 13 inheritance we would wish to see the propert}- of the future.. If ever we are to reaUze what the Laureate commends — " Arise and fly The reeling Faun, the sensual feast ; Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die." — it is humanity in its best strivings that alone can accomplish- the task. If it be true that " On solitary souls the universe Looks down inhospitable ; the human heart Finds nowhere shelter but in human kind," then must we see that all through life's days, such shelter- must not merely be given, but accorded freely, and with cheerful hand. If, as a great thinker has told us, " so deeply inherent is it in this life of ours, that men have to suffer for' each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain " — then, let us in the sacred name of the humanity we own, see that in no a(5tions or deeds of ours do we send forward to the ages a legacy of suffering and sorrow. Here, after all, in this plain question of inheritance, do you find the highest, noblest, most unselfish justification of a pure and holy life. You seek to live happily, because you will then be most likely to make others happy. You strive to live healthily, because you desire that those you may beget, or those over whom you exercise care to-day, ma\- transmit healthy bodies and minds to future ages. You have no sanation or command in all your creeds equal to this in power and force. You have no higher or better standpoint for all moralit}- than this desire so to live now, that the future may bear for others coronals of joy instead of crowns of thorns. You find here the justification of that personal enjoyment of life, which is the highest reward of him who lives truly and who lives well — in that the good you do to yourself, bears its full fruition in the lives that are to fill the world's places in the days to come. The religious phases of " inheritances " form a third and final aspeft in which our theme of this morning may be briefly considered. If the welfare of human life, viewed physically 14 and socially, can be shown to depend upon individual effort after pureness of living, the influence of transmitted forces and ideas in the matter of religious beliefs may be pronounced to te of equally definite kind. In religions, more, perhaps, than in any other phases of human life, you can trace the tremendous power with which inherited ideas operate amongst individuals and secfts. To what, if not to inherited bias, do we owe the prejudice with which one seCt regards another? From what, if not to a legacy of stereotyped ideas, does each creed develop the bitterness of feeling with which it pursues, maligns, or despises its neighbours ? Bigotry is as much the child of inheritances as are nobility of life, genius, and power. We inherit religions and creeds, as we derive from our forefathers brain and m.uscle. We drink in theologies with our mother's milk, just as we receive from our ancestors their tempers and their dispositions; and we inherit from infancy, our bias towards truth or falsehood, just as surely as we obtain from the past the physical accom- paniments of our life. We are swaddled in garments of tradition and rocked in cradles of myth, because the influences of past times, transmitted through countless generations, have set their enduring seal on our lives. Every persecution of old for the sake of religious or theological bias, bore testimony to the force with which inherited opinions had influenced the passions of men. In each controversy to-day, in the wrangling of se(5ts, in the war-cry of contending creeds, in the opprobrium and calumny of theological wars, and in the social ostracism that is not unknown amongst us to-day, the power of inheritances, not yet obliterated or superseded by milder and wiser thoughts, reigns supreme. Men persecute those who differ from them in theo- logical opinions and in religious beliefs, as often as not, because they cannot help their adts. They are born into the world Calvinists or Jews, Mohammedans or Buddhists, Roman Catholics or Freethinkers, just as surely as they derive their physical heritage from their fathers. They start life with an inherited bias towards a particular creed, as certainly as they possess the features of their family or their clan. Centuries of belief cannot fail (unless, indeed, the whole of natural law is one huge delusion) to have impressed on the mental constitu- tions of men their charadteristic features, any more than generations of this faculty or that, of this disease or that pecu- liarity, fail to show forth in the history of the race. To-day, what is the position of rehgious strife and theological fray in the world around us ? AMiat are the special features you see represented in the ways and works of religious advance ? Is it not true, that men will play the part of prosecutors and tyrants, not because they would not play a better rule, but because they ■cannot help their early bias of inherited dislike to the creeds they harass ? Is it not true that, while men are mostly better than their creeds, those beliefs linger with them, because, like the rudimentary and useless parts of the higher animal, they have not yet been entirely killed off in the advance and progress of the race ? Why is a theological dogma — like that of the creation of the world in six days, or that of the damnation of unbaptized infants — persistent still, when the science and common sense of the nineteenth century have exploded the ordinary myths of the sixteenth; when witchcraft is no longer a crime, and sorcery and magic find a place only in the entertainment halls ? Because " inheritance," in all its power, holds sway over the people ; because we have to lay our account for the propagation, through generations, of beliefs that have become for many fixed articles of faith ; and because we have to deal with accumulated growths, not of one year, but of centuries — growths that, despite the higher surroundings of to-day, remain fixed and immovable — amid the new evolutions that arise to wnden and expand the hopes of men. Happily, the great principles of change and new surround- ings come into play here, as in the physical life of the race. Despite the accumulated inheritances of mankind in the matter of religious beliefs and theological prepossessions, there are ■evidences that progress' will not wait and that advance will not brook delay. The fate of the living organism whose inheritance unfits it for its surroundings, awaits all past beliefs which still survive amongst us, and which are not consistent with scien- tific sweetness and light. Inheritances which do not adjust themselves to the life that is, cannot hope for a continuance of hopeful, healthy existence. They have served their day and generation, and they come before the world to-day to find a new atmosphere in which they cannot exist. They come to find the clearer air of science which dispels the murkiness and the gloom of the past. The}' are transmitted, to discover that they cannot i6 contend against the freer thoughts which stir the pulses of our- world. Thev come to see the inheritances of the past super- seded b\- heritages of nobler kind, which respond to all the influences that animate the expanding thoughts of liberal man- kind. There is thus a struggle of " inheritances " taking place- around us. To-day is the battlefield of the old and the new.. Now is the conflicl:-time, wherein the ideas which have done duty for centuries trust in their grim hold on the primitive mental constitution rather than on the reason and intelligence of men,. The fight is not uncertain — nor is the issue of the contest doubtful. It ma}- be a struggle prolonged, but the vi(5tory is- sure enough, even now. The part we have to play to-day is- that of seeing the newer inheritances to which we have falleni heirs, transmitted to those who come after us in all their soul- satisfying fulness, in all their grand mind-liberating power. That, of which we must be as careful as we are proud, is the source of such transmitted good. The school, the laboratory,, the family-circle, the creed we profess, are the growing-grounds wherein the seeds of the new inheritances are to be sown to- day. \\'hat we sow now in hope, shall arise in fulness when' we have passed to our rest. We may take no heed of its- growth — we need experience no anxiety for its welfare. " In- heritance " will take full charge of all our work, and reproduce for good, or for evil, all we do in the lives that smile around our pathways, that own our care, and that trust in our wisdom and love to-day. We. of the present age are the husbandmen who toil and sow for a future reaping. Let us see that we labour unselfishh-, hopefully, and without fear. We work for an end and an aim, glorious in its extent, all-encompassing in its fulness and beauty. Theologies in the past have offered us the dead sea fruit of heavens, on the one hand, and the terrors, of death and sin on the other ; but in these things we have neither jo}- nor fear. Ours is the prospect of life made happier, existence more cheerful, hope more real. For in our work of to-day, that goes down the line of the ages to the future, we have our true satisfaction — in this is our inheri- tance, uncorrupted, undefiled, eternal as the heavens, and that passeth not awa}". ■ FINSBURY, E.C. " IN PASTURES GREEN." -sm^^^iim-^ A DISCOURSE DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL FINSBURY, E.C. BY DR. ANDREW WILSON, F.R.S.E., &c. ^ I C ^5-f- PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON PRICE TWOPENCE \V. King & Sell, Printers, 13, GouQH Square, Fleet Street, London. a IN PASTURES GREEN." THERE is no better known passage in the whole range of Scripture than the psahn which contains the words that form the subject of this morning's discourse. In all the efforts of the singer of Israel — whether denouncing his enemies, calling forth vengeance on the heads of his foes, or rejoicing in the strength of his youth and viftory, his harp was never tuned to a truer or sweeter note than when he penned the words of this psalm. The mother croons the words to her babe as it sinks to rest in her protecting arms. The mind, far removed from orthodox ways and accustomed forms of worship, hears with something more than a kindly heart-welcome, the old familiar strains of his youth. The heart that has long ceased to regard the world and its affairs as lying under the protection of the God of battles or the political Jehovah of the ]qw, cannot hear the words of his childhood without some memory-token that, though their spirit is no longer his, he can still realize something in his own way of the peace and joy which the orthodox mind gains from its belief, and which the tones of the Hebrew singer tend to confirm. The psalm is, in itself, a poetic fragment. The words which are found as its setting in the metrical version, " appointed by the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland to be sung in churches," have escaped the baldness of the poetasters who twisted and contorted the Hebrew thoughts into common rhyme. Even the worst or the best efforts of the Scottish divines could not mar the beauty of the poem, and the words flow melodiously enough as the psalm is rendered in the familiar metre of the age. The Lord's my shepherd, I'll not want, He makes me down to lie In pastures green ; he leadeth me The quiet waters hy. My soul he doth restore again, And me to walk doth make Within the paths of righteousness, E'en for his own name's sake. Yea, tho' I walk in death's dark vale Yet will I fear none ill. For thou art with me ; and thy rod And staff me comfort still. My table thou has furnished In presence of my foes ; My head thou dost with oil anoint, And my cup overflows. Goodness and mercy all my life Shall surely follow me ; And in God's house for evermore My dwelling-place shall be. There is the true ring of poetry about the quaint words of the version of the north. It is a psalm of joy and comfort in the thought and idea that the footsteps of the singer are. ordered aright by the power he conceives makes for righteousness in man. For the singer, there is no more anxiety, no more care. Life is, in his view, an optimistic period. His wants are pro- vided for ; his table furnished, his cup overflowing. His song is the song of a thankful heart. Sorrow and care and trouble have flown away on the wings of the night, and joy has taken up its abode with him for evermore. Even the dark valley of the shadow has no terror for him. The rod and the staff shall comfort him. He will sing the praises of God for ever, and goodness and mercy shall follow him lovingly to the end. I question whether in all the range of poetry, religious or otherwise, you will find a better example of the frame of mind in which a human heart, that has solved all the problems of existence by a profound trust in good, may dwell. The psalm is a symphony of hope. No minor chord enters into the heart of the singer ; no disturbing cadence is found throughout its tones. For all the ills of life, he has found a reward ; and life drifts placidly on by the still waters and in the "pastures green" of the existence that knows no sorrow and that fears no ill. But the prevailing thought which crops up through all the variations of the theme, is the sense of placidity and repose which the singer experiences in his rooted trust in good. It is emphatically a song of the joys of the green pastures of life. There is, after all, a something that appeals to and touches the heart in the phrase I have chosen for the title of my discourse. The pidture that rises before your mental view as you listen to the song of the Hebrew harp, is one of pleasantness and one of peace. The broad river rolls before your eyes, hurrying onwards here, meandering placidly there, and bearing its burden silently to the great sea beyond. Its margin is flanked by the willows that dip their branches in its spray, and kiss its waters lovingly as they hurry onwards to the sea. Away, as far as the eye can reach, your "pastures green" stretch gratefully around. The sward is smooth and bright, and its trees shade the way- farer from the rays of the noonday sun. A fair pidiure this — of river and meadowland, such as our southern country presents in many a well-known nook. A different face of nature from that she presents in the rugged north, where cliff and mountain, rock and crag, bare granite boulder and snow-tipped peak, tell of a mood that is stern and cold and grey. It is not to the mountain grim and dark that you turn for consolation. The crag and peak tell you of the storm and the thunder; of the rain and the snow. But the " pastures green," with softer voice, speak of comfort and kindness. Their mood is that of the quiet that knows no evil and that dwells far from the gates of sorrow and pain. The nature-voices that the poet translates for us into the words of his song, are the accents of hope when the green pastures form his theme. It is in such a mood, and before such a vision of the beauty of the world, that the mind of man finds the peace that ofttimes passes understanding and that softens the whole tenor of a life. There are varied thoughts that flow from the text I have chosen to-day. There may be deeper meanings for thoughtful minds in the words of the Hebrew singer than we might dream of, did we merely regard his utterance as the song of a heart and mind at peace with itself and with all around. There is no such thing as an utterance destitute of all application to men, times, and lives far removed from the birthplace and period that first heard its lisping words. Thoughts never die ; but re-echo through the ages, and reappear continually in new guise to instruft the waiting races of the to-morrows of the universe. That which was spoken ages ago, is per- petually being sown in germ-form to-day ; and the thoughts we utter now, come to a perennial fruition in the ages of the future. It is so with the psalm which tells us of the joy that attends him who walks " in pastures green." The pathway may not be that of Israel, nor that wherein Christ trod. It may not be the green pastures of east, nor those of west, which attra(5t our footsteps. The hand that leads, and the staff that supports, may not be those of the faith that was strong in the singer of the Psalms. The whole surroundings of the singer and of the listening throng that first heard his voice, may have vanished away in the mists of the past. But somehow the essence of the thought lives on. That which you do not destroy, is the element of the song and the spirit of the psalm. Hope and joy, and the desire to make the best of life, are not extindt, because the Hebrew singer has been gathered to his fathers ; or because Jehovah hears no cry, and heeds no appeal from the sons and daughters of the earth. And so, to-day, whatever of hope and joy in life we may seek, whatever of that trust in man which replaces faith in God we may find, the old spirit of the singer comes fresh before us. His voice rings out even now across the line of the centuries that have passed since the sword and javelin were wielded in Israel's fray. It is the true utterance of man which never dies. Even now, the spirit of the singer reaches us in the accents of hope, bidding us fear no evil even with the dark valley looming before us, — telling us of the wisdom, the trust, the faith and the peace that follow those who walk " in pastures green." The burden of the song then, it seems to me, is that of making the most and the best of life. Translate the phrase " in green pastures " simply to mean an existence spent in all the pleasantness which it is possible for human life to know, and you reach at once the height and depth of the philosophy that takes the psalm to heart in its modern acceptation and in the new thoughts that rise from the culture and the science of our day. Although the aspects of life and living have changed widely since the days of the Psalmist, life presents much the same problems to view now, as in the days when David, carrying loaves to the camp, found a throne, or when Saul, seeking his father's asses, came to the kingdom of Israel. Wide revolution has not altered the great aim of humankind — that of living the best life it can. Although the gods have died in the past, and are dying to-day — although the shadow of the valley is, for us, no longer grim with the terror of ancient days, the spirit of humanity breathed out in the impassioned accents of the psalm remains unchanged. It has altered its direftion and extent ; but its tendency is onwards and upwards still. The green pastures lie before us to-day, as of yore, inviting us to enter in. Our cup may run over now, as in the days of old ; although the draught we quaff to-day is of different kind to that the Psalmist alludes, and of more satisfying nature withal. That eternal " I am " which makes for the good or the evil of existence, is the tendency of human life and nature towards its ideals ; and these ideals to-day are only more real, more true, more lasting, more readily appre- ciated and found than were the aims of the ancient singer. We, like him, have our " pastures green " ; but our land and possession are things of earth, of human hearts, of human love, trust, instinft, thought. We, like him, seek to dwell in the house of good for evermore ; but ours is the temple made with hands ; consecrated to the work of human heads and hearts; built up on the experiences sad and joyful of all the workers and toilers in the great service of science, literature, and art. The shepherd's care is over us, as it was over him, but it is the care of the tendencies that work for good in the pathways of human lives. We, like him, can sing the psalm of hope, contentment, peace — for we too have found the secret of life, the philosopher's stone of knowledge in that faith in human progress which, with the magic wand of patience, turns all the baser metal in our nature into the pure gold of forbearance, liberty, and love. What are the bounds which mark the green pastures wherein our lives to-day many spend their best and most 8 pleasant hours ? What are the tendencies which can to-day make existence the gladsome thing of which, viewed from the standpoint of Hebrew faith and culture, the Psalmist wrote so lovingly and well ? Has life, on the whole, increased in oppor- tunities of living happily, or has the progress of the ages lessened the chances of our walking " in green pastures " and bv the still waters of content ? I do not think that these questions can be truly answered, save by the affirmation that to him who desires to live life to the full, to make the most of every opportunity, to enlarge knowledge, to cultivate the arts of living well and happily, the times around us are second to none in their offer of ways and means to these ends. Look back along the line of the centuries ; take your stand if you will with Israel's singer, or in the later years of Greece and Rome, and you will see that whatever depths of culture, or heights of knowledge man in the past may have attained, he fell far short of the general excellence and the wide culture which to-day prevail. That which most marks the ways of ancient civilisations and the paths of ancient progress, is the tendency they exhibited towards excellence in one or two special features of their time. Study the Hebrew times and you will discover that with progress in faith, there was lack of advance in art and science. Literature flourished and poetry, or even the dramatic cast of thought attained a development of more than average kind. But progress in war and in the rude politics of the day was rapid enough. Man ever takes most readily to strategy when, as iron sharpens iron, his interests collide with and oppose those of other men. The Jewish periods were rich in such political achievements. Sword and javelin were ever ready for the fra}^ ; the chariot was never out of gear; and diplomacy and strategy, lying and craft, never want- ing to set the torch of war alight, and to send murder, rapine, and bloodshed broadcast over the land. The gentle touch of the Psalmist's poetry, the Epicureanism of Ecclesiastes, the mysticism of Isaiah, all interpose as stray developments in a historical record which, in respect of its political enormities, has possibly no equal in the history of man. But the tendency of the times was that of war. Backed by a theistic con- ception which lingers even now, which charged the chosen to possess the land, which directed them to choose the Canaans of the earth and to spoil the Egyptians as a lawful process of legitimate retaliation, there need be felt no surprise that the wars and massacres which disfigure Old Testament records, should have assumed a development over all the better and higher, and gentler traits of the human hearts that lived through these olden times. If modern epochs have had their battles and their crimes, if humanity in recent times has had its own share of weaknesses and its own bitterness of soul, it may yet claim that the later ages have presented more of the humanizing, elevating, purifying spirit than the early ages saw. Our developments have not been either all theological on the one hand, or all political on the other. Human energy has had its powers evolved into new and varied channels, since the days of Midian and the Philistines. Countless channels have opened up in the history of man's progress which neither Jew nor Gentile could foresee. For one aim in life, which even the singer of Israel possessed, you and I have hundreds of ways and means of enlarging the boundaries of our existence. For one channel of intellecftual escape from the thraldom of self, of body, of weariness, of warfare, which the ancient could com- mand, we have a vista, whereof no man can see the end. For the one chance of life in the green pastures of peace through which the Psalmist achieved in his faith in God, we have gained countless opportunities of finding our quiet havens of intellec- tual content, wherein we may possess our souls in peace. With the Greek and the Roman, the case was, I think, similar in many ways to the life of the ancient Jew. There art and literature held sway, no doubt, but the art-tendency developed singly and by itself. It had no aid from the colle(5tive culture of the time. It sped onwards rapidly to a high ideal, but vanished and disappeared in the annihilation which overcame the peoples who once mastered the world. The national tendency of Greece and Rome was to concen- tration rather than towards expansion. Life, in these da3-s, had its fair chances of growth ; but it was to the few and not to the many, that these opportunities came. The avenues of intel- lecftual culture were closed to the masses, and opened only to the rich or the favoured ones whose lives had set in the direction and way of mental growth. Culture was not uni- versal ; aspiration was not the privilege of the people at large. 10 Literature was noted scarcely for its social influence so much as for its dexterous setting of the thoughts of men ; and art- culture wielded its power over sedts and parties rather than over the whole national existence. Great as was the advance in the times of the Roman or the Greek, marked as was the philosophic advance over the days that preceded the classic age, there was nevertheless no wide diffusion of the fruits and tendencies of thought. Life for the classic, was a thing less of national and general than of personal nature. It led to personal gratification ; it ended in the excess that laid the Colosseum in ruins, and made the cities of Greece the abode of owls. There was no safety-valve for the tendency to progress which was beginning to be evolved ; and the energy which should have continued Roman progress onwards to the present time, found its speed over-hastened and its sphere narrowed by the intellectual bondage of the time. There is such a thing as too rapid mental advance. There is a possibility of culture dissipating itself, when the outlets for its powers are not numerous enough, when the onward bias is fettered by the conditions of national life. It is possible for the nation, as for the individual, to live intelledtually beyond its means. And where such a tendency exists, the pathway it pursues leads only to extinftion and decay, and carries the footsteps which should make for progress, far from the green pastures that mark the full enjoyment of life's aims, opportunities, and powers. To-day, we live in the possession of conditions and enjoy surroundings, which, wisely used, must tend to lead towards life's perfection and life's evolution in the direction of the highest good. Modern existence has often been descanted on as many-sided, and as confusing, wearying, unsatisfying in the multitude of aims it presents to view. I remember reading one of the most powerful protests against this so-called many- sidedness and ceaseless striving of the age, in the words of a poet who sings : — The Age culls simples, With a broad clown's back turned broadly to the glory of the stars ; We are gods by our own reckoning, and may well shut up the temples, And wield on, amid the incense-steam, the thunder of our cars. II And we throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring, With, at every mile run faster, " O ! the wondrous, wondrous age : " Little thinking if we work our souls as nobly as our iron. Or, if angels will commend us, at the gaol of pilgrimage. Why what is this patient entrance into nature's deep resources. But the child's most gradual learning to walk upright without bane ; When we drive forth, from the cloud of steam, majestical white horses. Are we greater than the first men, who held black ones by the mane ? If we trod the depths of ocean — if we struck the stars in rising. If we wrapped the globe intensely with one hot electric breath, 'Twere but power within our tether, no new spirit-power comprising. And in life we are not greater men, nor bolder men in death. The cynical strain of the poet shows that he has missed the liberal thinker's idea of what constitutes the best part of life, and the green pastures of the mind. It is regretful to find the play of such words full of meaning, bursting with power, linked to a conception of life, that may either be purely that of the pessimist, or which certainly is opposed to the views and ways of the spirit to which we owe all our advance, all our existing freedom, happiness, and peace. The verses bear the mark of imperfect knowledge of the meaning of life and the truths of progress. The poet sees in modern advance, in the feverish desire to find out the riddles of nature, to shorten time and abbreviate space, to open up every channel of improvement, only the desire of the soul which, like the caged bird, beats its wings against the bars of its prison-house, and chafes at the restrictions which the conditions of life lay upon its advance. The poet is the mouthpiece of the theology which shakes its head over protoplasm, which veils its eyes from the eternity of matter and force, which sees in evolution a dangerous heresy, and in science at large a power that threatens to swamp the puny conceptions of God, man, and nature, that have so long ''cribb'd, cabin'd, and confined" the surging thoughts of men. The sentiments of the poet speak of the fast-living, hurrying age, whose life is that of the steam-fiend, and the electric demon. Carry his thoughts out a little further — projedt: them outwards and beyond the point at which he leaves us, and what shall you 12 discover in his philosophy and teaching ? You will see how he deplores the advance of science, how the thoughts that broaden and widen " with the process of the suns " are to him words of despair ; how soul and mind are believed to be warped by the hurry and the bustle of existence; how in the crush of the ages lives are wrecked, and hopes exterminated by the pressure of the units that swell and toss on the stream of humanity's endeavours. And he strikes a deeper vein still, in his sarcasm against the progress he deplores. He concludes his diatribe with the expression that when death finds us waiting its advent, it will chill the soul and lead us hopeless to the grave. If these things be true, then must our life and hope be but vanity and vexation. If the poet's words are to be taken as the gospel of progress, then it behoves us to gird up our loins, and bestir ourselves in the endeavour to discover the exa(5t: lines of our true development. If all the science and art of our day are but appendages of a life that is made to outlive itself in the attempt to do more than life can accomplish, it is high time we should betake ourselves to other pastures than those in which we wander in hope, peace, and quietness to-day. It is an old and well-worn theme, this, of the doubtful advantage of human progress. It is a topic as old as humanity itself — only the poet has clothed the thoughts of the discontented and the fearful in the language of force and power. What is this striving and this running, after all, but the natural tendency of life, which, as it increases in numbers, means a greater struggle than the past has known ? Does the poet, and those of whom he is the mouthpiece and the interpreter, think that existence is to be a thing of lotus-eating, a period of still rest and inani- mate repose ? What is it that the poet, and the theologian for whom he speaks, deplore in the advance and progress that form the atmosphere in which the liberal thinker can alone live and breathe ? Accepting the teaching of evolution, they will tell us, we narrow and crush the individual, that the great mass may rush onwards in its hot haste after life and its fulness. " Natural selection," they say, will pick out the strong and leave the weak to fall. The things in which we glory, the science and art, invention and industry, of our age, are but the means which the time has developed to crush the individual life, to obliterate sentiment, to narrow sympathy, and to remove 13 all that is loving, tender, and true, from the heart of man. They say you cannot find the individual perfection in the mass. Life's aims become sodden, cumulative, non-aspiring. Every- thing that is personal, is swallowed up in the hurrying on of the age ; and the soul yearns after the simplicity of the primitive life for the true realization of its highest good. The " pastures green" of the singer are far removed from the way of this bustling array of search and inquiry ; and the quiet life by the still waters of content becomes only a dream of some past time, when man and his world were young. If these things were true, and the spirit of the poet an expression of reality and truth, I repeat, we should require to consider seriously the necessity and duty of retracing our intelle(?tual footsteps backwards from our day and time. But it is fortunate for all that the day carries us with it whether we will or no. There is no more turning back from the plough to which we have put our hand in these times, than of yore. The life that now is, claims us as its own; and neither god, angel, nor devil can free us from the tendencies that rule the existence we know. Is that existence a thing of dread as the poet would have us believe? Is it a rushing onwards past the "pastures green" wherein we had hoped to rest ? Is it a sinking of all that is best in the common whirlpool that swallows up the hopes of men ; and are the science and arts of to-day, the foes and not the friends of humanity in its strivings after the ideal life ? What is the answer to such inquiries? It lies on the surface of things, and the poet finds his refutation in every hope and circumstance of life that has smoothed man's pathway through the world's vistas in past and present years. Go back to the simplicity of life he dreams of as the ideal state, and you shall wander in the byeways of life, with limited opportunities, dormant powers, feeble resources. This modern life opens up before our eyes countless aspects of existence, whereof our fathers did not so much as dream. The fulness of our life to- day, rests not so much in the greater knowledge and the fuller wisdom, as in the comfort, liberty, and freedom we enjoy, and in the innumerable avenues of mental kind that open up before our eyes. Life can be lived well in so many different phases ; happiness can be cultivated in so many varied ways ; H knowledge can be extended by so many diverse channels, that we know a fulness and a scope to-day to which the past ages have been strangers in truth. And is there not something for good in the thought that it is better to live one's life to the full — better to work out existence, even to the end that may not satisfy us completely, than to rest in the indolence of ignorance or under the shadow of the poet's fear that we may think too much and too far? Rest in the arms of stereotyped creeds and churches ; decry the advance which has made us what we are, if you will ; think our progress a mistake ; and bar the door to inquiry — and then ? — there can be but left for you an existence that knows nothing high or noble ; while outside the gates you have barred, are waiting and crowding to come in to you the thoughts wherein you may read the story of a world. It is not true that in this life of ours, lived, as we should live it, to the full, there is the sodden accumulation of the instincts of the crowd, and the annihilation of the individual life. Does the individual live for himself alone ? Is each life a distindt quantity in the sum total of existence ? Are the interests, of the one, distinft, separated, removed from those of all ? Does your intellectual freedom concern you alone ? Is my neighbour's intelledtuality a matter of no moment to me or his advance a thing in which I do not desire to share ? It is good to be carried onwards with the stream of thought, because many things are possible to united effort which individual powers can never accomplish. It is something to know you participate in the advance of the mass. Here and there, individual effort leads the van ; but all are not born to pioneer the way in any phase of thought. The powers that perfecSt the mass, effedl their work, because they carry individual tendencies onwards and upwards in their flow ; and as the seething tides of humanity roll onwards in their vast sweep and majesty of extent, they carry with them to the perfection of life, the individual as well as the mass. The wave sweeps even the stranded wayfarers into the healthy flow of the tide, and brings them at length to their " pastures green." I quoted to you the words of a poet who found in the " pastures green " of the liberal thinker, and in those of the science-student and the hopeful spirit, only the bitterness of disappointment, and the woe of despair. That poet knows 15 nothing of the joy of the universe. He has not learned how to appreciate the beauty of the progress he condemns. He regards the speed of the age, rather than the ends which that speed may be made, and is being made, to serve. Far wiser are the thoughts, which, in every advance of science, see the way towards the " pastures green " wherein our race may Hve its Hfe to the full ; and truer far, in respedt of their force and meaning, are the thoughts of another poet, that, seeing in every advance of knowledge the brightening of the human lot, sings with clarion-voice : — Shall we bow beneath the preaching of the church's garbled teaching, With its farce of heavenly reaching over lines it must not pass ? With its multiform complexion ; every fierce and wrangling section Self-asserting a perfection that's denied it in the mass ? Quacks, that pour their paid-for thunder through the gates of fear and wonder, Shall we tear their creeds asunder — toss the fragments to the skies ? Priests and teachers leave behind us, with the windy words that blind us, Till the light can hardly find us, through the mesh of twisted lies ? Silence, babbler! close beside thee, there's a higher word to guide thee, All the creeds that chafe and chide thee are but dust of passing strife. Over all earth's fleeting phases, clashing doctrines, swelling phrases — God, the simpler standard raises, of the creed that was a Life. That will stand though churches crumble, when the system-mongers stumble In their own distradted jumble — that at least will never fall. And when science-do(ftors scout thee, priests denounce and bigots flout thee, Fold the simpler faith about thee, and adt justly by them all. This is the spirit of the thought that in all things finds the good — this is the hope and joy of the life that, through all bitter- ness, trial, and pain, at last finds waiting, clear and quiet, in the world's morning light, its " pastures green." No. 1.] 5^ 0iitj| Mm ^HigioiiB ^odrfj FINSBURY, E.G. "EARLY FOOTSTEPS AND THEIR GUIDANCE." A DISCOURSE DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C., On SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1884, BY ARTHUR W. BUTTON, M.A. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. NOVEMBER 30th 1884. READINGS : I. Plato's Republic. Book II (near the end). ( Davies and Vatighati's Translation.) " Come then, like idle story-tellers (p. 64.) not bound to compose tales themselves." (p. 67.) II. Huxley's Lecture on "A Liberal Education and where to find it." "That rnan, I think ... (p. 27) ■ wise and good purposes." (p. 31.) MEDITATION : Compilation from the Gospels in " The Sacred Anthology," (p. 322-323.) on "The Child and the Childlike." "EARLY FOOTSTEPS AND THEIR GUIDANCE." IT is just five months since, through the courtesy of Mr. Conway, I was enabled to address you from this place on a Sunday morning ; and it may be within the recollection of some of you that I then said a few words on a subject on which I might claim to have had some special experience, viz. : the " Attractive Power of Catholicism." To-day, however, when, by a similar act of kindness on the part of Dr. Andrew Wilson, I appear before you again, I propose to deal with a matter for the due treatment of which I cannot profess that I am able to bring any special know- ledge — indeed many of my hearers will have had practical experience therein, to which I can lay no claim — for what we are to consider is briefly this, how we can secure the moral and religious aspects of education, when we entirely exclude therefrom the theological element. It is a problem, the im- portance of which has doubtless been felt already by many of you, as it will be felt more widely in the future, how to develop and train ethical ideas and sentiments in the young, apart from supernatural sanctions. But, before I go further, in order to vindicate myself from the charge of having entered upon a question with which I am not qualified to deal, I will say as much as this, that although I have had no practical experience in dealing with it in the form in ^\ hich I have stated it, yet that some experience of a parallel kind I have had, which ought to aid me in the investigation of the problem, partly in a careful examination of the details of my own early moral and religious training, and of its effects which I can trace in my own lack of intellectual development ; and partly in the fact that for eleven out of the twelve years of my clerical career I was practically the sole manager of public elementary schools, that is of what are called voluntary schools under government inspection, in which the moral and religious training of the children was my special charge, and (I am happy to remember) my occupation for a short time almost every day. In two cases these were schools connected with the Established Church, one a large one in Oxford, and the other a small one in the country ; while in the third and last case, I had the care of a Catholic school with about 400 children in Birmingham. And, although I am satisfied, on grounds which I need not now specify, that I was bound in honesty to withdraw at the time that I did withdraw from any further participation in systems of education based on theological dogma, yet I stand before you now in a very con- siderable degree impenitent in regard to my proceedings in those days. There is, I am perfectly aware, in the orthodox religious education of our times, very much that is necessarily repugnant to all liberal thinkers. The account which Dr. Wilson gave us last Sunday of his youthful experience of the terribly dogmatic catechism in vogue among Scotch Presbyterians was amusing perhaps in the satirical form in which he gave it ; yet it seemed to me also truly pathetic. The mere waste of time involved in such unprofitable study ; the woful views con- cerning God and our fellow-men, which the Calvinistic theories of election, predestination, &c., inculcate ; or (allowing that the children do not comprehend what is meant) the inanity of this laboured fabrication of theological parrots — all this is bad enough — and worse remains behind in the wholesale manufac- ture of canting phraseology which darkens the intelligence and deadens the moral sense. But I must in fairness add that there is another side to the matter, a side of which I saw a good deal myself, and which I therefore adduce in evidence, that the method of imparting what is called " religious knowledge " to the children in elementary schools is very far from deserving that utter condemnation in which the advocates of a purely secular education are wont to indulge. For it is quite a mistake to suppose that this instruction consists entirely, or even chiefly in catechisms of dogmatic theology learned by heart. That is a part of it, certainly, and it is regarded as an indispensable basis ; but a greater portion of the time is occupied either with Scripture history, a knowledge of which can best be imparted by a selection of incidents, or of biographies in the form of interesting tales ; or with the illustration of important moral truths, where the teacher has even greater freedom, and can lay his finger on details which the children at once recognise as familiar in their own lives ; and from this very homeliness learn readily what is of daily practical use, while they hardly regard as a lesson what strikes them as rather an attractive or even an amusing conversation. In fact, a great part of what is con- demned in the lump as denominational theological instruction, is often enough the one humanising element in early education, the only feature that does not tend exclusively to make of the scholars nothing but reading, writing, and calculating machines ; and it is just because I know that the time set apart for this study is in many a school welcomed as a time of sweetness and light, as a refreshment after the weariness of sums and grammar, that, in spite of defects and absurdities which I am ready enough to acknowledge, I still profess myself impenitent in regard to the share which I have taken in promoting directly or indirectly, elementary religious instruction. Were is not for the insecurity of the basis on which it all rests, an insecurity which I have tardily and reluctantly felt myself bound to acknowledge, I should be disposed to maintain that a work of that kind is wholly in the direction of good. But it is precisely the widely-diffused sense of the insecurity of the old basis, which makes the subject of our discussion to-day to be of such vast practical importance. The gravity of the matter would hardly be so apparent if it were merely a question of details, and not of the basis, wherein this uncertainty is recognised. How to impart religious instruction, without including in it such doctrines as those of eternal punishment, or of the inspiration of Scripture, or of the miraculous intervention of a personal God in the affairs of the world, would not be an unanswerable question, though it might present certain difficulties. But how to impart such instruction, when we cannot assume as our basis a heaven any more than a hell ; or a supreme omniscient Being any more than an incarnate Saviour ; and when even the duty of prayer must entirely change its character, to prevent its becoming the veriest sham — under such radically altered circumstances what ought to be done ; — this, I think, is a question which has as yet received no adequate answer, for, indeed, it is one that is only just beginning to be asked. " Nothing can be done," would be, I suppose, the answer of the vast majority of our fellow-countrymen ; " you can do nothing for the religious training of your children, if you thus refuse to acknowledge any theological basis at all, if you cannot bid them believe in an eye that can see them in darkness, as well as in the light, in an ear so quick that it never fails to catch their most secret unuttered thoughts ; if you cannot warn them of a coming judgment, wherein hidden right and wrong shall be most accurately discerned and rewarded." " Nothing can be done " (the bolder theological spirits would go on to say) " unless you lay a much broader dogmatic basis than this. You must tell your children of the fallen state of man, and of his consequent consignment to eternal flames, had it not been for the advent of a Saviour-God, who, by his teaching partly, but more by his death and his sacraments, has found you the way to escape your otherwise pre-determined doom. This only is a sufficient platform from which you can impart any genuine religious teaching." And it is to this second objector that I propose first to make answer, though of answer you will say there is no need. It was, I think, in the spring of the year 1868, that Professor Liddon was preaching one of his famous sermons before the University of Oxford. (And when I mention the name of Dr. Liddon I wish to be understood to do so with sincere respect for his undoubted abilities, and with equally sincere affection for a man whose true friendship I have sorely tried by more than one change in my attitude towards his theology). The preacher inci- dentally referred to the question of infant baptism, and showed its necessity by the following illustration. A child that had been educated an orthodox Christian, without, however, being baptised, was supposed to be incurring the censure of its parents for its outrageously bad behaviour, and then to make the following retort : — " You have taught me that my nature is fallen, and that I am a child of wrath. How can I become anything but what I am, without that baptism for which you say I am not fit ? " And this reply of this enfant terrible, this disastrously precocious theologian, was accepted by a good proportion of the hearers, by dons and undergraduates alike, as a powerful argument in support of the preacher's assertion. Some smiled at each other and nbdded, as much as to say, '* There's a slap in the face for the Baptists." But there was, I recollect, among the hearers an undergraduate, then in his second year, on whom the anecdote made a somewhat different impression. He was one of whom his enemies might have said, that he was Hke Mr. Facing-Both-Ways, inasmuch as one day he would talk like a Catholic monk, while another day he would seem to have no faith in anything, save what he could see and touch ; but his friends would have made the excuse that his head and his heart were in conflict, and that he was sadly perplexed to know how to make the broader views of life he was acquiring, square with his deeply-rooted dogmatic prepossessions. It occurred then to this well-meaning young man, that that child would have been more manageable had his parents themselves not provided him with weapons to throw at their heads. Unfortunately it was no more than a passing thought, but it was as much as that, that the moral training of that obviously intelligent and logical child had been marred by its early indoctrination with the figment of the Fall of Man. But it would be, I am aware, a mere waste of time in lecturing before the members of this religious society to insist at any length on the duty of parents and teachers not to instil into the minds of the young, theological dogmas which are not even part of the original doctrine of the Founder of the Christian Faith, but are the deductions therefrom of Fathers or Schoolmen or of later theological doctors. For, if I rightly understand the position of the South Place Religious Society, it is something like this, that, while recognising in human nature the existence of religious instincts, which some philosophers have even regarded as the special characteristic of our race, and while admitting the duty of cultivating and regulating those instincts, you will not tolerate the rule of any system of theology, however rarefied it may be ; nor will you style yourselves the followers of any special philosophical or religious teacher, claiming for yourselves, and for each other, the right to modify your apprehension of what religion may be regarded as, whether in theory or in practice, in accordance with the continual expansion of the circle of human knowledge. In a lecture delivered some years ago, Mr. Domville, one of the chief promoters of the Sunday Lecture Society, went so far as to maintain, that no parents have any right to teach dogmas or creeds to their children. Into the question of their right in the abstract I will not enter, only noting in passing, that I do not 6 think their right can be disproved. But as to their poiver there can be no question at all ; for no one can have any right to interfere. No true liberal, I think, would be willing to advocate the interference of the State, any more than of the Church, between parents not criminal, and their children. And this being so, it naturally follows that parents who are earnest believers, will continue to train their little ones, either at home or at denominational schools, in their own special form of belief, and will perhaps be even the more careful to do so as they note the rapid growth of dangers to faith. Nor can anything be justly done by liberals to remedy this state of things, save in the way of educating public opinion, till it is generally recognised, that in an age of religious revolution like our own, to instil into the minds of children any system of theological doctrines based on supernatural sanctions, is almost certainly the same thing as to condemn them to a period, at least, of deep mental anxiety and distress, a period which will be prolonged in its extent and intensified in its painfulness, just in proportion as the teacher has been successful in planting the untenable system deeply in earnest and devout minds. I said almost, certainly, for there is, of course, the chance that in some cases contact with modern intellectual progress may be altogether avoided. But, however possible this may be to-day, in a generation or two it will have become a contingency barely worth reckoning on, when opinions which now we shrink from disclosing to others on account of the pain we may give, will have been openly adopted by all educated people who are free to adopt them ; and in any case, such an exceptional position is hardly one that parents or teachers can look forward to with satisfaction as a creditable result of their labours. Nor is this all the mischief that will have been done ; for a man who has spent years (it may be) indulging in ideas and aspirations, and devoting himself to activities based thereon, which in the end he has to acknowledge to have been vain, is distinctly and permanently at a disadvantage when compared with men who have never had to struggle through the fog. Not merely in past waste of time, nor merely in a present sense of disappointed hopes does this misfortune lie ; but in a certain intellectual and moral weakness, consequent upon an unprofitable expenditure of energy, and in an unpreparedness and a perhaps incurable unfitness to grapple with the questions of the day ; much as a fruit tree that has been trained to a wall succumbs to a very moderate breeze if it be detached from its accustomed support. But I am spending too much time over what is after all only a preliminary consideration. I should, perhaps, have taken it for granted, without further remark, that no one here proposes to base moral and religious education on statements, as if they were sober facts, of the existence of hell with its demons and its brimstone ; of the interference with the course of nature by gods, or angels, or saints ; of the going up into the skies of men who have lived on the earth ; or of the terrible noise of the trumpet which is to announce the end of the world. Since you know that the time is coming, or has even already come, in which these things can no longer obtain honest credence, you are not likely to make belief in them the basis on which to teach the virtue (among others) of honesty. But now we must proceed to consider whether we cannot find some intelligible and legitimate basis for the training of the moral sense, apart even from the assumption of the existence of a supreme spiritual and moral Ruler, who will eventually reward all men according to their works ; or whether we have to admit what, as I remarked, the vast majority of our fellow-countrymen would urge, that without this nothing can be done. The question, I think, may fairly be asked whether there is much evidence to show that faith in a personal God is after all so very potent a factor in the morality of ordinary men, as is here tacitly assumed ; and whether the fear or hope of supernatural punish- ments or rewards in a future life be really so vividly present to the minds of those who are oscillating between a selfish desire to commit some wrong action, and an unselfish instinct which bids them abstain therefrom. It is I believe really, in the vast majority of cases, a fear of discovery by his fellow-men, or an undefined dread of some proximate evil result, which restrains an evil-doer, rather than a fear of hell ; while, if good people would only admit it, their self-sacrificing actions for their neighbour's benefit, the heroism (it may be) of a doctor or of a hospital nurse, — these things are often the outcome of a variety of mixed motives, among which human sympathy is assuredly the best, while the one most rarely present, though it is the one most commonly alleged, is that which is called the " love of God." I do not, indeed, claim to have proved this point ; I only state my opinion ; but if I am right, it is clear that the omission (which is becoming necessary) of reference to the will of a personal God from the modern religious curriculum, need not after all be so very disastrous in its results. And the same is the case, I take it, in regard to the practice of prayer. It is a delicate question this, on which I will touch only very lightly, for I am aware that liberal thinkers, even the most advanced, may hold with, and in private practise, a method of meditation that may be described as prayer, though it excludes anything like supplication ad- dressed to an external power, and consists only in self-intro- spection, with reflections on the duties and trials of life, and aspirations after the higher motives of conduct, or after more patient resignation in sorrow. This I admit and admire ; nor can anyone condemn it as irrational ; but it is altogether distinct from that artificial practice of prayer which has commonly been taught to children. And of this last it may, I think, be truly said, that it is often enough a custom "more honoured in the breach than in the observance ; " and that children who have never learned any forms of prayer, are happy in their freedom from a wearisome unreality. That reasonable kind of prayer, to which I have referred, they may be left to learn for themselves, when times of sorrow or temptation force it upon them ; and if they learn it then, it will have all the greater value, as being from within, genuine and spontaneous. If then these things be so, it would follow that the abandon- ing pretty nearly the whole of the existing basis of religious education, need not have the disastrous results that are con- fidently prognosticated — in fact, it would seem as if the beneficial results, which are ordinarily obtained by a careful moral training^ do not really depend on the theological system, which, however, as I noted above, is regarded by most as their indispensable groundwork. Are we then to concede to the advocates of a purely secular education that nothing at all need be done in the way of religious teaching ; that the whole idea is a mistake from first to last ; and that the children would really be better off, if nothing of the kind were attempted ? I should by no means be willing to admit this ; for I believe that a real and substantial benefit is gained, incidentally at least, from such instruction ; not indeed from the special theological doctrines themselves, but from the vehicle in which these things are conveyed. The narratives, and the moral deductions from them — these are the important things — even though the narratives be not historically- true — and these we can retain and find serviceable, while we discard the accompanying dogmas without regret. And this is a point which I should wish to develop somewhat in detail. But before doing so, I will anticipate an objection, or more accurately an " interpellation," which might well be raised at this point. •' You admit," it might be said, " a religious education which apparently is to guide its recipients only in regard to their relations with humanity ; are you not aware that the system you seem to be feeling after has already been elaborately worked out and brought to its full completion by the founder of the Positivist Philosophy ? " There is more to be said in reply to this than I should care to trouble you with now ; but I will indicate what I think my answer would be. It is impossible to have no more than a slight acquaintance with the wTitings of Auguste Comte without having also a high opinion of and a sincere respect for his genius, his learning and his industry. And if we look to some of the English exponents of his philosophy, we cannot withhold our admiration from their dis- interested and unaffected goodness ; and I must add that, as filtered through their minds, there is an attractiveness about the system which I, for one, fail to detect in it as originally stated by their master. But having said as much as this, I am bound further to confess that having learned by experience to be some- what shy of systems and of organizations, unless they are able to give a very satisfactoiy account of how they have come into existence, I do not anticipate much advantage for the rising generation from the Positivist priesthood and catechism. Professor Huxley has described Positivism as Catholicism minus Christianity ; but to my mind it is hardly so venerable as that; for while the latter is the product of i8 centuries of development, and of thousands of devout minds, the latter, as a completed system, (and I am thinking of it now in its full-blown form, with its churches pointing to Paris and its green flag of the Western Republic), the latter all came out of one man's ink- bottle, and was to have been accepted on his authority. With more meanings than one the words would here be true, that in this there is a want of common sense. A story is current among lO the Catholic clergy in France tothe following effect: — WhenComte had finished his elaboration of the Positivist religion, he called on the Prime Minister of France (the famous Talleyrand, so the legend runs) and asked that the Positivist Church might by law be constituted the Established Church of the country. The Minister was gracious, nay cordial, and promised that nothing should be wanting on his part. " Thus nothing is easier, my dear Sir, if only you will do one thing, but that is indispensable : you will be good enough to die, and to rise again the third day." The story is perhaps apocryphal, or at any rate has been a little coloured ; but it illustrates characteristics of Comte (which doubtless his enemies have exaggerated), his tendency to rely on authority, and his readiness to assume that everywhere men's minds must needs have moved in the same direction as his own. Apart from this, I have no wish to disparage the evidence of a wide knowledge of human nature, which is borne by many even of the tiny details of his system. Some of them are much to our present purpose, for they are of a kind to be attractive to children, rather than to grown men ; and could thus be usefully incorporated into a non-theological system of religious educa- tion. Children delight in recurring anniversaries, and in festivals, each with its appropriate ceremonial ; and a shrewd remark put by George Eliot into the mouth of one of her characters in Roniola, implies that she did not regard as the wisest, the men who despise these things. " There has been no great people," says Pietro Cennini, " without processions ; and the man who thinks himself too wise to be moved by them to anything but contempt, is like the puddle that was proud of standing alone, while the river rushed by." I am not, therefore, disposed to complain that the Positivist system for the religious training of the young has not forgotten these things. I am only disposed to complain that it has provided them for us, all cut and dried, and therefore likely to be formal and unreal, if not ridiculous ; whereas, to avoid these dangers, these things must grow up spontaneously, and gradually take their shape, as each nation, or district, or association takes to be the most appropriate and expressive of its mind. We may, I hope, live to see the day, when children of our religious training will sing in picturesque procession, in a temple of free-thought, somewhat nobler perchance than this. But what is to be the ultimate II basis of our method of religious training ? — for a basis assuredly there must be. Speaking unaffectedly as one who has no desire save to cast his somewhat crude ideas into the common crucible, with the anticipation that, at a future date, whatever may have been of value in them will come forth purified, and strengthened by union with the ideas of others, — I should say that our basis is the instinct of duty, and our method the quickening of that instinct by the infusion of enthusiasm. The origin of this instinct I do not profess to be able to trace ; but it is unques- tionably present in the mind of every child ; and needs only development and cultivation. I suppose it is a product of the more civilised and social period of the existence of the human race ; for, while the selfish instincts secured survival in the earlier period, the unselfish ones are more likely to have secured it, and so have acquired strength, when men began to live together in the tribal stage ; for failure to respect the rights of his fellows would then lead to a man's punishment, and ultimately to his extinction ; while the man of order and justice would come to the front ; so that eventually, when the period of violence has ceased, there is found to be a strictly natural and scientific verification of that Beatitude, which, on the first hearing, seems to be so wholly improbable and unreasonable : — " Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." But, however this may be, anyhow we have ready to hand this instinct of duty, this intimate sense that good conduct is better than bad conduct ; and this is sufficient for our purpose. Duty, however, is (I think) a preferable term to conduct ; for the latter has reference only to the present moment, while duty is retrospec- tive and prospective as well. Our duty to the past expands into the reverence due to those of old time, whether poets, philosophers, philanthropists, politicians, artists, inventors, scientific discoverers, or what not ; to whom we owe the advantages and the happiness the human race has already attained. And in the case of children this reverence will include what is due to parents, to those in authority, and to old age ; and there is no greater remedy for juvenile conceit, than the being made clearly to see the utter dependence of the present on the past, and the consequent debt of gratitude which the youthful heir of all the ages owes to the brave toilers who now sleep an endless sleep. " For what hast thou," as St, Paul 12 well puts it, " which thou hast not received ? And if thou hast received it, why dost thou boast as if thou hadst not received it ? " And then, as to the duty owed to the future, it is well, I think, to accustom children to regard themselves as links in a chain — (such they presumably will prove to be ; such, in a state of society less hampered by social distinctions and ascetic theories than is our present state, every man and woman with the rarest exceptions would be) — and to show that the strength of a chain is the strength of its weakest link — and on this to base the duty of making the best of one's own life ; of being careful of one's own health ; of developing to the utmost one's own intelligence, or whatever talents one may possess ; and all this, not merely from any selfish motive, but so that the stream of humanity (to change the metaphor) may flow henceforth a little more strongly, a little more clearly, and a little more gladly, because our own life has been a drop in that stream. And here I am glad to find myself anticipated, in what I had thought was an original idea, by Auguste Comte. Unprofitable and vexatious as it undoubtedly is, to set Utopias before middle- aged people, who know pretty well the prospect that is before them, and whose aspirations have suffered somewhat from their experience of the troubles of life, and from their knowledge of the narrow limits within which alone its amelioration can be looked for — it is surely allowable and expedient to kindle the enthusiasm of children, not indeed by a sketch of an Utopia of a fantastic and impossible kind, but of one which from science and history we may learn to be really and rightly attainable, although its attainment may be hard enough to secure, and although generations, not a iew, must elapse before it has been actually attained. A master-hand (I admit) would be necessary to make the sketch I have in view ; but it would have, when duly completed, the double attractiveness of a kind of prophetic fairy-tale ; and its effect should be to stimulate and to give some definite aim to those aspirations after a better world, which most children at one time or another experience, but are taught to gratify and satisfy by the contemplation of a supernatural heaven. This reverence, however, for the past, and this care for the future, which I have brought, perhaps you will think rather labouredly, into the sphere of duty, are, after all, only subsidiary matters, which can hardly fail to be 13 taught meanwhile to a child, who is well instructed in his duty to the present. The main question here is the method by which the instruction is imparted, for there is no controversy as to its substance. And, though I am free to confess that I believe eventually a series of catechisms, graduated in comprehensivenes and in difficulty, will be found the most effectual method of imparting moral teaching, or at least will be recognised as an indispensable framework ; yet this must be left to the future ; while we have ready to hand that method of instruction by means of narratives, which all nations from the earliest known period have adopted as the simplest and best, for youthful minds. Through the medium of fables and fairy- tales, Dame Duty, instead of being pictured as a stern-featured spectacled step-mother, with her birch hanging within easy reach, becomes a chatty and welcome visitor, of whom it is a pleasure to learn. It is a question that may be debated, how far it is wise to teach children by means oi fictions — it may be debated, as it was by Plato, more than 2,000 years ago, but it can never be finally answered ; for what will suit one child will not suit another. Two representative men, Mr. John Stuart Mill and Mr. Ruskin may be taken as practically answering the question, that if you provide fiction voluminously, or if you exclude it rigidly, you may still produce an admirable, highly-cultivated, good, man. Perhaps if Mr. Mill's childhood had been blessed with the sunshine of a little play of fancy, he would have had less of that gloomy coldness which his autobiography betrays, and which made him less fitted to act with men, than to think for them. Perhaps if Mr. Ruskin had not been brought up entirely on fairy-tales, as he has recently told us he was (though in another book he says he was trained as a strict evangelical) there would have been something of scientific accuracy in his writings, to the utter absence of which they now owe a little of their charm. But neither defect in their education (if defects they were) has hindered the develop- ment of an honest straight-forward man ; and, though I believe the rising generation are rather fastidious of fables and fairy- tales, and prefer more solid reading, I am happy to think that there is no real danger of their ever being set aside. For myself, 1 have pleasant memories of an illustrated copy of iEsop's fables, given me by my god-father as soon as I could 14 read ; and, if I did not derive much moral benefit from their study, it was because from the first I took a dislike to the long-worded morals tacked on to the end of each story, appendages which seemed to me very little to the purpose, and better omitted. But this matter of the use of fiction in the guidance of early footsteps has a bearing on the corresponding use of the Bible. I have some difficulty in understanding how men of modern ideas and modern knowledge, can speak of the Bible in the terms they sometimes do. Auguste Comte puts it among the books which his disciples are to read. Mr. Goldwin Smith speaks of it as incomparable among other sacred Scriptures. Mr. Matthew Arnold implies that its study is a security for righteousness ; and other instances might be adduced. I should not quarrel with these sentiments, if only they were expressed with more discrimination, and did not apparently refer to the Bible as a whole. That the Bible contains the greater part of what is most admirable in ancient religious literature, and that no man can be considered fully educated, or can attain the highest culture, who is ignorant of it altogether, would, I suppose, be admitted on all hands. But when we remember that, in the form in which it is circulated by thousands and millions of copies in this country only, a vast amount of material is included, which is thoroughly bad reading, I am at a loss to understand how these sentiments can be so broadly expressed. I should have been more disposed to say that, were it not for the utter want of intelligence in the vast majority of those into whose hands it comes, and were it not for the neglect which the book as a whole usually suffers, it is a question whether it ought not, in its complete form, to be with- drawn from circulation. And another difficulty, which many have felt, lies in its repletion with miraculous incidents; in favour of which our countrymen as a rule make a most illogical excep- tion, and regard them as historically true. How can you teach young people, it is asked, any physical science, whose axiom is the unbroken uniformity of natural law, when, an hour later, another lesson is taught, in which that axiom is, as a matter of course, set aside ? Both objections are undoubtedly grave, and are sufficient to account for the reluctance which many have felt, and feel, to allow their children to learn anything about the Bible at all. But I question whether, as a mere matter of educa- 15 tion, it is quite wise to leave children in this ignorance concern- ing it ; and whether it is fair to them that when they come to associate with other scholars, they should be open to this reproach of knowing nothing about things with which others arc familiar; rather I should say that they should not only know of them but know also the t7'2ie account of them, and so escape a danger which is not an imaginary one. The religious instincts in most children are strong, and so is, in many, but in a decreasing number of, cases, the readiness to believe in the supernatural. Our race will have to be filtered through several more generations, before this characteristic shall have disappeared. What then will be a parent's distress to find that, in consequence of too great reticence on these subjects at home, and from the non-satisfaction of the religious instincts there, his children should at school have lapsed into a credulity from which he himself had had a painful struggle to get free ; and to learn from their condescending remarks, that they regard him as lying " in darkness and in the shadow of death." How much happier he, who in familiar discourse with them concerning the privilege of liberty from theological thralls, should be able humourously to quote to them the words " With a great sum obtained I this freedom," and to hear the reply from grateful and smiling lips, " But I was free-born." Surely all that is necessary to accomplish this end, so that we may avail our- selves freely of the rich treasure of instructive but unhistorical narratives which the Bible contains, is frankly to acknowledge that such is their character ; and to tell them to children on that understanding. Plato, I suppose, would have objected to the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit, on the ground that it would lead to unworthy ideas about the gods ; and so far he would have been right. But is there any reason why we should be squeamish on that particular point ? Begin the story with the words, " Once upon a time," and modify certain details in it that are not consonant with modern ideas of propriety, and children will find that it is not only of thrilling interest, but that it conveys a lesson about the subtle power of temptation, and the need of not even looking at the forbidden thing, which a score of scoldings would have failed equally well to teach. Mr. Clodd's little book on the " Childhood of Religions," which is probably well known to you, would have fulfilled the require- ments I have in view, had he not, from motives of prudence I t6 suppose, refrained from treating the Bible stories with the same freedom that he treats stories from other sacred books. He omits them in fact altogether, only hinting that they should be treated with that same freedom ; but his meaning would be less likely to be apprehended by the scholar, than by the intelligent teacher. Since, however, it may be taken for granted that he contemplates oral instruction to bring home the moral value of the tales, the omission is perhaps of less importance than it might seem. It is needless to insist on the absolute necessity of this oral instruction. To be directed to read a chapter from the Bible, and to be forbidden to make any comments thereon, — can one conceive anything more ridiculous than the position in which the School Board thus places its teachers ? So fatuous a compromise could content no one, we should say. But it contents all the Philistines in the land. It is however as yet, only in the family that the method of religious instruction I have endeavoured to sketch and to advo- cate can find any place. What I have had in view has been the home instruction of children till the age of lo or 12 years ; assuming that they who are then sent to school at a distance, will be brought into contact with other children, or with teachers, of more or less orthodox views. That then they will be able to hold their own, and be no discredit, but the reverse, to the re- ligious aspect of liberal thought, we may rest assured, if, in addition to a scientific habit of mind, they have acquired some knowledge of the history of religions, of the religions of other lands besides our own ; and if their imagination has been trained to subserve religious aims and pious conduct, — the imagination being taken to include, as Mr. Matthew Arnold in his latest publication tells us Wordsworth intends it to include " the mighty forces of love, reverence, gratitude, hope, pity and awe" — of such a moral and religious training, though necessarily at such an age incomplete, no man who loves his children need be either afraid or ashamed. You remember the words^of a poet of old times, " The greatest reverence is due to youth." Let us be careful to illustrate our sense of the truth of this maxim by never allowing any act or word of ours to suggest to the plastic minds of children that levity in regard to intellectual truth is compatible with moral rectitude. No. 2.] mt\ llaa |ldigioMs ^mt^ FINSBURY. E.G. "SHADOW & SUNSHINE OK HUMAN LIFE." A DISCOURSE DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C., On SUNDAY, JANUARY II, 1885, BY F. SYDNEY MORRIS. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN. AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. "SHADOW AND SUNSHINE OF HUMAN LIFE." THE question, " which predominates in human life, happiness or sorrow?"' has been frequently discussed and variously answered, and yet it is doubtful whether any intelligent man who has undertaken to furnish a reply, has been able even to satisfy himself, much less others. It is a question upon which there is bound to be diversity of opinion, and the opinion of each will be mainly based upon, and have reference to, his own experience, and the immediate conditions of his own individual existence. There are other questions of the kind. For instance, if you ask which is preferable, spring- or autumn ? the man who rents a moor and dotes upon the sport of shooting grouse or pheasants will reply, autumn. But he who is afflicted by some constitutional delicacy wliich keeps him prisoner throughout the shortening days and dark winter months, will reply spring, which comprises the annual period of his freedom and activity and delight. One will rejoice in the darkening evenings and the season of fireside, curtained social restfulness, and another in outdoor pursuits and recreations. It is a question of taste, tem- perament and circumstances. And so of this other question. The answer is different from different people. It is different from the same person at different times. He who is young and strong, beloved and pros2:)erous, finds life very good. But he who is old and friendless finds oftentimes all the goodness of life hidden under the trouble and the sorrow. / And the same man. Ask one when the distant vista of fame and fortune has just opened to his view, when he has first scored a great success, or when he is basking in the light and warmth of a tender love : yes, life is full of sunshine ! Ask the same question of the same man when his liver is out of order, and he will say the exact opposite. G-enerally speaking, there are four things that constitute the deep shadows of human life. One is the unsatisfactory nature of what is deemed pleasure. Men cry, ' If life is to be worth anything, enjoy ! enjoy ! ' And they proceed to enjoy as they understand enjoyment — and one enjoyment after another palls upon them — all in turn fail to fully satisfy the desires and fill full the life, and men grow jaded, bitter, fretful. While pleasure lasts, man is superior to everything. He reigns supreme. Future evil there is not — past evil has fallen into oblivion. There is a curious and very ancient story, which has found its way into nearly every literature of the world, which runs thus : — A man was pursued by an unicorn, and while he tried to flee from it he fell into a pit. In falling he stretched out both his arms and caught hold of a small tree that was growing on the side of the pit. Having gained a firm footing, and holding fast to the tree, he fancied he was safe : when he saw two mice, a black and a white one, gnawing at the root of the tree to which he was clinging. Looking down, he saw beneath him, a horrid dragon with his mouth wide open, ready to devour him ; and examining the place whereon his feet rested, the heads of four serpents glared at him ; then he looked up, and beheld drops of honey falling down from the tree to which he clung. Suddenly! the unicorn, the dragon, the mice, the serj^ents, all were forgotten, and his mind was intent only upon catching the sweet drops of honey trickling down from the tree ! The meaning of this is obvious. The unicorn is death ever chasing man. The pit is the world. The small tree is man's life, ever gnawed by the mice, black and white, that is night and day. The dragon represents hell ; the four serpents the four elements supposed to compose the human body. And yet surrounded by all these terrors man is able to forget them all and to think only of the honey of life, so long as it is fresh and trickles into his mouth. Pleasure, so long 3 as it is pleasure, makes man oblivious to all else. And so it is. But how soon does the sweetness turn to bitterness and produce nausea ; and then unless some other fount of pleasure is o^^ened to him ( and the time comes when all the founts of sensual pleasure are dried up) he realizes how diligently are the mice eating away his life, how persistent is the pursuit of death — and the value of life appears to him " nil." And this is the reason of the despondency and cynicism of multitudes. They have had a low and unworthy idea of in what happiness consis- ted. They have pursued pleasure, as the one essential to the enjoyment and fulness of life, a particular pleasure has met and satisfied the demand made of it for a while, but not for long. Many have been tried in succession, but all have failed to produce permanent satisfaction, and then follows depression, complaint, moroseness, in which a distorted view is taken of everything-, and life is deemed absolutely worthless. Another thing is: The difficulty of duty. It is universally acknowledged that it is man's duty to do right. But it is so difficult to decide in all cases what is right, and when a conclusion has been arrived at, so difficult to do what is right. When conventionally religious people talk so glibly about morality and immorality, and right and wrong, and duty, and so on, it seems to them, doubtless, as though the matter was all perfectly clear and perfectly easy, and the only thing that made men not do right according to their ideas was deliberate wilfulness and stubborn folly. Little do they know of that upon which they dogmatise. It is all very well for well-to-do Christians to talk in this way, to whom the church serves the purposes of a social club, by means of which they get into desirable society, who are never tempted to do anything that the world would condemn as a crime — because they have all they want, who look with abhor- rence upon covetousness and theft, who find that everything rather helps their ' religion,' and their difficulty would be to be conventionally irreligious, that is what would cost them something, for that would mean striking out for themselves, losing caste, perhaps good name and reputation, having opinions, and giving reasons for holding them ; and all this would be very unpleasant and painful to the average orthodox man. I say it is all very well for the comfortable Christian to talk thus, when the path of popular religion is the smoothest for him, when his " proba- tionary course " is made very agreeable, when he deems his reward at the end very sure. But what of the man who has been born in poverty, who perhaps has been reared on gin, who has been taught to thieve before he could talk, whose whole world has been a world of filth and vice ? This is not by any means an exceptional case ; it is the case with thousands. And what about the thousands more who have a glimmering of better things, and yet bowed down and crushed by grinding poverty year after year, have all their higher aspirations crushed within them, all the nobility of their natures paralyzed, who never have a higher thought or engage in a nobler work than that which has reference to the staving off hunger and the quenching of thirst ? There are thousands in tliis case. .Shelley sang — " How many a rustic Milton has passed by, Stifling the speechless longings of his heart In unremitting drudgery and care ! How many a vulgar Cato has compelled His energies, no longer tameless then, To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail ! How many a Xewton, to whose passive ken Those mighty spheres that gem infinity Were only specks of tinsel, fixed in heaven To light the midnight of his native town ! ' ' And so of common morality. I have known men who had a very clear conception of their duty, who made a very honest and courageous attempt to do their duty, who throughout years toiled, strove and suffered for this idea ; vv'ho in society endured misrepresentation and contumely, who in their business suffered anxiety and loss, who have at last been beaten ! And in their despair of ever being able to do what they were convinced it was their duty to do, they have bitterly exclaimed that there was no sunshine in life, and they have become sad and cynical. Pope's bold assertion, " Virtue alone is happiness below," has generally been taken as a brief and pithy expression of an important truth. But sad and certain is it that multitudes have found the statement false. Again, there is the Disappointment of hwinan hopes. A very general practice of man is to live largely in the future — not to make the most of what he has, but to dream of what he hopes to have. Not to make the most of what he is, but dream of what he hopes to be. This habit stimulates a boy to do his best to acquire knowledge w^hile at school, it incites a man oftentimes to \iVit forth his utmost effort, and he accomplishes what he would not have done without this incentive. But it must be confessed that human hopes are often doomed to disappointment — and disappointment of an ardently cherished hope is a cruel trial. What youth, when he has become a man, can look back to the hopes of his boyhood, and rejoice in their accomj)lishment ? Only here and there, one ; and these isolated cases are generally put on record. But in the thousands of unrecorded lives it is impos- sible. We hoped for success, perhaps for riches, perhaps for honour or wide influence. We dreamed of rising in the social scale — of swaying the thoughts of men — ^of making a mark in commerce, literature, art, or politics ; of developing a genius which would win acknowledgment from all men; we resolved to do greatly, purely, faithfully. And what have we done ? Nothing Vv'orthy of note. In the majority of cases we have just managed to hold our own in some course, we should, perhaps, not vrillingly have chosen, amongst hundreds of others who^can just manage to do the same : that is all. " I remenibei' the gleams and glooms that dart Across the schoolboy's brain, The song and the silence in the heart, That in part are jn-ophecies, and in part Aro longings wild and vain. And the voice of tliat fitful song Siugs on, and is never still : 'A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth :u"e long, long thoughts.' There are things of which I may not speak ; There are dreams that cannot die ; There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak, And bring a pallor into the cheek, And a mist before the eye ; And the words of that fatal song Come over me like a chill, A boy's will is the wind's will. And the thought 5 of youth are long, long thoughts." 6 And so it is in later life. Our hopes — tlie pure children of our faith and purpose are slain — as in the massacre of the innocents, slain by malice, slain by jealousy, slain by avarice, by envy, bigotry, indifference, untoward circumstances, but slain, until at last the only good things of human life seems to be sleep, dreams and death. One had a vision : — " Three gods alone remained. In the still, cold, moonlight air their shadows stood together. Hand in hand looking onward through the white night mists. Other gods perished with the faith of each age as it changed. Other gods lived by the breath of men's lips, the tears of prayer, the smoke of sacrifice. But they — their empire was the universe. In every young soul that leaps into the light of life rejoicing blindly, Oneiros has dominion, and he alone. In every creature that breathes, from the conqueror resting on a field of blood to the nest-bird cradled on its bed of leaves, Hypnos holds a sovereignty which nothing mortal can long resist and live. And Thanatos, to him belongs every created thing, past, present, and to come ; beneath his feet all generations lie ; and in the hollow of his hands he holds the worlds. Deathless as themselves their shadows stood. A late light strayed in from the grey skies, pale as the primrose flowers that grew amongst the reeds on the shore, and found its way to them trembling, and shone in the far-seeing depths of their unfathomable eyes — the eyes which spake and said, ' Sleep, dreams, death, we are the only gods that answer prayer.' " This is the conclusion to which a life of disappointed hopes brings a man ; and such a life truly has little sunshine in it. The fourth shadow is the shadoiv of death. The subject of death is seldom calmly considered. It is allowed to overcloud in many cases the whole of a life, which otherwise would have been rich and beautiful. When calmly and rationally considered, many things occur to one which are calculated to make it less terrible than it appears to the shallow and the fearful ; for instance, there is the shrewd and very suggestive remark of Hazlitt. "Perhaps the best cure for fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not. This gives us no concern. Why then does it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be ? I have no wish to have been alive a hundred years ago ; why should I regret that I shall not be alive a hundred years hence ? " And there is Schiller's remark, " Death cannot be an evil since it happens to all." But comfortable reflections are seldom indulged in, and doubtless many " through fear of death are all their life subject to bondage." Now orthodoxy, recognizing the darkness that hangs and broods over mankind, says nothing can dispel this darkness, nothing can shed light and sunshine but " revelation" — a special communication from the deity, announcing certain consoling- truths which could not be otherwise known by men, and it claims that " revelation," by showing that men are only serving a probation in this life, the results of which shall be reaped in the next life, has supplied a key to life's mysteries, a substitute for pleasure, assistance in duty, compensation for disappointment, and hope in death ; and the champions of this theory, of which the idea of probation is the keystone, do not see that although consolation may be supplied by it to some temperaments, yet to all thoughtful men a difficulty is added greater than any that are supposed to be removed : For probation is unjust if compulsory; and to whom is the choice given whether he will enter upon this probation or not ? It is more unjust still if the probationer is so hampered that he cannot possibly succeed ; and yet this is the case with thousands upon thousands. It is more unjust still if the end is more certainly gained by some other means. And this " revelation " teaches, for the doctrine of Kedemption maintains that at the eleventh hour all the future good may be acquired by a simple act of faith, although all the probationary period has been misspent. "Reve- lation" that supplies a god acting partially, feebly, unjustly; destroying men's liberty of action, and freedom of choice, putting man on his trial whether he will or no, and then preferring at the end the man who has done evil and repents, to the man who has done well and needs no repentance, adds a difficulty infinitely greater than any it is its supposed function to dispel. Such a theory is an insult to human intelligence, is offensive to human moraUty, is a mockery of human endeavour, is a derision of human woe ! 8 And yet this doctrine, and those associated with it, are said to siij^ply the only light and consolation possible to man in the midst of the general darkness of his experience. Not only light, but ^morality is said to depend for its existence absolutely upon these doctrines of " revelation.'"' Especially the doctrine of a future life resulting from the present probationary period. Plainly and boldly did Greorge Eliot protest against this mischievous teaching in her famous article on the poet Young. She summed up her argument with these tender and wise words : " Nay, it is conceiv- able that in some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality, that we are here for a little while, and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones, and to our many suffering fellow-men, lies nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of extended existence. And surely it ought to be a welcome fact, if the thought of mortality as well as of iminoiiality be favourable to virtue. We can imagine that the proprietors of a patent water supply may have a dread of common springs ; but for those who only share the general need, there cannot be too great a security against a lack of fresh water— or of pure morality. It should be matter of unmixed rejoicing if this latter necessary of health- ful life has its evolution ensured in the interaction of human souls as certainly as the evolution of science or of art; with which indeed it is but a tvv'in ray, melting into them with indefinable limits." But this rational feeling is not understood by the champions of orthodoxy, or if imderstood, is feared, as calculated to undermine what is called "revelation;"' and on all hands the statement is constantly reiterated — that the Christian " Revealed Gospel,'" with its liopes and fears, is the only efficient incentive to morality, and the only bringer of sunshine into otherwise dark and worthless human life. The persistence of this statement, in view of the diffused scientific knowledge of to-day, and the many proofs of the existence of morality and ' happiness apart from the acceptance of Christian dogma, and all the efforts to ameliorate the condition of the suffering masses, which arise and are maintained outside the limits of the church's influence and po\\er, would seem to show that those who make it are in terror lest the prestige of their 9 caste should be destroyed, and to lead us to the conclusion that ■ this is an unworthy and a dishonourable attempt to frighten people from enquiry. Free enquiry always results in the over- throw of authority. In these days it is fatal to the existence of any " cause,"' amongst the even very moderately intelligent, for its leaders to pose as antagonists of enquiry and investigation ; and so a quibble is resorted to, and it is put thus, ' Yes ; human reason cannot be hampered and held in bondage ; it is right to examine the matter all round ; a man may, if he will, deny the doctrines of Christianity. But how terrible are the consequences !' As a worthy canon of York minster said last week, " Scepticism passes on to infidelity, and immorality and vice must follow in their train." * Yes ! wickedness and misery are the consequences of the rejection of these dogmas ; all the gladness and beauty, the usefulness and sunshine of life sacrificed ! and also all the good of the hereafter! And so, timid souls are led to give up a right through fear of the evil consequences of its exercise. And this has led to a very general misconception of the facts of our life, involving very often the disparagement of the good and the exaltation of the bad or indifferent, a calling of the darkness light, and the light darkness. Thus work, for ages, has been deemed an evil, a curse, and idleness a blessing, which being prolonged throughout eternity, constitutes heaven. The church has brought about the prevalence of this idea, which is founded upon one passage of an ancient Hebrew legend, and is entirely opposed to universal human experience. And extreme church- men, even in this country to-day, oppose religion to all natural human associations, relationships and duties. They still say, as ecclesiasticism of the middle ages said, " Under which Lord will you serve?"' The church, the priest, as the interpreter of God"s will and lavr ? or human reason, human affections, ties and duties ? If you choose the former you lose your independence, but you secure salvation. If you choose the latter, you sacrifice the eternal interests of your soul to the temporary indulgence of your unregenerate disposition or intellect ; or as it is sometimes put, you must decide between Christ and Belial ; you must give up Belial if you choose Christ ; Christ will give you up if you * Canon Blunt, 10 choose Belial. Now this seems very grotesque and ridiculous, and so it is. But think of this alternative put with all the usual impudent assumption of infallibility that characterises the priestly caste, before a weak and religiously sentimental individual, or one made coward by his ignorance and crimes. On the one side there is liberty and independence that is not greatly deshed, fraught with dangers that are greatly dreaded by the superstitious ; and on the other side there is assurance of good that is longed for, coupled with evils that are not realized. What is sure to be the result ? Ecclesiastical authority wins the day, and with the intellectually weak it will continue to win the day for long to come. But is it not a terrible thing that in these days of criticism, knovfledge and progress, there should be a class of men whose avowed mission is to make the weaknesses of men and women the basis of their religion and not theh strengths, and so lead them in the name of religion away from rational instruction, from worthy duties, and from natural and beautiful affections and relationships ; who insist upon ignorance as a condition of piety, and upon disobedience of the claims of nature and humauity as the condition of acceptance with their God ? It is a terrible thing, and nothing will overthrow the influence of this class but the dissemination of knowledge of history and natm-al laws. Only when the origin and progress of religion is known, and the supernatural is felt to be incredible, will superstition and ecclesi- astical authority be destroyed. So we say that the Christian scheme adds difficulties instead of supplying consolations to the intelligent ; and worlcs incalculable mischief by making the really good and beautiful things of human life mean and unworthy ; and the evil, the unreal, the superstitious, and the imaginary things, of primary value and importance. Our endeavour in these days is to substitute the natural for the supernatural, and facts for fancies. It is very difficult, and is frauo-ht with pain to many, for as Mr. Spencer says, " no mental revolution can be accomplishevd without more or less of laceration. Be it a change of habit or change of conviction, it must, if the habit or conviction be strong, do violence to some of the feelings, ]1 and these must, of course, oppose it. For long experienced and therefore definite sources of satisfaction, have to be substituted for sources of satisfaction that have not been exjierienced, and are, therefore, indefinite. That which is relatively well-known and real, has to be given up for that which is relatively unknown and ideal ; and of course such a change cannot be made without a conflict involving pain." This is true of the common things of human life which have been overlooked as sources of supreme comfort and purest sunshine ; but which ought to be restored to their rightful place, and duly estimated as the real good things of life. For instance, raere existence is good. There is pleasure in moving and breath- ing. Mere physical life is good. Walt Whitman, in his " Poem of Joys," sings of many things as good, and justly so, which piously sedate people would condemn as merely animal pleasures, the indulgence of which is inconsistent with the cultivation of the mind and of the soul. Aye, it is good to live and breathe. It is good to sleep and wake. Good to move and to enjoy ; and men find it so, howsoever they may pretend to contemn the body. Wit- ness the way in which men bereft of all else cling to life at any cost. It is not always that they hope still for something better, or that they dread something worse ; it is, that it is good to live. Thought, intellectual strength and activity, is better still. To soar on the wings of the mind into lofty and distant regions ; to roam by means of thought all over the universe, to learn its facts, and wonder at its marvels, and ponder its mysteries ; to gather information from day to day, and upon this to meditate and reason ; to hold fellowship and converse with all the great minds of all countries and all ages, is to add life to life. Yes ! to add the larger life to the lesser, to enlarge the world a hundredfold, and store the mind "with pictures, strengths, and inspira- tions that remain though all else is taken away. So that a man who is destitute of external comfort and advantage, who suffers pecuniary loss, social ostracism, or any other depri- vation, yet has within him a world of enjoyment, association, occupation, and incentive to new endeavour, which fills his life with interest and sunshine. 12 Add' to this, Hope, wliicli, in spite of what I have said of disappointment, yet remains as a great consoUition and inspira- tion to humanity ; for hope is one of the fine3t sentiments of our nature. There are few things more good or beautiful than that of a man bringing the future to tell upon the present, proving his superiority to the scenes of the passing hour by recognizing their relation to hours and years that are to be, taking refuge from the din and troubles of his secular and sensual lot in the creations of love and fancy, as in a retreat of summer beauty : con- densing his existence ; toiling in the hard ways of duty with all the zeal and cheerfulness which can only come from the hope of success. Add again to this. Human Love, which enters everywhere, and smooths the rough edges of human life, and purifies and ennobles the thoughts and aspirations of all v/ho come within the range of its influence ; love, which casts a halo of glory oftentimes about common relationships and duties, and has often lifted menial employments to the dignity and lionour of heroisms, and noble life missions. In which is found added strensfth to bear the burdens of life, and meet its difficulties, and do its irksome works. In which is found consolation in the midst of life's anxieties and afflictions and perplexity, weariness and di;i- appointment. Love has been degraded, has been made a mean, a selfish, and despicable thing. ]Many deem it a thing to be held in contempt and derision : yet it is the soil out of which grow the most beautiful plants of generosity, charity, and self-sacrifice. It is the atmosphere which produces the loftiest aspirations, the worthiest activities, the fullest life. And he who has known it knows that often it makes all the difference between a life that is empty and worthless, and a life that is full of music and radiance, of power and beauty. And even those afflictions and adversities v/hich seem to destroy all the good of life may, after all, add to its value and supply sunshine. One said, " The great god walked by the edge of the river, and he mused on a gift to give man ; on a joy that should be a joy on the earth for ever ; and he passed by the lily white as snow, by io the thyme that fed tlio bees, by the gold heart in the arum flower, by the orange flame of the tall sandrush, by all the great water-blossoms which the sun kissed and the swallows loved ; and he came to the one little reed, pierced with the snakes' tongues, and all alone amidst millions. Then he took it up and cut it to the root, and killed it. Killed it as a reed, but lireathed into it a song, audible a-nd beautiful to all the ears of men. Was that death to the reed, or life ? Would a thousand summers of life, by the water's side have been worth that one thrill of song when a god first spoke through it ? "" Many a one has found a newness and richness of life in the very thing that seemed calculated to destroy all hope and paralyze all power. Many a one has found a new purpose grow out of a disappointed hope, a new strength grow out of a discovered weakness, a new meaning of life in the destruction of a cherished idea, in the wrecking of a favourite scheme. " Out of the salt depths of their calamity men have gathered the heroisms of their future. Out of the desert of their exile men have learned the power to return as conquerors." And in the deprivation of some great good that seemed absolutely essential to happiness in life, men have sometimes discovered that the real worth of life lay in something quite different, which but for this deprivation they would have missed altogether. And there is yet one other good in life to be mentioned, in a word, namely, service, service of humanity. I know there are pessimists who argue that such service is not called for, and is not useful ; and the act of render- ing it is not pleasurable ; and still I hold, that in this service of man is found the chief good and brightness of life. In spite of all the ingratitude and difiiculty and failure, all the doubt as to the wisdom of particular methods, yet this service of humanity is that which redeems life, above all things, from utter emptiness and worthlessness. It is no use saying this to the man who has never looked beyond himself, or done anythying but that which had reference to his own interests. But those who have done something for others knoiv that their purest pleasure was experienced in the rendering of such service. And those who have been able to come out of themselves, so to speak, and enter into the larger 14 life of humanity, have found themselves indeed in a "large place," a place of wider vision, of vaster faith, of more stable hope, of loftier purpose and fuller life. A value of life is found in knowledge, love, hope and the rest ; but the highest value and the brightest glory are discovered in the reflection that we each and all may contribute something to the attainment of a glorious destiny of humanity ; and is realized in so doing with patience, fidelity and faith. No. 3.] mil Mm %dipm 3mt^ FINSBURY, E.C. (( THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION, jj A DISCOURSE DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C, On SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1885. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. ''THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION." THE recent controversy in the pages of the Nineteenth Century on the question, 'What is to be the Religion of the Future 1' cannot have failed to interest all thoughtful men and women who do not shrink from the free discussion of such matters. It is no idle speculation for any of us. The religions of the past are dead or dying; the future is ever becoming the present, and the next step cannot be rightly taken without a clear prospect of the goal whither we are tending. Any form of religion which can be shown to be in advance of preceding systems in the line of Evolution, will command our obedience; and if in the prevailing anarchy of thought no clear light of day can be seen, we shall be ready to listen to any voice, crying in the wilderness of doubt, which leads us even in any degree nearer the path of progress. The voice of Mr. Herbert Spencer is entitled to special attention. He is the apostle of Evolution, and from the vantage-ground of his vast knowledge has scanned the horizon of the world and man with a wider range and a clearer vision than almost any other thinker of his time. "When, therefore, towards the close of a life devoted to researches in the highest realms of thought, he offers a deliberate judgment as to the probable future of religion, and defends it stoutly against the shafts of adverse criticism, we cannot too carefully examine the grounds of his faith, and apply the only valid test of its truth for us now — viz., its power of bringing disunited beliefs and emotions into a new and harmonious relation. Only if his saying is so hard that we cannot receive it without prejudice to convictions to which we cling as to our life, — only then shall we be justified in rejecting it. Before considering the future of religion, we are wisely counselled to study its past history, which alone can afford the key to a knowledge of its continuous growth. If we could gain a cleai* conception of how religious ideas arose, under what influences they were gradually modified, — in short, trace their progress from the earliest dawn of self- conscious existence on our globe up to the present day, we should feel a large measure of confidence in predicting not only the next step in advance, but the general direction and final goal of their development. A true theory of the place which religion will hold in human life when social progress has reached its limit, and a w^ise insight into the means by whicli this place can best be secured, is clearly dependent on a right conception of its origin and evolution. Such an ideal of preliminary study it is unfortunately all but impossible to realise. The beginnings of religion in the world are veiled by the dark mists which will for ever overhang the early history of mankind. No records, however ancient, can bring us within reach of what we wish to observe. The very existence of historical testimony presupposes some degree of intellectual advancement, and if, as we shall find reason to believe, religious conceptions are co-extensive with all mental development, and must therefore have arisen long before they could be recorded, we recognise that direct evidence as to the thoughts and feelings of primitive man, with regard to his oi'igin and destiny, is, from the nature of the case, impossible. In the absence of positive knowledge, we must be content with inference and probability. And there are various classes of facts which, as we are well justified in assuming, throw a strong and trustworthy light on prehistoric times. One of these indirect means of illumination will readily occur to all. If the early life of those tribes who first emerged from a pre-human state is necessarily hidden, at least it is open to us to become acquainted with the condition of peoples which at the present day, in various parts of the world represent all stages of barbarism, upwards from a phase in which they are scarcely distingiiishable from the brutes. Let us visit the Veddahs of Ceylon, the Andaman islanders, the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, and other similarly uncivilised races ; let us exen rely on the accounts of them brought by honest and competent explorers ; and, it may be said, we shall then have adequate grounds for inferring what beliefs and emotions, what manners and customs, our own forefathers possessed in a similar stage of evolution. Such a method seems very feasible, yet its success is marred by two serious difiiculties. In the first place, however candid be the enquiries, the task of interpreting the ideas found in a low state of development in terms of ideas belonging to 3 more advanced social conditions, is one which can hardly be pursued without the greatest risk of prepossessions and pi-ejudices, intellectual and emotional. In the second place, even if the investigation could be carried on with complete success, we are forced by certain other considerations to doubt whether the comparison between existing barbarous communities and the races with whom civilisation originated, is after all a just one. There are sti'ong reasons for believing that many, if not all, of the existing types of low structure, represent a phase-, not of the struggle upwards from purely animal life, but of degeneration from a higher level of civilisation attained by their ancestors. We may thank Mr. Spencer for the warnings he has given us on both of these heads, and if we find reason to convict him of sometimes disregarding his own warnings, we shall see all the more need for circumspection on our part. The practical lesson which we may learn from a sense of such diflSculties is mainly to avoid laying stress on aspects of religious faith and practice which are not in harmony with what we know of the general course of human life as a whole. Here, as elsewhere, it is only by taking the widest view that we can distinguish between the accidental and the essential. Our theory of human nature and the manner of its development is based on an acquaintance with many sides of life, and forms a more trustworthy guide for the construction of the hidden past as well as of the unknown future, than the con- flicting evidence from apparently parallel cases which is alone in our possession. What then is that essential property which is shared alike by all systems of belief and conduct, and in virtue of which they are termed Religions 1 What is there common to the Fetichism of the savage, the Polytheism of Gi-eece or Scandinavia, the religions of Buddha and Zoroaster, of Confucius and Mahomet, of Moses and of Jesus ■? Under what general expression may all these systems be included 1 Mr. Spencer in his First Principles has offered a reply to this question, and we cannot do better than listen to it. All religions, he says, in their intellectual aspect agree in asserting two things : " firstly, that there is something to be explained ; secondly, that such-and-such is the explanation." This is a good starting-point for our enquiry. We cannot, indeed, follow Mr. Spencer when he proceeds to draw support from it for his theory of the unknowable. "All religions," he goes on to say " agree in this, and it is the only element of truth they possess, that the Power which the universe manifests to us is uttei-ly B 2 inscrutable." This doctrine may he Mr, Spencer's own inference from the failure of all past forms of belief to express what he considers to be the truth, but to represent it as a position in which all systems agree with him is, indeed, to state the very reverse of the fact. That the mystery is inscrutable is what every religion explicitly denies in offering its own particular explanation. All religions then agree in asserting that there is something to be explained; and, it may safely be added, they agree in enjoining certain conduct as being in accordance with the explanation given. Each particular answer to our questionings about the source and meaning of our life, will naturally suggest special lines of action by which our destiny must be fulfilled. Further, such conduct will be accompanied by certain emotions, and a part of our action will be devoted to the expression of these. Every religion, in fact, as is generally recognised, has creed, practice and worship, but to these terms must be given a wider interpretation than they have hitherto commonly received. What is the essential characteristic of a creed? Our vision has been so long narrowed to the horizon of Christianity and similar intermediate faiths, that it is only with difficulty that we can regard as an accidental mark what has come to be looked on as necessary to a religious creed, viz., a reference to the supernatural, or in Mr. Spencer's words, to " that which passes beyond experience." Such a limitation is untenable, as much in view of the earliest forms of religion as of that which claims to supersede Christianity as the religion of the future. The true meaning of a creed may be best learned by considering its origin. Religion undoubtedly has its roots in nature-worship and in ancestor-worship, but whether the latter is alone original, and the worship of nature derived from it, as Mr. Spencer argues, is a question to be determined more by considerations of probability than by any ingenuity in manipulating the meagre and doubtful facts on which reliance is placed. With all respect for the labours of sociologists who lead a forlorn hope in the interests of scientific truth, we are acting prudently in throwing the burden of proof on those who take an extreme position. Until the advocates of the ghost-theory, or the pure mythologists, have shown more ground for the adoption of one or other principle as the sole explanation of the origin of religion, we are justified in preferring to follow ordinary reason and probability. Accepting then for the present a combined nature — and ancestor — worship as the earliest definite form of religion, we must proceed to consider how it could have arisen. Let us try to place ourselves in 5 the position of pi'imitive man in face of the natui'al objects and events around him. What are his most striking experiences 1 The daily course of the sun and the stars, the changes of light and darkness, the ravages of the storm and the toi-rent, the attacks of ■s\dld beasts and human enemies, the search for food and shelter, the services of family and friends — such are the influences which affect his life. Most of them he refers to forces outside of himself, over which he has little or no control ; but in many cases the initiative comes from within, and he reacts freely on his surroundings. In a further class of his experiences, such as dreams or illness, he is conscious of feelings which seem to ai-ise without any perceptible cause. How will he most naturally interpret all these events 1 And first, what do we mean by interpretation 1 Science teaches us that the explanation of any fact is simply the classing it under some more general fact, as when we are said to explain the motion of the moon round the earth by referring it to the wider law of gravitation. The savage in trying to assign a cause or antecedent to the natural events around him, readily imagines that in the case of all forces there must be the same personal consciousness of effort with which he is familiar in his own actions. The distinction between animate and inanimate things, which seems to us so simple, is one which undeveloped intelligence cannot easily make ; and accordingly all objects which move, or even offer resistance, are naturally endowed with the natures of living beings. The primitive man dwelt in a world of spirits. Stars, rocks, streams, trees, — all were creatures like himself, different in form indeed but possessed of similar powers. The develop- ment of this subjective method of explaining natural objects and events, from the fetichistic phase where everything is endowed with personality, through a polytheism where different orders of facts are referred to special deities, up to the conception of a single god as the personal first cause of the whole universe, — this pi'ocess will after- wards be referred to, and we may first pass to the question before us : ' What is the essence of this primitive creed from which all theistic systems have sprung ^ ' Its most prominent character is its perfect naturalness. The unknown can only be understood by being related to what is known, and the projection of human thoughts and feelings into the imagined personal causes of surrounding forces, was, as a tentative explanation of the facts, not only excusable, but essentially scientific. The earliest ci'eed was in fact simply a statement of all the knowledge then attainable, expressed in general terms, by means of the only reasonable principle of causation that was at hand, viz., the conception of personality. The knowledge indeed was scanty, and the interpi-etation was wrong ; but in its intention, and as far as was possible in its effect, it represents an earnest and well-directed effort to gather into a focus all the highest wisdom of the time. I believe that in this purpose we find the essence of all creeds ; that this is the ideal of religion in its intellectual aspect ; and that whenever any form of religious belief falls palpably out of harmony with the results attained in the general field of human knowledge, its death-knell must be sounded, and the elements of religion be constituted afresh. Let us now turn to the practical aspect, the system of conduct associated with every creed. What actions would be the natural outcome of primitive beliefs ? In the early stages of human develop- ment, external forces are for the most part antagonistic. Dangers lie on every side, and nature is sparing of her gifts. The personalities to which experience is referred are thus conceived in general as beings of malignant power; and the conduct enjoined l)y such a conviction is that which will tend either to gain their goodwill or to neutralise their power by appealing to deities believed to be friendly. Efforts at propitiation naturally take the forms suggested by a similar relation of subjection to other human beings. If the anger of the chief ♦ was appeased by offerings of food, there was every reason to suppose that with the spirits the same practice would be effectual. Thus sacrifices and sorcery came to form the sum of human duty, as sanctioned by religious doctrine, and conduct inevitably but disastrously followed rather the error of interpretation than the genuine though inadequate knowledge on which it was based. The ideal of religious practice must accord with the ideal of religious belief. As the perfect creed would be the expression of a single principle of the highest generality, embodying the fullest knowledge in an organised form, so would the perfect life be the wise ordering of every action in conformity to the conditions established by such a creed. The essence therefore, of religious duty is obedience to the laws of human life as determined by the widest knowledge attainable ; and whenever it finds itself cramped and distorted by the dictates of an outworn creed on which it professes to depend, then again will the cry be heard for a re-organisation of religion. I have spoken of creed and practice, of belief and conduct: the third element of religion remains, — worship, or the expression of emotion. With primitive man, struggling for existence under adverse conditions, the consciousness of individual helplessness, of action under outward constraint, is painfully persistent, and his religious obser- vances are performed largely under the influence of fear. This is not an emotion which is accustomed to seek free expression. In such circumstances the feelings are naturally repressed, and with the exception of occasional prayers to the deities, ivorship, as we understand it, cannot be said to have yet appeared. But its place in religion is fully indicated. It is the natural expression of the emotion appropriate to conduct determined by the conditions of life, and when these conditions became milder and gradually moulded man into confoi'mity with them, happier feelings supplanting fear found greater and greater freedom of exercise. The essence of worship then is the expression of the feelings called forth in following the guidance of the widest knowledge. From this side also, the demand for reform in religion may be heard. A want of harmony in the various aspects of life is nowhere more readily felt than in the sphere of emotion, where spontaneity of expression depends on the freedom from constraint of the action it accompanies. "Whenever religious feelings get divorced from the natural play of ordinary healthy emotion, there again is a sign that a new adjustment is required. We have now gathered from a view of the origin and early develop" ment of religion what it is in essence, under the three aspects, intellectual, practical and emotional. The result may be stated as follows : — Its creed is the statement of general principles of knowledge. Its practice is obedience to corresponding general principles of action. Its worship is the expression of emotion in harmony with such action. This definition of religion is offered as the only expression applicable to all its foi'ms, in its genesis, throughout its development, and in its ideal. Too nan*ow it cannot be called, for there is nothing in life which it does not embi'ace. Too bi'oad it will be called by many, and while I am not concerned to defend it against the attacks of those who would impose the shibboleths of their various sects, I shall anticipate the general criticism, that the width of the definition, making it co-extensive with the whole of life, renders it meaningless. Why should we speak of x*eligion at all, it will be said, if by the term we mean only a general expression of life in all its aspects 1 My reply is, that while such a universal scope is implied in the essential theory of religion, the reality has invariably and inevitably fallen short of its attainment. To the primitive man there could have been no distinction between x'eligion and life, but that of principle and detail. In no 8 subsequent system lias there been any waiving of the claim to rule in every field of experience ; . but never again can that claim be justified in fact until the limit of human evolution is reached ; not till the sum of knowledge is complete, and throws a light on the path of conduct which men cannot choose but follow ; not till it is one and the same thing to know the trutk and to obey it, will religion again coincide with life. Religion, say the secularists, is an excrescence on civilisa- tion, and is destined to disappear. It is destined to disappear, but not in our day, and not because people will cease to care about the matters with which it concerns itself, but because they will come to care for nothing else. The more closely religion realises its ideal of assuming a real control over every province of life, and the more completely it justifies its right to such a position, the less obtrusive will be the separation between them. We may anticipate a time in the millennium of social development when men will speak no more of religion, because there is nothing from which it needs to be distin- guished. This is a dream of the distant future ; but it is only in such dreams that we can catch a glimpse of the goal towards which our footsteps must be directed. Only by keeping steadfastly before us this ideal of religious development, and by studying carefully the course of its progress from the earliest forms up to our own day, can we rightly answer the all-important question which is ever pressing on us — ' What is the religion for us now '? ' If the faiths of the past have failed us ; if the gulf between the religion of our fathers and the life that throbs in us is greater than can be bridged by any compromise, what are we to do 1 There ai-e but the two courses open. Either we must do without any religion, or we must have a new one, more suited to our needs. There are many in our time who choose the former alternative. It has been their lot, perhaps, to suffer more than others from the evil results of growing up in a faith which has ceased to harmonise with life, and if, smarting under a rule which they feel to be unjust and harmful, they not only cast off the yoke of the particular religion which has betrayed its trust to them, but renounce all religious influences whatever, we can sympathise with their irritation, while we deplore the attitude it has led them to adopt. What do they mean by doing without religion 1 Those of them who are leading earnest lives, — and there are many such, — mean little beyond the rejection of a name which has come to be hateful to them. The real guidance of thought and conduct which religion ought to represent comes to them in other guise, and they accept it unwittingly ; but in so far as tliey are setting their faces against such control, they are denying that knowledge, and action, and feeling, can be combined in a harmonious whole ; they are placing individual opinion above the collective wisdom ; they are turning liberty into license, and preferring anarchy to order. If we would avoid such a conclusion, we must accept the alternative. Religion must be re-organised. Christianity, nay Theism in every form, has run its course. How are we to replace it 1 This question can best be answered by considering how religion first came to depart from its ideal of uniting under a general expression the highest principles attainable in every department of life. The intellectual aspect of a faith is the most definite, and in great part gives its character to the system of conduct, and the mode of emotional expression associated with it. It is chiefly the creed, therefore, that we must examine in the history of religious development. We have seen that the superstitions of primitive man, while perfectly reasonable in view of the meagre experience on which they were based, erred through over-hasty generalisation. They resulted from applying indiscriminately to organic and inorganic forces alike, the subjective notion of a personal cause, which is applicable only to the former class. It is of the essence of religion to explain, i.e., to generalise, and inadequate genei'alisations are better than none, when they are allowed to serve the purpose only until a wider experience is available. But interpretations which have once become current are difiicult to displace, and ages passed before the scientific method of reconstituting tentative solutions by the light of a wider study of facts, acquired sufiicient authority to challenge success- fully the crude principles of explanation which had so long enjoyed a prescriptive right to dominate the minds of men. Meanwhile these primitive conceptions had started on an independent career. Divorced from the genuine knowledge which a growing acquaintance with the facts of nature afforded, the tissue of superstition underwent a development of its own. The world of spirits was generalised as we have seen, and became a hierarchy of gods. The Pantheon finally resolved itself into one supreme deity, and the process could go no further. Monotheism has had a long reign, but as an intelhgible principle of explanation, having any relation to genuine knowledge, it has now lost its influence. Meanwhile the more careful classification of facts, and the more deliberate and judicious methods of interpreta- tion, established under the name of science, have gradually been supplanting theological beliefs; and the central conception under 10 which the antecedents of all forces were generalised, the idea of a personal first cause, is losing its reality, and fading into thin air in the form of a sentimental Pantheism. God the creator has become an " Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed." It may be predicted that no permanent resting-place will be found in such a half-way-house in the process of euthanasia which theology is bound to undergo under the dissolving influences of a wider and deeper knowledge. It represents perhaps the furthest limit of progress which the majority of our own generation can reach in their sad journeying away fi-om the faith of their fathers ; but if those who accept it can recognise the compromise they are making, and have faith to look beyond it, they will rejoice that though they cannot themselves enter the promised land, they can, at least, see it from afar, and be moved by the hopes of the younger spirits to whom it will be granted to enjoy the full inheritance of liberty. The widest knowledge of the time, which it is the function of religion to co-ordinate and express, is to be found no longer in the records of priestly lore or the imaginations of the poets, but in the labours of patient searchers after truth in the realm of science ; science, not falsely so called in a narrow sense, but including the whole study of man, and of society. That the progress of scientific know- ledge will eventually bring to light a method of interpretation, having a unity and authority greater than any we now possess, we cannot positively assert, but we have a foretaste of such a consummation in the form of a principle now rapidly winning its way to general acceptance in all departments of thought. The doctrine of Evolution, which applies the historical method to all classes of facts, and traces the growth of what is complex out of comparatively simple beginnings, bears with it the promise of forming an ideal principle of explanation. When the conceptions to which it gives birth, and which are so alien to our traditional modes of thought, have fully permeated every field of knowledge, and have become an organic possession of our race, I believe that a consensus of opinion will be reached, establishing, beyond the possibility of reasonable question, the broad outlines of a universal religious creed. But while we indulge in such hopes, we may not forget that every form of religion that has yet existed has claimed an absolute sway to the end of time, and nevertheless has sooner or later found itself shackled with bonds which it could not throw off and live. Whatever confidence we may feel in constituting afresh the elements of a creed, however careful we may be to leave an ample 11 margiu for cliange and development, we dare not believe that in two thousand years or so the process -vvdll not have to be gone through again. But while we may not presume to set a limit to the progress of thought, we know that if our reconstruction of religion is made with wisdom and serious purpose, it will not only serve its day and generation, but will in due time become a stepping-stone to the higher form of faith destined to succeed it. Our present duty is to discover the widest truth which has so far been established, bearing on human destiny, and fitted to form the basis of our creed. Judged by the standard of Evolution, the organic world is placed by science above the inorganic, as presenting a more complex history, and among living beings the highest rank is unques- tionably taken by the human race. Looking at the matter therefore from a pui-ely objective point of view, we are justified in regarding man as an embodiment of the most perfect development which has yet been attained. A further element of vast importance to be considered is the Isolation in which we stand to the human race as forming certain of the units of which it is composed. Every object and event in the universe that comes %\T.thin our knowledge, is inevitably coloured by its special reference to human life. The only interpi*etation we can give to the facts around us is mainly determined by factors peculiar to human nature. Further, by far the most potent element in the conditions of the external world by which our life is shaped, is made up of the influences of our fellow-men. Material surroundings, at first all important, sink into comparative insignificance, when placed beside the countless forces, moral and intellectual, impressed on us every moment of our lives, through the actions and woi'ds of the human beings with whom we come in contact. On every ground thei-efore, subjective and objective, we are amply justified in regarding Humanity as the highest unity we know to have a real demonstrable existence. We may be told that Humanity is only a part of nature and that we must not resti'ict our view to anything short of the whole field of possible knowledge in laying the basis of our creed. I would reply, that while Humanity is not proposed as the widest possible unity, no other wider can as yet be conceived in that intimate relation with individual lives, which would alone enable it to form a sure foundation of religious belief. It may be that in days to come, the animal kingdom, or the whole organic world — nay the material universe itself, will be grasped in its totality as a single existence with which our life may be consciously brought into harmony ; but for that, the time is 12 not yet, and it will be wise to distrust any short cuts to the conception of such a unity, which under the names of God or Nature, lead us to accept as realities what are no more than empty words. The position which the idea of Humanity is alone at present fitted to hold as the central conception of the creed which science dictates, may be even better recognised if we turn to the practical side of religion. Conduct, as we have seen, must always depend on knowledge or belief. What has been the evolution of conduct corresponding to the intellectual evolution which we have just been considering % What was the result on action of the separation which occurred at an early stage between the genuine knowledge founded on observation, and the premature generalisations which, unchecked by reference to facts, rapidly degenerated into baseless superstitions ■? There naturally arose a similar separation of conduct into two distinct lines. The belief in supernatural powers led to the offerings, sacrifices, and other ceremonial observances, of which mention has already been made ; while the growing familiarity which man acquired with the actual conditions of his life determined his conduct in relation to matters unconnected with his religious belief. Such natural action, prompted by ever-pressing needs, and guided by actual knowledge of fact, came to demand a larger and larger share of his energy, far exceeding in real importance the duties towards the gods, though theoretically held to be subordi- nate to these. The bond between the practical conduct of life which we term morality, and the duties prescribed by fear of supernatural powers, tended to become ever more artificial. This unnatural divorce between the secular and the religious became more pronounced, under the growing prominence of the social element in the surround- ings, which made demands on conduct, similar in their personal nature to those thought to be imposed by the deities. The claims of fellow-men began to compete with the claims of the gods, and from time to time, re-constructions of religion were proposed, by which the conflicting ideals might be brought into harmony. Of these attempts to humanise the supernatural, by far the most noteworthy is the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, in whose person divine and human attributes were held to be united. In Christianity, morality received afresh the touch of religious emotion, and the prestige of religious sanction. The compro- mise has served its purpose well, but it has outlived its usefulness, and now there is heard in our midst the cry : ' We cannot serve two masters ; we must have a new faith in Avhich the claims of our fellow-creatures shall be accorded the sole place of honour, and the 13 human mce be freed from tlio theologiccal thraldom l>y which the working out of its true destiny is impeded.' If religion is to fulfil its true function of establishing general principles of conduct in harmony with the highest knowledge, it must listen to the demand which is made alike in the name of science and of morality, that Humanity shall be enthroned as the central conception in reference to which the guidance of human life shall be determined. Sympathetic co-operation with our fellow-men in every form of healthy action sanctioned by the conditions of social well-being, — truth, justice, forbearance, fortitude ; these are the virtues which the human race requires of us, and which we cannot choose but render if we would take a worthy part in the evolution of mankind. In its broad outline there is little new in such a scheme of religious practice. Most of it is to be found in the precepts of Christianity which have been taught for near two thousand years, and the new faith must come not to destroy but to fulfil. But much gain is to be hoped for in the increased freedom of scope which must follow the frank avowal of seeking those ends alone which directly advance the welfare and happiness of Humanity. No loss of power will then take place through the indulgence of vain and selfish thoughts about a personal conscious life beyond the grave. Our vision will be bounded by our real knowledge of the world around us, and when we have recognised the fulness of life which such a know- ledge affords, we shall gladly cease to beat our wings against the bars of our eai'thly cage. Such must be the creed and the practice of the I'eligion with which alone we shall now be satisfied. There remains only that I should speak of the worship, the mode of emotional expression which will form the fitting accompaniment to belief and conduct such as hav& been described. We must first ask what the feelings are which are naturally called forth in the practical service of the human race. The unsocial condition of primitive man was, as we have seen, one where the severity of natural forces, as yet untamed to his will, begot a belief in malignant spirits who were propitiated under the influence of fear, an emotion unfavorable to freedom of expression. In the separation of religious observance from ordinary action, the accompanying emotion necessarily shared. The fear of the gods remained, but in response to -the modified conceptions of supernatural power which arose from the growing conformity of man with nature, its character gradually changed, it admitted more of the sentiment of gratitude, and assumed the name of reverence. Meanwhile, the growth of social life through 14 family and tribal ties brought about a community of interest which served to develop all forms of sympathetic emotion. Happiness increased with the growing command of the resources of life, and found its highest and amplest sphere in the exercise of social virtues. Here we find another justification of the place in our I'eligion which has been assigned to Humanity. Unless the course of evolution brings us to conditions affording a broader basis of common interest with all forms of organic nature than now exist, we must decline to consider as a fitting religious ideal any conception wider than that of human progress, and human well-being. Sympathy with our fellow-creatures in leading a healthy and happy life is thus the prevailing emotion which religious worship must now seek to express, and we may ask in conclusion, " What is the most fitting form for such expression to take V All kinds of feelings have their natural outlet in the sphere of Art, where the modes of their expression are idealised. In the forms of fiesthetic creations, especially those which appeal to the eye and the ear, the elements of religious woi-ship have always been found. Poetry, music, painting, architecture, dancing, — all the arts of beauty, can be first recognised as accompaniments of ceremonial observances ; and before religion became a thing apart from ordinary life, and lost its place as the guiding principle of human progress, worship and art must have been one. The place then lost it is our part to restore as far as in us lies. But the forms of artistic expression which we seek must have a higher aim than those which have satisfied the needs of the past. The sympathetic feelings which have been developed in social life have a wider range and a deeper root than any which could arise in the early condition of mankind, and we must look for a new and a grander harmony in which they will be fittingly expressed. The forms of beauty have not only been divorced from religion in the main current of their development, but they have been long separated from each other. If the happiness which comes with the possession of a wise rule of life, and the pursuit of noble aims, is to find due expression within the bonds of sympathy, our worship must unite in a common stream forms of art which are now pursuing separate courses. For the best music we now go to the concert I'oom ; the best painting and sculptui-e we seek in the picture-gallery ; the best poetry we read at home. It was not always so, and it will not be so in the future. The separatism of art must disappear under the influence of the universal synthesis which religion is destined to afford, and the attainment of which we are striving to hasten. We may trust that a time is not far 15 distant when a faith tliat is based on true knowledge, and a practice in which duty and love have joined hands, will find expi-ession in a worship where the temple is indeed a temple of art, and where all beautiful forms that the eye can enjoy, and all beautiful sounds that can meet the ear, are combined in the celebration of that sympathy with our fellow-men, which it is of the essence of religion to teach. The foundations of faith have already been laid. Many have been the workei's who have brought materials by different paths for the construction of the new ideal. The traditions of this Society are in themselves a monument of such labours. But especially to Auguste Comte is due the eternal gratitude of the world for the consecration of Humanity as the central conception of the religion of the future. On this rock let us build, and though the rain descend, and the floods come, verily our house shall not be moved. No. 4.] 0iil| Ika lieligmuB ^^mtj FINSBURY, E.G. "POLITICS AND A HUMAN RELIGION." A DISCOURSE DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C., On SUNDAY, NOVEMBER ist, 1885. BY FREDERIC HARRISON, M.A. PUBLISHED BY E. W, ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. POLITICS Axn A HUMAN RELIGION. "TIOR nionths past our country has been ringing with the con- -*- flicting appeals of eager political parties ; and the month on which we enter to-day will decide, for good or for evil to our English race, one of the greatest and most complicated of the Parliamentary struggles of our time. To-morrow we in London are called upon to choose a body to whom shall be entrusted the momentous issue of the education of our people. And within a few weeks we shall have to choose a body even more important, ^\ith duties far wider and more difficult, to whom we shall entrust the destinies of England and its Empire. I am assuredly not one of those to whom the poli- tical parties of to-day are as the combats of Angels with Demons ; nor do I feel inclined to exaggerate the moral or the spiritual value of tliis or that election, of this or that polic}'. I listen a.s coolly as any one to the high-flown professions of candi- dates, and to the moral perfections, or moral inicjuities with which they are credited and for which they are denounced. But does any man of honesty and sense believe in his heart that it all means nothing — that, in all this outpouring of hope and passion, there is 7io moral issue at all, 7io spiritual problem involved : that it matters to us no more than a horse- racBj or the price of consols 1 Here, then, is a crucial test to which to bring the religions, the creeds, the ethical systems which are contending for our allegiance. A religion, or a moral system of any kind, ought to teach us how to live, hoAv to do our duty in the sphere in which we find ourselves. And few kinds of duty can be more real than what should be the spirit and aim that we should give to the government of our coun- try. " How to make the best State " was the problem presented to ancient philosophers. Tell us, ye religions, ye gods, ye gospels, ye new philosophies of ethic and of evolution — in what spirit shall we vote —by what signs shall we know the sound policy, the best states- men ? They are dumb. Or, when they do speak, our conscience cries out — Would that they toejx dumb ! Here is the organic weakness of the Gospel. I am as deeply con- vinced as any follower of Christ can be, of the moral beauty of much in the Gospel teachings : of the personal holiness that it can still inspire, especially in the home and in the silent communing of the heart. But the organic weakness of the Gospel is in the world, in public life, in politics, and the higher righteousness of the wise and brave citizen. Thus it is, that the Gospel (I say it in no contemptuous sense) is the religion to-day of women ; for women, at least for the present, are so much less called to public duties than are men. But does the ' Sermon on the Mount ' make good citizens to-day ? Did it ever make them 1 The ' Sermon ' of Jesus is full of refined and purifying sentiments — but go to it to-morrow for counsel, when you have to vote for the School Board ; go to it and ask — What is the duty of a citizen in choosing a Parliament? There is something — yes, there are counsels too often forgotten, as where it is said — " Whosoever shall say to his brother Baca, or thou fool, shall be danger f and — " let your communication be yea, yea, nay, nay : for whatsoever is more than these, cometh of evil." That, no doubt, is still useful counsel ; but is it the priests of the Gospel whose communication in political strife is ever — yea, yea ! and never Raca, or 'thou fool?' But when we go to the other precepts of the "Sermon" — "Resist not evil!" "Resist not evil ! " " Turn to the smiter the other cheek also ! " " Uive to him that asketh thee." " Take no thought for your life." "Take no thought for the morrow ; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." What teaching is this? Prudence, energy, foresight, practical wisdom, severe justice, worldly sagacity, all the stern virtues of the manly citizen, actually denounced as sin ! And so on all through the truly characteristic features of the Gosj^el and of Christ's moral teaching, so in all the real exponents of Christian feeling from the "Imitation of Christ" to the "Christian Year," the spirit is this unworldly, or rather other-worldly ecstasy ; spiritualism, mysticism, that would wrap us in a cloudland or dreamland of devotional exaltation, leaving the dead world to bury its dead. I do not doubt that there are profound elements of personal purification in this supernatural trance — so there are in the inefiable ecstasies of a Buddhist mystic, or a Mussulman dervish — but how utterly incompatible with politics or any useful con- duct in the social world ! There may be practical and sensible Christians, and the Gospel may not altogether exclude courage and enei'gy in politics; but it is in spite of the creed, not by the aid of it, by strange perversions and adaptations of its literal sense. The active devoted citizen not only gets no guidance whatever from the "Sermon on the Mount;" but almost every public act of his life is a violation of its precepts, to be justified only by the argument that its precepts are an impossible form of mystical extravagance. Take the Churclies, in the widest sense of the term, any of the organised communions of any theological creed, Catholic, Protestant, or Deist, established or free, dogmatic or merely sentimental, have they anything to say on politics by their official or collective organs 1 Now I do not for a moment doubt that theve are many churchmen and Christians, priests, ministers, and leaders in their congregations, who are active citizens and devoted politicians. But they are this not in their character of church- men, but as men ; on human and practical grounds, not on theo- logical grounds — nay, usually in spite of their church, sect, or creed — by a noble inconsistency jireferring their duty to their country to the precepts of their Saviour, and their own character on earth to their eternal reward in heaven. There are good, earnest, sagacious citizens amongst the devoutest Christian men — not very commonly but not a few. Nay, there are such citizens amongst the priests, even the priests of the Catholic and Established Cluirches, But the dead weight of the organised churches, of every theological creed is everywhere found to pull with a constant cruel strain towards the crushing out in its devotees of true political energy ; deforming politics into a narx'ow, sectional, sectarian intrigue — turning the duty of citizens into some wretched professional contest — alas ! too often into a struggle for the loaves and the fishes, the robes, emblems, the prerogatives of a privileged class. Would that they still con- fined their teaching to the supersensuous nonsense of the " Sermon on the Mount." Would that they uttered nothing worse than unmanly and hysterical rhapsodies ! Alas ! they enter into politics too often, with all the astuteness of finished intriguers ; they conduct a secret and most dictatorial caucus with all the energy of fanaticism bent on one narrow end and heated with one personal passion. And where the churches are political, they are political only to degrade politics, and distract the State, J am not assuming thak to take sides in this or that party- is necessarily wrong ; that Conservatism is wicked, or any- such ignorant pi-ejudice. Far from it. I wish to stand now in a region above the politics of party. My very contention is that churches and religion should have nothing to do with party struggles as such, but should seek to mould and modify, raise, and inspire opinions in both parties alike, teaching the Conservative how to conserve what is good and permanent, and the Radical to found what has deep and living root. I do not say that the churches are an evil in politics because they are Conservative, for they are sometimes revolutionary, in fact if not in name, nor am 1 denying that some free communities of Christians are at times on the side of the right question of the hour, and the really patriotic statesman. They are this at times; for there is a ])rofound wellspring of Humanity iu the Gospel yet -and the words of Paul about love and the brotherhood of man, and the duty of the strong to the weak — are, thank the Humanity which inspired them, not yet powerless, even when all else he said falls on us "like a tale of little meaning though the words be strong." No I the free communions are now and then, even in their official voice and their collective action, stout citizens who deserve Avell of the Republic. But with how little steady knowledge and settled grasp of any political principle, how fitfully and im- })ulsively, with how much shallow sentiment and one-sided prejudice, with what blind and unwise self-delusion, with what obstinate and ignorant partizanship, with how much even of liypocrisy and mere cant of sect, I say this even of those which go right. And the rest ? Ah ! the rest ! x\.t this very hour are the churches and the pulpits ringing with appeals to the congregation to go forth to-morrow at all 6 loss and discomfort to themselves, to do their duty at the poll like citizens, to choose the most wise, the most generous, the best trained men and women they can find to direct the education of the people, those who care most for the best conceivable training for the children of the poor ; those who have made the School Board and its work almost the only genuine church existing in this island, and its purifying civilizing mission the only living gospel yet heard in our crowded alleys. Are the pulpits crying aloud, as the very stones in our streets should cry out, for the best education, the most loving care of these neglected little ones, the most free education, education in which the pence of the poorest shall not be wrung from them, till the widowed mother or the over-burdened father has to ask himself with groans and tears — is it better for the child to be ignorant or stunted, untaught or unfed 1 A re they crying out for the most free education, whatever it cost, the most open education without one obstacle of sect, or creed, or class that we can break down? Are they calling out in the name of their God, and their tSaviour, to lift from our nation the curse and shame of an ignorant and besotted population, are they thundering against the vile Judases who hold the purse strings so tight and growl and wrangle over every penny that goes to make us a great people, are they doing this at this very hour? Ah ! how few are they ] Or are they preparing secret, perhaps unspoken, bargains with those who, in their hearts, wish to keep the people untaught, that they may use them the more readily in their service with the jobbers, the intriguei's, and the unclean contrivei's of disci'editable plots ; are they even now marshalling theii- bands to break up the state pystem of teaching, that they may 7 push the interests of their own sectarian ends, risking, without a word of regret, the whole future of education in England for the sake of the local advancement of their own profes- sional schemes'? And if, as they say, Jesus of Nazareth be really risen again, and from the divine Throne of Mercy above is this night looking into the hearts of these church- men and gospel Christians as they are preparing for the issue of to-morrow — he who said, " Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not ! " and " whoso offendeth one of these little ones, it were better that a millstone were hung round his neck," — will his gentle and tender soul be filled with joy as he watches with the all-seeing eye, so they tell us, the motives, hopes, and aims of his worshippers, will he find it all un- selfishness, purity, public spirit — nothing pharisaical, nothing personal, nothing that savours of the Scribes and Pharisees who sit in Moses' seat, and are bitter with all who contest their exclusive prerogative to sit there 1 And for that much greater civic contest, which a few weeks now must decide, are they, these churches and congregations, striving in the name of the Gospel of Love, and an all- merciful Father of us all, to soften the bitterness of party, to call all parties to more spiritual thoughts, to purify all sectarian temper, to warn our rulers against unjust aggression on the weak, and of the just claims of alien and rude people, are they using their vast influence to impress on the citizens the higher duties of Humanity, and the larger interests of the whole English people 1 Why, the narrow, sectarian, professional bitterness they are giving to this contest is becoming a by- word and a scandal to the laity ; the very newspapers ring with it as something indecent in this age of vehement partizan- ship 5 their churches and vestries are turned iiito committee* I'ooms ; the seats of the woi-fship}»er.s of Christ are covered with scurrilous pamj^hlets ; and their sermons are electioneering diatribes. One of these, of which the print was sent to nie, calls on the votei-s of this city to vote against a friend of mine because he is an intidel, and it (quotes the BilJe to justify the vote — '• If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be anathema," and again, " If anj-- man preach any other Gospel to you, than that ye have received, let him bo accursed." So says this evangelical electioneerer. I should be sorry to preach that Gospel myself, and I will take my chance of being " accursed '' bv his Master iii Heaven, Such is the interest which we are assured that the Saviour of mankind takes in the return of Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett Burdett Coutts ; and such are the supernatural terrors with which he threatens all those who o]>pose that statesman. But I speak not of men like this, men who like the famous Tetzel, in the days of Luther, are the sure signs of a near Reformation in religion. I speak of men who would not stoop to sully a particular candidate with calumny and their own Chinxli with malignity. I spe.ik of the Cliurches and the priests, and the especially Christian organisations of all kinds, those who do deal with real political and not A\ith personal questions; and who raise real legislative questions, which are not essentially mere matters of party. But what (juestions are they ? Xarrow pro- fessional questions, the privileges of an order, the supremacy of a sect, the interests of an institution, which throughout all English History has been altiuiiately the tool, (.lie jnirasite, tlie evil genius, now of one set of politicians, now of another — always fighting for its own wealth, its own ascendancy, its own prerogative. " The Church in danger "' is the cry now from the ten thousand jnilpits, as it was in the days of Laud, or of Sancroft, of Saclierevell, or of Eldon. Tlio Cliiuvli is in daugor, that i.s to say, the ])eople in Parliament may enact that Bishops shall no longer sit in the Honse of Loi'ds, that the preachers of the Gospel shall not he State officials, with a State salary, that part of the enormous endowments of the richest Church in the world shall be devoted to the education of the people, the pui'pose for which they were originally given ; that the special religious communities of the rich, those at any rate where the rich have absolute control, shall be placed on an eipiality with the religious communities of the poor — that all shall be free, freely governed by their own members and not by politicians in the House of Commons, free to teach a creed, as settled by themselves and not as prescribed by Act of the legislature : free fi'om the degrading care about temporal jn'ofits and legal rights, free to gi\e their whole efforts to sjnritual and moral ends. The fear that this may come about is the real 'danger to the Church,' by wliich it seems Heaven itself is agitated, and to avert which the apostolical successors of the tishermen of Galilee ar(> called to tight, with weapons at once spiritual and material. And in all this, there is not a word about the common political interests of all Englishmen, and the great ques- tions which await us, the raising of the people's con- dition, the uniting of classes, the removal of industrial op- pression by the rich, the higher spirit in our foreign dealings, the great duty of citizenship apart from i>arty and ambition. Of all that can lift politics into the I'cgiou of inorality, good order, duty, and the true spiritual held — nothing. The mere earthly institution, its rights, its possessions till up the whole view. For this everything else is thrust aside. The highest quaKties and services, the noblest cliaracter. the Avants of the 10 State, all weigh nothing — as against the professional interest of the Institution. There are two classes which in this great struggle of citizens and the rivalry of great policies stand out conspicuous as being solely intent on the interests of their only order or class, and as ready to sacrifice all public in- terests to their own, to league with any cabal, to accept any candidate, with whom they can hope to gain a petty triumph, or a short respite for themselves. Those two are the Church- men and the Publicans. And I know not which of the two are making the more selfish and unworthy appeal for a really professional cause with the most unblushing contempt for any large public purpose. It must always be so where religion rests on any theological basis whatever. Theology, and supra-mundane sanctions, ecstatic bliss, eternal torments, absolute, transcendental objects of worship of themselves exclude all healthy and rational politics. They act with potent, though spasmodic, effect in the individual soul, the sense of sin, the voice of conscience, the desire of purity, and thirst after righteousness. But bring them to public life, and the charm is snapped. The care for our souls, the hope of glory in Heaven, the preposterous hyper- boles of all the gospels and the priests, have no common ground with prudent citizenship. Either they lead us off from any interest in these woi'ldly things ; or, if they bring us to worldly things at all, it is to present them in theological, clerical, or ecclesiastical lights. What can the welfare of England, or the sympathy of classes, or the reform of taxation matter to men who teach that in a brief span we shall all be with the Angels or the Devils, forever and forever; to whom the Saviour of mankind has committed the task of cursing those ■who take a different opinion from theirs; and to whom the 11 least privilege tliat strengthens tlieir order is tlie hope of Heaven or the risk of Hell in the sight of a crucified redeemer who is himself all-wise, all-good and all-powerful." To tamper with one of the least resources of one of the most unworthy of his ministers, to put the greatest of merely worldly improve- ments into the scale with Infinity, Perfection, and Omnipotence, is to be a rebel and an infidel, to be in danger of the judgment. Many Christian men, as I say, many Christian priests are good citizens and wise patriots; but it is on launan grounds, by reason of their lay conscience, not of their creed. They are so because they are men too good to be consistent Christians. They judge and decide the questions put to them as citizens, on purely secular grounds ; tliey are not thinking of their immortal souls, but of tlieir own good name; they consider their neighbours, not the recording angel ; they read Mills' political economy, or Gladstone's speeches — and not the sermon on the mount. How would the sermon on the mount, or any other sermon, practically clear their mind 1 Would entire libraries of theology from the Apocalypse of Saint John down to "Essays and Reviews" teach them one rational lesson in taxation, self-government, or the organisation of the Empire. No ! they would reply. " God forbid that the gospel should deal with such mere woi'ldly things. Worldly wisdom must be learned from scientific books, practical statesman, the debates of citizens and politicians of experience." These abso- lute supra-mundane forms of religion are for Sundays, and for devotional exercises, as they are called — -but not for action at all. So far as they affect politics at all, their effect is disturbing, mischievous, and inliuman. These clerical desperadoes rush into politics like the most fanatical Nihilists or Anar- chists. Their cause is one absolutely supreme and above all 12 considerations of expediency, order, and mere human fairness. Absolute creeds, whether frankly anarchical or professedly evangelical, are alike in this : they disable their votaries from healthy civic activity. You might as well give men loaded revolvers and send them to a stormy meeting Avith orders to convince their opponents, as give men an absolute faith for a political guide, whether it be the paramount duty of destroy- ing everything, or the absolute commands of Christ and the everlastinar life of his chosen servants. To act steadily and wisely on politics, to inspire great civic devo- tion, every system must be an eartJihj, not a heavenly one : relative to man's nature, not absolute and supernatural : human, not divine. Ideals there must be, but ideals of earthly good and improve- ment, not of ecstatic bliss and perfection : spiritual motives, but motives appealing to man's social, not his ^>e?'S07?.a/ nature : a power mightier than ourselves, but a visible, practical, and social powei', not an abstract omnipotence. I am, as you know, myself convinced that this power, or ideal, or spring of civic action must be such as Auguste Comte was the first to explain it in all its reality. But I do not now desire to limit my appeal to the scheme of belief that is knovrn as positivism. There are niany systems of thought, of life, which differ fi'om that: nor am I claiming now for Comte any right to be above criticism or for his system to be above revision, any more than any absolute novelty. Human and earthly ideals in religion are in the air of England, of Europe, of the civilised world. The old idea of the priests tliat if we cease to direct our vision to heaven we become as the beasts that perish, that without theology there is no religion, without salvation no virtue, without eternity no hope — all this, I say, is passing away— as belief in virgins, saints, and relics once melted away with the revival of knowledge and thought. The grandeur of huuiau duty, the splendour of earthly progress, and the future of our human race as the goal and inspirer of all high efforts in life — these are ideas which exist far and wide in a thousand forms, and under sundry names, wherever clear brains, and steadfast spirits, and genuine sympathy are found in the souls of men. And I, for one, am not asking you to confine these multiform aspirations to any cast-iron form. There is, I say, a truly Iivman religious spirit in many shapes and of many schools : and to some human religion alone can we look to inspire in men a really civic ardour and sound political sense. A deep and living trust that this mighty stream of human civilisation is not destined to waste itself, like the Rhine, in trackless swamps, but will pass on whilst the race continues in a fuller and stronger tide ; the trust that this mighty sti'eam is one which each little drop of our own lives can deepen and swell, whilst it gives to that drop a true course and a value in the sum of all things — this faith will colour and purify our whole active life. The pettishness and selfishness of political intrigue, the narrowness of party, tlie passions of ambition may be curbed and purged by this, as they never can be by visions of Paradise and transcendental perfections and sublimities. Great causes in the liistory of a people, great crises, great patriotic hopes, do, as we know, give a majesty, and a purity to the political life of any nation that is capable of a noble movement. It is the business of Human religion to make this spirit of patriotic devotion, steadfast, rational, and truly religious in its power. It has far more to do than simply to encourage emotions. It must found and group ideas; knowledge, principles, social 14 and historical doctrines. Now political or historical doctrines are an offence to theology. It turns from them as a profana- tion with its " God forbid !" as a nun might be scandalised by a play of Shakespeare, or a lecture on Political Economy. But to a human religion, to a human and social philosophy of any kind, social and historical principles are the highest types of its office. The moral improvement of this world here, the social education of the people and its leaders, the wise organisation of government, the best adjustment of the State and its constituents — all this is the chief end and masterpiece of human philosophy and social religion. I turn to that which in many ways is a social danger of our time, more potent and unmanly than Theology itself — -I mean the silent, unshaped, but widely prevailing belief that all religion of any kind is no matter, that religion has come to an end and has left the earth for ever. The real enemy of high ideals is not the Agnostic — or the man who says he knoivs of no object of religious alteration ; but rather it is, the Aphrontistic, the man who says it does not matter to have any object of religious sympathy. These are the real materialists of our age. " Let us make our fortunes, and fill our lives with comfort ; let us be neighbourly, and discourage vice and crime ; but life has no room for ideals, aspirations, devotion or religion." This is the earthly hell of humanity — this is the inner atheism of an age given up to material progress. It is impossible to argue with those in whom cynicism and self-engrossment has dried up the very fountains of human sympathy and ideal enthusiasm. But to all who retain these sacred springs of moral elevation within their souls, to those who have ever known the hallowed emotions of home, of parent, child, wife, sister ; of friendship, of kinship, of patriotism, to those who have ever tried to hold up to their children a standard of right, and an object of reverence, to those who in any relation of life have ever known the potency of a high motive and a noble resolve in a social cause : — to all of them 15 we will say " can you douLt that man's political activity, like his personal and family morality, like his social honour and his good name in his daily work, must be stimulated and guided by a genuine human enthusiasm." Is it enough for this to have a vague sentimental impression of some mystical harmony of the Universe ; some shadowy Optimism that somebody or something must have ordered these things for the best ; to hold the mind secure in that bastard philosophy of evolution, which is mex'ely another form of laisscz /aire — the selfish acquiescence in evil, I mean, in the lazy pretext that everything is working itself out in the long run, whether it be for the best, or the worst, is not our affair, and whatever it be, it is not for us to meddle. How can any intellectual opinion about the laws of this material world in any case inspire a moral and social devotion to active duty ? Devotion to duty, under a deep and abiding sense of our moral and social responsibility, needs to call in all the powers of our complex nature, all the secret springs of character and motive. We must appeal to men's sympathy as well as know- ledge ; to enthusiasm as well as convictions ; to habits as well as to culture. Ambition, envy, covetousness, disorder, injustice, vanity, and mad recklessness, are passions so common in our social organisation and so frightfully dangerous to its peace, that we need every resource that we can get to curb and guide the movement of public life. Will every passion that is known to politics be exorcised by lectures on the laws of physical development and the analogies Avhich are found in the embryonic morphology 1 Will ambition be tamed by appeals to the " survival of the fittest 1 " Will " Natural Selection " by itself make a prosperous common- wealth ; or will a true patriot be bred by a course of studv of Protoplasm 1 Why, you had far better, for the formation of character and the duty of a citizen, go to the " Sermon on the Mount " as your guide, with all its extravagance of morbid quietism, than go for your guide to the " Origin of Species," with all its wealth of scientific suggestion. Nay, the IG transeendeulalism of '• Co.suiogony " is even inoi'e alien U> tlio duties of active patriotism, than is the transcendentalisni of tiio " Kingdom of Heaven." No ! liuman duty and human character need to be trained on moral enthusiasm i-esting on social forces. The battle of justice and injustice, selfishness and self-devotion, folly and wisdom, in the ordering of Nations, need the highest controll- ing powers to wliich men can appeal. They compel iis to resort to human enthusiasm and social devotion — that is to a human religion. A Human Religion of some sort is an abso- lute necessity of our time, when transcendental religion has lost its salt and its savour in public, if not in personal life, unless we are content to sink without a struggle into gross contentment with the unrestrained triumph of mere self-interest- Which of us here is prepared for this ? Happily the outlook is not so dark. When a real hvman religion has established its kingdom on earth — a religion with a code of earthly duty, with an object of earthly reverence, and a scheme to kindle earthly emotions and enthusiasms, all grouped round and issuing out of our sense of fellowsliip in humanity, and our part in the welfare of humanity — men will be trained from childhood to look on their si'oat civic duties as amon£;st the noblest of all human obligations; public O2)inion will lie elevated by the ever-j'iresent sense that a public function is a religious duty ; the meanness of personal ambition will be confronted with a sense of the mighty and organic whole with which we are incorporate, or which we are defying. Sloth and selfishness in our public duties will be treason against humanity as well as disloyalty to our fellow-citizens. And as we debate the questions of the houi", nay, as we give our vote for a new School Board, or for a new House of Commons, it will be ever present to our memory that this vote, be it wise or foolish, selfish or patriotic, is so far as in us lies, deciding the future of that greatest Power of which w^e have certain evidence on earth — the course of Human Civilisation, and is forming some infini- tesimal atom in the life of Humanity. No. 5.] C mtli Mm |teligmtt0 ^mrfg FINSBURY, E.C. "ENTHUSIASM OF THE MARKET-PLACE AND OF THE STUDY." A DISCOURSE DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C, On SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29///, 1885. BY KARL PEARSON, M.A. PUBLISHED BY E. W, ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. To H, B. This Lecture, hastily written, amid a pressure of other and more routine work, may still, perhaps, serve as a slight token of the affection I bear for a genuine 'man of the study,' from whom alone I have learnt to understand and to value its enthusiasm. K. P. ENTHUSIASM OF THE MARKET-PLACE AND OF THE STUDY. Who will absolve you bad Christians ? ' ' Study,' I replied, ' and Knowledge.' Conrad 3futh in a letter to Peter Eberbaeh, circa 1510. THERE are two types of human character wMdi must have impressed themselves even upon those least observant of the phases of life which surround us. Nor is it only in observing the present, but also in studying the past, that we find the same two types influencing, each in its own peculiar fashion, the growth of human thought and the forms of human society. By " studying the past " I do not mean reading a popular historical work, but taking a hundred, or better, fifty years in the life of a nation, and studying that out. Each of us is capable of such a study, although it may require the leisure moments, not of weeks, but of years. It means understanding, not only the politics of that people in those years ; not only what their thinkers wrote ; not only how the educated classes thought and lived ; but in addition how the mass of the folk struggled, and what stirred them to feeling or to action. In this latter respect more may often be learnt from folk-songs and broadsheets than from a whole round of foreign campaigns. Anyone, who has made some such study as I have suggested, will not only have recognised the two opposing types of human character, but be better able to judge of the parts they have played in human development. Without any assertion that one of these types is thoroughly harmful, and only the other of real social value, we may still enquire whether the one be not of more service to humanity than the other, and so socially endeavour to repress the one and cultivate the other. If, on examining longer periods of human histor}^, we find that in the more developed extant societies the first type is tending to recede before the second, we shall have considerable help in arriving at a judgment of their relative social value. The two types which I am desirous of placing before you this morning I term the " Man of the Market-Place," and the "Man of the Study." Let me endeavour to explain to you what mean- ing I attach to these names. In the earlier forms of human society, impulses to certain lines of social conduct are transmitted from generation to generation, either by direct contact between old and young, or possibly by some hereditary principle. Upon these impulses the stability of the society depends, and they have been evolved in the race-struggle for existence. Looked at from an outside point of vieWj they build the social habit and the current morality of that stage of society. Without them the society would decay, and yet no man in that primitive state understands how they have arisen. Viewed on the one side as indispensable to the race, on the other appearing to have no origin in human reason or human power, it is not to be wondered at, if we find morality in these early forms of civilisation associated with the super- human. To give the strongest possible sanction to morality — for on that sanction race-existence depends — it is associated with the supersensuous, it becomes part of a religious cult. Immorality, whose only rational meaning is something anti-social, becomes sin ; it plays a part in the relation of each individual man to the supernatural. Nor is it hard to understand how such a superstition might be a valuable factor of race-pi-eservation. On the scientific and historical basis there is no difficulty whatever in explaining how morality has come to have a supernatural value, or why such a belief should be so widespread. You may be inclined to turn round upon me and say : But every reasoning person considers immorality as another term for what is anti- social. This may be quite true, but reasoning persons are not to be met with on every Sabbath day's jom-ney ; and I find vast numbers of those with whom I come in contact still talk of morality, justice, good and evil, as if they had at least an abstract value, and were not synonymous with what is social or anti-social. When a great modern thinker like Kant can lay down the absurd proposition that the world exists in order that man may have a field for moral action ; when from thousands of voices in this land, from the platform and the press, we hear cries of justice and morality, and human right, and divine retribution, then indeed we become conscious how widespread is the delusion that there is an absolute code of morality or justice which is hidden somewhere in the inner consciousness of each individual. In judging of Christianity, not as a revelation, but as a system of morality, we are often apt to give it too high praise, forgetful that to the teach- ing of Jesus the Christ carried to its legitimate outcome in the Latin Fathers modern Europe owes the superstition that life is created for morality, not morality created for life — I mean, that life exists for wider purposes than mere morality ; morality is only a condition which renders social life possible. I am moral, not because such is the object of my life, but because by being so I gratify the social impulses impressed upon me by early education, and by hereditary instinct. (Iratification of impulse brings pleasure, and pleasure in life is one of the conditions necessary to our grasping it and working it to the full extent of its rich possibilities. If we agree then that morality is what is social, and immorality what is anti-social, that neither have an absolute or supernatural value, we shall be led to inquire of any course of action how it affects the welfare of society ; that is, not only of those whom the action may be towards, but of him who is its source, for both alike belong to human society. To judge whether an action be moral or not we must investigate its effects, not only on others but on self. Now if the only actions which came before us were murder or brutally-sensual, there would be no difficulty in judging their effect on others or on self, in determining their anti-social character. But most of the actions re- quired in human life ai-e far more difficult of analysis, far more com- plex in their bearings on others and on self. In addition they often require an immediate decision. When a man decides ra[)idly on his course of action, we say he is a man of character; when his decisions genei'ally prove in the sequel to have been correct, we attribute to him insight or wisdom. We look up to him as a wise man, and endeavour to imitate him, or to learn from him. The insight or wisdom we have thus spoken of, and which is so intimately con- nected with character, is the result of training, of mental discipline, or of what in the broad sense of the word we may term education. It is not only experience of men, but still more a knowledge of the laws which govern human society, of the effects of certain courses of action as manifested in history, nay even of natural laws, whether mechanical or physiological, which govern man because he is a part of nature, that makes up this education. But more, this know- ledge, this education in itself, is not sufficient to form what we term a wise man ; each truth learnt from science or history must have become a part of a man's existence ; the theoretical truth must form such a part of his very being, that it influences almost unconsciously every practical action; the comparatively trivial doings of each day must all be consistent with, I will even say dictated by, those general laws which have been deduced from a study of history and from, a study of science. Then and then only a man's actions become certain, harmonious and definite in purpose ; then we recognise that we have to deal with a man of character ; with a man whose morality is something more than a superstition, an* integral part of his thinking being. If a theory of life is worth studying, let its propounder bring evidence that it has moulded his own character, has been the mainspring of his actions. There 4 is no truer touchstone than that of the value of a philosophical system. Examine the lives of the great German metaphysicians, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, you will find them men petulant, irritable, even cowardly in action. Examine the life of a Spinoza and you will for the first time understand his philosophy; it was an element of his being. Lecturing from this platform nearly three years ago, I described freethought not merely as the shaking off of dogmatism, but as the single-minded devotion to the pursuit of truth. Deep thought, patient study, even the labour of a whole life, might be needed before a man obtained the right to call himself a freethinker. Some of my audience, in the discussion which followed, strongly objected to such a system as leaving no place for morality, for the play of the emotions. I was much struck by the objections at the time, as it shewed me what a gulf sepai'ated my conception of morality from that of some of my audience. Morality was then, and is still, to me the gratification of the social passion in one's actions. But in what fashion must this gratification take place 1 On the basis of those principles of human conduct which we have deduced hy study from history and from science. As I said then, the ignorant and uneducated cannot be freethinkers ; so I say now, the ignorant and the uneducated cannot be moral. As I said then, freethought is an ideal to which we can only approximate, an ideal which expands with every advance of our positive knowledge ; so I say now, that morality is an ideal of human action to which we can only approxi- mate — an ideal which expands with every advance of our positive knowledge. As the true freethinker must be in possession of the highest knowledge of his time, so he will be in possession of all that is known of the laws of human development. He, and he only, is capable of fulfilling his social instinct in accordance with those laws. He, and he only, seems to me capable of being really moral. Morality is not the blind following of a social impulse, but a habit of action based upon character — character moulded by that know- ledge of truth which must become a part of our being. Let me give you one or two examples of what I mean by the relation of morality to knowledge. The question of compulsory vaccination is one which can only be answered by investigation of general laws and particular statistics, not always easily accessible or easily intelligible when accessible ; yet, notwithstanding this, the question has been dragged on to the hustings, made a matter of 'human right,' 'individual libei^ty,' and those other vague. generali- ties which abound on the market-place. Another good example is that of sexual morality ; here the most difficult questions arise, which are intimately connected with almost every phase of our modern social life. These questions are extremely hard to answer ; they involve not only a wide study of comparative history, but frequently of the most complex problems in physiology ; problems often which 5 tliat science, only in its infancy, has not yet solved. To such ques- tions we ought to come with the most cautious, the most impai'tial, the most earnest minds, because their very nature tends to excite our prejudices, to thrust aside our intellectual rule, and so, to warp our judgment. But what do we find in actual life 1 These questions are brought onto the market-place ; made the subject of appeal on the one side to the supernatural, or to some absolute code of morality ; on the other side to strong emotions, which, utterly untutored, are the natural outcome of our strong social impulses. Where we might expect a calm appeal to the results of science and the facts of human history, we are confronted with the deity, absolute justice, the moral rights of man, and other terms which are calculated to excite strong feeling, while they successfully screen the yawning void of ignorance. As a last example, let me point to a problem which is becoming all important to our age — the great social changes, the economic re- organisation, which is pressing upon us. We none of us know exactly what is coming ; we ai'e only conscious of a vast feeling of unrest, of discontent with our present social organism, which manifests itself, not in one or two little groups of men, but throughout all the strata of society. The socialistic movement in England would have little meaning if we were to weigh its im- portance by the existing socialist societies or their organs in the press. It is because we find throughout all classes a decay of the old conceptions of social justice and of the old principles of social action — a growing disbelief in once accepted economic laws — a tendency to question the veiy foundations of our social system — it is because of these manifestations that we can speak of a great social problem before us. This problem is one of the hardest which a nation can have to work out ; one which requires all its energy, and all its intellect ; it is fraught with the highest possi- bilities and the most terrible dangers. Human society cannot be changed in a year, scarcely in a hundred years ; its organism is as complex as that of the most difi'erentiated type of physical life ; you can destroy that life, ruin that organism, but remould it you cannot without the patient labour of generations, even of cen- turies. That labour itself must be directed by knowledge, know- ledge of the laws which have dictated the rise and decay of human societies, and of those physical influences which manifest them- selves in humanity as temperament, impulse, and passion. No single man, no single group of men, no generation of men can re- model human society — their influence when measured in the future will be found wondrously insignificant. They may, if they are strong men of the market-place, produce a German Reformation or a French Revolution ; but when the historian not of the outside, but of the inside, comes to investigate that phase of society before and after the movement, what does he find? A great deal of human pain, a great deal of destruction. And of human creation 1 6 The veriest little ; new forms here and there perhaps, hut ixnder them the old slave turning the old wheel ; humanity toiling on inider the old yoke ; the same round of human selfishness, of human misery, of human ignorance — touched here and there, as of old, by the same human lieauty, the same human greatness. It is because the man of the study recognises how little is the all which even extended insight will enable him to do for social change that he condemns the man of the market-place, who not only thinks he understands the social problem, but has even found its solution. The man of the study is convinced that to change, really change, human society requires long generations of educative labour. Human progress, like Nature, never leaps ; this is the most certain of all laws deduced from the study of human development. If this be formulated in the somewhat obscure phase : " Social growth takes place by evolution not by revolution," the man of the market-place declares in one breath that his )-evolution is an evolution, and in the next either sings some glorious chant, a blind appeal to force, or informs you that he can shoulder a rifle, and could render our present society impossible by the use of dynamite, with the pi'operties of which he is well acquainted. Poor fellow — would that he were as well acquainted with the properties of human nature ! The examples I have placed before you may be sufficient to show liow much morality is a question not of feeling but of knowledge, of study. In a recent speech at the Church Congress a theologian, a man of the market-place, declared that he considered questions of ethics as lying outside the field of the intellect ; that is one of the most immoral statements I have ever come across. It causes one almost to despair of one's country and its people, when it is possible for the holders of such views to 1)e raised to positions of great moral influence ! You will feel, I know, that it is a very hard saying : the ignorant cannot he tnoral. It is so opposed to all the Christian conceptions of morality in which we ourselves have been reared, and which have been impressed upon our forefathers for generations. Morality Avith the Christian is a matter of feeling ; obedience to a code revealed by a transcendental manifestation of the deity. The hundreds of appeals made weekly from the pulpits of this country, urging mankind to a moral course of life, are appeals to the emotions, not to the reason. In my sense of the words, they are made by men of the market-place, not by men of the stud3^ The Christian movement, as Mark Pattison has well pointed out, arose entirely outside the sphere of educated thought. Unlike modern freethought, it was not the outcome of the knowledge and culture of its age. In its neglect of the great Greek systems of philosophy, it was a return to blind emotion, even to barbarism. This oppo- sition of Christianity and Reason reached its climax in the second century, possibly with Tertullian. *' What," writes this Father, " have the philosopher and Christian in common 1 The disciple of Greece and the disciple of heaven 1 What have Athens and Jerusalem, the Church and the Academy, heretics and Christians, in common 1 There is no more curiosity for us, now that Christ has come, nor any occasion for further investigation, since we have the Gospel The Son of God is dead ; it is right credible, because it is absurd ; being buried, he has arisen ; it is certain, because it is impossible." Although there have been periods of history when Christianity has stood in the van of intellectual progress, we must yet hold that she has on the whole, and perhaps not unnaturally, exhibited a suspicion of human reason. She has preferred the methods of the market-place to those of the study ; men of words, prophets and orators may be picked up at every street corner ; the scholar, the man of thought requires a life-time in the making, and, being made, will he any longer be a Christian 1 If, and if only, he finds Christianity to be one with the highest knowledge of his age. I have endeavoured to emphasise this relation of Christianity to intellect, because our current morality is essentially Christian — is essentially a matter of blind feeling— and hence it comes about that we find the statement : the ignorant cannot be moral, such a very hard saying. The freethinker, placing on one side the supernatural, finding an all-sufficient religion in the pursuit of truth, in the investigation of law, will surely not be content to accept the old Christian conception of morality 1 To leave his reason on this point out of account, and appeal to feeling as a test of truth 1 Let him remember what other teachers, in their way as great or greater than Jesus — greater if we measure them by intellectual power, — have taught. With Gautama the Buddha, knowledge was the key to higher life ; right living the outcome of self-culture. Moses the son of Maimon, chief of Jewish philo- sophers, tells us that evil is the work of infirm souls, and that infirm souls shall seek the ivise, the physicians of soul. Averroes, the greatest of mediseval freethinkers, whom Christian art de- picted with Judas crushed in the jaws of Satan, asserted that knowledge is the only key to perfect living. That Spinoza taught all evil arises from confused ideas, from ignorance, is known to all. If the philosophers, as Tertullian has declaimed, are the patriarchs and prophets of heretics, then surely we freethinkers should attend to what they have taught ! But I can give you a still more striking instance of how the men of the study have based morality upon knowledge. I refer to that little band of real workers, the Humanists of the early sixteenth century. Men like Erasmus, Sebastian Brant, and Conrad Muth were working for a real reform- ation of the German people on the basis of education, of knowledge, of that progress which alone is sure, because it is based on the 8 reason. These men, one and all, identified immorality with ignorance; the immoral man with the fool. Feared on the one side b)'' the monks, abused on the other by the Lutherans, they are asked: 'Who will absolve you bad Christians'?' 'Study,' they replied, ' and Knowledge.' It were instructive, had we time, to see how the labour of these men of the study was swept away by the popular passion roused by the men of the market-place. Suffice it to say that Luther described evil-doing as disobedience to a supernatural code; sin as a want of belief in Jesus the Christ; and reason as the ' arch whore ' and ' devil's bride.' Appealing to popular ignorance and blind emotion, he re-imposed upon half Europe the Christian conception of morality ; and we freethinkers of to-day have again to start from the standpoint of the Humanists : Study and Knowledge alone absolve from sin; morality is impos- sible to the ignorant. If yon will agi-ee with me, at least for the purposes of my present lecture, that the ideal moral nature is a character moulded by study and knowledge — a mind which is not only in possession of facts, but in which the laws drawn from these facts have become modes of thought inexplicably wound up in its being, then we may proceed further and enquire : How can this ideal be apj)roached 1 What is the motive force behind it 1 How does it affect our practical conduct 1 Hoio can this ideal be app7-oached ? If immoi-ality be one with ignorance, this question is not hard to answer. The moral life to the freethinker is like the religious life, it is a growth — a growth in knowledge. As the freethinker's religion is the pursuit of truth and his sole guide the reason, so his morality consists in the application of that truth to the practical side of life. His moralit}^ is a part of his I'eligious being, even as much a part as the Christian's. More than once a Christian has said to me : " I do not deny that you present freethinkers may be moral. You have been brought up in the Christian faith, and its morality still influences your lives. How will it be however with your children and your childreiis children, who have never felt that influence?" "Never felt that influence?" I reply. "No! but the influence of something more human, something which is matter not of belief, but of knowledge ; something which can guide their life infinitely more surely than a super- natural code. The morality which springs from the human, the rational guidance of the social impulse, is ten times moi'e stable than the morality which is based upon the emotional appeals of a dogmatic faith." When the Christian comes to me and jjrates of his morality, I feel like Hamlet scorning Laertes' -love for Ophelia — Why I will fight with him upon this theme Until my eyelids will no longer wag. ******** Swounds, show me what thou'lt do : Woo't weep? woo't tight/ woo't fast? woo't tear thyself? Woo't drink up eisel ? eat a crocodile ? I'll do't. Dost thou come here to whine ? To outface me with leaping in her grave ? Be buried quick with her and so will I ; And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw Millions of acres on us. till our ground, Singeing his pate against the burning zone, Make Ossa like a wart ! Naj', an thoult mouth. I'll rant as well as thou. That we freethinkers have not a morality, or only the remnants of an antique faith — ])rejudices gained from a Christian education which cling like limpets to the rock of our intellectual being — is the libel of ignorance. We have a morality, and those who hold it assert that it stands above the Christian dispensation, as the Christian above the Hebrew. Like the Hebrew however it is a matter of law, and the lawgiver is Reason. Reason is the only lawgiver, by whom the intellectual forces of the nineteenth centuiy can be ordered and disciplined. The only practical method of making society as a whole approach the freethinker's ideal of morality is to educate it, to teach it to use its reason in guiding the race instincts or social impulses. Understand what I mean by education. I do not mean mere knowledge of scientific or historic facts ; but these facts co-ordinated into laws, and these laws so much a mode of thought, that they are the rules of human action. The learned man may not be in any sense of the word educated, and is thus frequently immoral. Often what we are accustomed to call education is mferely the means to its attainment. You must give vour folk — if vou wish it to be moral, to have social stability — not only the means of education, but the leisure to pursue that means to its end. Let us put this statement in a more concise form. Society depends for its stability on the morality of the individual. The morality of the individual is co-ordinate with his education. It is therefore a primary function of society to educate its members. It may seem to some of you a i)latitude even when I say that to improve the morality of society you must improve its education. Yet how far is this principle cai-ried into practice by our would-be moral reformers ? Do they set themselves down to the life-long task of slowly but surely educating their fel- lows 1 Or do they rush out onto the market-place, proclaim that God bids men do this or that ; that this or that course of action is virtuous, is righteous, is moral, without once troiibling to define their words 1 How many such moral reformers have made that study of science and history, have gained that knowledge of social and physical law which would make them to be moral themselves, still more to guide their fellows 1 In many of the complex problems of modern life, we 10 freethinkers can only say, that we are struggling towards the light, that we are endeavouring to gain that knowledge which will lead us to their solution. And yet how often does the man of the market-place rush by us proclaiming what he thinks an obvious truth, appealing to the blind passions of the ignorant mass of humanity, and drawing after him such a flood of popular energy that those germs of intellectual life and rational action which for years we may have been labor- iously implanting disappear in the torrent ! After the flood has subsided, when human life has returned, as history shews us it invariably does, to its old channels, the men of the study come back to what may be left of their old labours and begin afresh their endless process of education. Some few will be disheartened, quite hopeless, but the many know that the work in which they are engaged requires the slow evolution of centuries, not to accomplish, because there is no end to human knowledge, no end to the discovery of truth, but to manifest itself in its results. The man of the study has no desire to leave a name as the founder of an idea ; he is content to have enjoyed the fulness of life — to have passed a life religious, because it is rational ; moral, because it has been spent in accordance with the highest knowledge of his day ; social, 1)ecause it has been directed to the purposes of education, to the discovery and spread of truth. It is easy to see how the man who has time for education, for self-culture, may strive towards the freethinker's standai'd of morality. But what about the toiler, the man Avhose days are spent in the hard round of purely mechanical labour ? I can only I'eply that so long as such a man has no time for the development of his intellectual nature he cannot be moral in my sense of the word. He may follow instinctively a certain course of action, which may not in ordinaiy matters be directly anti-social, but in the complex problems of life he Avill as often go wrong as right. The existence of large masses of men in our pi'esent society incapable of moral action is one of the gravest questions of the time ; it is significant for the stability of our social forms. It places at the disj^osal of the men of the market-jilace a power of stirring up popular passion, the danger of which it is hard to exaggerate. That education is now a privilege of class, is the strongest argument which our socialistic friends could adopt if they knew how to use it aright, but it is not one with Avhich they can appeal to the blind feeling of the masses. If all social reform be, as I am convinced it is, the outcome alone of increased morality, and if morality be a matter of education and of knowledge, then all real social reform can only proceed" step by step with the slow, often hardly perceptible, process of popular education. What a field of social action lies here for all who wish to enjoy the fulness of life ! Here the freethinker's mission is at once religious and moral ! His morality — not perhaps in the sense of the market- » 11 place, but at least in that of the study — is socialism, his religious cult is that pursuit of truth, which, when obtained, directs his moral, his social action. "Would that moi'e men of learning were so educated as to recognise this new code of social action ! That edu- cation is needed for the masses, not that the workman may make ten good screws where he formerly made nine bad ones, but that the workman himself may be capable of moral, that is, social action. Men of science proclaim the need of technical education for the English artizan, if he is to survive in the battle for existence with German and French rivals. A more pitiable plea for technical education could hardly be imagined. We, freethinkers, demand technical education for the workman, becaiise we believe that it enables him to replace a mechanical routine by a series of intelligent acts ; we believe that when he is accustomed to intelligent, rather than mechanical action in handicraft, he will no longer be content with a mechanical code of social action ; he will begin to inquire and to investigate ; — his morality also will become a matter of thought and of knowlede-e, no lonsrer of faith or of custom. That would indeed be a great step towards social reform, a great advance m social stability. To the freethinkers of the old school, who fancy their mission is to destroy Christianity only, we of the new school cry : ' Go and study Christianity ; learn what it, as a purely human institution, has in 1,800 years done and failed to do, then only will you be in a position in destroying to create ; — to create that religion which is alone foreshadowed in the future.' To the socialists of the old school, who think that revolutionary agitation, paper schemes of social reconstruction, and manifestoes appealing to class passion, are the only possible modes of action, we of the new school cry : ' Go out and ediicate, create a new morality, the basis of which shall be knowledge, and socialism will come, although in a shape which none of us have imagined. It may need the labour of centuries, but it is the one method of action, which at each step gives us sure foothold. To the firm ground of reason trusts the man who would build for postei'ity.' So much then in answer to our first question of the method by which we can approach the moral ideal. (Jur second question : \Yhat is the motive force behind this tnorality? leads me to a point, which has given the title to this lecture, and presents undoubted difficulty to those who have thrown aside all appeal to the emotions as the motive force in conduct. The energy which enables a man of the market-place to carry out his projects, may be measured by the amount of enthusiasm he is capable of raising among his fellow men. To create enthusiasm by an appeal to the emotions, and direct it to a definite goal is essen- tially the method of the man of the market-place. He does not try to move men through their reasons, he does not try to educate them, but he strives to influence their feelings, to excite their 12 passions, and, in so doing, to raise their enthusiasm for the cavise he has at heart. Party passion, superstition, religious hatred, national prejudices, class-feeling, every phase of individual desii-e, or of race- impulse, is made use of by the man of the market-place to raise the excitement necessary for the accomplishment of his purpose. Where can the man of the study find a motive force, an enthusiasm like this 1 How can his calm appeal to the reason, his slow process of education, ever produce the enthusiasm needful for the achievement of a great end 1 Is there no enthusiasm of the study which can be compared with the enthusiasm of the market-place;] This is the question we have to answer. Here is the void which so many have felt in the freethinker's faith, in that morality which is based on knowledge. What is there in the calm pursuit of truth to call forth enthusiasm, what great social heroism can be based on a study of the laws of human life? I do not know whether any of you ever study the sermons of Christian divines, but for me they form a frequent source of amuse- ment and instruction. They afford a great insight into human character, human ignorance, and human struggle, which one hardly finds manifested elsewhere. A theologian, preaching before the University of Cambridge a few years since, made "use of the following words : — " But what is enthusiasm, but, as the term imports, the state of one who is habitually eV^eos, possessed by some power of God 1 " The sentence is interesting, not only as bearing upon the character of the preacher, who could dismiss with a philological quibble, a possible enthusiasm among us freethinkers, but also as clearly marking the gulf which separates the enthusiasm of the market- place from that of the study. Perhaps, indeed, the gulf is so great that we ought not to call the two things by the same name, yet at least it is convenient in order to contrast them. The enthusiasm of the market-place is, as our theologian expresses it, the state of one who is possessed (or rather imagines he is possessed) by some superhuman power. It is not a state of rational inspiration, but rather of frenzy— of religious, social, or political fanaticism. It is the state of excitement to which the ignorant may be aroiised, on the one hand by confused ideas taking possession of their fancy ; or, on the other hand by a rhetorical appeal to their prejudice and to their passion. Enthusiasm of the market-place is so prevalent to-day that we have not to go far in search of samples. It is rampant in our political and social life. The politicians to whom we entrust the destinies of our country are essentially men of the market-place ; men who have won their present positions by appeal to class prejudice and to passionate ignorance. The politician who discusses a bill from its broad social value, who does not speak from a party standpoint, and who tries to reason in the House, is scarcely yet known. The present Prime Minister raises enthusiasm 13 among a section of his countrymen by expressing his horror at the ' wave of infidelity ' he tells us is sweeping across the land ; the last Prime Minister raises enthusiasm in another section of his countrymen by employing his leisure in defending what he terms the ' majestic process ' of creation described in the first chapter of Genesis. When a writer talks of " the detachment and collection of light, leaving in darkness as it proceeded the still chaotic mass from which it was detached," — we recognise how hopelessly ignorant he is of the conceptions of modern science as to light. We demand what intellectual right he has to criticise, what he describes as the vain and boastful theories of modern thought. We cry : ' Understand, go into the school and learn, before you come onto the market-place and talk.' Mr. Gladstone, in his recent article in the Nineteenth Century, writes also, that : " We do not hear the authority of Scrip- ture impeached on the ground that it assigns to the Almighty eyes and ears, hands, arms, and feet ; nay, even the emotions of the human being." Now, these are precisely the strongest arguments which freethinkers at present use against scripture, and which many great philosophers have used in the past : " The understanding, will and intelligence, ascribed to God," says Spinoza, " can have no more in common with our human faculties than the Dog a sign in the heavens has with the barking animal we call a dog on earth." Is Mr. Gladstone ignorant alike of past and present? Those of you who wish to study enthusiasm of the market-place should read his article, notably the last two pages, wherein he tilts, like Don Quixote at the windmill, at the scientific doctrine of evolution. The language is magnificent, the rhetoric is unsurpassed, only there is an utter absence of logical thought, of the spirit of scholarly investigation. If our political leaders make such statements, what shall we say of them ? Are they intellectually inferior men, or are they intellectually dishonest % Let us content ourselves by describing them as men of the market-place. Such enthusiasm as we have described — an enthusiasm in the sense of the Cambridge theologian — based upon prejudice not upon reason, is an impossibility for the man of the study. If this is all enthusiasm means, then the ideal freethinker must be without it. But is there nothing which can take its place? Nothing which can be termed enthusiasm of the study ? We think there is, although as ils strength lies in calmness not in fanaticism, in persistence rather than petulance, it is not easy to make it manifest to those who have not experienced it as a motive power in action. The enthusiasm of which I speak springs from the desire of knowledge. You cannot deny the existence of this desire, amounting in many cases to an absolute passion. Men have sacrificed everything, even their life, in the pursuit of truth. Nor was the spirit which moved all ambition, for many neither sought nor knew anything of fame. Granting that knowledge plays a great part in the struggle 14 for existence, it is not hard to understand how the pursuit of truth has become a passion in a portion of mankind. That life is of necessity cramped and suifering which does not grasp the laws of the social and physical world which surrounds it ; its sphere of action is limited and it cannot enjoy existence to the full. Increasing knowledge brings with it increasing activity ; life becomes an intelligible whole, every physical law Avithout is found to be one with the mental process within ; crude conceptions of a distinction between matter and spii'it fade away. That process of science which Mr. (iladstone speaks bitterly of as converting the world into a huge mechanism, is grasped as the one process by which the world becomes intelligible — spiritual, if you will. Physical law and social law become as much facts of the intellect as any mental process. The truth gained by study becomes a part of a man's intellectual nature, and it is as impossible for him to contradict it in action as to destroy a part of his own body. The man of the study would as soon think of lireaking through a social law, which he had discovered by historical research, as of acting contrary to a physical law ; both would be alike destructive of a part of his intellectual nature. It is this consistency of action, this uniform obedience to rational law, which gives the man of the study character, raises his morality from a matter of feeling to a matter of reason. The steady persistency which arises from a knowledge of truth, social and physical, having become a part of man's intellectual nature, which arises from the absolute refusal of that intellectual natui'e to stultify itself, is what I term the enthusiasm of the study. It is this enthusiasm of the study which, I believe, must Ije at the back of all really social action. Enthusiasm of the market-place may for the moment appear to move mountains, but it is appearance only. The reaction comes, and when the flood has subsided we find how little the religious, the social, or the political fanatic has in truth accom})lished ! The fi'otli remains — the name, the institution, the form — but the real social good is too often, what we mathematicians term a negative qviantity. The long, scarcely perceptible swell of the sea may be more dangerous to an ironclad than the storm which breaks over it. So it is that the scarcely per- ceptible influence of enthusiasm of the study may with the centuries achieve more than all the strong eloquence of the market-place. It is faith in this one principle which makes us struggle towai'ds the ideal of freethought, which makes us proclaim reason and knowledge as the sole factors of moral action ; nay, which makes vis believe that the future may bring a social regeneration for our folk, if in the social storms of the future we trust for guidance to the enthusiasm of the study rather than to the enthvisiasm of the market-place. If I have made my meaning in the least clear to you, it would seem almost idle to attempt an answer to my thii'd question : What effect should these doctrines have on our practical conduct % To 15 cultivate in ourselves the persistent enthusiasm of the study; to endeavour by every means in our power to assist the education of others who have not the like means of intellectual development ; to insist that moral problems shall be solved not on the basis of customary morality or individual prejudice, but solely by a thorough investigation of physical and social law ; to repress so far as lies in our power those men of the market-place, who render our political life an apotheosis of ignorance, not a field for the display of a nation's wisdom ; to recollect that inspiration and blind will, the prophet and the martyr, are not wanted in this our nineteenth century, they belong to the past. Should a man cry out that he has discovered a great truth, to listen to no emotional appeal, but demand the rational grounds of his faith, however great be his name or respected his authority. To refuse belief to an opinion, although it be held by the many, until we find a rational basis for its existence. Shox'tly, to consider all things, which are not based on the firm ground of reason subject to the sacred right of doubt ; to treat all mere belief as delusion, and to reckon the unknown not as a field for dogma, but as a problem to be solved. To act thus and think thus, surely is to allow the doctrines of freethought to in- fluence our practical conduct ! To convert the market-place into the study ! And if his life be spent in only struggling towai-ds these ideals, in the long task of learning how to live, may we not at least place as an epitaph over our freethinker, Robert Browning's lines to the old Humanist who perished before he had satisfied his craving for knowledge : — Did not he magnify the mind, show clear Just what it all meant ? He would not discount life, as fools do here, Paid by instalment. ***** That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it : This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. No. 6.] c 0iitj} Mm ^eligi0ns ^mrfj FINSBURY, E.G. SCIENCE r,\ EMOTIONS, A DISCOURSE DELIVERED AT SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C., On SUNDAY, DECEMBER 27 tk, 1885. BY EDWARD CLODD. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE CHILDHOOD OF THE WORLD. Crown 8vo., 3/, ) ", • Sjiecial Edition for Schoo's, 1;. THE CHILDHOOD OF RELIGIONS. Crown 8vo, 5/. Special Edition for Schools, 1/6. JESUS OF NAZARETH. Crown 8vo., 6 , Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. MYTHS AND DREAMS. Crown 8vo., 5/ ChATTO ct "WiNDUS. SCIENCE AND THE EMOTIONS. IN 1842 Haydon wrote to Wordsworth, recalling to his memory a dinner-party which took place many years before at the house of the former, " Don't you remember," he asks, " Keats pro- posing ' Confusion to the memory of Newton ;' and upon your insisting upon an explanation before you drank it, his saying, ' Because he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism?'" Keats gives expression to the same sentiment in "Lamia": Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy ? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven : We know her woof, her texture, she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air and gnom^d mine — Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade. Both story and quotation, like the sneer of "Wordsworth him- self at the naturalist as one who would visit his mother's grave only to botanize on it, illustrate the antagonism of men of letters to facts into the significance of which their prejudices, fears and ignorances hinder them from enquiring ; an antagonism still appar- ent in the intermittent controversies upon the place of science and literature in culture. It shares the general attitude of the literary and poetic temper towards that which it apprehends will covertly take away moi-e than it gives, the gift itself being inferior in quality as in quantity. It is born of unreasoning fear, which nevertheless commands some degree of sympathy, that science, which admits no break in the chain of cause and effect between certain material phenomena and certain mental phenomena, should reduce the finer vibrations of the spirit, the tremulous throbs of hope, reverence, admiration and love, to terms of dynamics. Because science says Ohne phosphor Kein Gedanke, " without phosphor no thought," — which terrible epigram is only another way of saying that we cannot think without a brain, any more than we can see without eyes ; and that there is no manifestation of mind apart from body, — it opines that man is to be regarded as a soulless mechanism. It is the outcome of that unhappy presentment of spirit and matter as things irreconcile- able, the one as all-noble and pure, the other as ignoble and vile, instead of opposite terms for the self-same mystery. It dreads, and in this lies that inherent scepticism and unfaith which it charges upon its antagonists, that the statement of all phenomena in terms of mechanical relations, of materialistic formulre and symbols, will dethrone man from that self-elected supremacy which isolates him from the creatures beneath him and from the universe around him ; that the anatomy will kill the poetry, and the demonstration of a like community of origin and of destiny between man and brute degrade him from his kinship with the angels. It is an attitude which not only resists every conception of unity between man and all other forms of organic life, and between these and the sum-total of things, but also between the several faculties of man himself. Affections, Instincts, Principles, and Powers, Impulse and Eeason, Freedom and Control — So men, unravelling God's harmonious whole, Eend in a thousand shreds this life of ours. Vain labour 1 Deep and broad, where none may see, Spring the foundations of that shadowy throne Where man"s one nature, queen-like, sits alone, Centred in a majestic unity.* The dividing lines between the provinces of reason and emotion are not easy to trace, and leaving the phrenologists of various schools to appoint their own Boundary Commission, we may find it more * Poems, Vol, I, p, 7, MatthevY Arnold, Sonnet > Written in Butler's Sermons, 3 advantageous to learn how the artificial separations disappear in view of those concentric if not coincident relations between the two which science, the only reconciler, establishes, and how she supplies nutrition and stimulus to both, not setting up one before the other, making man conscious not of duality, but of "majestic unity." Since the like materials — Nature in its totality — are dealt with by the reason and the emotions, the defect must lie in us if there be discord within concerning their significance. For Nature is one, and man one with her, vrhether he will or not. Therefore the discord must arise either because the emotions refuse to recognise the validity of the report which science brings concerning materials which it is her function to weigh and measure and analyse and generalise about, or because the reason disdains to call in the imagination to light her towards the impenetrable maze where " men grow blind though angels know the rest." It would indeed be strange if that which brings its great cloud of witnesses to the unity of things should set Tip a middle wall of partition within the mind of man himself, building, as it were, water-tight compartments, or mapping it out like the plaster skulls of the phrenologists. But let us see if the blame can be apportioned. Science is organized knowledge — knowledge of causes. It works by method. Its methods are to observe, to compare, to set forth points of likeness and unlikeness, resulting in classification ; to search for true and sufficient causes, to establish unvarying relations between causes and effects — those uniformities of co-existence and succession which are, for convenience, called " laws of nature." For convenience only, since all that science is concerned with is to discover whether or no there be an unchanging order among phenomena, leaving the question of the existence of anything beyond and behind these as unknown and unknowable, as altogether outside her province. Thus, in physics science deals with the stuff of which the universe is made up. Admitting that nothing can be known respecting the ultimate nature of what is called matter, (a word, by the way, which the Latin materia, from which we have it direct, derives from mater, mother,) it seeks to explain what it is by noting what it does, and assumes certain properties from its activities as manifest in the play of the forces and energies of the universe. It notes the action of the force of gravitation throughout space in the mutual attraction of every mass for every other mass ; of the force of cohesion in the union at imperceptible distances of the compound bodies which make up such masses ; of the force of affinity, wonderfullest of all, under which every atom, which has its own fixed weight, unites in never- varying proportions with other atoms to form molecules whose properties are unlike those possessed by the uncombined atoms. In contrast and eternal opposition to these binding forces, it notes the action of disrupting, repellent energies in the motions known to us as light, heat, electricity, magnetism, and so forth, among masses infinite in their distance from one another, as well as among bodies composing such masses, the intervals between which are measureless in their minuteness. It shows how the play of these opposing forces and energies is essential to the mechanical action of the universe. If force had unresisted play, all the atoms in the universe would gravitate to a common centre, and ultimately form a perfect sphere in which no life would exist, and in which no work would be done. If energy had unresisted play, the atoms in the universe would be driven asunder, and remain for ever separated, with the like result of changeless powerlessness, as in the case of force alone. But with these two powers in conflict, like the Ahriman and Ormuzd of the old Persian religion, the universe is the theatre of ceaseless redistri- bution of its contents, whether in the sweep of the stars and their attendant systems through space, or in the pendulum-like vibrations of the invisible particles of every body, or in the throbs of the ethereal medium. Science has established the fundamental identity of the materials — not seen and eternal — of which the universe in its totality is built up ; whether itbe the grass of the field, which "to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven," or the man in all his nobility of mental and naoral equipment, to whose fleeting life that withering grass suggests an old-world parallel. Whether man or monkey, elephant or oyster, bird or the tree in which it builds its nest, bee or the flower from which it gathers honey — carbonic acid, water, and ammonia, the chemistry of a bottle of smelling salts, — are alike the physical basis of their common life. The doctrine of continuity, which has no "favoured-nation clause " for man, not merely includes his material life with lower forms, but his spiritual life also. Into whatever department of the cosmos enquiry is pushed, whether of the embryonic universe or the embryonic soul, the like conditions obtain — the All is a unit, quivering with energy throughout, in planet, stones, heat and rain, every part influenced by every other part. It would seem that in this statement of relations, brief as it is necessarily is, science, calling into wholesome exercise every faculty of man, has already draAvn on the imagination. And so in truth it has. In the explanation given of the behaviour of the particles of matter throughout the universe under the activity of certain forces and energies, such explanation is based on a series of assumptions. The forces and energies inhei'ing in matter, or with which it was endowed at the outset, are themselves to be included in one term as the manifestation of an indestructible power unknown and unknowable ; the masses of matter, whether large or small, which are the vehicles of that power, are made up of unseen and invisible particles. One-half the crust of the earth itself is composed of oxygen which, when in the free state, is an invisible and tasteless gas. Our knowledge of molecules, still more of atoms, is yet in its infancy, and it would seem that particles which are beyond the range of our most powerful microscopes to reveal may be as astoundingly complex as the giant orbs of the heavens — nay, as the universe itself. Many ingenious experiments and calculations have been made to arrive at their size and structure, but they leave the problem of the ultimate divisibility or indivisibility of matter where they found it. The seven hundredth millionth part of an inch is considerably under the thickness to which, if it could be done, a plate of zinc or copper could be reduced without making it cease to be zinc or copper as we know and handle them. The ovum of mammals, which averages 6 about the hunclrcd-ancl-fiftieth of au inch in diameter, probably contains not less than five thousand billions of molecules. But, as showing how approximate only such estimates are, we are, in using the highest optical aid we can command, about as far from a know- ledge of the ultimate structure of organic bodies as we should be of the contents of a newspaper seen with the naked eye one-third of a mile off. The pores between the particles of bodies, as also the awful spaces between the stars, are not vacant, and for the explanation of varied, yet related, phenomena of motions, it is a necessary assumption that both intervals between atoms, and spaces between stars, are filled with a highly rarified elastic medium called ether, which is the vehicle of energy alike from the infinitely great to the infinitely small. Thus does science, in its ultimate analysis of the matter in motion of which the universe is made up, land us in assumptions which are not the ipse dixit of any man or school, but which are continually open to revision as research is extended ; and which are a permanent field for the play of imagination and emotion in their varied expressions. Things which the eye cannot see, which the ear can- not hear, which the hand cannot touch, but which in their totality compose this glory of colour and form, of vastness and change and movement, are one and all resolvable into states of consciousness, into unknown causes of sensations. The liistory of man's intellectual advance is a history of escape from the illusions of the sense- perceptions, of the correction of first impressions about his surround- ings conveyed by the organs of sense, as in the apparent motions and sizes of the heavenly bodies, in the shape of the earth, and so forth. But, as further illustration of our powerlessness to prove the objective reality of external things, and how they are quite other than they appear, let us deal with the more recondite illusions concerning colour and hardness, as e.g. greenness in grass and hardness in diamonds. To deny that there is any greenness in the one or any quality of hardness in the other, seems at the first blush startling even to those who are familiar with the difference between appearances and realities. Yet this is the fact. For ^y]lat is really going on in the grass is not a state of greenness, but vast myriads of motions, each of which is repeated about as often every second as there are seconds in thirty millions of years. These motions in the grass occasion wave-like motions around of a like rapidity, some of which occur within our eyes, and acting on some compound or compounds in the black pigment which lies behind the retina, pro- duce there chemical change of one or more of the compounds. This change, whatever its exact nature, excites the optic nerve to make a stir within the brain, and it is this last motion which determines the perception of green in the mind. The same explanation applies to the brilliancy of the diamond, with certain variations of detail in regard to the absorption or reflection of the several light-rays, and to its hardness also. When the vast accumulation of molecular motions which is called my finger approaches that other accumulation of motions which is called a diamond, these motions act upon one another, and my finger is compressed upon certain nerves, exciting them to produce those motions within my brain which, though quite unlike the motions outside, are the motions that are really accompanied by the sensation of hardness. Thus much of illustration from the metaphysics of sensation may show that when explanation of any department of phenomena is attempted, whether of things material as rock, or immaterial as the colour of the lichen that covers it, we have to fall back upon the deliverances of consciousness. As Tennyson says in " Tiresias " : — " Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, Nor canst thou prove the Worki thou movest in, Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone. Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one ; Thou canst not prove that I who speak with thee Am not thyself in converse with thyself. For nothing worthy proving can be proven Nor yet disproven. 8 The world, as has been said, embraces not only a Newton, but a Shakspere ; not only a Boyle, but a Raphael ; not only a Knox, but a Beethoven ; and not in each of these, but in all, is human nature whole. And in refreshing contrast to the timid prejudices of those men of " provincial " mind who, like Keats, fear that with the refraction of the sun-ray on a prism all the loveliness and glory and power of idealization were scattered, let us look at the attitude of Goethe. Of that rare combination of the scientific in equal balance, or, as one may say, atomic proportion, with the poetic, he supplies a wholesome example, save in the memorable instance of his vm- I'easoning opposition to the Newtonian theory of colour. His comprehensive genius could not exclude scientific research from its embrace, and in this exercise the advantage of an organizing capacity in union with the power to apprehend general relations is manifest. He had not the labour of original research thrust upon him, for there was an abundance of systematized materials at hand- But it was their subordinate, yet necessary place, in an inclusive whole that his insight enabled him to detect, while the specialists, who had gathered the materials, were only " the minds of their own eyes," and could not, as the saying goes, see the forest for the trees. Failing to grasp the relations of things, they remained on a lower plane. This power to sink the special in the general in Goethe was manifest in two distinct and permanent contri- butions to science; namely, the variations of structure from a common type, and the metamorphoses of plants. The upper jaw of most vertebrates consists of two bones united by sutures, but in man the upper jaw consists of one bone only. Goethe, however, discovered in the human jaw faint traces of the sutures, and he concluded from this that man's remote ancestors had a division of the upper jaw cori-esponding to that of mammals, reptiles, birds, and fishes. From the survival of this relic, which now performs no function, Goethe's larger insight led him to the conclusion that all differences in animal structure are variations of a common primitive type, a principle which has since remained the leading idea of comparative anatomy. In the second example, the same scientific use of the imagination led him to the inference that just as the arm in man and ape, the flipper in the whale, the fore- leg in the horse, the wing in the bat, and so forth, arc the vai'ied forms of an anterior limb which always retains the same divisions, however obscured, and the same connection with the trunk ; that just as in vertebi-ates the skull consists of modified vertebrse, so all parts of the plant, the cotyledon, stem-leaf, aspel, petal, stamen, and so forth, are modified leaves. Here, indeed, science and imagination met together, the poet and biologist kissed each other, the path was widened for transmuting, as Tyndall, whose own eloquent plea for the functions played by the imagination in science will occur to us, says concerning Emerson, " the conceptions of science into the fairer forms and warmer hues of an ideal world." Faraday supplies a kindred example, although his connexion with the obscure sect of the Sandemanians could not fail, unconsciously or not, to influence his reluctance to accept any theory excluding the operations of the supernatural. Tyndall says that nature and her contemplation produced in him a kind of spiritual exultation ; he was always in the temper of the poet ; and, like the poet, he eventually reached that point of emotion which produces poetic creation. Once, after long brooding on the subject of force and matter, he saw, as if lit by a stream of sudden light, the whole of the universe traversed by lines of force, and these lines in their ceaseless tremors producing light and radiant heat. Dashing forward on the trail of his idea, and thrilled into creation by the emotion which he felt, he declared that these were the lines of gravitating force, and that that force itself constituted matter ; that is, like Boscovich, he made foi^e identical with matter. Faraday himself called it the shadow of a speculation, but it was born of the spontaneity of poetry as the handmaid of philosophy. Science supplied the materials, poetry united them ; the combination was mechanical ; poetry transformed it into the vital. But, on the other hand, there is the temper illusti^ated in the story of the mathematician who, when he heard an enthusiast praise " Paradise Lost," asked, " What does it prove 1 " For such minds the siccicm 10 lumen, "the dry light" of the intellect suffices, and their lives are not less noble or pure because no celestial ray gives them a gleam of the mystery behind things seen. But that they are unemotional proves them incomplete ; it does not prove that the emotions may be stifled or allowed to remain fallow ; wei'e this done, they would yield noxious weed, and emit pestilential vapour of the sensual or the hysterical. They exist, and their wise regulation, not their suppres- sion, is essential if humanity is to press forward towards the unattained ideals of the wisest and the best. " Some people," as Huxley says, " cannot by any means be got to understand the first book of Euclid, but the truths of mathematics are no less necessary and binding on the great mass of mankind. Some there are who cannot feel the difference between the Sonata Apjjassionafa and Cherry Ripe, or between a gravestone-cutter's cherub and the Apollo Belvidere, but the canons of art are none the less acknow- ledged." And if the man of science feels impatience at the not seldom mischievous effects of emotion undisciplined, at its resistance to the rigidity of fact, it is well to remember that the persistence of emotion is due not merely to the long ages in which it was without curb or check from the intellect, but to its precedence in the development of the human mind. "In wonder," says Coleridge, "all Philosophy began ; in Avonder it ends ;" and the history of the race^thus far confirms it. Man wondered before he reasoned, and all that he learned at the outset he has had to unlearn in slow and reluctant substitution of the false by the true. Ignorance is the mother of mystery ; in awe, and fear, and wonder, begotten by that which man could not understand, we have the germ of that interpretation of nature which remained uncorrected till the relatively late period in his history when science was born. And wherever science has yet unpenetrated, Avherever theology opposes successful front to its attacks, or accepts an armistice, or veils a treaty of surrender in enigmatic terms, the ancient creeds with their miracles, and the ancient philosophies with their myths, remain as the survivals of a pre-scientific age. But while philosophy ends in wonder, it will be wonder which 11 shall justify itself to, and bo justified by, the intelligence which brings true and proven report concerning that which first awakened the wonder, and that sustains it still. With the gradual perception of order, of law as everywhere if it be anywhere, the vague feeling of incoherency, of unrelation, of caprice, dies away : nature is no longer the " eyeless ghost," the unfamiliar, the dreaded, but revered as the benefactor whose smile is for those who abide in her ways, and who find in the revelation of her order the inspiration of their own. M. Kenan, in recently dismissing as unfounded " that eternal Jeremiad indulged in by certain people over the pretended Paradises of which the Avorld is being deprived by science," remarked that in place of the Apostolic triad of faith, hope and charity, as the three things that abide, he would substitute goodness, beauty and truth, and that the greatest of these is truth. For "Nature and Art do not exclude illusions which may or may not be beneficial, but truth is what actually is. And since there is absolute truth in what is scientifically demonstrated, science must be held to be supreme. Until man had verified knowledge of his surroundings, there could be no sure-f ootedness in his interpretation of their significance. While mankind believed that the world was a plain, over-arched by a solid vault, in the grooves of which the stars travelled ; while Fathers of the Church were denying the existence of the Antipodes as impossible because the dwellers there would be outside the pale of salvation, and the existence of more than seven planets, because the ancient division of time into weeks would be thereby discredited ; it mattered little what creeds were adopted by Ecumenical Councils ; one was as false as another, where all had no correspondences in the nature of things. But science has changed all this, not by repression of any faculty, but in cultivation of all. The yet unslaked curiosity which it has fed, the stimulus to enquiry which it supplies, have called, and will call yet more, every power of the mind into exercise. The discovery that nature is in nowise what man imagined her when he filled earth and sky with gods to whose chaotic frolic, or to whose caprice and internecine struggles he attributed the seeming disoixler of the world, has, in the unfolding of cosmos out of chaos, excited desire to know what nature really is. And is afiection to be chilled, are the 12 sanctities of life desecrated, are awe and wonder to be paralysed, because man is disillusioned when confronted by the fact of a universe infinitely bigger than he thought it 1 Are the emotions so dependent upon the ancient cosmogonies, upon theories of creating and destroying gods, arbiters of our eternal and immutable destiny, that the discrediting of these products of the mythopseic period shrivels, and perchance annihilates, those emo- tions ? Are legends more poetic, more nutritive to the imagination, than facts 1 Are the myths of transformations of classic gods and goddesses as wonderful as those which nature works in chrysalis and medusa 1 Which has the latent poetry, and gives larger play to wonder : the myth of the creation of man from moist mud, and the insertion within him of a living principle by the exhalation of the breath of a god in hliman shape ; or the fact of embryonic develop- ment, the babe growing in the womb, " woven by something not itself, without conscious participation on the part of either father or mother, and appearing in due time with all its organs and their implications ; " not only with eye — lens, and humours, and retina ; not only with ear — tympanum, cochlea and Corti's fibres, " a three- thousand stringed organ, built adjacent to the brain, and employed by it to sift, separate, and interpret, antecedent to all consciousness, the sonorous tremors of the external world ; " but also with its inherited mental and moral tendencies from parents, its temper, its tastes, its virtues and vices ? Is it in the barbarian's notion of the firmament as a solid hammered 'plate, through the opened windows of which the rain poured down, and which has its analogue in the child's imagination that the tree-tops touched the sky ; or in the astronomer, whose telescope gathers light emitted thousands of years ago from stars vaster than our sun, that the wonder enlarges until the ancient words tremble on his lip — " Lo ! these are part of his ways ; but how little a portion is heard of him 1 but the thunder of his power who can understand *? " Has not science given us the stupendous mystei-ies of existence, of limitless space, of unbroken sequence, in place of the pseudo- mysteries recorded in documents which man, in the absence of a surer word of prophecy, credited with a supernatural character, and 13 which are products of the pre-scientific ages, when any conception of orderly succession was foreign to minds attributing everything to divine interference 1 The revelations of devout and learu'd Who rose before us, and as prophets burn'd, Are all but stories, M'hicli, awoke from sleep. They told their comrades, and to sleep return'd.* While these ancient writings, which men whose honesty we can- not impugn, but the wilful paralysing of whose intelligence astounds us, claim to be of divine origin, are relegated to their right place among the interesting and valuable relics of human speculation about man and his destiny, has science revealed anything that weakens or opposes itself to the ancient words in which the essence of all religion, past, present, and to come, is given — " to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly before thy God V Provided we connote by the word God, not the crude anthropomorphisms which are still the back-bone of our current theology, but the symbolic conception of that which is the life and motion of the universe, to know which in the physical order is to know time past, present, and to come, in the existence and succession of phenomena ; to know which in the moral order is to know what has been, is, and will be, within the human consciousness. And in instilling within us the conviction that only in obedience to that physical order and that moral order can man work out the salvation of man, does not science, in transferring obligation and motive from the unstable to the stable, exercise a loftier influence on character than theology has wrought 1 Does it not exercise an ennobling moral influence in its inculcation of the love of truth, in its supply of standards of truth which never vary, which submit themselves to the sevei-est test ; and in its protest against the casuistries, the mental reservations, the elastic defini- tions which have loosened the moral fibre and made veracity subservient, especially in politics and theology, to place and power 1 And while enlarging to boundless horizons the area in which specula- tion, borne on the wings of imagination, may disport itself ; has not science, on the other hand, in defining, and therefore limiting, the *Omar Khayj-dm, v. Ixv. 14 scope of the emotions as expressible in the duties and charities of life, deepened their practical value ^ As man no longer finds a cloak for selfishness or for the evasion of obligations in possible compensa- tions which another life may yield to the Lazaruses of this life ; as he realizes his debt to the past of which he is the outcome and his responsibility to the future towards whose making or marring his unit of eftort, the sum total of what he is and does, contributes ; the emotions will be quickened and deepened. They will be con- centrated upon practical service, the effect of which may, as the laws of heredity are more understood, be approximately determined, instead of diffused and diluted in the speculative and the remote. Therefore, the poet may take heart. If he would write fadeless lines, let him base his work upon, let his ideal perceptions be luminous with, the truest interpretation of nature that may be had ; that his words may be the winged angels of the universal ideas of science, touching the furthest fringes of space, and bringing the message of philosophy to the business and bosoms of men. Nor need he despair that materials for epics grander than those yet written will be lacking. Nature includes humanity. Science, in analysis which can never be exhaustive, alters neither ; and replaces the ideals which may be destroyed by ideals endowed with a permanent life in their correspondence to the suggestiveness which cannot be ex- hausted. Human relations and actions involve the persistence of the emotions 3 the births, the struggles, the travails of humanity towards a better, these will endure ; the air be charged as ever with farewells to the dying, tremulous as ever with kisses of the living; the crises of history will, under enlarging conditions afltecting wider areas, repeat themselves, and heroes arise under the inspiration of causes involving prof ounder issues than the world has yet seen. Out of these will the ages to come weave the Epic of Man, charged with divinest truth. For, as Spenser says : — deeds do die, however nobly done, And thoughts of men do as themselves decay ; But wise words taught in numbers for to run, Eecorded by the Muses, live for aye. With a clear conception of the inter-relation and interplay of the 15 several faculties, across which the artificial line dividing faith and reason has so long been drawn, the alertness of our sensations for all sources of outer beauty remains unimpaired. "The old and lovely attitude of devout service does not pass away to leave vacancy, but is transformed into a yet more devout obligation and service towards creatures that have only their own fellowship and mutual ministry to lean upon ; and if we miss something of the ancient solace of special and personal protection, the loss is not un- worthily made good by the growth of an imperial sense of partici- pation in the common movement and equal destination of eternal forces."'^ * Morley's Critical Miscell,, l§t series, p. 229. No. 7.] 0ut| llace lleligbus ^mt^ FINSBURY, E.C. HOSTILE & GENEROUS TOLERATION. (A NEW THEORY OF TOLERATION.) " Give us no lights Great Heaven, but such as turns To energy of human fellow sJiip.'" — George Eliot. BY GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE. A DISCOURSE DELIVERED IN SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, On SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 28th, 1886. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRTCE TWOPENCE. / [The reader who happens to have been a hearer of this Discourse ivill find that a short passage is now included explaining the way in which Intolerance becomes connected ivith the Conscience. It was omitted by the Speaker lest the Discourse shoidd exceed the time allotted to it.] ^be prater. \ The spealtcr .fa'ul that when he attended Churches, which it was oft his delight to do, he observed that prayers were made which, had hcen vsed iefore. He, therefore, wmild repeat one which he had made but once — a long time ago and far off — namely, in the Parher Memorial Hall, Boston, a hall associated with the name of a great preaclicr, Theodore Parher, as this Chapel is with the name of William Johnson Fox, and later with that of Moncure D. Conway. \ TF, in that illimitable and coherent mystery which we call the Universe, -*- there bendeth a listening ear to creatures who presume to speak to it, we ask chiefly that there may be given unto us reticence and modesty. We pray not for the rich, who have more means of happiness than belong to them, nor for the powerful, who have more resources for doing good than they use. We exclaim, with the great Persian Saadi : " O God, have mercy on the wicked, for thou hast done everything for the good in making them good." We pray that sense be given to the poor, who are poor because they want sense. We pray not merely for the poor of this land where we speak, but for the poor of every country ; for the barbarian of every clime, for the slave who is in bonds and the slave who is called "free," and is not so. Teach civilised and cultivated men to understand that God is at least a gentleman, whose lofty generosity is above incompetent praise, and shrinks from the weariness of interminable, pauperic thanks. Above all, teach the people that they dwell in a self- acting Universe, and that its conjectured author can derive no honor save in beholding a self-helping, independent, and gladsome world. O Nature, who art more intelligent than any Church, more merciful than any creed, more joyous than any psalm, disclaim the awful impos- tures of superstition and terror, let the common people learn to trust, and know that there can be no glory to any god save in the happiness of his creatures, human and otherwise. Give to the people ambition without vanity ; give them purposes which they know to be compatible with the good of others ; give them the love of politics apart from peculation ; enable them to see that freedom is not outrage. Above all, endow them with the grandest charm of equality, quietness, courtesy, and deference to each other. Truth springs up like flowers in the fields and hedgerows of life,— always modest, always unobtrusive, always gladsome. Give us discernment to see it ; give us the sense to welcome it ; give us the curiosity to study it ; give us the understanding to know its worth ; give us the courage to act upon it ; give us the generosity to extend it to all who know it not. Then we shall need no more to vex the indulgent ear of God with the ignominious supplications of unmanly despair or way- ward discontent ; and we shall rise to the dignity of the highest nations, which are known by the sign that they have the least need of prayer. HOSTILE AND GENEROUS TOLERATION. IT is ful]y forty -five years since I sat in yonder pew [pointing to the gallery] thinking I should like one day to speak once from this platform— my present subject being then in my mind. Perhaps there — or there — [indicating seats where some of the older congre- gation were then present] sit now not more than half-a-dozen persons who were part of the congregation in the year 184L Even the great preacher whom I then heard, whose clear, steely, pene- trating, persuasive voice, reached every ear and inspired every understanding — is no more. A few Sundays after I first heard Mr. Fox, he read in this place a letter which I had written to him, being then a prisoner in a distant gaol, because toleration of any kind was not then a virtue in those parts. Mr. Justice Erskine admitted that I had not obtruded my opinions on anyone (which I never do) but had merely answered a public question fairly and frankly. He admitted that I could not honestly have given any other answer, and, I being a young man, he sentenced me to six months' imprisonment to encourage me in candour. Mr. Fox pleaded, in his eloquent way, for permissive toleration. Tolerance went no farther in England in 1841. The first question is " What is Toleration 1" It is permission, and permission is dicta- tion, since he who can give permission can withhold it, and so far as he has influence can compel you in the course he desires you to take. Then arises the further question, " Has anyone a right to dictate to another what he shall do or believe 1" It is idle to ask this question — since everybody does it. Intolerance is instinctive : it is born with us. It is the gift of Nature, put into our minds at birth, to protect us in unknown paths : which lie before us in early years. But of this protective intolerance we have less and less need as experience brings us wider knowledge. In inexperienced days we are oft intolerant of good — not knowing it. There are those who hold Intolerance as always evil. This is not so. It is in many things defensive even in mature life. Intolerance of evil is necessary to men and governments. A State should be intolerant of oppression— of injustice — of class privilege — of inequality of rights— of slavery — of poverty — of unhealthy tenements ; which breed death. When a State lacking wisdom permits preventible evils it is guilty of ignorant toleration. Everybody can see that acts harmful to order, property, and life must be prohibited. The trouble comes with regard to ideas. Yet ideas are the germs of acts — some evil and more good — which good or evil are the source of all intellectual life. Their number constitute the riches of the understanding. Ancient Aryanism and Paganism understood this : It was Christianity which first introduced a terror of intellectual toleration into the human mind. How slowly that alarmed distrust of ideas is decreasing, the history of modern toleration shows. From Milton to James Mill the theory of toleration received no enlargement. From James Mill until now, it has stood at the point of coldly permitting what we dislike. Milton wrote for Puritan Toleration — Mill for Intellectual Toleration. Milton said "I mean not to tolerate Popery and open superstition, which itself should be extirpated." "That which is impious, or evil absolutely, either against faith or manners, no law can possibly permit." Baxter, who wrote after Milton, called religious toleration " Soul-murder " which in the perverted eyes of orthodoxy it is. When reminded that he himself had needed toleration, (he having been imprisoned for his faith) he answered " Ah but the cases were very different, I was in the right ; whereas the vast majority of those who will benefit by this new f angled toleration are shockingly in the wrong." Yet it was Baxter who dug out and adopted from an obscure German treatise, the noble maxim which went beyond Milton in civility to honest error. The maxim was this, " In necessary things unity, in doubtful things liberty, in all things charity." Both Milton and Baxter, the two greatest names in the Puritan calendar — were only for Toleration Limited. The Church was for Uni- formity — with ]io tolerance for Dissent — Dissenters were for Religious Toleration measured by the Puritan Conscience. Puritan Toleration knew no extension until the days of James Mill and Lord Brougham. They taught the new Theory of Intellectual Toleration. The Puritan doctrine was that all heretical diversity of opinion proceeds from depravity of heart. James Mill demon- strated that belief depended, not upon the state of the heart, but upon the nature of the evidence before the understanding — there- fore actual belief, whatever it was should be void of offence in the eye of man, and void of crime in the eye of God. This theory means that though sincere opinion is not always true, nor always useful ; it is always to be permitted and acted upon, so long as no injury results to others therefrom. The standard of the new Toleration was as Grote said in his far-perceiving way — " Reasoned Truth." Its condition of Tolerance was that it should submit to criticism and seek to establish itself by Discussion alone. This was an enormous gain. Toleration by Evidence superseded Toleration by Conscience and doubled the population of Ideas in the world. In my early controversial days Toleration by Evidence was not in the mind of any Church — unless among Unitarians. It is in the mind of society now. Still it is a sort of Poor-law toleration, which regards poor ideas like poor persons coming upon the Rates, who cannot be killed — but for whom the very least is to be done which will keep them alive. It does not strangle Truth at its birth — it gives it a chance of life — but accords it no friendly settlement, lest it become chargeable upon some philosophical parish already overburdened with pauper opinions. This is Inclement Toleration — it is a frozen sort of permission that new or unfi'iended Truth may look after itself and take care of itself — if it can. Philo- sophical Toleration carries a Refrigerator in its heart : it has a 6 congealing compassion for new ideas, under which tliey commonly perish. Only the hardier sort live and bud in more genial days. We have other forms of reluctant consent, that opinions not our own may live : the most respectable being Politic Toleration, as that adopted by the Romans, who regarded all religions as equally true to the people, equally useful to the magistrate, and equally false in the eyes of the Philosopher. This is the Toleration of statesmen and gentlemen, who despise interference with the caprice or conscience of others, as the act of vulgar fanatics. Among modern Sectaries there has grown up what may be denominated a Prudent Toleration as when some sects admit the right of other sects to exist — lest they should be put down themselves. Roman Catholic macjistrates in Protestant countries are tolerant for this reason. Protestant Viceroys in India, however mad they may be and often have been, to convert the natives, are compelled to permit even superstition to practise its ceremonies, which are not murderous — lest mutinies and religious wars arise, and render our rule impossible there. There are opinions which arise in ignorance and presumption. Sometimes defensible ideas are expressed so un- skilfully or so ojffensively that statesmen accord to them a Con- temptuous Toleration on the ground that they are Pole-cat opinions, which if interfered with may become noisome and fill the atmo- sphere with undesirable odours. Thus the State treats eccentric creeds and publications to which prohibition might draw morbid attention — with Silent Toleration. Under the best theory of toler- ation extant, new thought (except in this Chapel) is treated with utter shabbiness, and even treachery. Even in the prize ring you must fight fair. Yet religious controversy is mostly, far below the Prize Ring in respect of fairness. If a man fought with an adversary whose sword was shorter than his own — the seconds who permitted such a duel would be execrated. If a man fought with pistols knowing that his adversary's could not go off, and had so contrived it — it would be regarded as murder if his adversary was killed. This conduct which would be held infamous by men of honour is regarded as " conscientious " in clerical and political con- troversy. If a chemical controversy was proposed to Huxley or Tyndall, witli an antagonist who had a broken retort, or who had no proper apparatus for proving the thing in dispute ; these philo- sophers, being gentlemen, would disdain to contend with him, while he was so circumstanced, or they would lend him what he needed for his demonstration, that he might do his best. Yet it is most rare that any Christian advocate will engage in controversy with any adversary unless he is destitute of means of defence. Preachers — opulently provided at home for defending their tenets — have often refused to meet me — a wandering disputant — unless the proceeds of the debate were given to some charity — not that they cared for the charity having more — what they cared for was that I should have nothing. Indeed, most preachers prefer that their adversary should not be heard at all, and where they have autho. rity over platforms or libraries, they prohibit discussion and exclude all works which give the side opposite to their own. This is hamstringing opinion clandestinely, as the Irish do cattle by night, and the operators issue from 10,000 Churches. That is a Cowardly Toleration, yet most prevalent, which pro- fesses to respect the right of rival opinion, and at the same time attaches to it some odious badge which shall expose it to hatred and ridicule — which challenges it to make good its claim to exist but refuses it public halls for its advocates to speak in, and hinders the circulation of papers which represent it. It takes the credit of fighting opinion openly, and assassinates it secretly : or stands by while others kill it. Why is it that Toleration is' so commonly not only Hostile but shabby 1 It is because even Liberal minded Christians and even Liberal Thinkers say " I cannot help those who main- tain erroneous and dangerous opinions to propagate them. It is against my conscience. All I can give is due to the support of what I take to be truth." This is the thought that kills the senti- ment of generous toleration. I admit no man is called upon to aid any opinion not conscientiously maintained from a passion for facts ; and for the good of others. He is not called upon to aid the thief or murderer. There is no thief who is willing to be robbed — there is no murderer who is willing to be killed. You know by that sign that the thief is a knave and the murderer a scoundrel, and the profligate and the obscene belong by their acts to the same class. For them no plea is made by me : they do not concern us here. It is only honest beliefs in emergency which are entitled to helpful countenance. If it be " against a man's conscience " to give aid to honest opinion he thinks dangerous, he is equally bound not to suffer it to be done. Toleration itself is aid as far as it goes since it gives sanction and opportunity to error. He who finds it against his conscience to aid opinion, not his own, is right to put it down. It was under this conscientious belief that the Inquisition was justifiable against Protestants. The Five Mile Acts were fair against Nonconformists. The Test Acts were justifiable precaution against them. ^The mob that burnt Priestley's house were wiser than they knew. The clergy who prevented the Royal Society from sending Priestley to the South Seas with Capt. Cook lest Unitarianism should corrupt the fishes, were within the rights of conscience. This Chapel ought to be closed on that principle. No Synagogue should be allowed to remain open. Boycotting in Ireland is entirely laudable. The Tory should stamp out the Whig and the Radical should stamp out the Liberal, and the Social Democrat stamp out both of them. The State should determine not only opinion but dietary, as Sir Wilfred Lawson and the vegetarians wish the State would. Tyranny is the only lawful form of govern- ment and murder the legitimate agent of Uniformity, and as such Richelieu employed it. All short of this is but the cowardice of conscience, temporizing with what it knows to be dangerous. We see in the Liberal disunion and feebleness of a hundred -boroughs what one is almost tempted to call the farce of conscience. The working class Liberals want to have their own way but cannot pay their way and have conscientious objections to going any part of the same way with those who can pay for them ; and those who can pay their way cannot conscientiously help those who want to go farther than themselves. Thus, but for the pure eccentricity of conscience the Liberals of limited aims could get all they want, and the more insatiable Liberals would get half of what they want. Instead of this they let those attain to power who will give them 9 nothing. In the early part of this century there was no Unitarian Church in the town of Bury. The then Earl of Derby held all the available laud and refused to sell a site, and the Unitarians had to wait until they could convert a Bury man who had land and then wait till he died, when he left them the bit on which their Church now stands. The Earl who fought cocks and supported the Church, was quite right on the "conscientious " theory. He could not con- sistently assist in propagating opinions he thought dangerous. Neither here nor elsewhere, nor at any time, have I thought it right to maintain any theory which I had not tested, nor counsel any course which I did not practise. Though I early departed from the faith of my Mother, yet as her sight grew dim I bought her Bibles of larger and larger type as years passed on, and when I visited her read the Bible to her. It never occurred to me that because I had another source of trust that she should not have that which was consolation to her. When I lived at Harrow lately, a poor lady neighbour of great age, told how " that the missionary who visited her counselled her to read her Bible constantly, but I can no longer see " she remarked. As the missionary neither brought her Scriptures in large type, nor gave her glasses I bought her spectacles that she might nourish her last hopes by what she esteemed, the sacred page. When I lived at Temple Bar, Mr. Twining, the Banker, sent me a circular which other residents received, saying that the Vicar of St. Bride's was absent through illness from overwork, and that funds were wanted for an assistant curate. I sent half-a-guinea saying that though I was not likely to need the curate's services I was glad that my poorer neighbours, of a different way of thinking, should have that consolation in their last hours, which his ministrations might afford them. I did this because I am perhaps the only person extant who is not fully assured of his own infallibility. Honest convictions are as food. Opinions on which another can live would be injurious to me. That aliment of belief may gladden the soul of my neighbour and save the Inquirer, the Sinctator and Mr. Mallock from melancholy — which might, indeed would, generate in me decay and despair, yet would I in no way diminish that which " makes life worth living " to them, 10 Iiad I tlie power to do it. What I couteud for is that the Toleration among Liberals should at least be as broad, as impartial, and as helpful as that of the State. The State concedes to all equal publicity of opinion, and assists it by facilities. " Civil and religious equality " accords equal rights and chances to Error and Ti'uth. The majority of men being in the wrong, upon nearly every question — if the State gave a preference for any form of opinion, it would give the preference to the wrong one — as it usually has done. Why should we not personally treat the opinion of our neighbours with as much liberality as the State 1 The Post Office carries the letters of liars and knaves as well as tliose of true and honest men. The railways carry the thief with his plunder, and the murderer from justice — as well as the police who follow in pursuit of them — and rarely overtake them. The physician restores the health of the rascal, although he knows that he is invigorating him for new outrages. The Statesman grants equal political rights to the traitor and the patriot as we have lately done in Ireland. Parliament admits to their seats Members base and honourable — mostly the base — without enquiry, or hesita- tion — unless they happen to be honest heretics. The Post Office cannot pause to peruse the letters in its boxes before despatching them. Railway Companies cannot examine into the characters of passengers before issuing tickets to them — the physician cannot enquire into the personal morality of his patient before prescribing for him — the Statesman cannot analyse political qualities of the electors before enfranchising them. The House of Commons cannot enter into the private lives of its Members before permitting them to address the Speaker. All the business of the "World would stand still — intercourse would be arrested — legislation would cease — honest men would be ruined, and the sick would die — before an infallible inquisition into claims and character of every person 11 could be made. It is the same with intellectual truth. Unless we accord what we deem error an equal chance with what we deem truth, truth will have but a precarious chance, and instead of pro- ceeding with buoyant steps will continue to limp through the world. A wise Toleration, like the impartial Sun, irradiates equally the just and the unjust. After all the brilliant truths which controversy and controversy alone has established, it is strange how few are the per- sons who see in the competent Adversary not the enemy but the Friend in the search for Truth. As yet there is no recognized toleration which does not treat all opinion — not our own — as an evil to be endured lest the attempt to repress it should aggravate it. Whereas all new ideas should be challenged to enter fairly equipped, the arena of discussion, where only error is killed and truth is vindicated. I am against that Reluctant toleration which suffers your opinion because it cannot safely destroy it — but if it could would also destroy those who hold it. I am for a Brave toleration which does not fear the sound of many voices nor the glare of many lights. I despise that Timid toleration which has neither the spirit of truth, nor the trust of truth — which fearing to stab, starves rival opinion, lest it should prove too strong in contest. Let us hate that Penurious toleration which gives nothing — which takes credit for acknowledging your right to your opinions, but will render them no succour in their time of need, and will cheerfully see them die of starvation as Jane Shore was left to die by the King. I am for a Generous toleration which not only asserts fair play but takes care that rival opinion is not killed by foul play. I am for toleration which is clean-handed and open-handed, which does not connive at the assassination of opinion, nor is accessory to it, either beforev or after the fact. For all the purposes of intellectual fraternity I see people simply as clothed in their qualities. Their outward dress, 12 tlieir features, tlieir stature, are to me as thuugli they were not. But their ideal loftier than their life — their ambition of service— their fair intent— their passion for justice — their strivings for untied truth — are to me as palpable things. The charity of equity does not consist in starving the cause of truth of which you are assured, in order to support that to which you are opposed, but in according to unfriended truth moderate hospitality. New ideas, like products of earth or ocean, are often as messengers from the realms of unknown Nature. Some of these strangers bear no letter of introduction, and their message is disre- garded though of miraculous interest, as has often appeared afterwards. But my argument will be incomplete and inconclusive if it appears to ignore or undervalue conscience in judgment and conduct. I am for conscience, provided it is an instructed conscience. I admit it remains to me to show how intolerance arises in upright minds. The origin of Conscience is in the desire for rectitude and truth. Conscience is the sense of duty founded upon truth — real or sup- posed. But if the knowledge be narrow the conscience will be narrow, and its action mischievous so far as it lacks understanding. There is a foolish conscience as well as a wise conscience. The operation of the foolish conscience is seen in Intolerance. Conscience insjDired by its instinct of rectitude and confident of its good intent, supposes itself infallible. Not knowing that it is not all-knowing — not knowing that sincerity though sinless is not errorless — it mistakes its own honesty for infallibility, and regards all ideas, not its own, as hostile to truth, and thinks it a duty to withstand them and suppress them. A new idea affronts their se^se of unmistakeableness. Their minds are made up, and they have no room in it for new conceptions. A new idea conflicts with their narrower knowledge. They cannot harmonise it with the 13 ideas they have. To give up what they have been taught is true, is beyond their power. They do not know that a wise man is always unlearning errors which have imposed themselves upon him. They cannot conceive that an obscure author of a new thought is wiser than all the world — as every discoverer and every inventor is — as the world well knows by the mighty resources of national and intel- lectual wealth which despised, unfriended and neglected thinkers have brought it. It is conscience believing in its own infallibility and resenting all thought which would make it wiser, that has created and sustained hostile intolerance. Now science has taught men how ideas arise, intolerance, however conscientious, is seen to be a sin against improvement, and general friendliness to new thought is a condition of progress. It is science which shows that the time is come when toleration may cease to be hostile and may advantageously be friendly and even generous. Not that a man is called upon to prostrate himself before every fool thought, that may be obtruded on his notice for the first time. If indeed he is sure that the thought is foolish he had better let the fool demonstrate himself its folly, which not being done often leads ignorant persons to think it true, and on that account to champion it. Civility to new ideas has this merit, that it ensures genial welcome to new truth, always lonely. How many discoverers and inventors by whose unregarded labours v e profit daily, were uncheered and unfriended, who lived in penury, often in scorn, and perished in despair. We know their value now, and pour our tardy thanks into the dull cold ear of death and put up memorials to them. As Mr. Fox once said in this place, " We refused them bread while living and give them a stone when dead." This will go on unless a generous toleration of new truth comes to prevail. Besides, what a gain this sentiment is in diffusing truth. The art 14 of resjectJEg ihe ideas of others is the surest way of obtaining attention to our own. Men never turn away from the truth when they see it presented in good faith and good feeling. It is the brutal, coarse, and contemptuous presentment of it which repels them from it. For myself I never forget how in my youth, and in controversy, an incurable distrust of Christianity crept into my heart by arrogant, disdainful and disparaging toleration. On last Tuesday I had the pleasure to pay a visit to Mr. Bright at his home in Rochdale. The conversation turning upon America, I mentioned how, when Mr. Wendell Phillips, counted the greatest orator of America as we count Mr. Bright the greatest orator here, was showing me State Street in Boston, we met Mr. Bright's son with some friends, when Phillips took off his hat and stood with his fine Roman head uncovered all the while he spoke with him. Mr. Bright said to me, " I ought to have rebuked him." I answered " No. I saw no nobler sight in America. It proved that the Republic had reverence in its heart for something higher than dollars. It was part of the respect they owed you who had served the nation." Mr. Bright replied in words which serve well to illustrate my argument. He said " he could not understand why so much kindness was shown to him and to all who bore his name, when all the service he had ever been able to render to America was to make a few speeches pleading for justice towards her. And he added, I believe that had Lord Palmerston listened to my appeal to him, to treat America with a friendly and not a hostile neutrality, the hearts of the two nations had been knit together as though they had never been parted." It is ever thus: generous toleration of the rights of others is the negotiator of truth between individuals and of goodwill between nations. It was knowing this which caused George Eliot to say "the gi-eatest of virtues is tolerance," and Schiller to write that "large tolerance is only possible to men of the largest information." 15 ^bc BcneMctioiu One to whom the Christian world accords the high name of the Chief of Apostles said : — "Now abideth three things — Faith, Hope and Charity — but the greatest of these is Charity." More than any other Apostle, Paul forgot in practice what he thus de- clared — but it was a great moment when he perceived that Charity was the supreme virtue of man. And it will be better for Truth and Peace and Unity, if we shall remain permanently under that noble inspiration. No. a] out\ Ibte |ieligi0HS ^00^5 . FINSBURY, E.G. EMOTION IN HISTORY: % #lamt into the Springs of IJrogttss, A DISCOURSE DELIVERED IN SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C., On SUNDAY, MARCH i^tk, 1886, BV JOHN ROBERTSON. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. PBINTED FOB THE PUBLISHER BT ■WATBBLOW AND SONS LIMITED, LONDON WALL. — GWB. EMOTION IN HLSTOEY: A GLANCE INTO THE SPRINGS OF PROGRESS. THE great questions whicli divide philosophers, it has been truly- said, are not, as common-sense people are a})t to suppose, mere artificial disputes engendered by rival systems, but are rather, in the main, extensions into abstract and technical terms of differences which spi'ing up among every-day thinkers, on every-day occasions, and which, to say truth, are as a rule discussed on such occasions with no more and no less decisive result than attends most philo- sophic encounters. A few prominent questions will sufficiently illustrate the point. The problem of the existence of a God remains the last, as it is one of the first, that forces itself on the human mind in any stage of its development. Our most encyclopsedic philosopher, Mr. Spencer, after reviewing all the phases of thought known to him, from the highest to the lowest, decides that where primaeval man liegan by surmising a power or powers behind the actual things around ; and where the ordinary man to-day unhesi- tatingly accepts the doctrine of the existence of such a power, the most philosophic mind of all will admit the existence of an infinite mystery, never to be solved, but, nevertheless, always to be faced and never to be ignored, by the man of the future. And so with the problem of free will. The philosophers carry that to further lengths, and into subtler analyses, than do the common-sense people who discuss in simple language, and short sentences, the question whether a certain man's bad actions are to be blamed as deliberately wrong, as breaches of a known moral law, or are to be palliated as the results of inherited character, of bad education, and of untoward circumstances. And just sp it is with the vexed question I have pointed at in the title of this discourse. Nothing is more common in ordinary talk than an inquiry as to whether So-and-So is lacking in qualities of tlie lieart or of the liead ; and whethei', that being ascertained, the inferior heart or the inferior head does the more harm, or is the more to be objected to. Probably the more frequent verdict is that the person whose " heart is in the right place," as the phrase goes, is a more estimable character than the other whose heart is not all that could be desired, even if that other does less real harm in the world. Good people naturally tend to appeal to what they call good feeling, and have a leaning to the motto " love is lord of alL" Yet it happens every now and then that one of these good people is acutely impressed by the truth that " evil is wrought by want of thought as well as want of heart," and then we find them almost inclined to think that want of thought is the true name for that want of consideration for others which they had termed want of heart. A great novelist, deeply convinced of the close con- nection between self-criticism and right action, has illustrated her view in her fictions, with such results that many people are brought to take perhaps a severer view of the conduct of such a character as Arthur Donnithorne in Adcmi Becle, not at all what we call a heart- less type, than of such a character as Rosamond Vincy in Midd/eniarch, to whom the word applies with admitted accuracy. Well, this difference of view as to the nature and relative importance of the springs of conduct is substantially reproduced in the disagreements of great thinkers, under whose formulae whole schools range them- selves. In the philosophy of history we find it strenuously disputed whether it is feeling or idea, knowledge or sentiment, emotion or reason, that impels or controls the progress of society, and it must be confessed that the philosophers are about as capable as the rest of us of changing their point of view, and even of holding the two views alternately or indiscriminately. This point is, in fact, the crux of the philosophy of history, so far as that has any general practical interest. But I do not propose either to impeach or to invoke the authority of any of the great names of philosophy in this purely practical enquiry. It is a less presumptuous and a more hopeful course to try to look into the question in those phases in which it naturally presents itself in actual life, than to undertake to set the philosophers right all round ; and if we still go astray, at least we shall have fatigued ourselves a little the less in the process. Let us see, as plainly as may be, what our problem is. It is. Whether the ruling force in historic progress, practically speaking, is opinion, as fixed by processes of reasoning, or the, so-to-speak, o O elemental influence of the affections — in the sense of sympathies and aversions, desii-es and loves and hates. Are great historic changes the result of ideas deduced from earlier ideas ; or are they rather the outcome of, as it were, spontaneous tides of feeling, which the ideas only serve to justify and express? Are political crises, as Mr. Spencer puts it, the effects of " moral antagonisms ; " or are they produced by conflicting theories and convictions ? Let us, instead of lingering at the outset over our words, and striving for definitions, put our case in terms of known historical events, and see if we can grasp its elements in that form. Any period will serve us. Take first the instance of the rise and consummation of the antagonism to slavery in the United States, as being a historical episode to which we are near enough in sympathy and in acquaintance with details, and from which we ai*e vet far enoucrh removed to view it as a whole and in true perspective. Was that important occurrence the out- come of a demonstration of the illegitimacy of slavery in a demo- cratic country, or of its demoralising effect on all concerned ; or was it rather the expression of an uprising of humane emotion — of sheer brotherly love 1 Were people persuaded and convinced that slavery was wrong ; or did they set out by a spontaneous aversion to it ? There is plenty to be said on both sides. It would hardly do, on the one hand, to say that the abolitionists were all good I'easoners, and their opponents the reverse ; or, on the other hand, that only in- humane people upheld or tolerated the institution. The various cases of Channing, of Lincoln, and of Hawthorne, should give us pause on that head. Again, we can see that there was nothing new in the arguments against slavery ; and they were certainly very simple. Why was it that at first eveiy pulpit in the United States was in favor of the slave-o^\^lers, all justifying slavery by passages in the Bible ; while ultimately, in the North at least, the clerical attitude almost entirely changed ? Had the ministers simply come to see that they had misunderstood the Bible? Both sides had appealed to the Bible : did the Bible settle it 1 It seems hardly possible to decide that it did ; but if we do not so decide, neither can we with confidence say that people's minds were changed by reasoning ; for the only process of reasoning ti-aceable in many cases seems to have consisted in showing that cruelty was being inflicted, and appealing to a dislike of cruelty assumed to exist in the general mind ; which is something like saying that it was an emotion that did the work. Take next the case of the French Revohition, variously described as the outcome of an emotional contagion and of certain political teachings. One has only to look into these matters in a dispassionate spirit to begin to suspect that the difficulty dealt with is one we ourselves have created in making the distinction with which we set out. What is it, we find ourselves asking — what is it that distinguishes emotional action from reasoned action 1 Rousseau, we are told, appealed to men's emotions. But how did he do it 1 Did he not do it by laying down certain propositions of an intellectual nature, such as that all men were born free, and that inequality was the great source of misery 1 To say such things is to state ideas, to argue, to appeal to a certain sense of logical sequence, limited it is true, but still recognisable as an intellectual function, in the ordinary sense of the term. So that, to come to the point, we begin to perceive a state of emotion to be a natural sequence or concomitant, in certain cases, of a mental process ; and, what is still more to the purpose, we begin to perceive that the emotion cannot very well be called into play except through some appeal to the judgment. There is, perhaps, an equal chance that this kind of analysis may seem on the one hand a needless dissection, and on the other a too facile dismissal of a problem that is very i-eal for many. For, remember, this distinction between reason and emotion, this treat- ment of them as two independent influences, so to speak, is one of the commonest theories of human nature, being implied alike in our private discussions, in our public propaganda, and in the distinct teachings of rival philosophies. Hear this utterance of Bentham in his young days,* in I'egard to the jui'ist Blackstone : — " For indeed such an ungenerous antipathy [i.e. Blackstone's antipathy to political and legal reform] seemed of itself enough to promise a general vein of obscure and crooked x-easoning, from whence no clear and sterling knowledge could be derived ; so intimate is the connection between some of the gifts of the understanding, and some of the affections of the heart." Here is the father of utilitarianism himself, whom Carlyle has denounced as a mere logic-mill, devoid of living emotion, actually urging that a certain human-kindness, or enthusiasm for the general good, is the necessary condition not only of helpful action, but even of right reasoning and accurate pex-ception. Bentham is indeed only one of many cases of character which, when we look into them, strongly suggest the fallibility of those processes by which we infer a man to have been warm-hearted or the reverse. When * See his "Fragment on Government," 1776. the " Life of Macaulay " appeared there was a sincere surprise over the revelation that the man who had been generally regarded as a bx'illiant partisan writer, almost devoid of the deeper emotions, and by not a few as a sort of hard-mouthed sophist, utterly lacking in sweetness and light, was in private life full of the tenderest family devotion, so deeply attached to his sisters that he never seemed to want to marry, and a very fountain of affection and goodness to them and theirs his whole life long. So deeply rooted, indeed, had become the notion that Macaulay was a mere intellectual phenomenon, that the writer of one sketch of him has declared he was without any sensibility to the effects of landscape, though Macaulay has told in his diary how one piece of scenery in the Himalayas moved him to tears ; the inaccuracy being no doubt the result of the precon- ceived opinion. History and biography are full of these apparent paradoxes. When, some fifty years ago, it was proposed to run the projected railway to Brighton through a piece of lovely scenery which would be destroyed by the construction, who, among English literary men, was it that, alone, piiblicly protested and appealed against the scheme? John Stuart Mill, the utilitarian, supposed by many of his discerning contemporaries to advocate the constant sub- ordination of the beautiful to the vulgarly useful, and to reduce all life to a sordid balancing of material gains and losses. The world truly plays fantastic tricks in its general judgments — those crystal- lizations of the " harebrained chatter of irresponsible frivolity " into dicta which pass as indisputable universal truth. It is the part of prudence, then — to put it no more forcibly — to look with doubt on the conventional sepai-ation between the emotional and the rational in character; and, by consequence, to doubt the independence of the two influences in historic action. There is scarcely an argument in the case for either that cannot be, and is not, turned against itself. Buckle teaches us — in a work* which no real student of history can look on without resjject, and which has, I venture to say, much more real stamina of sound in- duction in it than some recent ready-writers give it credit for — that powerful thinker reasons, on a survey of the movement of modern civilisation, that moral progress, so far as there is any, is purely and * Tlie so-called "History of Civilization in England." See chapter iv. It should he remembered that all that is published of this work was desij^ned as but an introduce tion, and that the author, in his ready appreciation of every new writer of his day, showed an openness of mind which would in all probability have ere long led him to modify such of his tlieories ast were premature. () simply a result of increasing knowledge of the laws of nature, the increasing thoughtfulness which such knowledge brings giving rise directly to modei-ation of primitive passion and clearer perception of the claims of others, and indirectly furthering the same ends by promoting the arts. The main principles of international and private morality, says Buckle, were as well known and as commonly enunciated two thousand years ago as now. That wars of aggression are wrong, that we should do as we would be done by — these were moral commonplaces then as now : the difference is that in the interval a whole world of intellectual and material influences has come into play, and we have become in that way different creatures. Buckle indeed does say that morality is really unprogressive, that the proportion between well-meaning people and ill-meaning people remains much the same, and that the social change consists in our fuller knowledge preventing us from committing such atrocities as burning heretics, and so forth. And, armed ^vith testimony as he usually is, the historian can cite three respectable names on his side — Mackintosh, who said that "moi'ality makes no discoveries;" Condorcet, who declared that "the morality of all nations has been the same; " and Kant, who laid it down that " in moral philosojihy we have got no further than the ancients." But just here come in the advocates of the emotional view, who say : " Quite so. The ancients knew the logic of moi'ality as well as the moderns ; but they lacked the sympathy, the emotion for justice, the passion for others' well-being, which makes modern life supei'ior." On this, to be quite frank, one has some misgivings. Is our international morality, one asks, so much better than that of the ancients ? When we contemplate the policy of Csesar and Alexander we seem at first to be in a different moral environment ; but when we recall our own exj^loits in India, Africa, America, in Afghanistan, in Zululand, in Egypt, and in Burmah, the difference does not appear quite so clear. The truth is that our ethics, while they have improved within the limits of the nation, are almost purely barbarous as concerns our relations with uncivilised states, that is to say, with those states which we can oppress with impunity. It is, indeed, to be hoped — otherwise our morality has a rather dreary outlook — that the practice of inter- national bui'glary will ere long be universally discredited, and that national exultation over a battue campaign against ill-armed savages will become as impossible in Europe as a revival of the gladiatorial shows of Borne ; but that we are still barbarians in that regax'd is pi'oved year after year by the brutalising series of representations of scenes of carnage in our illustrated press. Still, let us acknowledge that we are improving at home. If we make war on Egy|)t and annex Burmah, shooting as rebels those who defend their country against us, at least we put down prize-fighting in England. It is hardly possible not to speak satirically of these things, and yet, grotesque as the contrasts are, the fact is indisputable that the moral sense is developing among us. And if we compare the inner life of ancient Rome with our own we may take heart and hope. Those atrocious women of the Empire, who could take satisfaction in having slaves flogged to death in their presence, and who could clamorously insist that the vanquished gladiator should be stabbed to the heart by his comrade antagonist — these women, and the women of Juvenal, are not to be matched, happily, among the mothers of our time. And when we think of the mere diabolism of the morals of such beings — nay, when we think of the normal and univei-sal insensibility to scenes of outrage not only among the ancients, but in the middle ages, it does seem as if what was wanting to our forefathers was really, as the emotionalists say, the power of feeling— the simple elemental sense of compassion and fellow- creatureship which Mahomet, in a moment of emotion, declared to be one of the best gifts of Allah to men. And yet even here we shall find, I think, if we study it out, that the emotional explanation is not the final one. Let us carry ourselves in imagination to a famous and impres- sive scene in medieval histoiy, that of the abdication of his imperial functions by Charles the Fifth at Brussels in 1555, in favour of his son Philip — the scene which is so vividly reproduced for us by Mr. Motley.* The old Emperor, we are told in the dispatch of the English envoy, who was present, " begged the forgiveness of his subjects if he had ever unwittingly omitted the performance of any of his duties towards them. And here he broke into a weeping, whereunto, besides the dolefulness of the matter, I think, he was moche provoked by seeing the whole company to do the lyke before ; there beyng in myne opinion not one man in the whole assemblie, stranger or another, that dewring the time of a good piece of his oration ^loui'ed not out as abundantly teares, some more, some lesse. And yet he px-ayed them to bear with his imperfections, proceeding of his sickly age, and of the mentioning of so tender a matter as * " Rise of the Dutch Republic," Ft. I., ch. i. 8 the departing from such a sort of dere and loving subjects." And there is abundant further testimony to the same effect. " And yet," asks Mr. Motley, half in amazement, Jialf in indignation, " what was the Emperor Charles to the inhabitants of the Netherlands that they should weep for him 1 His conduct towards them dux-ing his whole career had been one of unmitigated oppression The interests of the Netherlands had never been even a secondary consideration with their master. He had fulfilled no duty towards them. He had committed the greatest crimes against them. He had regarded them merely as a treasury upon which to draw ; while the sums which he extorted were spent upon ceaseless and senseless wars, which were of no more interest to them than if they had been waged in another planet." He had cut down their liberties ; he had inflicted bloody and crushing penalties on the city of Ghent for simply asserting its ancient rights to self-taxation. All undeniably true, and yet who doubts that the display of emotion both by the cruel old king and the people of the Netherlands was, as Mr. Motley tells us, perfectly sincere ? That was genuine emo- tion, assuredly ; and such facile emotion, impossible now to us, was possible in those days to men and women whom in other respects we perceive to have been barbai'ously callous. Excessive sympathetic emotion is not only not incompatible with a comparatively primitive development of moral sensibility, but actually correlates naturally with that. And if we go back to the case of the Romans, with their very women capable of gross cruelty, we shall on impartial reconsideration find we are in presence not of mere sterility of emotional qualit}-, but rather of a monstrous and deadly over- growth of the emotional nature, a frightful perversion of it, fatal to the subject as well as the victims, a sure portent of the ruin of the society in which it was possible. Look at the matter rightly and you will see that these ferocious appetites were of the v-ery stuff of emotion, were really the expression of a profound craving for excitement, bred in a brutal and corrupt society, and not to be allayed by any save brutal methods. Where the idle English woman of fashion, with her gentle nurture and her delicate nerves, seeks her emotional pabulum in society, in gaiety, in spectacle, in the levde, at the race-course, at the theatre, in the novel, and in the fashionable church, the patrician woman of impeiial Rome, with her more animal nature, her profounder ennui^ and her wilder un- rest, craved a far fiercer thrill, a tigerish joy. And as with the woman, so with the man ; for, indeed, what is it but a spontaneous emotion that makes us more aghast at cruelty in tlie Roman woman than in tlie Roman man 1 Take the whole question into the dispassionate arena of anthx-opo- logical science, and it becomes still clearer. What is it that makes the main psychological difference between the average savage and the average civilised man 1 Not a relative subordination of emotion in the savage, not a preponderance of it in the ordinary European. The savage is clearly far more a creature of feeling, in the wide sense of the word, than the civilised white. His primary feelings are much more violent when they come into play. His curiosity is a wild excitement, his rage is a frenzy, his devotion is a passion, his fear is a paralysis ; and when we sum up the states of mind which make up an ordinary year of his life we find they consist far more of pure emotion — that is of mere sensation of appetite, of desire, of hati'ed, of curiosity, of general physical excitement, and of feax* — far more of these than of reflection or reasoning ; and this not only absolutely, but relatively to the life of the civilised white. The lower savages are unreflecting and devoid of foresight in an extreme degree. It is told of the Caribs * that they will sell their hammocks for less in the morniog than in the evening, so incapable are they of realising for twelve hours in advance their inevitable future. And like those higher barbarians whom Mr. Wallace has described so attractively,! they are at the same time capable of passing from a state of good humor to one of murderous fury in a few minutes, just as two encountering dogs may at the mere sight of each other pass from a normal state of temper into one of destruc- tive rage. These, then, are the out-and-out ci'eatures of emotion ; the organisms in which feeling most absolutely determines conduct ; and they can scarcely be called a moral sviccess. Consider, now, in the light of our examples, what an emotion practically is. It is, as the term etymologically implies, an outflow of feeling, a moving of the nervous being ; and this kind of nervous excitation, in one sort or another, may exist either in company of a primitive appetite or passion, or an irrational belief, or in company with a high principle, or a wide sympathy, or a selfish desire, or a base purpose. It is, so to speak, the striking of the clock — the clock being the mechanism of the mind-, in which every moment's * By Labat, writing in 1724. See Wuitz, " Introduction to Anthropology," Trans, p. 295. t " Malay Archipelago," Vol. 11., p. 460, cf., p. 443. 10 cuuditiuii is tliu outcome of one that went before ; and if for the sake of the metaphor you will consider the different houi-s on the dial to represent different perceptions, from the animal desires up to the joy of self-denial and the enthusiasm of humanity ; and if you will further regard the clock hands as the percipient intelligence — the intellectual and the physical consciousness — then the figure becomes not inapt. The human personality is a striking clock ; and neither does the striking move the hands, nor the mere motion of the hands cause the striking ; but both alike are the results of the obscure mechanism within — the hands moving and pointing noise- lessly, and the bell doing its part in salient sound. And in the well- ordered clock you cannot have the one without the other. If the machine strikes at random, or always before the hour, you say it has gone wrong : your clock that does nothing but strike is the analogue of the madman ; while your clock which does not strike for the higher sympathies, but marks only egoisms and appetites, is in another way an undesirable instrument. But, to pass from the metaphor, the important truth for us all is this, that not only are ideas and emotions not antagonistic aspects of consciovisness, but they are positively inconceivable apart. There is positively no perception whatever, whether physical or intellectual, whether abstract or con- crete, that does not involve an emotion, in its due degree, as surely as an object i)laced in light casts its shadow. You might smile if 1 named some of the conditions of mind which, on this principle, are to be conceived of as involving emotion, like every other, on their own small scale ; but it is not perfectly clear that every sensation of physical pleasure and physical pain, to begin with, has an aspect correlative with those higher spiritual exaltations which we best remember ; that the gratification of curiosity, the memory of a bereavement, the solution of a mathematical problem, the perception of skill in a work of art, or beauty or ugliness in an object, the appreciation of truth in a thought or nobleness in an action — is it not clear that all these are cases in which a simple state of consciousness, of thought or of simple sense, swells into the suffused sensation which we name emotion, and cannot even be recognised save as the emotion supervenes 1 And if this, be found invariably true of the higher forms of ideation — if this passage from perceiving to feeling be there a simple matter of course, then it follows that just such a passage from perceiving to feeling takes place in every process of sane consciousness whatever, from the most trivial intellectual opera- 11 tion to the highest and profoundest. You have it in the trifling case of your hardly perceptible satisfaction when you get your change right after making purchases in a shop, and you have it in its fitting degree in the swelling of the heart of Franklin when he found he had drawn lightning from the cloud, of Archimedes when he had solved his problem, of Thackeray when he felt he had accomplished a stroke of genius in his novel ; * and yoti have not merely noble emotional ])oetry but the strictest scientific truth in the lyrical cry of Keats over his first reading of Chapman's Homer : — " Then felt I like some watcher of the sides When a new planet swims into his ken ; Or like stont Cortoz, when with eagle eyes He stared on the Pacific, and all his men Looked at each other, with a wild surmise, SUeut, upon a peak of Darien." Be sure thei^e is no process of reasoning which fails of its throb of emotion in the exact degree of its depth and clearness ; no altitudes of the intellect where the fires of feeling do not glow ; and if it should ever seem to you that that white light of truth which men say shines on the loftier heights is a cold radiance, bethink you whether you might not there at times find healing from the scorchings of the fires of passion and of suffering which you chance upon below, or rest and soothing from the changing heats and chills of the region of social warfare and aspiration. However that may be for each one of us, there the great law remains, that the thrill of the astronomer over the new truth he has wrested from the vast book of the heavens is but a higher phase of the play of cerebral intelligence than the wonder of the earliest man over the strangely-shaped stone in which he divines a deity ; and that when, in contemplating the infinite mystery of things, we are shaken " with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls," we are still paralleling the simplest instance in which the awakening of an idea or perception in our consciousness flows into something which, while we cannot dissociate it from the thought, we call an emotion. And now it may be asked, what is the practical lesson to be drawn from this law of human nature. It is, I think, not obscure, and not unimportant. What we have seen is that while the emotions of the lower man are few, violent and preponderating, being little modified by reflection, those of the higher man are many, are more subtle, ♦ When some one praised the passage in '' Vanity Fair," in which Rebecca admires her husband as he strikes down the Marcjuis, Thackeray admitted that on writing the description he thrcvr down hU prn. rxclnimiiic; it wns a stroke of pjenius. 12 are really more extensive than the savage's — seeing that the latter has very many hours of mere lethargy — and are above all balanced and guided by the cultivated reason. The difference between a good clerk and a bad clerk, said a shrewd man of business once to me, is simply that the good clerk does ever^^thing twice ; and this thinking twice is, broadly speaking, the secret of improvement in conduct. Or, to put it otherwise, what we want is not the divorce of emotion from action, that being indeed a contradiction in terms, but the securing that the force of emotion shall accrue to the best ideas and desires rather than to the worst, so that the balance of action shall be beneficent. And this is the practical truth contained in the teaching of Buckle, that as the multiplication of higher ideas and desires means widened knowledge, it is the widening knowledge of mankind that determines their course — moral progress being im- possible without intellectual ; or, as we may say, to go back to our homely figui'e, the clock cannot go on striking the hours when the hands are not moving. Remember, all the effective emotion of the past related itself to ideas, and what you want is that new ideas shall be substituted for these, thus bringing about a new dii-ection of that motor force which we call emotion. It was strictly an exagger- ation to say that our savage, or even our dog, represented emotion pure and simple : there, too, the emotion, be it of love or hatred or desire, flows from a definite perception in sense or in memory. The nearest approach to a contagion of pure emotion is that of a dancing mania such as we read of in history and occasionally in the news- papers ; or an epidemic of hysteria — and such phenomena are really forms of disease. Normal emotion belongs to an idea. Afiect the perception, the idea, alter or modify or supersede that, and the emotion will take care of itself as surely as your shadow. The emotion of patriotism which hurled the people of Greece triumph- antly against the invading hosts of Persia was a stress of feeling round a few vivid memories and forecasts, and that emotion has affected all subsequent European civilisation mainly for the better. The excitement of mediteval Christendom for the Crusades was just another outburst of feeling upon one or two simple intellectual con- ceptions ; and these conceptions happening to be false and foolish, and the emotion for them happening to be so violent and so un- happily fostered, the net result was a mere tempest of destruction and misery, leaving no discernible balance of good, and involving lasting harm — incalculable in the barbavising of European modes of 13 thought, and the direct arrest of nobler tendencies. Our formula, it may be said, does not go far, but at least it is of universal validity, and it clears the way for others. Applying it to the rise of Christianity, we say that the Christian movement began in the acceptance of a definite idea — the idea of an incarnation of deity ; and that if the new relieion became more emotional than those before it, it was exactly in so far as the dazzling idea of a sacrifice by divinity on behalf of humanity generated a new outbreak of emotion. But this emotion, mark, could soon coexist or alternate with the emotions of hate, whether religious or secular ; hate to the enemies of the new deity, or to heretic companions, coming in as soon as the first trance of the new idea was over. And we say that if that idea was intellectually unsound, it cannot conceivably be pei*- manent ; that the emotion for it cannot save it from the advance of truer ideas ; and that to abandon it for the truer ideas is not at all to make an end of religious emotion as such but to give it a new and better bias. Nay, so absolute is the union of emotion and intelligence that we tend to go astray even in speaking thus ; for the very desire to substitute the true for the false is in itself an emotion ; so that it is by an impulse of feeling as fundamental as our appetites that we turn from the incredible doctrine to the credible ; and the passion of the sceptic for truth is as essentially an emotion as the yearning of the believer for spiritual rest. All this seems rather a truism than a truth when we think it over ; and yet how far are we from putting the truth in practice ! See what it involves. It implies that an emotion in itself is no criterion of its own rightness or value ; that the French Revolution might be in large measure a beneficent outbreak of emotion over true ideas, and a pernicious play of further emotion over delusions. It reminds us that the struggle for and against slavery really repre- sented a conflict of emotions, and that the one was as genuine as the other. From all which it follows that we can never be too studious of the beliefs to which our emotions attach, whether by processes of comparison or of analysis, these being the only means open to us of checking oi;r tendencies and of seeing whether we are making for good or for evil in the world. If we did but hold this idea firmly, how many of our antagonisms would slacken ; how many of our prepossessions would grow temperate ; how many of our fanaticisms would lose their heat ! Instead of there being a pi-esumption against every bold new idea, there would be a certain leaning to a presump- 14 tion in farour of it. To-day, for instance, there is a very natural resentment among certain classes at projiosals for what is known as a graduated income-tax, and for imposing certain obligations on land- owners. I am not now inquiring whether these proposals are reasonable or not. But I do say that when we go back in imagina- tion to the beginnings of the French E,evolution ; when we remember how the French noblesse actually paid no taxes at all, leaving the whole State burdens to fall on the artificers, and on the wretched tillers of the soil, and how they yet strenuously and warmly resisted the proposals to tax them* — when we recall these things, we ai'e at least driven to question whether the case of the contemporary English upper class is fundamentally diiferent from that of the old French upper class. What is certain is that the emotion of resent- ment in the one case was as genuine and as spontaneous as in the other. And so with our enthusiasms. Rememberins: that the mere warmth of our feeling for our belief is not in itself a test of our rightness, should we not sometimes temper our estimate of those who differ from us 1 It is only too clear that even a humane emotion gives no securit}^ for its own proper application ; and that a warm affection for animals, for instance, may entirely fail to make an anti- vivisector just and candid to those who oppose him. But there is a further and less obvious corollary. It has probably sui'prised many thoughtful people recently to find such a writer as Mr. Arnold sud- denly taking up the cry of the war-party in regard to the episode of the battle of Majuba Hill in the Ti*ansvaalWar, and deriding the Ministry! which had had the unusual courage — a courage, unfortunately, not exhibited since — to cut short an admittedly unjustifiable Avar when it was found to be unjustifiable, even though our arms had sustained a reverse in the earlier part of it. Mr. Arnold sneered at this policy. I do not say that Mr. Arnold's writings never before exhibited such a spirit ; but certainly many of us were surpi-ised to see it in him ; and it seemed to need explanation. Now, what strikes one on reflection is that similar championship of what had otherwise appeai'ed a barbarous policy has come at different times from such writers as Carlyle, Kingsley, and Mr. Ruskin — as, for instance, in the case of Governor Eyre's doings in Jamaica ; and that one thing these writers had in common even with Mr. Arnold was a strong * For making the proposal Turgot was dismissed from office. See Carlyle's " History," B. ii., c. iv. ; and the Essay on Turgot in Mr. Morley's Critical IMisccIlanies. t See his article in the Nineteenth Century, February, 1885. 15 tendency to stand up for certain ways of thinking, ap]jai'ently not so mnch because they were true as because they were old. From which one is strongly led to infer that a constant bias to the ideas of the past — ideas, that is, which the modern mind is discarding or has dis- carded — tends to involve a reproduction of the emotions of the past, and these precisely the most undesirable ones. For the emotions re- act on each other, and prepare the way for each other, till, whether for good or bad, they go far to determine the acceptance of ideas. It has been the happy distinction of advanced religious thought in this country that it has usually been identified with the love of freedom and the love of peace ; and it is surely significant that an emotion of a more or less contrary tendency should be found associated with more or less reactionary tenets. For, indeed, this respect for the mere assertion of force is one of the most inveterate of the emotional aberrations of our race. It distorts many men's whole conception of the past, enabling them to see only a halo of glory round theii' country's history at a time when it was full of misery and largely governed by mean ideals ; and the whole cause of the transformation is the record of certain naval and military victories. It makes it possible for an admirable poet to sing of a " hope for the world in the coming wars," and to create a contem- porary cultus of sentimental bloodshed which has been fitly summed up in the injunction, " Go to the Crimea and thou shalt be saved." It produces a popular attitude of oscillation between callous dis- regard for the status of our soldiers in time of peace and barbaric jubilation over them when they have had some slaughter to perform. From all which harmful things, it is the work of all good men to deliver us. It will not be an easy task, or one soon performed. The poet who sang that the meanest flower could give him thoughts lying too deep for tears, was he who sang that Carnage was God's daughter ; and even the young George Eliot, sensitively attuned to high and humane feelings, is for a time capable of the same strange creed ; so subtle and so sinister are the kinships of those emotions which we are so often tempted to hail as something higher and nobler than patient thought. The final truth is that the general level of emotion follows the general movement of thought — this being the real explanation of the anti-slavery struggle, in which it was not one idea or one emotion that did the work, but the broad development of culture made a new form of emotion possible, and that in turn fostered a new doctrine. The new generation differs 16 subtly from the old in its whole mental texture, and thus can respond to appeals to which that was deaf. We conclude, then, that the upward path for men lies by the way of knowledge and reason — a path from which emotion is in nowise shut out, but in which it is ever more finely touched to finer issues. The path will have its thorns. It may present to us great thinkers curiously lackiug in some forms of sympathy — a profound Hume who can cherish strange national hatreds — a great evolutionist who may strenuously seek to promote the blind struggle for existence ; but in so far as such a thinker gives us truth he can only work our weal, and if he ever teach mistakenly he will be baffled by forces of beneficence which he himself has stirred. It is such a thinker who has admirably warned us against " the profoundest of all in- fidelity, the fear lest the truth be bad.""^ Free from that fear, we may look forward to a future in which emotion shall have become so constantly bent to the betterment of things that men's lives will be a harmonious union, as of " pei-fect music unto noble words." We, to-day, alas, cannot even fully dream such a scene and such a life, but in this indefinable hope, as in all good thoughts, our reason and our emotions blend. JOHN ROBERTSON. * Spencer's Essays, Vol. I., " f^rogress, its Law and Cause," p. 59, No. 9.] 0iit(] Mm lldigmttB ^mt^ FINSBURY, E.C. WHAT IS MATERIALISM? A DISCOURSE DELIVERED IN SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C, (9/^ SUNDAY MORNING, MARCH 21st, 1886, BY LESLIE STEPHEN. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE TKINIED FOR THE PUBLISHEE BT WATi;KlO\y AND SONS LIMITED, LONDON WALL. — GWa. WHAT IS MATERIALISM? By LESLIE STEPHEN. I AM to speak to-day of a wide and difficult question. I may as well premise that I shall not stop to guard myself as though I were engaged in a scholastic disputation ; hut I must endeavour to point out certain common ambiguities of language. All philosophical discussions have a tendency to take the form of arguments as to the meanings of words. Such arguments, it must be added, frequently imply very serious and jirofound contrasts of opinion. But one consequence is that woixls which have been much used in philosophical controversy tend to change their meaning and to become charged with wholly new contents. When such words have passed from the philosophic arena into the more heated regions of theological controversy, and when they have spread yet further, and got into the hands of the gentlemen who expound theories of the universe in articles and lectui-es, they lose all precision ; they are no longer fit for use as constituents in the construction of a system, but ai'e the mere conventional " half-bricks " which a controversialist ■ considers himself to be justified in casting at the head of a stranger to his own system. This has been the fate of the woi-d "Materialist," and my purpose to-day is to consider — so far as I can — what are the meanings which it covers in point of fact, how they are properly related, and in Avhat applications they convey a serious or a justifiable imputation. " Materialism," in its strictest sense, means a certain philosophical or metaphysical doctrine. Secondly, it means a certain religious or (as would generally be said) anti-religious doctrine. Thirdly, it is applied both to a certain ethical doctrine, and to certain moral tendencies, which are i-egarded as naturally allied to the doctrine, whether as suggested by it or fostered by it. I must, in the first place, touch, however inadequately, upon the metapliysieal or philosophical question. Materialism is the doctrine that matter is the sole ultimate reality. There is nothing which is not material. The oj)posite doctrine is, that mind is the sole ultimate reality. Nothing exists except mind variously modified. The most famous historical representatives of these two theories in English literature are Thomas Hobbes, a "\yriter of astonishing power and originality, whose influence upon men's minds in the seventeenth century has never been surpassed until the rise of Darwinism in our own ; and Bishop Berkeley, the subtlest of all English meta- physicians, whose influence, in spite of the ridicule of sciolists, is traceable in English speculation down to the present day. The con- clusion to which modei-n speculation is gravitating is, I think, in some form or other, that the antithesis does not really represent a contradiction, but rather two methods of combining experience, each jierfectly legitimate in its own sphere, and leading to apparent con- tradiction, when, and only when, there is a misunderstanding as to the true limits of joossible knowledge. Let me try to put this briefly. Materialism, in the first place, represents the necessary and proper attitude of the man of science, i.e. of physical science. His pi'oblem is simply this : to give the laws of all pei-ceived or perceivable phenomena in terms of time and space ; to measui'e everything that can be measured in miles and feet, hours and seconds. He speaks of " forces " and '• energies," but he knows nothing of their intrinsic nature, but only of their visible, tangible, sensible manifestations ; and so long as he confines himself to a certain sphere, we go along with him willingly. AYe follow the triumphs of the astronomer and of the physicist who deals with the refined questions of light, heat, electricity, and the laws of chemical combination, without hesitation or misgiving. "We wish him good-speed, and rejoice in his powers. But the time comes when he is ambitious to apply the same method to organic and living matter ; when he traces, or tries to trace, the genesis of animals fi'om mere protoplasm, and of protoplasm from lifeless matter ; when he studies the brain and the nervous system ; and when, resting on the vmdeniable fact that the brain is, in some sense, the organ of thought, he attempts to push his conquests further, and seems to be approaching a physical or mechanical theoiy of thought itself. Then we become alarmed and ask whether we shall be cheated out of our belief that reason and emotion exercise some influence, and be driven to hold that oxir consciousness is a PI ■1 lueve pliantom, looking ou at the niechauical operations of an automaton. Before answering, let us take the position of the idealist. It was given by Berkeley, crudely and imperfectly, but yet so as to state the essential and invincible position. We can, he urged in substance, know of nothing but thoughts, emotions, volitions, sensations, modi- fications of our own consciousness. The whole of my universe consists of my own feelings ; either such as are actually present at a given time, or such as have been, or will be, or might be present ; and beyond this of the feelings which I attribute to other beings, of con- .sciousness identical with or analogoiis to my own. I construct my universe by extending my own and annexing your consciousness. The man of science deals with the perceived ; he takes no account of the perceiver ; in common technical phrase, he remains at the objective instead of the subjective point of view ; he is absolutely bound to do so ; he must do so, if he would discover truth or keep bis mind clear; but he is not entitled to assume that because he only attends to one aspect of things, that aspect can, in point of fact, exist without the other ; that there can be anything pei'ceived with- out a perceiver, or anything simply "objective" without a "sub- jective " aspect implied. We speak, for example, to take Berkeley's apparent paradox, of some definite object — tlie sun, let us say. That, for the man of science, is a mass of matter of definite dimensions. But, regarded under a different aspect, the sun is equally the name of a certain group of feelings, of heat, light, and so forth, present perhaps, to me now ; which was and will be present to me and you and to every conscious inhabitant of the solar system or the universe. And if I ask, what it is as apart from such a group of feelings, or rather when feeling itself is supposed to be annihilated, I must, to be logical, answer "I cannot })ossibly knosv."' The verbal answer is " matter " ; but of matter as something outside of sensation, an abstract entity, we neither know, nor, as Berkeley has taught us, can we ever know anything. The dead, mechanical substratum is a mere figment — a word corresponding to no intelligible thought. The universe is thei-efore built up of feelings, in a sense at least as true as that in which it is built up of matter. There is, of course, a paradoxical sound in such statements — an air of over-refinement and flying in the face of common sense. Yet I must go a step further before I can show that the logic is not only (or so I tliink) sound, but of practical importance. The external world is known to us through the senses alone. It is only in so far as I can see, touch, handle, that I infer the existence of anything beyond myself. But there is one all-important distinction in regard to my inference. The world of physical science is that which we construct directly from the senses. Physical science is nothing but a systematic and accui'ate co-ordination of all tlie directly sense- given knowledge. But there is, if I may say so, another external world, which is equally known to me through the senses, as its external manifestation, though not known directly as sensible. That is the world of the thoughts, emotions, volitions, of the conscioiisness of other beings than myself. I know of the existence of this room because I can see, touch, grasp. I know precisely in the same way of the existence of your bodies in the room — that is, by the direct evidence of my senses. But I know of your thoughts and emotions only by an indirect process of inference, which must always start from the sense-given evidence. I see that a man's hand trembles as I see that a leaf trembles or a candle flickers. I know that he is fi'ightened only because I see that his hand trembles, or from some other external indication, which always comes back in the last resort to some evidence of the senses. I know of his bodily existence because I see him-; of his state of mind only by a variety of infer- ences, based always on some observation of fact or of sense-given knowledge. Now, the question remains, how are we to express this distinction ? We must, I think, reply thus. In both cases, we must first observe, there is an inference. When I see a table, I infer that you see the same table ; that is, I infer that you have identically the same sensations. But I cannot be directly conscious of your sensations. I cannot see a man's sense of light any more than I can see his emotion of fear. To speak in such a way is to talk absolute non- sense ; to put together sounds instead of using words ; to combine phrases so as to convey no meaning. Yet this is the nonsense to which a materialist is not unfrequently driven. To preserve an apparent consistency, he has to talk, not of sensations of light or perceptions of figured objects, but of red or blue sensations, square or round perceptions. He avoids such phrases because they ai-e explicit nonsense ; but he slides into them, and therefore into implicit nonsense unawares, because they are the natural tendency of 5 his "ways of tliouglit or, at least, of speech. And, if we think it out, we shall find that the real source of the confusion is this. The external sensible world is the same for you and me. When I have the set of sensations corresponding to a given object, I infer at once, without more ado, that you have an identical set of seiisations. The sensation, thei'efore, comes to be regarded, and quite truly, as some- thing independent of any idiosyncrasy of yours or mine ; therefoi'e as a something independent of the particular person who has it ; and next (and here is the fallacy) as something independent of con- sciousness in general. Light and heat are words which properly have no meaning whatever, except in reference to beings endowed with a capacity for seeing and feeling. Bat because, so far as we live in the same world, our feelings have the same laws, we imagine the feelings themselves to be somehow external to all consciousness. We speak of a bright, hot body existing apart from all possibility of sensations, and do not observe that our words have lost all meaning whatever — that brightness and heat mean, and can only mean, certain affections of the senses. And, in the next place, since we know of a consciousness different from our own, of thought, emotion, volition, only through their manifestations in the external world constructed out of sensation alone ; as, therefore, in this case, we have to make an indirect in- ference — to infer that another man is frightened, not because Ave have the same emotion, but because (for example) we see him tremble and turn pale, that is because we have certain sensations common to all other observers — Ave are led to imagine that the sensations have also a superior reality. As far as my OAvn direct consciousness goes, I am as sui-e of the reality of fear as of the reality of the visible or external sensations. But since I knoAV of your emotion only by an indirect process of inference from sensations, I imagine it to be somehoAv less real than sensation. Because my knowledge is dependent, I fancy that the reality is dependent. The order of inference is mistaken for an order of existence. The thought is imagined to be a mere appendage to the external manifestation of thought. Thus, Ave first OA'erlook the fact that all kinds of knoAv- ledo-e of fact imply an inference from sensations ; Ave then falsely attribute external reality to sensations inconceivable apart from a percipient being, and then Ave suppose the other modifications of consciousness knoAvn to us through the sensations to be, in point 6 of fact, less real, or absolutely unreal — mere phantoms subordinate to the working of the mechanical automaton. If I have been forced to be unduly metaphysical, it is because the popular view is also metaphysical. It implicitly involves a meta- physical theory, with the disadvantage that the metaphysics ai'e erroneous. It can only be met by attempting to give the true theory which it implicitly denies. And to show this, it must be sufficient to apply the conclusions we have reached to the most obvious cases. The universe, it is sometimes said, is in danger of being resolved into the blind play of mechanical forces, and the mind into a result of material changes in the brain. Let us suppose the scientific reasoner to have carried out his observations to the furthest possible point, and ask what will be the true inference. I do not wish to take refuge in saying what has not yet been proved, but what that is which can never be proved and which there is no tendency to prove. The evolutionist, it is said, points to a period at which consciousness Avas non-existent, at which the earth and the solar system were mere masses of incandescent gas, a mad play of incoherent atoms. All sentient and animate existence has slowly grown out of this chaos in which there is no room for the action of mind or a general intelli- gence. Now what the evolutionist really aims at doing certainly sounds like this, but there is an important difFei'ence. He en- deavours to say what you would have seen if you had lived through ages of indefinite duration ; what conceivably some observer or observers may have seen ; and so to detect the law of the great series of phenomena which have succeeded one another or melted into each other through countless seons. If certain speculations arc well-founded, such observers may have seen or did see a state of things in which no organized or living being existed in the chaos of atoms out of which the world has groAvn. But, we must notice, we are still dealing with phenomena ; that is, with things perceived or perceivable, and if we ask what existed at this jieriod in- dependently of all observation, avc must again answer, wc do not know, we cannot possibly make even a conjecture. The mind becomes an absolute blank in regard to things outside all conscious- ness. All inference, negative and positive, becomes illusory. We reach an intellectual vacuum. The supposed abstraction, a blind dead matter instead of all mind, is something of which we can know nothing. It is a mere cipher, a name without any contents what- ever, a blank form for absolute ignorance. We may hope, within very- narrow limits, to lay down rules of phenomena ; but we are not one step the nearer to knowing what a phenomenon is — what kind of force lay behind it, what hands pulled the strings of the puppet. We cannot peer into the abyss or roll back the curtain. " Immerst iu darkness, rouud the drama rolled, Which for the pastime of eternity, Thou didst thyself enact, contrive, behold." And therefore we no more lower our conceptions of the living being by tracing it back to the dark germ out of which it was evolved, than we raise the germ by attributing to it a potentiality of higher existence. We are limited by the nature of thought, to watching the actual series and projecting it backwards or forwards. Of what lies beneath or behind, we have only a sham knowledge. Matter and soul or mind taken by themselves are purely negative phrases. We know of nothing but consciousness in its various modifications, and to speak of a time in which it Avas not, is to speak of something of which we cannot think — that is, to make sounds, not to use words. And this applies equally to the imaginary danger that thought may be resolved into mere mechanical action. We are as sure as we can be of anything that the thoughts and emotions of ourselves and others are as much realities as our sensations, and play a real part in the evolution of the great drama. We know, it is true, that we can only get at other people's thoughts and emotions through some sensible manifestation. In some way, which has hitherto eluded all enquiry, every thought in the mind corresponds (so we must assume) to some process in the brain. • When Shakespeare produced Hamlet or Newton the Principia, something happened in the little lumps of matter which we call their bi-ains. That is tacitly admitted in every reasoning about our neighbours. To make the reasoning more definite and precise is the aim of physiologists. Hitherto they are at the very threshold of the science. They have scarcely even raised the veiy hem of the curtain. But let them go as far as they will, the ultimate conclusion would only be this — that when / have a certain sensation or should have it if I could look into a living brain ; when, there- fore, I see, or should see, certain motions of material particles, I see the external signature of an intellectual process ; that is, I have a sensation which indicates that certain corresponding — how corres- ponding we cannot say even in the vaguest way — but certain corresponding intellectual and emotional i^rocesses are taking place in your mind. But tliese processes are not the less real than tlio signs by which I (in. the supposed case) become aware of them. Nor do they in any sense follow a mere mechanical law. For the matter which constitutes a brain, though it obeys the ordinary mechani- cal laws of gravitation and so forth, has also laws of its own — in virtue of what we call its organization — a word which simply implies that it has the new set of laws implied in its correspondence to the action of an intelligence. In either case, and in all cases, no such result as is sometimes anticipated is to be dreaded from physical science properly under- stood, however far it may advance. The old " I think, therefore I am," remains : — we can systematize the indications of consciousness, not explain it, or explain it away. The fallacy latent in all materialism, taken as a philosophical system, reveals itself in down- right nonsense, when we mistake the assignment of a law of possible consciousness for a specification of a reality outside consciousness. It is a mistake of science for metaphysics. But the supposed danger that mind can ever be analysed into matter, or thought and emotions proved to be unreal, is a mei'e chimera, resulting from a miscon- ception of the limits of thought. And, havdng laid down this point, I can deal with the other senses of materialism. For, in the first place, a religious materialism is supposed to mean a disbelief in the soul as a permanent exist- ence sej^arate from the body. A materialist is proi^erly defined as one who refuses to admit of personal immortality. Now, one question immediately arises, if we would not be cheated by words. Is the soul really conceived as an immaterial substance 1 It is so in name, but what is meant by the name? The importance of asking this question appears from the fact that, historically speak- ing, the earlier conceptions of the soul ai'e plainly and unequivocally materialist. Men of science have lately occupied themselves with tracing the savage doctrine of animism. Animism is a belief in a soul which difiers from the body, not in being immaterial, but at most in being composed of a finer matter. The soul, in the belief of simple tribes, is still in need of food and fire and clothes; it re- quires to be fed and housed, and after a time it gradually dissipates itself like a vapour, and ceases to exist, if it does not prolong existence in some land of shadows, where it still indulges in hunt- ing and fighting and feasting. Moreovei", this conception still exists in all the less refined minds, and in some highly cultivated minds, and is represented in all the ruder forms of religion. It has been said, though I know not how truly, that a genuine belief in immaterial substance did not exist until Descartes, that is until a comparatively late period of philosophical history. Souls, according to Tertullian, expand and contract, wriggle and twist, like worms among the interstices of matter. I need only to point to the sensuous images of hell and heaven, sanctioned by great poets and accepted by the vulgar in all ages. In a famous passage of Jeremy Taylor, the great preacher has exhausted his imagination to describe the physical torments of every conceivable sense which are provided for the damned. Franciscus Ribera, says Taylor's quaint contem- porary. Burton, will have hell a material and local fire in the middle of the earth, 200 Italian miles in diameter. But Lessius will have the local hell far less, one Du.tch mile in diameter, all tilled with fire and brimstone ; because, as he demonstrates, that space cubically multiplied will make a space able to hold 800,000 million of damned bodies (allowing each body G ft. square), which will abundantly suflice because (this is satisfactory, though I don't know how it is proved) it is certain that there will not be- 100,000 millions of daimied. This is a grotesque evolution from a mode of belief still accepted by the vulgar — even the educated vulgar. If we doubt the essentially materialistic nature of the soul, we need only look at the pictures or listen to the addresses by which the faith of ignorant Catholics or Protestants is fanned to excitement, or attend one of the seances in which intelligent philosophers prove the immortality of the soul by discovering that so-called spirits can untie knots in ropes or write with slate pencils. Now this is no accident of belief. Of course it represents the sensuous imagery by which a philosophical doctrine is shadowed out in the cruder minds. But the question is, Avhat remains when the sensuous imagery is really destroyed, and the philosophical doctrine really accepted 1 What conception at all remains of the soul when you seriously think of it apart from all physical manifestation or embodiment ? It is only through the medium of sensations, as I have said, that we can know of any other consciousness than our own. Annihilate that medium, and can we think of a conscious 10 being at all ? Is there any sucli thing conceivable as abstract thought, emotion, volition, absolutely free from material embodiment, or as life apart from all the processes which go to make up life here 1 We may deny the materialist doctrine that nothing exists except matter ; because matter itself in this sense turns out to be a word without meaning. But can we assert that there is anything knowable which has not its material aspect? "What, in fact, can the philosopher say to the problem if he is resolved fairly and truly, as well as nominally, to part company with materialism — really and truly to purify the soul from all material taint, to substitute for the contrast of two unthinkable entities, spirit and matter, the conception of a contrast between object and subject, perceiving and perceived? To me it seems, I confess frankly, that all that he can really say comes to very little. He may, indeed, say that to the man of science there is no such thing as creation and annihilation, as the sudden interpolation of a new thing into the universe or its sudden elimination. All that we can ever see or know is transformation, evolution, a perpetual alteration, but never a diminution of the w^hole. And it may seem probable, though I know not how to state it, that there is a subjective formula answei'ing to this objective formula, that consciousness is as inde- structible as force, and therefore that we must conceive — in some way or other — of a continuity of consciousness as well as of its objects. But the argument leaves a gap. Such a doctrine— vague enough as it is — can hardly be applied to the support of what is called personal immortality. It is as consistent with the various religions which contemplate an absorption of the individual into a world-soul, as with the religion which supposes that the person is an indestructible and eternal unit. To pronounce dogmatically upon such questions seems to me to be foolish. It would perhaps even be thought wrong were it not that somehow or other it has come to be regarded as a duty to profess the utmost confidence of belief upon matters in which the only legitimate conclusion is that ignorance is in pro- portion to the impossibility of knowledge, and hence that uncertainty is an absolute necessity. Let us be content not to jjronounce with decision on the points where the deepest philosophers are most at a loss — especially if we do not happen to be philosophers at all. And now I can approach what is really the important question — ■ the question of the bearing of these theories upon conduct. What, 11 I have to ask, is materialism in tlie ethical sense ? After mj previous remarks I think that the answer is clear, if we are logically to carry out our conclusions ; and moreover I think that the answer is one which has always been implicitly accepted. The aversion to philoso- phical matei'ialism depends on this, that it appears to throw doubt upon the reality of the higher functions of thought, emotion, volition. The aversion falls in with the logical objection, for I have tried to show that no such doubt is logically possible, nor is really sanctioned by the scientific view. And, in the same way, ethical materialism should mean such theories of ethics as deny — implicitly or explicitly — the existence of those emotions and reasonings which are essential to a really moral action. If, for example, the action which ajjparently springs from love of our neighbour could be shown to be, in any intelligible result, a mere product of mechanical laws of motion, we should certainly take the whole meaning o\it of moral law. And again, in the sphere of practice, it may be said that a man who acts as if love of truth or love of our neighbour had no real existence, or (though the sense is not quite the same) as if the merely phy,sical appetites which he shares with the brutes supplied the only really existing motives, or the only motives worth taking into account, he may be not unfairly called a materialist. This description falls in, I think, with the view which has been generally taken by the loftier moralists. Augustc Comte, the great thinker to whom I should acknowledge my obligations the more readily because he has often been unfairly ridiculed, says, that the essence of materialism is the explanation of the higher by the lower — of the laws of life, for example^ by the material laws of inorganic matter. And doubtless there is a connection between this tendency to such explanations and the tendency to explain all the higher motives as merely cases of the lower motives. The philosophic materialist finds it difficult, for example, to bring genuine altruism, a real desire to do good to others, into his system ; and the acutest writers of the class have shown great ingenuity in explaining everything that looks like self- sacrifice or nobility of feeling into the covert action of some baser motive. Virtue, says Mandeville, one of the cleverest, is the ofi'spring which flattery begot upon pride. When we think that we are acting from a good motive we are merely cheating ourselves, or cheated by our neighbours, into some subtle form of hypocrisy. The virtuous pretence is a mere blind to conceal motives identical with 12 those wliicli animate the criminal or the sensualist, though it happens that we can gratify them more securely by acting so as to excite the aj)plause instead of the resentment of others. I will only say, however, upon this point, that if a man can be a materialist at all consistently, if he can describe feelings without absolute con- tradiction or downright nonsense, in terms of material phenomena, he may, for anything I know, find some way of expressing the higher as well as the lower instincts. The true objection to the system is, that it will express neither with any accuracy. It is difficult to say what is the logical result of a system which begins by self-contradiction, and, therefore, we may say of the philosophical materialist, not only what must be said of all pliilosophers, that the man's practice may be better than his principles ; but also that if his principles can be made to work at all, they may be stretched to include a better morality than he possibly contemplates. But the religious argument is of more relevance. The man who denies the existence of a soul is called a materialist, and on one assumption, the statement that such a denial implies also a moral materialism is justifiable. The distinction may be taken to imjily that the soul is the seat of reason and of the higher instincts ; whereas the body is, in some Avay, the condition or organ of the lower instincts. To deny the existence of the soul is, of course, in that sense, to deny the existence of the faculties by which man is distinguished from the brutes. And then we reach the formula " let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die ! " That is, let us gratify the lower appetites, for in fact we have no other's to gratify. But suppose that the philoso- pher who denies the existence of the soul denies equally the exist- ence of the body ; supj^ose him to say not, " I accept your division, and then deny the reality of one of the two assumed existents ; * but, I deny your principle of distinction altogether ; I regard ab- stract matter and an abstract spirit as equally unthinkable; I hold, in short, that your theory is a sensuous image inadequately rejiresenting the true mode of distinction ; in that case, the issue becomes different. In fact, as I have said, the believer in a soul may — perhaps must — retain a materialist element in his belief. The question still remains, what is his real view of the nature of the soul, after he has pro- fessed his belief that it will survive the body 1 Is it still really con- ceived with material attributes 1 If so he may still preach an ethical materialism. The excellent Paley (I use the ej^ithet without any 10 O intention of satix-e) maintained, as you may remember, that the essence of virtue was doing good to our neighbours, from hopes or fears of rewards or punishments after death. Paley has the merit — hei'e and elsewhere — of saying plainly what he means, and therefore of saying very often something that shocks people who believed the same without knowing what it meant. And here, he brings out the point with admirable precision. I should say (following most moralists) that the essence of virtue was to do good to your neighbour from love to your neigh- bour, Paley holds that that is a mere Pagan theory, and that you are not really virtuous till you are hoping for heaven or fearing hell. Now, we must ask, what do you mean by heaven and hell 1 If you take the view of hell maintained by Ribera and Lessius, your motive to virtue is the dread of being shut up in a furnace, a mile in diameter, full of sulphur and brimstone ; or, in any case, pure physical fear. The one driving wheel of morality according to this is fear of material toi'ment. Being virtuous is acting from terror of the lash, and the difference between saint and sinner is that one is more convinced than the other that he will be caught and sent to a posthumous prison. Such a doctrine is materialistic, and not the less is it really so, whether the policeman is the A 1, round the corner, or the policeman with horns and hoofs in the pit of sulphur and brimstone. But Paley did not, I fancy, believe in hell ex- cept as a sensuous image. Why then did he attribute such importance to the supei'natural sanction 1 For a very simple reason. Because he held that the selfish motives were the only motives, or the only motives worth notice. Therefore he held that men could only be kept from vice by the dread of personal suffering. As they are not sure to suffer in this world, they must be made sure of suffering in the next. Tn other words, the theory is still so far materialistic as it implies a thoroughgoing egoism or a disbelief in the efficacy or reality of unselfish motive. Now, materialism of this kind is not only compatible with a belief in the existence of a soul; but is very frequently expressly associated with it. Theologians, I will do them the justice to say, are as much opposed to each other upon this vital question as philo- sophers. Many theologians have preached and practised the loftiest morality, and have held it to be inseparably connected with their own doctrine. But, it is also true, that one of the most popular argumeiats with theologians implies a tacit acceptance of Paley's 14 theory. That is to say, it is denied that morality can dispense with the sanction of heaven or hell ; that people will, in fact, be good unless they see their way to be paid for it ; that sympathy with suflering, interest in the welfare of the race, can keep a man straight unless the motives are supplemented by terror for what has been called a supernatural chief justice. Now, I do not noAV stop to inquire whether this judgment of consequence be well founded. All I have to say is, that it belongs to the materialist system, in so far as it implies a disbelief in the power of those motives in which the materialist finds it hardest to believe. So far as the man shares the materialist view — so far as he disbelieves in the loftier motives, regards them as merely the base instincts in masquerade, so far he will be inclined to think that people cannot be kept out of the broad and pleasant road, unless they, like Bunyan's hero, see a concrete devil standing at the end of it. You are still a materialist philo- sophically if the soul in which you believe is really a subtler kind of mattei'. You are still at the materialist side of morality if you say that a man is bound to do good to his neighbour, and yet proclaim that the only way to make him do good is to make him see that it will be doing good to himself. And here is the final point to which I call attention. The real question, so far as conduct is concerned, is not whether a man will live a longer or a shorter time, a minute or an eternity ; but what he is made of while he does last. Are the higher motives realities or shams 1 If shams, we may as well eat and drink whether we are to die to-morrow or live for evei", for then, in truth, all our conduct is but a hunting for some physical gratification. If they are realities, then, whether we are to die to-morrow or to live for ever, it is an equally good argument for obeying the higher motives, whilst we have time to give them practical eflfect. It is not a question how long our trumpery personality will last, but how we are actually constituted, live, and move. That is the only test by which to try the character of moral systems. We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love, says Wordsworth, in one of the phrases Avhich stamp him as the greatest of poetical moralists, And even as these are well and wisely fixed In dignity of Being we ascend. We rise, in the language more familiar to science, in the scale of 15 development, so far as we become susceptible of those loftier emo- tions which take us out of ourselves, present us with higher ideals, stimulate us to further reaching efforts, and awaken sympathies with a larger circle of conscious existence. Materialism, in the moral sense, is any system which tries in practice or theory to explain away such motives, to deny their reality or attenuate their importance, and to regard each man as a separate and distinct atom, kept in order only by an external pressure of downright physical force. The materialism — as the word is sometimes used — which comes with the develop- ment of luxury, that which finds a vent in mere aesthetic gratification — is a refined form of the same tendencies ; in so far as it implies isolation from the hopes and fears of mankind at large, and a power of treating even the s}Tnpathies to which px'actical application is refused as merely a means of dreamy self-indulgence. All true moral feeling, briefly, rests on the growth of altruism, on identifica- tion of ourselves with the greater organisation to which wo belong ; and the true evil of materialism is that it encourages us to disbelieve, to explain away and to scoff at all manifestations of this spirit. I have tried to show what is the true connection of the various doctrines briefly indicated, and to show, amongst other things, that doctrines often stigmatized by an invidious name are really freer from the imputed fault than their rivals ; nay, that an essentially materialist theory lurks in the theories of those who most freq^uently denounce materialism. I add, indeed, emphatically, that many men are often better than their theories, and that avowed cynicism and dis- belief in generous motive often goes along with really generous conduct. Yet it is desirable that there should be a conformity between our theory and our practice. And whethei", in theoiy or in action, the true test of morality is not any particular doctrine about the duration of our personal existence, but the hearty and sincere acceptance of a conviction of the reality of unselfishness, of the belief that in sti'engthening and widening, and giving practical effect to our sympathies with our fellows, lies the one satisfactory and adequate employment of our faculties, and the one hope of raising society to be something better, healthier, and happier than it actually is. No. \9j ^oiit^lllacfllcligiousSotitti) FINSBURY, B.C. LIFE AND DEATH. Part I.— DEATH. A DISCOURSE Di:Livi:REri ix SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C., H^' H. C. MARCH, M.D, Lond. Autlior of Dayci'inisiii, Ancestral Man, East Lancashire Nomenclature, &'c., &'C. PUBLISHED 11 Y E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARL-\ LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. PRINTKD BY W. KI\G AND SELL, PRINTKES, 12, OOUOH SQUARE, I'LEKT STREET, I.uNDOK, E.C. LIFE AND DEATH Part L— DEATH. Introductory Meditation. IT was once said by a great thinker that two things filled him with amazement : the starry heavens and the mind of man. And if we look back into the dim past, in the myths of early races, in the signs and symbols our fathers rudely wrought, in the roots and germs of language, we learn that ever the starry heavens have stimulated human imagination. Above a sense of wonder grew a conception of power, as the bright constellations of the northern sky swept round the celestial pole night after night ; and as, day by day, sun and moon rose and set. And now we know that this stupendous revolution of all the stars ; that the beauty of dawn and the glory of sunset ; that the mystery and gloom of night and the glad return of day, are due, after all, to nothing but the rota- tion of our own little dwelling-place. And still the starry heavens fill us with amazement. Inconceivable stellar dis- tances ; spaces so great that light herself, the swiftest of all fleet things, traverses them only after years of effort, or faints altogether in the dreadful void : energies of titanic power com- pelling remotest planets to hold a steady path : unimagin- able fierceness of fire, resolving the very elements by fervent heat : bright scattering of cosmical dust, or dire impadl of one vast mass upon a vaster — all this might and majesty and immensit}^ blinding the eyes with excess of light, making reason totter in a vain attempt to apprehend them ; all these things that fill us with astonishment and awe, are in the end nothing but the mere multiplica- tion of spaces and of forces beyond conception small. The utmost span of distance is made up of inches, and can be passed over line upon line. The atom not large enough to be seen or weighed ; the seat of energy too minute to be esti- mated ; the atom that, alone, w^ould be an utterly negligible quantity, by its mere numerical aggregation with atoms not dissimilar to itself, produces all the mass, and might, and movement that we see around us. It is by the greater multi- tude of his atoms, that the sun sways Uranus or Neptune ; B by the greater agitation of his atoms that he sheds light and warmth on all his planets. And if there be any merit in magnitude, or any virtue in velocity, our veneration is due, not to the infinitely great but to the infinitely little. Shall we say then of a marble face that grows under the chisel of a Pheidias, that its worth and beauty lie in the mole- cules of carbonate of lime ? By no means ; worth and beauty lie in "the mind of man." But let the Aphrodite Urania, or the frieze of the Parthenon be abandoned by human care, and the graceful sculpture is nothing more than a block of lime- stone from the. quarries of Greece or Italy. Long before the advent of man, the world was full of good and pleasant things. Not always for us did the sheep wear wool, or the bee gather honey. Earth was fairer in primaeval times than she will ever be to human vision. But in the works of Nature as well as in those of Art, loveliness lies in the mind of man. And, haply, we may yet come to learn that man himself, with all his wondrous faculties, is but a massing together of a multitude of minute organisms, the aggregation and co-ordination and co-operation of a multitude of minute vitalities ; and that, once more, it is the potency of the little that lies behind the veil of magnitude and power. Mors et Vita. Of all the things that may befall us, two at least are cer- tain — life and death. Amid the ceaseless employments of the one, we think little — perhaps rightly think little — of the other. Yet needful it is that those who hold the unpopular opinions of a weak minority should, from time to time, as the history of the past grows clear, and the light of knowledge increases, review and reconsider the grounds on which the opposing majority of mankind base their beliefs. And this may well be done, as regards the subject of to-day's discourse, by a " religious society " — assuming that religion means observ- ance ; by a society whose observance is not, as with most men, of rites and ceremonies, but of duty and self-control ; and by a society that is free, as all suppose, from the entanglement of any formulary or creed. An inquiry into matters of general belief is met by two difficulties — first, the influence of the law of heredity ; and then, the ten- dency of revolt against authority to pass to an extreme of negation. We may take it that a belief is inherited when a man, obstinately maintaining it, without proof, acts as if he believed the very contrary, without being able to see any incon- sistency in his conduct. Thousands of years ago, there grew up in the mind of the great Aryan family conceptions of the nature of death that, in some form or other, have prevailed ever since ; and this lapse of time is long enough to have built these conceptions into the cerebral structure of our race, to have made them an inseparable part of our own thought, and to have produced an intellectual bias most difficult to guide or overcome. Moreover, doubt is born of mental vigour, and it has often happened that when the strength of manhood has passed, a man's doubts have passed also, and his last state has been worse than the first. On the other hand, a man who has successfully dislodged some foolish creed of his childhood, or plucked from his breast a rooted supersition, may too stubbornly refuse to consider any fresh evidence that might afterwards be forthcoming, and in reaction against error may close his eyes to the truth. The nature and origin of what is called "vitality," the question of a previous existence, the best way of laying out life to advantage, cannot be dealt with now, even to the extent of a definition — and we must not say that death is the cessa- tion of life, since this is the very point on which issue is joined. Is the dissolution of the body the end of personal existence ? or is it nothing but the setting free of the soul to a personal life better and fuller than the present ? When a man lies wrapped in slumber, his mind is often busy in dreams, visiting distant places and holding converse with the absent, or meeting with all manner of adventure ; and when he is awakened he comes to himself, not all at once, but gradually and with bewilderment. How natural then was the notion that, in the visions of the night, the soul leaving the unconscious body, wanders at will and comes back to her undisturbed abode at leisure ; but if its rest is rudely broken, returns with difficulty and reluctance. And what when death happens to the slumberer, or when " Glamis hath murdered sleep " while the soul is yet on her dark wanderings ? What more natural than to suppose that the returning ghost ever haunts her former tenement, and that when she sadly revisits the glimpses of the moon, the frail spirit can appear no other- wise than shaped in the familiar form and clad in the garments of the flesh, an astral body, dim and intangible. To most men, however, and for the most part, the spirit was invisible. Whatever it was that endowed the material frame with its qualities of consciousness and volition, whatever it was that withdrew at the moment of death, or wandered in the hours of sleep, it was invisible. Of what, then, could it consist ? When this question was asked for the first time, men spoke only of four elements, fire, air, water, and earth ; and B 2 of these none was invisible but air. Upon air, too, life was dependent as much as upon food. Material food nourished the material body, but the invisible mind fed upon the viewless air. That man might become a living soul, God breathed into him the breath of life. The germs of such notions can be found in the beginnings of language. Allied to the Sanscrit an to breathe, the Greeks had avefio<; = wmd, and the Latins anima = the soul. Similarly from fvX^ = to breathe, grew -^vxv = the deathless principle ; and the organs of respiration were its abode. But as fresh psychological dis- tin(5tions were made, and as a knowledge of anatomy was gained, more names were required. It was noticed that after death, although the veins are full, the arteries of the body are usually found empty ; and it was conjedtured that they were occupied during life by a subtler air, conveyed to them from the lungs, where it was elaborated ; and dprTjpia, originally the name of the windpipe, became the name of these blood vessels. Uvevfia, which means "wind" and "breath," was the term used by the Greeks to designate this subtler air, the higher or reasoning soul, as then distinguished from -^vxv, the lower or animal soul, while the Latins called it spiritus, or spirit, from spiro = to breathe. Thus, we are able to see how among Aryan races a belief in mind as an entity, and in its separable- ness from the body, first began. But the Greek philosophers were entangled in the subtleties of language, increased for them by the fact that they knew none but their own. Their arguments, therefore, were often little better than verbal juggles. They thought that whatever had a name must have an existence, and that numbers were beings. The doctrine of the eternity of the soul was based on the doctrine of the eternity of ideas. An abstract self-existent " beauty " was the cause of the beautiful, and, in arithmetic, the self-existent prin- ciple " oddness " was the reason why a number was "odd." A principle, they maintained, could not accept its opposite, and if two odd numbers were added together to make an even sum, " oddness" was not destroyed, it retired. In the closing hours of the life of Socrates, as told in the most pathetic of all stories, when his friends with resistless logic had refuted his arguments for immortality one by one, and a sudden consterna- tion had seized them, that what they had trusted so long had failed them at the proof, the undaunted philosopher fell back upon this last reason as altogether conclusive of the question. "What makes the body alive?" he asked. "The soul," was the reply. " So that it is she that brings life to the body?" "Yes." "What is the opposite to life?" " Death." " But the soul cannot accept the opposite of what it brings ; and what is that principle which does not admit of death?" "The immortal." "But as the soul cannot accept its opposite, which is death, therefore she must be immortal ? " " Yes, Socrates," was the reply, "that is abundantly proved." And so, summed up in one sentence, the supreme argument came to this — the soul was immortal because ideas, like those of " oddness " and of " beauty," were, in their belief, eternal. But it was necessary to go farther ; for if the soul is an entity, or a group of entities, a corporeal abode must be assigned to it. Thus Plato (B.C. 388) speaks of reason, residing in the skull, as the cranial soul ; of courage and energy, residing in the chest, as the pectoral soul ; and of appetite, as the abdominal soul. Reason, the charioteer, drove two horses, the twin soul of emotion, one docile, the other capricious. Aristotle (b.c. 334), with much keenness and clearness, anticipated, in large mea- sure, the better knowledge of to-day. We are accustomed to distinguish the vertebrate organism into two portions, the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious was first evolved, with its involuntary nervous and muscular organs, concerned with growth and nutrition. This portion Aristotle called the abode of the Nutritive Soul, the ^/^f^??, which pro- vides, he says, for the " preservation of the individual, and for the continuance of the race." On the other hand, the conscious portion, evolved in later times, with its voluntary nervous and muscular organs, concerned with intelligence and will, Aristotle called the abode of the Rational Soul, the Trvevfia. And it is a curious thing that St. Paul, hundreds of years later, showed himself to have had some acquaintance with these early speculations, when he wrote to the Corinthians about a aoj/iia ^^v)(^lk6v, or a body concerned with the nutritive energy, and a aco/xa Trvev/j^ariKov or a body concerned with the rational energy ; but then he goes on to assert that whereas, at death, the part of the body that displays nutritive energy perishes, the other part that displays rational energy does not perish, but will come up again out of the earth at the last day. Aristotle, on the contrary, declared that " body " is the correlate of " soul," and that the soul cannot be without a body ; or, in modern language, matter is the correlate of force, and force cannot be conceived of as acting irrespectively of matter. At the time when these philosophical discussions took place, belief in a future state of rewards and punishments had already grown up in all parts of the civilized world. So much so, that Epicurus (b.c. 310) protested that the chief miseries of life arose, not from bodily pains, but partly from the delusions of mistaken hope, and partly from the delusions of fear, especially the fear of the gods and of eternal sufferings after death, as announced by prophets and poets ; against whom he maintained that death was a permanent extinction of consciousness. It is probable that the most definite of such ideas came from the East, where the Hindus had evolved the doctrine of metempsychosis, which was received by Pythagoras, by Plato, and apparently by the Druids, who all taught that the spirit meets her deserts in another life and in other bodies. Indeed, the previous existence of the soul was regarded by the Socratic school as an almost self-evident truth ; at any rate, as one capable of conclusive proof. They had no doubt whatever as to their existence before birth ; their only difficulty was as to their existence after death — the controversy was whether the soul was re-incarnated, or was rendered back to the eternal spirit of the universe. And Cicero declared that though in reading certain arguments in favour of a personal future, he felt inclined to assent, his half-formed conviftion vanished as soon as he closed the book. But leaving our own Aryan kins- men, and turning to an alien race and religion, we find in the sacred writings of the Jews the same evolution of thought. " Who knoweth the spirit of man, whether it goeth upwards?" asked an inquiring Hebrew, " and the spirit of the beast, whether it goeth downwards to the earth ? " That in after times they were sorely exercised by speculations on immortality is shown by the existence of the Sadducean sedt, who denied it. But Archbishop Whately found it an easy matter to prove that whereas the teaching of Moses was diredlly contrary to the doctrine of a future state of retribution, *' any belief in it that had sprung up at the time of Christ was the gradual result of general causes, and was in no way due to any utterances of the later prophets." But all speculation came to a speedy end with the spread of Christianity. Immortality was preached as a thing beyond any question. But associated with this dodtrine and preached with it as equally beyond question were two others : the resur- rection of the body, and the provision of a place of torment. How definite and realistic were the conceptions throughout Christendom, for 1,500 years, of the regions called heaven and hell we learn by the paintings and the homilies that every- where described them. Of late years, however, a great deal has been done to attenuate the worse part of these doctrines. A refuse-heap outside Jerusalem is made to account for the undying worm and the unquenchable fire ; and it is urged that the word eternal may mean only " enduring." But there are still left a few awkward passages that cannot be charmed away even by the magic of an Archdeacon's amiable suggestions : notably, the doom of evil-doers, to be pronounced by Christ, when he shall sit on his throne of judgment, and shall say, as the New Version has it, " Depart from me, under a curse, into the eternal fire, which is prepared for the devil and his angels," Indeed, modern apologists are placed in an uncomfortable dilemma ; for unless such words as these are true, they are cruelly misleading, and are responsible for a terror the direst and grimmest that ever affrighted the unhappy soul of man. But it is further sought to attenuate the other do(5trine professed by Churchmen every Sunday — a belief in the resurrection of the body ; though it is beyond doubt that, to use Archbishop Whately's words, '* the Christian's hope, as founded on the gospel is the resurrection of the body — a doctrine," he candidly adds, " which seems never to have occurred to any of the heathen." This matter is worth a moment's consideration. The Greek term veKp6^«* Introductory Meditation. W'E all believe that in the beginning of the present order of things, the material system, of which we form a part, was one vast undivided fiery cloud. But the unity that existed then exists yet, in spite of appa- rent separation. Invisible bonds still bind the planets together. The force of gravity, more mysterious than that of vitality, links every atom of this globe to the atoms of all other globes, however remote. The ships of every ocean float on tides , raised by this far-reaching strength, and all the magnetic needles on earth tremble as flames of hydrogen burst forth upon the sun. It is the sun whose heat stirs our atmosphere into storms. He is the prince of the power of the air. It is his angelic light that breathes into the dead matter of to-day the breath of life, and the 700,000,000,000,000 in a second of his inconceivable vibrations were far surpassed in energy when he and the earth were young. Nor need there be even a material severance of one globe from another. For if the law that governs the expansion of gases holds good in the highest altitudes, the air that sur- rounds us is bounded by no surface, but spreads outwards with increasing tenuity, till it makes actual contact with the thinly- extended atmospheres of other planets in the interplanetary spaces. Daily, too, there come to us myriads of messengers from without. Hourly they fall, these visitors from afar. Some, dissipated by the heat of inrush, vanish like a lightning flash ; some, fused to the core, yet reach the earth ; and some safely descend that still retain in their interior the utter cold of cosmical space. Now we know that many of the germs of life, easily destroyed by heat, cannot be killed by cold. May we suppose that such a meteorite — that of all the meteorites that ever fall, one only in a million years — should come hither so freighted ? Any germs hidden in its crevices would be secure B 2 i8 from combustion, while those on its surface, long before the denser region of the atmosphere was reached and a destrudtive heat produced, would be blown away at the first breath of the thinnest outer air, and would slowly alight on the surface of the soil. There are some meteorites, however, that do not reach the earth. They enter a little way into our atmosphere, are delayed a little in their progress, but yet effect their escape, and continue their path through space, though with an altered course and a retarded velocity. Now, the germs of some terrestrial organisms are so smalt as to be revealed by no microscope, and so light as to occupy days in falling one inch in a still chamber. May we suppose that during the a6tion of a circular storm,, caught by the uprush of a huge column of air in the centre of a cyclone, the minutest of all germs can be wafted to the top- most layers of our atmosphere, drawn within the attraction of some passing meteorite and hurried off to sow a barren world with life, to reinforce a fruitful one with a new vigour, or to curse it with a new disease ? In any case, let us recognise the faft that we form aru integral part of a material system that is one and indivisible ; . though the unity that includes all things, is itself a superlative plurality. Discourse. The nature of life is, of all controverted questions, the most difficult and the most obscure. It is difficult, for it involves abstruse and technical research ; whilst its obscurity, as we are often told, lies in this, that " all our knowledge is a " knowledge of states of consciousness," and that "'we can be " sure of only two things — that we are, and that we think/'' Moreover, as a corollary to this, we are further informed that we have no proof whatever of the existence of external objecfts; that though we may talk of seeing a table, the table is nothing but a modification of the mind ; and that though we may speak of the mind, this itself is only a manifestation of the Absolute. Happily for us, we have escaped from this ghastly jungle, because we have escaped from continual introspecftion. We have come, in faft, to distrust the deliverance of our own con- sciousness until it has been corroborated by that of our fellows, to whom we appeal to know if what is white and heavy to us is also heavy and white to them. And we have learned at last to detedl, and even to eliminate, what is called " the personal " equation," the irreducible minimum of error dependent upon emotional disturbance, and upon defe(5ts in our own organs of 19 sensation. So that we will, if you please, amend this account by saying that knowledge consists of inferences drawn from states of consciousness; and then we will assert that the first and surest inference is the objedtive existence of matter and force, the reality of an external world. But now, having secured an environment, the question arises as to its origin. Those persons who tell us that the earth rests on an elephant, and that the elephant stands on a tortoise, are not at all disconcerted by further inquiries, for they add that the tortoise they speak of is self-sustained. So, those who declare that all force is volitional, and that all volition is personal, are quite content to reply, to every ob- jection, that the person they speak of is self-existent. Put into a single sentence, their esteemed explanation of all things appears to be this — that at some time, and in some manner, by some volition of some competent person, something was made out of nothing. But if postulates of any kind are to be urged, and postu- lates of some kind are necessary, the simplest would seem to be these two — resolvable perhaps into one — the eternity of matter and the persistence of energy. As we contemplate the various associations of matter, and the various groups of energy, that we see around us, we are accustomed to make a grand distinction between those we call dead and those we call living. In everything that lives we find an assemblage of matter, constant in composition, familiarly known as protoplasm ; together with a display of energies, constant in character, familiarly known as life. The materials of protoplasm are carbon, the most obstinately solid substance, and hydrogen, the most obstinately gaseous ; oxygen, which possesses almost universal affinity, and nitrogen, which has almost no affinities at all ; together with phosphorus and sulphur, both recognised by strangely mobile properties. The energies of protoplasm, or the vital forces, are movement, the basis of work ; and growth, the basis of reprodu(5tion. But protoplasm, like any other matter, is unable to alter its state of motion or of rest, unless under some influence from without. The force discharged as work or as growth has been previously admitted as food. If this were not so, if the changes in living stuff were strictly spontaneous, we should find everywhere a causeless evolution of energy, followed, in the event of death, by its total destruction ; which reason cannot admit. Life, then, as exhibited in " fitly disposed matter," is not an entity ; it is a performance. It is the process whereby the 20 movement and growth of protoplasm are maintained in response- to external forces which, in this connedlion, are called stimuli. The stage or scene of the transaftion called life is the sub- stance called protoplasm — transparent, viscid, structureless — which exists only in minute masses, for the most part beyond the reach of the unassisted eye. These protoplasmic units doubtless owe their smallness to natural selection, as being best suited to molecular change, to the reception of ethereal vibrations, to the absorption of nutriment, and to the require- ments of growth. The origin of protoplasm has been the occasion of niuch controversy, and the subje(5t of many experiments. Did it arise through the interaftion of matter and energy, or was it made and set agoing by miracle ? Now, as was once well said, "the proposition that a given " thing has been created, even if true, is not capable of proof.. " By the nature of the case, direct evidence of the facft cannot " be obtained. And the only possible indirect evidence is not " obtainable either. For it cannot be proved that natural' " agencies are incompetent to cause the existence of anything.- " The most that can be proved is that no known natural cause " is competent to do so ; but this would be a proof of our own " ignorance, and not of the incompetence of nature." Suppose a man with a measure of corn, a little phosphate of lime, and a suitable temperature, had tried to generate a horse in a stable. Suppose such an observer, having failed tO' accomplish this, had "worked out the life history" of this animal, and had discovered that it never arises spontaneously,., but is always produced by pre-existent horses. Or suppose him to have worked out the life-history of a bacterium, to have ascertained that it never springs into being out of warm turnip-juice; but that it is, like the horse, generated by organisms of its own kind. He would doubtless be right in coming to the general conclusion that the capacity for life is obtained by inheritance. But could he justly infer from these researches that a natural origin of living matter, however remote, is impossible ? Because we know that the pro- genitors of the horse were not always horses, and we may be sure that the ancestors of the batterium were not always bafteria. The farther we go back into the past, the simpler are the forms in which life appears; and the inference is obvious that protoplasm, the basis of the life of all organisms, must itself have been subjedt to an evolution of incalculable duration. All animal life depends, in the last resort, on vegetable life. 21 Therefore, in the final analysis, all the living matter of the world has descended from sun-beshone particles of protoplasm, and without the pulse of solar light would soon wither away. If we watch a growing plant in an aquarium, exposed to the rays of the sun, we shall see a stream of oxygen bubbling to the surface as, in response to the stimulus of intense vibrations, the molecules of carbon are piled one upon another. Vegetable protoplasm is the matter which moves, like the vane of a radiometer, when smitten by the ethereal undu- lations. Thus irradiated, it stores up the inconceivable velocities of light in a form of tension, to be subsequently liberated as heat, as motion, as work done in tissue-building, or as that kind of force which we call vis nervosa ; and which, by the polar behaviour of germinal matter, by movements of division and of repulsion, by the structural arrangements of vertebrates, by the galvanic discharges of certain animals, suggests a slowly adting ele(5tricity — not gliding on the surface, or running swiftly through metallic conductors; but entangled, as it were, in complex molecular agitations. Although protoplasm exists only in minute masses, great multitudes of these are enabled to live in a co-operative union, chiefly by such beneficial adaptations of their waste produ(5ts as natural selection has gradually established. The shell of a mollusc and the stem of a tree are advantageous allocations of effete materials. So supported, crowds of tender masses of living stuff are associated in a common vitality. Indeed, one fifth part of the human body consists of proto- plasm, and when only a speck of this substance, exposed to irregular changes of heat and nutriment, will yet display the wonderful read;ions of life, what may not be possible to a quantity many pounds in weight, surrounded by a high and even temperature, stretched out amid streams of richest food, supplied with special surfaces like the eye and ear to correlate it with its environment, and stored with inherited proclivities, the transmitted results of protoplasmic experiences gathered in all times both recent and remote. But a colony like this could never have been evolved with- out some means of intercommunication — without a concentration of protoplasmic vigour in nerve-cells, kept in sympathy with each other by a nerve-current, the vis nervosa. At an early period of development the nerve-cells are situated very closely together, but afterwards, while some of them are aggregated into centres, others are gradually separated one from another, and lie at a considerable distance from the surface of the organ- ism. , But they are all conne(5ted by means of the nerves, in a series of closed circuits, along which the vis nervosa travels in such 22 wise that a change in the molecular agitations of any nerve- cell, situated in any part of the body, is practically reproduced by nerve-cells situated in any other part, and especially by those in the brain — widely separated nerve-cells being made to vibrate, as it were, in unison, in a way that reminds us of telephonic plates and wires. So that it is the same thing to the protoplasm of the brain as if it lay on the eye or the ear ; or to the protoplasm that excites the muscle of the foot as if it dwelt in the tip of the finger. And this is well shown by a decapitated frog, for when one leg is pinched, the other is raised and begins to rub the injured spot. In a submarine cable the energy flows in a sort of undula- tion. In the fifth part of a second after contact is made in England, the current begins to be perceptible in Newfoundland; but not till the end of three seconds does the wave, that will ultimately fill the circuit, attain its greatest amplitude. The vis nervosa, flowing from some sense-organ, the skin, the eye, the ear, and travelling with comparative slowness, at a rate perhaps of lOO feet in a second, likewise produces its effects not all at once, but in' a similar undulation of energy ; and when this wave reaches the brain, its velocity is reduced to about eight feet in a second. There is a tendency, therefore, to prolong in the interior of the body molecular agitations originated on the surface ; so that the excitement of a nerve- change actually persists after the stimulus is withdrawn. In this way, sensations become, as it were, registered in the brain. As long as they persist they are the materials for memory ; and when they are consciously remembered they constitute what we call ideas. And now we have reached the central problem of life ; for to learn the secret of memory is to read the riddle of mind. What is memory? we ask, and what is that which remembers? The simplest as well as the profoundest case of memory lies in the fact of heredity ; the transmission of proclivities from one protoplasmic unit to another, through countless genera- tions. If the protoplasmic unit were conscious, its inherited tendency would be a fixed or permanent idea. A more familiar but less fundamental case of memory can be observed in protoplasmic colonies. When an organism has frequently received two or more stimuli together, or in close succession, the persisting molecular responses remain asso- ciated in the brain, so that the subsequent renewal of one of these stimuli arouses the fading response to the other. A bee, for example, has tasted the nectar of blue flowers. When the coloured petal catches the insecTt's eye, there ensues a revival of the molecular agitations that were originally excited by the 23 flavour of honey. If the bee now flies to the flower, the action is due not only to the memory, or persistence, of two former nerve-states, but to their persistence in association, so that both are revived by one stimulus ; the sight of the flower revives the memory of blueness, and it revives the memory of nectar too. If the insect's protoplasm were conscious, we should say that the bee had an idea of honey, and inferred its situation from the hue of the flower. When portions of a dog's brain are washed away by a jet of water, the animal can still see surrounding objects, but has lost all recolleftion of their meaning, except the most profound one, that of their inertia. The dog makes no distinction between a block of wood and a piece of bread, but regards both as obstacles to be avoided ; and even this recolle6tion vanishes when further portions of the brain are removed. In vertebrates, then, it is the cerebral protoplasm that remembers ; and memories are the materials for thought. A dog that listens to a distant foot-fall, and presently runs forth to meet his unseen master, has gone through a thinking pro- cess, and has drawn an inference. This may be only intuitional, but if the dog is capable of conscious thought, his inference is an a6t of reason. And, here must be noticed the important ia.6i that thought and consciousness are by no means the same thing. The dis- tinction is recognised in the phrase " unconscious cerebration." Unconscious mental operations are not confined to the sleeping state, since, in the "brown study" of waking hours, during a long train of intense thought, we are not only altogether un- conscious at the time, but afterwards are often unable to recall the subject of our cogitations. And further, sensation and consciousness are by no means the same thing. A sensation is the nerve-change produced in an organ of special sense by an external stimulus. The resistance that compresses the skin, the fragrant substance that visits the nostril, produce a specific nerve-change. Such changes, such sensations, constantly occur, of which we are totally unobservant. But sounds that fall unheeded on the ear, or scenes that pass unnoticed before the eye, are never- theless transmitted to the brain, and recorded in cerebral nerve-cells ; it may be to startle us thereafter by incongruous thoughts, or to trouble us with monstrous dreams. It is also noteworthy that ideas, unless quickened by repeated sensations, become gradually less distindl and less exaft. There is often a great want of correspondence between the reality and our recolle(5lion of it, when some place or person, long unseen, is visited again. 24 Sometimes, too, we are perplexed by the fancy that a. conversation, to which we are hstening, we have heard before,, long ago, as it were in a previous existence. The explanation of this feeling is that our consciousness has suffered a momentary lapse ; and presently, on its revival, the voices, come to us as a reminiscence ; and the mind cannot easily gauge the remoteness of a bygone event. Before memory can awake into consciousness, it must be linked with some aftual sensation, and before a sensation can be consciously considered, it must be associated with memory. But memories would be of little use unless they were co- ordinated. We could not be properly aware, for example, of a. musical performance, however perfectly we might remember the individual notes, if we failed to associate together those that had already been uttered, or if we were unable to join this, co-ordinated recolleftion with the sounds ©f the moment. Neither in memory alone is there consciousness, nor in sensa- tion alone ; but when these two mingle, at that instant some degree of consciousness emerges. Consciousness, then, is a " variable," fluftuating between zero and a high sense of cerebral change ; its degree is dependent on the quantities and areas of brain-protoplasm that happen to be in a state of activity, and they are never all adlive at once ; and it consists of co-ordinated memory vibrating in response to actual sensation. But we are aware of more than thoughts and sense-changes, we are conscious of emotions — that is to say, of mental pertur- bations that have their root in pleasures and pains. What,, then, are these, and how did they originate ? It is a law for all sentient things that stimuli which tend to the well-being of an organism, or the enlargement of its life, excite in the protoplasmic units what are called " movements of aggression," a stepping towards the favouring environment — as the rootlet follows moisture, as the flower turns to the sun, as the sea-anemone opens its tentacles to the inflowing tide. But these reactions are not necessarily pleasurable. On the other hand, stimuli that tend to ill-being, or the abridgment of life, excite "movements of regression" or of repulsion — a stepping from, or a pushing away, the unfavouring circumstance. I3ut these rea(5lions are not necessarily painfuL Now, it is clear that if " movements of aggression " — those excited by beneficial stimuli — were, by some structural varia- tion, to be associated in any organism with a diffusive thrill or vibration, the advantageous rea(5lions of such an individual would be thereby augmented, and it would be helped in its struggle for existence. 25 A peculiarity of this kind, increased by natural selecfliorr and transmitted by heredity, would result in what we call pleasure. In a similar way, it would be of service to an organism if its " movements of regression " became associated with a painful agitation ; its avoidance of injurious influences would thereby be more energetic and more successful. That pleasure and pain arose in some accidental variations in protoplasmic response, is indicated by the fadt that we find extreme differences in the amount of distress or of delight that different persons experience from the same cause. It has been observed, too, that when a portion of the human brain is impaired by injury or disease, stimulation of the skin, as by pinching or burning, produces a sensation of touch or of warmth, but nothing more ; tJie organism can fed, but cannot feel pain. And it has been further noticed that, in such a case, the response to the stimulus, though painless, is more widely diffused, and may even show itself in convulsive movements. The portion of the brain that was impaired had therefore an " inhibitory " or restraining function, obstrufting the flow of the vis nervosa, like a resistance introduced into an elec^trical circuit. Pain answers to a sensation of " inhibition " or restraint; and this is why feelings of discomfort are lessened by a free discharge of nerve force, whether by bodily movements or by mental occupation. We may say, then, that emotions are a form of protoplas- mic perturbation ; that they are produced by co-ordinated memories of pleasures or pains ; and that they emerge into consciousness when linked with ac^tual sensations. The song of a bird, the sportiveness of young animals, human exultation : these are emotional phases of " move- " ments of aggression," just as collapse of body and remorse of mind represent those emotions that originated in states of ill-being. We may gladly believe, however, that the writhing of an injured worm and the quivering of a wounded insert are only " movements of regression.'' These creatures feel, but do not feel pain. With vertebrates the case is different. Probabl3an most of them the " inhibitory centre " exists, the mechanism for the producTtion of conscious distress ; though in the humbler orders, as with infants, the resistance is so imperfecft that convulsions are apt to occur instead of pain. Life makes its next grand advance in the evolution of language, that is in the evolution of the various means whereby animals indicate to each other their mental states. Emotional language is almost universal, for it is employed even b}' insedts. It is capable of arousing in those who receive it the feeling it 26 expresses, and, consequently, of occasioning on their part corresponding movements, "aggressive" or "regressive." In this ia6t we see the origin of sympathy, of the altruistic impulse : the delight in others' joy, and the desire to succour those in distress. But intellectual language, which is used to indicate thought, as distincft from emotion, is confined to the higher vertebrates, and has reached its last development in the acquisition by man of the faculty of speech and writing. That this is a recent acquirement is shown by the fa(5l that it is " unilateral ; " the protoplasmic centre which corresponds to it exists only in the left hemisphere of the brain. It is shown, too, in this that the function is not developed without much assistance ; we require to be taught both to speak and to write. A thought expressed, has the value of a proposition, and a proposition is the unit of intelleftual language. A concrete proposition, such as "food is here," can be expressed by emotional language. But abstract propositions not only require words for their expression, they cannot even be thought without verbal signs. Hence the origin of the faculty of speech marks the dawn of abstracft thought, and until words can be used, the feeling of " self-consciousness " is impossible as far as it rests on abstradt considerations of personal •identity. A voluntary ac5l is the response of the whole organism, of the whole protoplasmic colony, to some stimulus. When the aft is the result of choice, it takes place at the close of an interval sufficiently long for memories to be revived, and so it depends partly upon inherited proclivities and partly upon recoUeftions of the effects of previous aftions. When a chick is hatched artificially, though it possesses the faculty of feeding, it frequently needs help to bring its inherited powers into relation with its environment. It may not at first pick up the corn that is thrown to it. In this event, the poultry-keeper, tapping on the floor with the tip of his finger, makes a noise like the cluck of a hen. Thus he stimulates an adt of unconscious protoplasmic memory. Sounds that the indivi- dual chick never heard before, nevertheless awaken a proclivity acquired long ages ago, and transmitted by countless genera- tions of ancestors. Less mature than the brain of a bird is that of an infant at its birth. The faculties of a child awake, one after another, in the order, it would seem, of their original evolution. Touch and taste are present from the first, but hearing does not come till the fourth day. The pupils reacft to light in an hour, and i 20 Oi Thomas Carlyle ii 5 o; The Wandering Jew . . »i 4 6 A Necklace of Stories >i 4 Republican Superstitions >) 2 6 Farewell Discourses . . M 2 1 . CONWAY, M.A. Farewell Discourses, in 7 separate Numbers, A Gnostic's Apology, The Gift and the Altar, Of One Risen and Unrecognised, The Criminal Law, Substitutes for Hell, The Palace of Delight, and Apologia . . . . . . each A Charge to be kept at South Place Intellectual Suicide The First Love Again The Religion of Humanity The Rising Generation . . The Oath and its Ethics . . Tennyson's " Despair " .. Life and Death of Garfield 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 LESSONS FOR THE DAY. Vols. I. d- II. Discourses Delivered at South Place Chapel by Moncure D. Conway, M.A. Price 3s. per vol. Each containing 26 Nos., neatly bound in cloth. Most of ths ISIumhers may still he had, price Id. each. By Dr. Andrew Wilson, r.R.S.E.,F.L.S., Studies, chiefly Net. s. d. Leisure Time Biological.. .. .. ..5 Chapters on Evolution . . ..63 Leaves from a Naturalist's Note Book 2 1 Wild Animals : their Haunts and Habits . . . . . . ..63 The Student's Guide to Zoology . . 5 5 Elements of Zoology . . ..42 Manual of Health Science. . .. 2 1 Sketches of Animal Life . . ..13 Common Accidents, and How to Treat Them 13 Zoology . . . . . . . . 1 . 3 Animal Physiology . . . . 10 ■Guide to the Study of Flowers . . 6 The Religious Aspects of Health . . 2 Inheritances . . . . . . ..02 In Pastures Green . . . . ..02 What is Religion ? 2 The Hopes of Liberalism . . ..02 By Arthur W. Hutton, M.A. Early Footsteps and their Guidance 2 By Frederic Harrison, M.A. Pantheism and Cosmic Emotion. . Politics and a Human Religion . . By A. J. Ellis, B.A., F.R.S., &c., &c. Salvation . . . . . . . . Truth Speculation . . . . . . . . Duty The Dyer's Hand The above Five Discourses in One Vol., bound ill cloth. Is. On Discussion . . . . ..03 Comte's Religion of Humanity . . 4 By Rev. P. H. Wicksteed, M.A. Going Through and Getting Over . . 2 By W. C. CouPLAND, M.A. The Conduct of Life The Spirit of Goethe's Faust By F. Sydney Morris. Agnosticism versus Dogmatism . . The Shadow and Sunshine of Life By James Oliphant, M.A. The Essence of Religion . . By J. Allanson Picton, M.A., M. The Transfiguration of Religion . . Six Lectures on " The Conflict of Oligarchy and Democracy," vols., bound in cloth . . Six Lectures on " Lessons from the Rise and Fall of the English Commonwealth," vols., bound in cloth By Karl Pearson, M.A. Enthusiasm of the Market-place and of the Study. . By Edward Clodd. Science and the Emotions By Rev. T. W. Freckelton. The Modern Analogue of the Ancient Prophet . . By Geo. Jacob Holyoake. Hostile and Generous Toleration . . By John Robertson. Emotion in History : a Glance into the Springs of Progress. . By Leslie Stephen. What is Materialism ? By H. C. March, M.D., Lond. Life and Death. Part I. — Death ,, ,, II.— Life Darwinism & the Evolution of Man s. d 2 6 1 2 2 p. 2 1 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 6 General Conference Thinkers . . of Liberal 1 HYMNS AND ANTHEMS. Cloth, Jimp, Is. ; Cloth, boards, red ed(jes, 2s. ; Roan, gilt edijes, 3.s, No. 12.] 5? iitjj IP 1 aa |ltl igious § o ti ctij FINSBURY, B.C. THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STORY OF FAUST. « WITH TWO READINGS FROM GOETHE AND CARLYLE. A DISCOURSE DELIVERED IN SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C., BY CHARLES GASKELL HIGGINSON, AI.A. Loud., of Owen's College, Manchester. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. PRINTED BY W. KING AKD SELL, 12, GOUGH SQUARE, FLEET STREET, LONDON. THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STORY OF FAUST. — o->- Introductory Reading.* Or hast thou forgotten Paris and Voltaire ? How the aged, withered man, though but a sceptic, mocker, and miUinery Court- poet, yet because even he seemed the wisest, best, could drag mankind at his chariot-wheels, so that princes coveted a smile from him, and the loveliest of France would have laid their hair beneath his feet ! All Paris was one vast Temple of Hero-Worship ; though their Divinity, moreover, was of feature too apish. But if such things were done in the dry tree, what will be done in the green ? If in the most parched season of Man's History, in the most parched spot of Europe, when Parisian life was at best but a scientific Hortus Siccus bedizened with some Italian gumflowers, such virtue could come out of it ; what is it to be looked for when life again waves leafy and bloomy, and your Hero-Divinity shall have nothing ape-like, but be wholly human ? Know that there is in man a quite indestrudfible reverence for whatsoever holds of Heaven, or even plausibly counterfeits such holding. Show the dullest clodpole, show the haughtiest featherhead that a soul higher than himself is actually here ; were his knees stiffened into brass, he must doum and worship. There is no Church sayest thou ? The voice of Prophecy has gone dumb ? This is even what I dispute ; but, in any case, hast thou not still preaching enough ? A preaching friar settles himself in every village, and builds a pulpit which he calls Newspaper, Therefrom he preaches what most momentous dodlrine is in him, for man's salvation ; and dost not thou listen and believe ? Look well, thou seest everywhere a new Clergy of the Mendicant Orders, some bare-footed, some almost bare-backed, fashion itself into * From Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus ; " the latter part of the Chapter called " Organic Filaments." 30 shape, and teach and preach zealously enough for copper alms and the love of God. These break in pieces the ancient idols, and, though themselves too often reprobate, as idol-breakers are wont to be, mark out the sites of new Churches, where the true God-ordained that are to follow may find audience and minister. Said I not, before the old skin was shed, the new had formed itself beneath it ? But there is no Religion. Fool ! I tell thee there is. Hast thou well considered all that lies in this immeasurable froth-ocean we name Literature ? Fragments of a genuine Church-Homiletic lie scattered there, which Time will assort ; na}', fractions even of a liturgy could I point out. And knowest thou no Prophet, even in the vesture, environment, and dialecft of this age ? None to whom the Godlike had revealed itself, through all meanest and highest forms of the Common, and by him been again prophetically revealed ; in whose inspired melody, even in these rag-gathering and rag-burning days, man's life again begins, were it but afar oft, to be divine ? Knowest thou none such ? I know him, and name him — Goethe. But thou as yet standest in no temple, joinest in no psalm- worship, feelest well that, where there is no ministering Priest, the people perish. Be of comfort ! Thou art not alone if thou have faith. Spake we not of a Communion of Saints, unseen, yet not unreal, accompanying and, brother-like, embracing thee, so thou be worthy ? Their heroic sufferings rise up melodiously together to Heaven, out of all lands and out of all times, as a sacred Misereie ; their heroic actions also, as a boundless, everlasting Psalm of Triumph. Neither say that thou hast now no symbol of the God- like. Is not God's Universe a symbol of the God-like ? Is not Immensity a Temple ? Is not Man's History, and Men's History, a perpetual Evangel ? Listen, and for organ-music thou wilt ever, as of old, hear the Morning Stars sing together. Second Reading.* (a) From the Prologue in Heaven, after the Song of Archangels. Mephis. : Since Thou, O Lord, deign'st to approach again, And ask us how we do. in manner kindest, And heretofore to meet myself wert fain, Among Thy menials, now, my face Thou findest. Pardon, this troop I cannot follow after With lofty speech, though by them scorned and spurned : My pathos certainly would move Thy laughter, If Thou hadst not all merriment unlearned. Of suns and worlds I've nothing to be quoted ; How men torment themselves is all I've noted. The little god o' the world sticks to the same old wa}-, And is as whimsical as on Creation's day. * From Bayard Taylor's excellent Translation of Goethe's "Faust" (" Chandos Classics.") 31 The Lord Mephis. : The Lord : Mephis. : The Lord ]\Iephis. : The Lord Mephis. : The Lord Mephis. : The Lord Life somewhat better might content him, But for the gleam of heavenly light which Thou hast lent him : He calls it Reason — thence his power's increased To be far beastlier than any beast. Saving Thy Gracious Presence, he to me A long-legged grasshopper appears to be. That springing flies, and flying springs. And in the grass the same old ditty sings. Would he still lay among the grass he grows in ! Each bit of dung he seeks, to stick his nose in. Hast tnou then nothing more to mention ? Comest ever thus with ill intention ? Kindest nothmg right on earth, eternally? No, Lord ! I find things there still bad as they can be; Man's misery even to pity moves my nature ; I've scarce the heart to plague the wretched creature. Know'st Faust ? The Do(51:or Faust ? My servant, he. Forsooth ! He serves }'ou after strange devices : No earthly meat or drink the fool suffices : His spirit's lerment far aspireth ; Half conscious of his frenzied, crazed unrest, The fairest stars from Heaven he requireth, From earth the highest raptures and the best ; And all the near and far that he desireth. Fails to subdue the tumult of his breast. Though still confused his service unto me, I soon shall lead him to a clearer morning. Sees not the gardener, even while buds his tree. Both flower and fruit the future years adorning ? What will you bet ? There's still a chance to gain him ; If unto me full leave you give, Gently upon my road to train him ! As long as he on earth shall live, So long I make no prohibition. While Man's desires and aspirations stir He cannot choose but err. My thanks ! I find the dead no acquisition. And never cared to have them in my keeping, I much prefer the cheeks where ruddy blood is leaping, And when a corpse approaches, close my house : It goes with me as with the cat the mouse. Enough ! What thou hast asked is granted, , Turn off this spirit from his fountain head. To trap him let thy snares be planted, And him with thee be downward led, 32 Then stand aba.shed when thou art forced to say A good man through obscurest aspiration Has yet an instinct of the one true way. Mephis. : Agreed ! But 'tis a short probation, About my bet I feel no trepidation. If I fulfil my expectation You'll let me triumph with a swelling breast ; Dust shall he eat, and with a zest. As did a certain snake, my near relation. The Lord : Therein thou'rt free, according to thy merits, The like of th.ee have never moved my hate, Of all the bold denying spirits The waggish knave least trouble doth create. Man's acftive nature, flagging, seeks too soon the level, Unqualified repose he learns to crave, Whence willingly the comrade him I gave Who works, excites, and must create, as Devil. (b) Faust's last speech, Part II., Act v. Faust now is very old and blind. Below the hills a marshy plain Infe(5t:s what I so long have been retrieving ; This stagnant pool likewise to drain W^ere now my latest and my best achieving. To many millions let me furnish soil. Though not secure, yet free to acftive toil ; Green, fertile fields, where men and herds go forth At once with comfort en the newest earth, And swiftly settled on the hill's firm base. Created by the bold, industrious race. A land like Paradise here, round about, Up to the brink the tide may roar without. And tho' it gnaw to burst with force the limit. By common impulse all unite to hem it. Yes ! To this thought I hold with firm persistence. The last result of wisdom stamps it true; He only earns his freedom and existence Who daily conquers them anew. Thus here, by dangers girt, shall glide away Of childhood, manhood, age, the vigorous day. And such a throng I fain would see,— Stand on free soil among a people free ! Then dared I hail the moment fleeing : " Ah ! still delay — thou art so fair ! " The traces cannot of my earthly being In aons perish, — they are there. In proud fore-feeling of such lofty bliss I now enjoy the highest moment, — this ! (Faust sinks back). 33 Discourse. I CHOOSE this subjecft for my morning's discourse in no critical spirit. Partly because, from this very platform, the master- piece of Goethe has been treated, in a course of ten popular le(5tures, with conspicuous ability, by a man whom nature, education, and familiarity with the German language, combine to make a specially competent exponent of the great German poet.* Yet one word I must say on a matter of criticism, because attempts are continually made in England and Ger- many to make the public believe that the first part of Faust is a complete work in itself, while the second part is merely an afterthought, and a bad one. After toiling enthusiastically through the poem in the original, and reading a fair amount of pleadings on both sides (viz., Blackie, Henry Morley, and Lewes on the one side, and Bayard Taylor and Coupland on the other), I must say that it is perfectly plain that Bayard Taylor and Coupland are right in regarding the first part as a fragment, and the second part as a fragment, and the two parts together as one whole. Since the publication of Mr. Coupland's book, I am glad to see that Professor Henry Morley and Messrs. Routledge have published the Second Part of Faust in English. This is something for those who called it a " feebler afterthought." The readers of their library can now judge for themselves. People have long been shy of the second part ; and I suppose that Mr. Irving is responsible for sustaining the widespread though wrong belief that the Faust story consists simply of the Gretchen episode. Under this belief, a friend of mine was truly sorry to hear that I meant to preach on the moral significance of the story of Faust. He thought it was such a bad significance. But the play, as a whole, is not of man's degradation, but of his improvement ; not of the descent, but the ascent of man. To all who can read truly this is plain. And if I have no wish to pose as a critic, still less would I be an esthete, reading and gloating over the most touching parts of the tragedy ; though that indeed could be profitalDly done by some people at some time and some place. But I would rather, if I can — and ! that I had eloquence to do it well ! — quicken you to hear the * See Coupland's " The Spirit of Goethe's Faust." Bell, ys. 6d. 34 inspiriting tramp of the stately march of tiie play's main adlion ; awaken you to the song that I heard underl}ing the Wagnerian orchestration of the great master; kindle you with some of the fire caught fromthe lamp of Genius itself. I know not, and I care little, if some professor of the Dryasdust school would find enough in my discourse to contradidl in large unreadable volumes. The poets have written for us all and stimulate our hearts and minds in various ways ; we hear each with his own ears, we speak each with his own lips; and if we cannot each hear or speak the whole message of the lavish creator, it is no matter ; w^e seleft, digest, and are strengthened by our own part. Now, just as for centuries the choice spirits of the times have read attentively another great poem not all unlike Goethe's, the book of Job ; and have felt that that book has kindled thoughts in them, that must come out to the multitudes that thronged listening for what was best on the Lord's Day ; so I take this work in this fulness of time, the Faust, far greater than the Job, and pass on to you the thoughts that it gives me of matters of deepest human concern. It would indeed be unpardonable if I made any cardinal error on matter of fac^ ; but within those limits my appeal is rather to the appreciative heart than to the critical understanding. We stand to-day as w^e stood when Goethe died, and Faust was first published as a whole, more than fifty years ago, in the most signal and urgent need of a great reconstru{5live social reform. Our society is badly diseased in its four main organs: in its capitalists or kings, or leaders of aftion; in its educators or priests, or leaders of thought ; in its women, or moral provi- dence ; in its workmen, or general providence. How^ is this reform to be brought about? One answer is common amongst the clergy, who find, for a wonder, their best advocate in Thomas Carlyle. That great man was disgusted at seeing rogues clamouring for and trying to lead social reforms, and vehemently exhorted individuals to mend themselves, and thereby make every man one villain the less. With this senti- ment I should be the last to quarrel ; I see clearly the paramount importance of personal influence in all parts of society. It is evident, from the very Cabinet itself down to those multitudes whom misery just fails completely to animalize; nay, it is plain in the animals themselves. But the modern knight-errant must not take the field in an odd helmet, an odd pair of greaves, with a mere sword or a mere shield ; he must be armed fully ; for there will be occasion for every weapon of offence and defence ; and so I dare not negledl: the other answer, which is now associated with Robert Owen's name. 35 that the individual villain can be reformed only by the ante- cedent reform of society as a whole. The strength of the Owenite position is well stated by Burns, " O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us," and by- Sydney Smith, who said that he would rather show twent\- what ought to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow his own showing. We are sounder critics of others than of our- selves, and are therefore better qualified to reform others than ourselves. So that even if every individual is personally a villain, he will, in the main, by precept and pressure, though not by example, tend to reform his villain society, and to redeem others from the villainy to which he clmgs himself. It is important not to be a rascal ; but even if one is, one can certainly push society to the good. The world owes many good things to men whose private life will not bear scrutiny. The fad is we must do both ; we must thrust with the lance of self-reform, and smite with the battle-axe of social reform. We must reform, at once, private life where we can ; and we must better public opinion and institutions where we can. We may study too much the influence of individual man on humanity; we may study too much the influence of humanity upon individual man. But I purposely leave the first matter for another occasion, and shall consider to-day the redeeming influence of the social state upon the individual, of humanity upon man. The Faust story, in one of its aspefts at any rate, is the story of the bettering of man by the pressure of the social state. It may be of an individual man, it may be of a certain epoch, it may be of Humanity herself; for as the individual man repeats in shorthand the life of the race, so also does this or that century, when the world seems new-born, run rapidly through all the stages of human evolution. You can interpret the poet now this way, now that ; and now and then, of course, you must give him freedom to go his own way, to chaff a few German literary critics, or a few geologists ; or to burst into most enthusiastic praise and regret for Byron, — all mere digressions. In the natural man there are two sets of impulses : some selfish or mainly selfish, some social and generous or mainly so, the selfish ones stronger than the social ones. The Chinese puzzle of man is to get the stronger selfish ones har- nessed in the service of the generous weaker ones. This could never be done, were it not for the fact that the social state is necessary to man, and that in that state the selfish impulses of individuals constantly clash ; and selfish individuals, even 36 with their own selfishness, crush the selfishness of others. On the other hand, the more that unselfishness becomes the general rule, the stronger the tribe or nation becomes ; and, since the fadt of living in society tends to crush selfishness and to foster unselfishness, the great problem is not desperate of solution. For societies selfishness is suicidal, and generosity is vitalizing. Thus society schools us from nature up the several degrees of grace. In the eighteenth century the foremost minds of Europe, backed in France by the masses, had made a clean slate of the past, so far as men could do it. The Church and the King were alike brushed aside, and with child-like faith our fore- runners trusted in the sublime instin(5ls of the natural man to carry out the ideal Utopia. Now, to do away with authority in Church and State is to make every man his own pope, and every man his own king. This is the main significance of the words Liberty, Equality, Rights of Man, and Private Judgment as used by our forerunners. The abolition of social control simply meant that the individual was thrown back on himself; and that meant the easy vidfory of the selfish over the unselfish impulses. Faust, the representative man, has sold himself to the Devil. From this condition redemption has to come again, somehow, by the pressure of the needs of social life. Here then you have Goethe's pi6ture. Faust is the revolu- tionary man, and because revolutionary under the power of the Devil, the Evil One, the selfish propensities, or what you will. Because he has cast off the old man of Catholicism, and put on the new man of the Revolution, he has gone back into earlier stages of human history, has become young again. He is alone with Mephistopheles. And here note the difference between Goethe and (say) St. James in their views of man. St, James (chap, iv.) gives man the credit of all his evil devices, and God (someone outside) the credit of all man's good devices. Goethe gives the man Faust the credit of all things good, and all his evil devices are imputed to an external Evil One. Really, both good and evil are to be imputed to man, since we cannot make any transcendental outsider effedlually responsible ; but the Christians took the gloomy view of man's nature, while the Revolutionists, equally charadleristically, took the over- cheerful view. Behold then the natural man with his over- bearing companion, the selfish instinft. And now comes the first step in the redemption. The next selfish passion, after hunger, is that of conjugal love in its lowest form ; in its lowest form it is completely selfish. To this passion Faust is driven, and there comes the 37 sad Gretchen episode which ever3'body knows, which on all grounds, indeed, I will not repeat. Yet it is from such base beginnings that the institution of the Family gradually rose ; and we may well take heart for the future of man when we see such a vicftory of Grace over Nature in the past. It is the charadteristic of the passion of love that, coarse as may be its first appeals, its subsequent appeals become purer and purer ; and although it may begin as the Devil's advocate, it changes its ground until it ends as the most powerful inspirer of good that we know. Under its influence we see Faust constantly improving and giving a moderately severe battle to Mephisto- pheles. Yet he is unsuccessful ; however, we feel that the vic5tory is of such a nature that Mephistopheles, like Pyrrhus of old, might say, "A few more such and I am undone." For along with the predatory instindlis of the natural man, there came a strong personal affection which was unselfish, a tender- ness which, when the selfish instincts had done their worst to the ruin and death of the beloved, bred a remorse so deep as to assure in the future that constancy and permanence which would establish what we now know as the Family. Here, then, we have the pressure of Family as the first redeeming force afting on the natural man. But man is obliged not only to form the home, but also to form the State. In the first d.6\ of the second part of " Faust" we find the hero still with Mephistopheles, plunged into political life. No doubt it is largely on selfish grounds that men form States. Each hopes less exposure to danger, longer life, greater plenty, and so forth ; in short, more happiness and less misery. Without such selfish appeals probably no State could have risen. But when once it is formed, the State, like the home, is a most powerful educator of men to unselfishness. In practical civic life we have to depend on each other, to give way to each other at every turn ; the people and their rulers must serve each other, must live in some rude kind of harmony. So we have Faust brought into a political crisis, over which he suc- cessfully tides the people in the very temporary and rough-and- ready manner of the praftical politician. Political life, then, is the second redeeming influence for the natural man against the Devil of his own natural overweight of selfishness. The life for self is stunted ; the life for others is enlarged. The second and third adts are taken up with the redeeming influence of art. Goethe here uses very skilfully the part of the old Faust story, which tells us that Faust, at imperial instigation, called up the form of Helen of Troy from the under-world. The fact that two a(?ts are used for the subjedl -^.s vJ of art, shows how highly Goethe rated the good influence of art upon the human soul. Good and moralizing I believe the influence of beauty to be ; but we must not be surprised if Goethe overrated it. The appeal of beauty is certainly sensuous and selfish to a great extent ; but truly, it is won- derful how the Greeks were able to invest their statues with so much of that kind of beauty which appeals not to sense but throuo^h sense, to whatever there is in us that can dance with joy when we see the brows of our fellows grow broad and high with noble thoughts, when we know of their dignity and daring, and at^ivity and strength, and joy and efficiency, and steady loyalty and faithful love. Yes ! the appeal of beauty, like that of political adfion, and of domestic affetlion, is on the side of grace, is regenerative ; since all the best art has glorified what is good ; nay, no art is really worthy of the name unless it is vitally moral. Even the illustrious vaunt of beauty itself is but a vaunt and a lie ; unless, as in the Greek statues, there gleam through the flesh the soul, through the natural beauty the beauty of holiness. Our whole life is full of association; we do not approach and admire the highest beauty because we think it a mere matter of line-juggling; nay, but beauty is the promise of good, and unless we believe that promise, it is no beauty to us. Would goodness be wooed for herself by the evil ones whom she wakens from their foolish dream, she must seem as well as be, and be clothed in the rich garb of beauty, that is her right. The Greeks knew that the beautiful was the natural ally of the good (see their word kalokagathos). Naturally, we are won to the good by the blaze of its attendant beauties. Nevertheless, the Faust is still attended by Mephistopheles. The sensuous and selfish basis of the lower forms of beauty's appeal is evident enough. In some so-called Art galleries such appeals of beauty are common. But, on the whole, the artist is indeed one of the great redeemers of the natural man. Will anyone be surprised to know that the next acT; of the play is taken up with war ? Yet war is a great school of morals, doubtless an indispensable one. It is an ethical kinder- garten. Mutual fidelity amongst large masses of men is so difficult a virtue, that nothing short of the fadt that other better disciplined men would come and cut them to pieces could generate it in any sufficient degree. True, men fight men in war; but it is better for group A B C D to fight group W X Y Z, and for each group to be perfectly friendly within its own limits, than for everyone to be against everyone else. It is something for A to be at one with B, C, and D ; for W to 39 be at one with X, Y, and Z. As a beginning therefore, war is good ; and the bigger the range of the alhes the better ; until one group may get the command of the whole known world, and be able to impose the custom of peace (" Pacis imponere morem." — Virgil). Such to some extent was the mission of Rome. Only unluckily we were not spiritually in condition to profit fully by it. War is one of the chief redeemers of man, through the necessity which it brings of forming societies larger and larger, of closest fidelity through life and death. Even now the soldier is justly taken as the model of the citizen, simply he has become permeated with the intent to die for others. But it is the citizen's duty not only to die, if need be, for others, but also to live for others. Industry is the bloodless war with the forces of external nature. Just as in war S6'//-defence and aggrandizement is at the bottom of the noble military structure, so also in industr}- Mephistopheles attends and assists Faust. Industry involves war for a while to defend it ; so that after offensive war may have ceased, defensive war becomes necessary, and remains necessary, to some extent, to the end of human history. Industry, though now much less truly social and civilized than war was in Roman or Catholic times, owing to the insanity of competition now dominant, is really and normally more social. The normal spirit of industry is not competition, any more than the normal warrior is the franc-tireur ; it is combination. We must militarize our industry, for industry is war at its highest point where the whole human race is allied, and external Nature is at once the foe and the booty ; a foe, too, whose own guns are constantly turned and used on our side. A main point of industry is that labour afts upon land, that the one great being Humanity a(5ts upon the other great being, the Earth. With excellent discernment, therefore, Goethe represents Faust as redeeming tracts of land from the sea; this is the part of industry most impressive to the thoughtful mind. His schooling is now over ; he looks ahead, and says of the ideal future moment that it is too fair, and would that it might stay. He dies, and the angels take his soul. The victory is won. The revolutionary man, having thrown away the ancient faith and loyalty, and thereby sold himself to the Devil on condition that the Devil can make him contented, passes under the influence of the selfish instincts through the schools of Conjugal Love, of Politics, of Art, of War, and of Industry. These schools, however, so stunt his selfish impulses, and so develop his generous impulses, that he leaves the Devil's army and joins that of the Angels. For he dies pleased not with his 40 own moment, but with the future moment that is not his own; and his pleasure comes not from Mephistopheles' agency, but from the steady vidT:ory in his heart of the Social over the Selfish, of Good over Evil. One word more. We are all like the dying Faust. We are immersed in an age irrevocably committed to Industry ; and we can see, I can anyhow, the sure advent of the day of Man's great industrial success; when, learning to combine, instead of compete, humanity shall, in the combination of a world-wide Roman army, inherit the Earth, improve and enjoy her, instead of writhing on her in an epileptic fit of cut-throat competition. At present Faust is blind, and Mephistopheles is carrying on most of our Industry ; and Goethe told too truly the story of the day when he introduces eviction, arson, and murder into Faust's industrial efforts. Faust meant well, Mephistopheles did the mischief. Ah, yes ! but the Kingdom of Evil is within you. Mephistopheles is our eternal companion. We are now in the cannibal stage of Industry. As much difference as there was between the worst Patagonian brave and the Chevalier Bayard, so much is there between Industry as it is and Industry as it may soon be. Let us work in the twilight for the coming, of that day. We here may see it, for the Republic of Humanity, like the Kingdom of God of old, cometh like a thief in the night when none suspecSts. But more likely we must all content ourselves with the eyes of Faith, leaving the sight to the eyes unborn. Yet, anyhow, I see the East reddening, and if our race deserves it, as I believe to be the case, that blessed moment which Faust anticipated will come, and after the dayspring the day shall visit Humanity in unprecedented splendour. CHARLES GASKELL HIGGINSON. October 24, 1886. WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN THE LIBRARY ON SUNDAY MORNINGS, 11 a.m. By MONCURE D Travels in South Kensington Emerson at Home and Abroad The Sacred Anthology Idols and Ideals Christianity Human Sacrifices in England Demonology and Devil-lore . . Thomas Carlyle The Wandering Jew . . A Necklace of Stories Eepublican Superstitions Farewell Discourses . . lucecl ices. s. a. „ 9 „ 8 o! „ 10 ,, 4 oi n 1 „ 6 „ 20 M 5 „ -1 6 „ -1 2 G 2 1 . CONWAY, M.A. Farewell Discourses, in 7 separate s. d Numbers, A Gnostic's Apology, The Gift and the Altar, Of One Risen and Unrecognised, The Criminal Law, Substitutes for Hell, The Palace of Delight, and Apologia.. .. .. each 1 A Charge to be kept at South Place 2 Intellectual Suicide . . . . 2 The First Love Again . . . . 2 The Religion of Humanity . . 2 The Rising Generation . . . . 2 The Oath and its Ethics.. .. 2 Tennyson's " Despair " .. .. 2 Life and Death of Garfield . . 2 LESSONS FOIi THE DAY. Vols. I. d II. Discourses Delivered at South Place Chapel by Moncure D. Conway, M.A. Price 3s. per vol. Each containing 26 Nos., neatly bound in cloth. Most of the Numbers may still he Jiad, price Id. each. By Dr. Andrew Wilson, r.R.S.E.,F.L.S., &C. Net. Leisure Time Studies, chiefly s. d. 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March, M.D., Lond. Life and Death. Part I.— Death 2 ,, II.— Life 2 Darwinism & the Evolution of Man 6 General Conference of Liberal Thinkers 10 HYMNS AND ANTHEMS. Cloth, liwjy. Is. ; Cloth, hoards, red edges, 2s. ; Roan, gilt edges, 3#. No. 13.] 0ut W ka |ldigi0iiB ^md^ FINSBURY, B.C. EQUALITY. A DISCOURSE DELIVERED IN SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C., BY JOHN ROBERTSON, Esq. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. PRINTED BY W. KING AND SELL, 12, GOUGH SQUARE, FLEET STREET, LONDON. EQUALITY. ►»^- " 1 ? QUALITY," says a distinguished living judge, in a JLZ/ book that is less heard of to-day than it was ten years ago — " equality, like liberty, appears to me to be a big name for a small thing."* It seems probable that, though the speaker is a jurist, he does not here say quite what he means. To say that equality or liberty is a big name, is to say that it points to a great aspiration or an important principle ; in which case the sentence is either a mere verbal paradox, or a simple assertion that the results men have to show for the democratic creed fall very far short of the ideal. That is, liberty and equality, as conceived by those who framed and those who have adopted the well-known motto, were terms implying a great amount of unattained good ; while it turns out that mere liberty so far as we have or can at present have it, and equalit}- so far as it has gone or can yet go in Europe, leave a great deal to be desired. So be it : but the fa.6t surely goes to prove rather that the true liberty and the true equality are very great things ; that the big names are really big names in the only intelligible sense — that of expressing great ideas, none the less great because still to be realized. And in this connec^tion it may be permitted to wonder somewhat at the zeal with which some powerful minds in these days set themselves to blacken and belittle what was, after all, on the face of it, the formula of an ideal condition to be aimed at and not a description of what had been attained. Other ideals receive an astonishingly lenient treatment in comparison. The aims of primitive Christianity, let it be remembered, have sometimes been sketched in terms almost identical with the Republican motto — I will not say with what amount of accuracy — and the claim in that case seems to be regarded as its own vindication. It is not now seriously pretended that the ideal first Christians achieved their ends any more than the enthusiasts of later * "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." By James Fitzjames Stephen, 1873, p. 253. 42 times ; but it seems to be imputed as a virtue to the former that they had an ideal ; while the too high hopes of the latter seem to be viewed as mere matter for contumely. And yet it would not be difficult to show that to the movement of senti- ment which arose with them is to be traced nearly every forward principle of these times. All that is best in our morality is found to have had its re-birth, if not its birth, among the generation which first invoked those great names of liberty, equality, fraternity. And, granting that there has been much foolish talk and much short-sighted rejoicing over the mere traffic in the words, apart from any substantial pro- du(?tion of the things, it is still not at all clear that the dismissal of the whole as foolish is so eminently practical a proceeding as it claims to be. Take, for instance, the word happiness — a big name, surely, and one which by the general consent of the human race has never yet been married to permanent fadt : I am not aware that any modern writer of the pradtical school compiles books to discredit happiness, though some authorities have certainly adjured us not to make happiness our end and aim. But judicial-minded gentlemen, who at other times profess to find life on the whole very tolerable, will take the trouble to look out a motto, in the original Greek, from the great pessimist ^^ischylus, by way of lending weight to their assault on a forecast of human hap- piness which analyses the matter into a few broad social conceptions. Now, this deprecatory exordium in a manner confesses that what I want to put to you is not any great triumph of equality thus far ; and not even any possible attainment of equality, by political or other specific means, in the near future, but rather the do(51:rine that the principle of equality is a great ideal, and that the ultimate failure of humanity to realise it, would prac- tically mean the ultimate failure of civilisation — certainly the disappointment of the most important of the other pradfical aspirations for the future of mankind. And, in order to make this out, it will not be necessary to apply an extremely exalted standard to life, or to carry the notion of evolution to the highest points of imaginary perfection. A very cursory survey of adlual conditions will discover the extent of the evil ; and a much improved state of things will, I think, be found to be not so very Utopian or visionary. The ordinary tone, it must be confessed, is against equality. One sees, to begin with, that many politicians who speak respedtfully — and even, on given occasions, enthusiastically — of liberty, and who have nothing very distindt to say against 43 fraternity, are quite positive that equality is pure delusion and nonsense. It is not merely the opponents of democracy who take this tone. One who cannot at all be so described, and a very different kind of writer from our judicial authority — the Austrian Dr. Max Nordau, whose book has been sup- pressed by the Austrian Government — is found declaring that " Equality is a chimera of book-worms and visionaries, who have never studied nature and humanity with their own eyes Fraternity ? Oh, this is a sublime word, the ideal goal of human progress, a presage of the condition of our race at the time when it attains to the summit of its fullest development, a time still very remote. But equality ? That is a mere creature of the imagina- tion, for which there is no room in any sensible discussion."* This is damping; and yet I take leave to attempt the vindi- cation of the tabooed principle. After all, the terms fraternity and equality to a large extent cover the same ground ; and it is not very clear how the fullest fraternity can be realised without such an attainment of equality as will carry us to our ideal. If you really feel that every man is your brother, how shall you rest content with leaving anyone to endure the disadvantages which befall him under his in- feriority of gifts ? How exclude any from your society as not being attraftive company enough ? But I am not seeking merely to balance definitions against one another. I want you to look at this as a praftical question, and to take the ideas in their plain significance. Now, Dr. Nordau cannot have sup- posed that equality, as understood by its advocates, has the truly chimerical meaning of absolute sameness of faculty all round : he must have understood that it meant, in however wide a sense, equality of status — what our legal critic was thinking of when he said that equality before the law is diffi- cult, but equality in society impossible. This then is the problem. Fraternity is commonly understood to be a spirit of general, undefined goodwill to our fellow creatures, and to stop short of the realisation of a life of anything like actual brother- hood : must we rest content with this ? Whatever be the full bearing of the word fraternity, we know that in pradf ice thus far it has signified something short of equality. The history of Christianity is a decisive proof. It has always been a Christian dodfrine that believers are brethren in Christ, per- sonal merit or gifts availing nothing for salvation. It is re- corded, you may remember, of a distinguished Scotch clergyman, that when a lady of rank once expressed to him her disturbance * " The Conventional Lies of Civilisation." Translation, pp. 117-8. 44 at the idea of meeting her tradesmen and other inferiors on equal terms in heaven, he promptly assured her that she need be under no apprehension on the subjedt, as she would never meet anyone in heaven while she remained in that frame of mind. And though you find Shakespeare, in " King John," making Queen Constance talk of meeting her son in " the court of heaven," meaning the aristocratic or royal quarter, it is never- theless certain that the Church has in all ages — however gross might be its sycophancy in prac^tice, and however it might foster wars within Christendom — taught as matter of dodtrine that Christians are one in Christ, and ought to love one another as brothers on that account even during this life. But who, save the special pleaders of the churches, will say that there has on the whole been any more pradliical fraternity or equality under Christianity during the ages of faith than under Paganism ? It is possible, then, to hold fraternity in theory without at all approximating to equality or brotherhood in fadt. If, therefore, we are to look at the matter to good purpose, and not merely to deal with abstraftions, we must ask ourselves whether social equality is not both a profoundly desirable and a possible thing ; and whether, on accepting the spirit of it, we may not adjust our whole daily lives to the bringing of it into manifold practice. Some of you may be repelled at the outset by the surmise that any such thorough-going prescription of equality must amount to the pure and simple advocacy of Socialism, as we have it in these days ; but the ideas are essentially distincSl. How far the ultimate ideals would coincide is, indeed, a clearly contingent question ; but the preaching of equality seems to me to go on different lines from the ordinary preaching of Socialism. Socialism, as understood by all schools, is a matter of machinery for the lessening of economic evil, and I do not now direct your attention to economic evil at all. Nor am I prescribing political machinery. Pra(5tical as the matter is, it is chiefly on the side of feeling that I would like to present it. The idea of equality has, in these days, already gone far enough to bring it about, that when we consider the distincftion habitually drawn a few centuries, or even a few generations, ago between persons of aristocratic descent and all others, we find it, in itself, entirely preposterous. The distinction only came to have its quasi-religious importance, and therefore its inherent absurdity, when it had virtually ceased to have any basis in actual faft. Pedigree became more and more important, precisely as original endowment became less and less the decisive factor in men's status ; and it finally 45 became an established superstition in a state of society in which such endowment, whether mental or physical, came to count as nearly for nothing as it ever conceivably can in a state of things at all progressive. All this we can see clearly enough ; and we have as good as discarded the notion of giving a man any moral credit for his parentage — though in those social regions where empty conventions live longest, there is no doubt still a widespread cult of what is called " birth " or "family." But can we say there is now no element of purely arbitrary and prejudiced discrimination in the attitude of the majority of us towards those whom we describe as not being of our class? If we do not now — being so numerous, and consequently so hazy about our pedigrees — reason that so-and-so is our "inferior" because of the nature of his ancestry as compared with ours, can we say that we have got to the point of treating those about us either with strict re- ference to their real charadters or capacities, or on terms of entirely equal status ? I fear we are still a long way from such a consummation. Let us take, by way of test, a certain number of the prac- tical relations that subsist, temporarily or permanently, between ordinary people in this country — such as those of master or mistress and domestic servant, buyer and seller on a large scale, buyer and seller on a small scale, artist and artist's customer, employer and workman or workwoman, shopkeeper and shop-assistant, passenger and cabman or rail- way servant, barrister or lawyer and clerk, landholder and architedt. It is obvious on a moment's thought that there are very wide differences of tone or spirit, in a general way, between people in some of these various positions — that, say, the same person as a rule will as it were change his mental pitch according as he enters into one or other of the relations I have mentioned. No one will deny, for instance, that the average middle-class man is likely to take a different tone towards the artist whom he asks to paint his portrait, from that which he takes towards his housemaid ; and that the average lady, similarly, has different modes of address for the counter-server in a shop and the doctor she consults about her health. In each case a service is commissioned, rendered, and paid for ; but how different are the various intellecftual or spiritual relations ! It may at first sight seem as if the prin- ciple of variation were simply that of variation in culture — that tone or spirit of address is adjusted to the intellectual relation between the parties. But this is only a part of the truth, and it tends to hide the rest. The lady, for one thing, 46 can have no knowledge as to the comparative culture of the shopman and the doctor : in any case she would distinguish between the dress-designer and the measurer-out of material, without thinking of the chances as to culture at all. Again, the difference of tone as between wholesale buyer and seller — that is, between principals — and between retail seller and buyer, is clearly not in the main a question of conscious estimate of culture on either side ; nor does the involuntary respeft paid, say, to a great or famous physician, as compared with an obscure one, rest on any notion that the famous man is likely to be the better educated. To take yet another case : an able adtor will always receive more homage, both in public and in private, than one who may be much more cultured, but is yet a much worse acftor. Where then are we to look for the principle of variation ? I propose to look for it first under the closest of the normal relations I have named — that of the master or mistress and the domestic servant. Here, undoubtedly, we have the most friction, the most strife, the most complaint, the most difficulty. The details are too notorious to need specifying : let us there- fore take the pleadings on the two sides as heard, and try at once to sum up. Has the average master or mistress made out a clear case of hardship ? It has always seemed to me, as a fairly disinterested onlooker, that whatever may be the faults of the average domestic, there is something in the whole con- ception of domestic service, as commonly prevailing among us, that puts the average employer philosophically in the wrong. Observe, certain impulses of self-assertion belong in the nature of things to all healthy organisms ; and pra(?tical morals and good manners may be said to consist in the orderly and con- siderate mutual adjustment of these tendencies, as among equals before the law, or equals in intercourse, respedtively. But between house-ruler and house-servant there is always a presumption of a constant suppression of the organic impulse on one side, and a constant parade of it on the other. This tendency is such that a master or mistress who may even be scrupulously — I will not say merely courteous, but, so to speak, equal-minded in dealings with tradespeople, will be found to retain the tone of superiority towards the servant at home. The domestic gives her services for her wages just as does the do(5tor or the artist, just as the gas company or the grocer supply their producfts ; but somehow it is assumed that she in particular should hold a tone of humility, as of one receiving unmerited favours. All the complaints about dis- respect from servants imply this. Now it is significant that no 47 such complaints are heard in regard to the relations, say, of clerks and their masters, or even those of shopmen and their employers, though here there is certainly plenty of tyranny. The reason is no doubt partly that the constant association within the household involves the constancy of a strain which, in the other cases, only subsists during working hours ; quarrels being thus more likely between mistress and servant than between master and assistant, just as they are unhappily more common between husband and wife than between business partners. But that is not all. There is, undoubtedly, a special exaction of respe(5t from the home-servant — an exa(5tion such as is not made outside ; and it is abundantly plain that this correlates with the general complaint against servants. There is, accordingly, no comfort for those citizens who sigh for a return to the semi-feudal relations of the past in this matter. The more down-trodden sex has supplied, and doubtless will continue to supply, almost the whole of the class which thus, by the very nature of its funftion, most nearly reproduces the whole relation of master and slave, but disability of sex and disability of class are alike on the slow but sure way to extinftion ; and whoever is inclined to maintain them by conserving the old fashion of humility in household servitude, is, however unconsciously, obstrufting right progress. You cannot have a general spread of education and of the social spirit without undermining inequality in its last stronghold — the last, because it lies nearest the centre of the social organism — the domestic circle. But just as clear as the logical principle, unhappily, is the difficulty of the amendment it prescribes. Here and there one hears of people who try to treat their servants as moral equals, just as they would treat people of their own class, or relatives of their own, who were no better educated than their servants ; but it is not pretended that their path is an easy one. For the spirit of inequality, in its correlative forms, holds the field on both sides, and the " inferior," so-called, will be found to shrink from the life of equality where the " superior " is willing to realise it. And this, of course, is the real sting of the evil, that in a society theoretically democratic, and therefore in theory morally homogeneous, one class still crouches in spirit before another, even while its half-developed instin(5ts of self- assertion are coming into play. If the harm and the pathos of this are not perceived, the aspiration for equality cannot be really sympathised with. What, let us ask, turning from the single domestic issue to the broad question, what good moral cause is there for the 48 obeisance of any one human being before any other ? Surely the general answer of educated people will limit us to the simple recognition of moral or intellectual superiority. Putting aside certain corrupt survivals — as, the whole phenomena of royalism ; and certain official conventions — as, the deference paid to judges in court, there is no serious stickling in these days for any theory of class homage. In ordinary society there is no pra(5\ical translation whatever of the sense of mental in- equality into any display of humility. To feel respedl there, is not to adopt the tone of humility as we see it in the bearing exa(ft2d from the servants. Why, then, should not a similar sense of a common humanity, or of social equivalence, rule over those relations in which there is hardly any greater range of mental disparity, but only a difference of relative func^tion ? You are always liable, whatever be your class, to the society of people whom you would not seleft as fitting intelleftual com- panions ; but, they being of your own class, the tone of equality subsists. We can all maintain cordial and even loving rela- tions with kinsfolk whose habits of mind are widely different from our own ; and when, as wili sometimes happen, we have relatives who are not only uncultured, but a trifle vulgar, we still grin and bear it. Why then is it impossible that the same tone, the same recognition of the indefeasible rights of a personality as such, should enter into all relations between employer and employed, between rich and poor, between mistress and servant, between lady and shop-girl, between gentleman and waiter ? The hindrance is not one of culture or of manners — we can get over such difficulties in the society of our own kindred : we must rather look for it in the immemorial tradition, the subtle heredity, of past human conditions, in which collective life has only with infinite slowness been transformed from a cruel clash of brute force, and a mindless tyranny of naked strength, up through all degrees of class abjecftion, slavery, serfdom, and servitude, to the sophisticated medley of our present world. Mr. Ruskin, in a curious pas- sage, finds a grotesquel}' materialistic cause for the gulf of inequality between the peasant poor and the landholding rich. "The star group of the squills, garlic, and onions," he says, " has always caused me great wonder. I cannot understand " why its beauty and serviceableness should have been asso- " ciated with the rank scent which has been really among the " most pow^erful means of degrading peasant life, and sepa- " rating it from that of the higher classes."* I fancy that we * " The Queen of the Air," 2nd edition, p. 98. 49 to-day, whatever may be our point of view as regards the design theory, are agreed that the secret of class aHena- tion lies a little further inside the skull than the olfactory nerve. Perhaps the point that most needs insisting on is the moral obligation on us all to be very patient and very scrupulous in this matter. True altruism means not merely a negative but also a positive attitude. It involves the bearing of burdens and the assumption of disagreeable functions. Not a few of us must have had a certain sense of chill a 3'ear or two ago in reading the reprint of a short newspaper essay written long before by George Eliot, in which the great novelist, after wittily representing the difficulties and trials of an attempt to teach servants to do the right thing intelligently, and of their own will, comes to the conclusion that it is best not to appeal to their reason at all, but simply to give your orders and see that they are attended to. You do not attempt, said the essayist, to guide your child by appeals to his reason : that would be to make him a monster, without reverence, without affections ; and just so it is with the average domestic. The logic of the analogy is not very clear, but here are the essayist's words of summing-up : " Wise masters and mis- " tresses will not argue with their servants, will not give them " reasons, will not consult them. A mild yet firm authority, " which rigorously demands that certain things be done with- " out urging motives or entering into explanations, is both " preferred by the servants themselves, and is the best means " of educating them into any improvement of their methods " and habits. Authority and tradition are the chief, almost " the only safe guides of the uninstrudted — are the chief " means of developing the crude mind, whether childish or " adult." And so on. It is certainly chilling, coming from such a quarter. But I seriously submit to you to-day that not merely is the logic of that counsel unsound but the ethics of the whole is on the wrong line. How, let us ask ourselves, is the crude adult mind ever to rise above crudity if it is to be treated as a mere machine ? Your child's mind will change of itself, and will begin one day to reason in spite of you : the servant's mind, in the terms of the case, is to be conserved in all its imperfections. Now, this is only the application to the domestic problem of the strong-man or autocrat theory of government ; which proceeds on the assumption that the majority of people are incurably unwise, and therefore unfit to govern themselves ; and that accordingly a strong despot is the proper thing for us. And some people call that do6trine 50 pra(ftical. Well, we may be mostly unwise ; but then our autocratic theorist shares in the inheritance. What is to be said of the pradticality of a system which, finding unwisdom to begin with, goes about to deepen and perpetuate it ? Take the case of the paternal autocracy of Cromwell, a ruler not only strong but in the main enlightened and sagacious in hiS' executive practice. What was the total effect of his assump- tion of all the functions of government ? The reduction of the English nation from that state of moral vigour in which it could wage the revolutionary war, to that in which it could of its own will grovel before Charles the Second and place his foot on its neck. So true is it that men must work their own salvation, and that he who seeks to take in his hands the destiny of his fellows may be unknowingly a curse to them in the very degree of his capacity to overrule their wills, as he thinks, for their own good. But the matter has wider bearings still. Once take your stand on the abstrad^ principle of a benevolent despotism, and you will not stop with dictating to your servants, to say nothing of promoting unconstitutional government. See how our judicial authority applies the same principle to the first of all domestic relations, that of husband and wife. Where there is a real inequality to start with, he argues, you should recognise inequality of rights ; and he goes on to put the case of the necessity, in married life, of deciding on a great many ques- tions of praftice. On a thousand such questions, he says, " The wisest and the most affectionate people might arrive at opposite conclusions. What is to be done in such a case ? for something must be done. I say the wife ought to give way. She ought to obey her husband, and carry out the view at which he deliberately arrives, just as when the captain gives the word to cut away the masts, the lieutenant carries out his orders at once, though he may be a better seaman and may disapprove them. I also say that to regard this as a humiliation, as a wrong, as an evil in itself, is a mark not of spirit and courage, but of a base, unworthy, muti- nous disposition — a disposition utterly subversive of all that is most worth having in life. The tacit assumption involved in it is that it is a degradation ever to give up one's own will to the will of another, and to me this appears the root of all evil, the negation of that which renders any combined efforts possible." Before we take up the moral issue, just let us note for a moment here how naively a legal mind can transcend its habit of logic when in the full glow of a prejudice. It is most pernicious, we are told, to insist on always having our own way ; ergo, in married life the man must always have his. It 51 is base and unworthy to refuse ever to give in ; therefore a husband must never give in. Such harmonies are to be found in legal minds. But the logical question, however entertaining it may thus become, is only the shell of the matter. The question of the relations of personality between men and women in married life, I would here say, is one, the essentials of which the legal mind is highly capable of missing : it takes us down to spiritual principles which even the idealistic mind — as we have seen in the case of George Eliot — cannot always be trusted to perceive. It is no idle paradox to say that the woman's question may just as truly be called the man's ques- tion : how truly, those can perhaps best understand who will take the trouble to trace the tedium vitce and the other forces of dissolution in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome, with their very clearly defined relations between the sexes ; and then to analyse the elements of modern pessimism, whether of the every-day order or the philosophic. But you who have been taught by Moncure Conway cannot be backward in the under- standing of this matter ; and in any case I would not presume to offer you a body of do6t;rine on such a topic. I will just say, as regarding our theme of equality, that to make conjugal co-operation a matter of the giving and taking of orders, in which the one side is to sacrifice its wishes always and the other side never, is just to reduce the whole relation to the lowest moral basis on which it can possibly stand. No two people can live such a life without deteriorating or at best stag- nating : they are off the line of moral evolution. And if you can see this, you will see that just the same kind of deterioration — though doubtless in a less degree — is involved in all habitual relations of entirely arbitrary command and spiritless obedience. Let us not shrink from asserting this, in face of those practical exigencies which seem most abso- lutely to exclude our principle. The fadt, so much harped on, that there can be no equalit}', in an}^ sense, in an army, is simply one more argument against armies. It is indeed a most encouraging thought that the progress of real democratic feeling, in such a society as that of modern Europe, tends to gradually eliminate war, not only by making men averse to mutual slaughter, but by making them progressively unfit for the mechanical submission that the military life implies. It is not that willing obedience or willing compromise is repulsive to a healthy mind. Justice Stephen is quite right so far. It is that a constant attitude of unquestioning submission, with the very idea of independent judgment excluded, is per- ceptibly degrading to anyone capable of such judgment — 52 degrading, that is, at the very best, inasmuch as it stunts the whole growth of the intelhgence which resignedly submits to it. And just as education and other good things become diffused among us, there must assuredly take place a transformation of the old system of mere drill and discipline in all the organisa- tions in which many men work together. You will not have anarchy ; but you will have elasticity, else your political pro- gress halts on one foot. You cannot have the ideal of an army permanently imposed on the civic machinery of an evolving society. To see the spiritual gain involved in equality, we have but to turn to the society of the United States and note the diffe- rences between it and our own. For those of us who have not seen it with our eyes there is a vivid and valuable species of report in the whole body of American fi(5tion, in so far as it deals with home life, and is not concerned to sketch the life of Europe. Here, and similarly in the American plays, the tone of equality strikes one constantly, and, I think, always pleasantly. That tone of mutual recognition which we catch in cases where with us the relation is merely servile — how taking it is, how suggestive of cheerfulness and a forward motion of things. There, too, there is a servant problem, but how much nearer they seem to a democratic solution than we ! It is difficult to say where the attra(5tion precisely lies, but somehow there seems to be a gain of moral sunshine in respe(5l of the sum total of those, forms of class life which are there independent and self-respedting, while here they strike the note of subjecftion and humility. When you read in Mr. Howells of a lumberman, whose life is one of wandering and toil, but who, being given to random reading, will talk familiarly with an educated man about "old Arnold" and "old Spencer" and "old Huxley;" who, as the novelist says, is through life buoyed up by a few wildly interpreted maxims of Emerson, and retains always the same tone of "gross and ridiculous optimism" — this picture has its comic side, but has it not also one full of brightness and healthy significance ? It seems to me that all that element of self- j confidence and equal-mindedness which we note in all grades of American life as compared with our own, is so much substitution of social light for social gloom. There may be other evils, but this surely is a gain. Sir James Stephen, on whom we can always place entire reliance as devil's advocate in these matters, observes that it is to be questioned "whether the enormous " development of equality in America, the rapid production of " an immense multitude of commonplace, self-satisfied, and " essentially slight people, is an exploit which the whole 53 " world need fall down and worship." But our genial jurist is again misconceiving the problem. It is not the produftion of self-satisfied, commonplace people that is the alleged gain — we in England, by the way, may compete with confidence in the matter of commonplaceness — but the production of these self-satisfied multitudes where other countries, such as our own, produce legions that can never attain self-satisfacftion, or do so only on the sorriest pretexts. In short, America manu- factures happiness where we produce abjeftion and poverty of soul; and about the expediency of producing these last there is no question at all. As for the alleged " slightness " of the people who grow up under the regime of equality — well, we are all rather poor creatures at best ; and, in any case, it is not at all clear that the special producfts of inequality among us, whether upper-class or lower, have even the saving-grace of solidity. As for the moral aspe(5t of the matter, it is extremely hard to see where our advantage lies. What are we to infer of the social condition of a country where there is a " British Ladies' Female Emigration Society" — where the "ladies" subscribe to send the " females" abroad ? I find that it is still a perfecStly common thing, both in Presbyterian Scotland, and in Episcopalian England, for clergymen to hold separate Bible or confirmation-classes for "young ladies" and " 3-oung women" this sort of thing surviving, under the very auspices of fraternal Christianity. Do not suppose, from any of these trifling data, that this is after all only a small question of manners and passing con- ventions. The future of every nation is bound up in the resolution it takes as to this problem. Indeed, we might say that only those states which come to the sound conclusion will have any long national future at all. The human struggle for survival, in the time to come, is going to mean a competition in all kinds of fitness to live ; and my burden to-day is that the sense of personal equality is one of the plainest conditions of satisfactory life. And round this centre will group themselves many contests of ideas — the contests on behalf of the freedom of women, of children, of the workers, of the lower races, of the masses of the higher races. You will find that a general con- nection runs through the forms of opinion on these matters ; and you will find further, what is very significant, that back- ward-pointing opinion on more abstra(5t; questions tends to join itself to rea(5tionary opinion on these several topics. It is worth noting that Carlyle, in his latter years the strenuous theocratic prophet of despotism, and the foe of all schemes of advance- ment, was of opinion in his younger days, when he was some- 54 thing of a rationalist, and believed in national education, that conquering heroes were a class of people the world could do very well without.* In those days, and perhaps later, he taught that " the true Shekinah is man." But what has become of the Shekinah in the later doctrine of political sub- jedtion and the vileness of mankind ? Let us take up his dis- carded creed : man is the highest thing we know, and to view him as such is to deplore every form of human degradation, every stain of indignity on a human personality, which reason and experience tell us we might efface. Where Carlyle, with his anti-fraternal view of things, grew out of his aversion to despotism into a boundless devotion to it, Voltaire, with his ever-deepening human sympathies, grew out of his early homage to absolutismt into a ripe convicftion that that had been a mistaken reading of the book of history. Apropos of Carlyle's anti-humanism, there has been broached, in passionate contradidtion of him, a dodtrine which seems to carry the idea of equality to its furthest spiritual bounds — the dodlrine laid down, namely, by the late Mr. Henry James, in his remarkable paper on Carlyle, that just as economic science prescribes for Europe the utilisation of its enormous volume of waste matter, so immensely valuable, in order to the physical regeneration of its soil, so the moral regeneration of the race demands the absorption into its life of all its outcasts, the care of whom will mean its moral salvation. From my standpoint, I cannot accept the principle so put, but it seems to me to point to a truth. The absorption of any element of weakness or blemish into the general life, cannot well fail to mean the presence of that weakness in the new combination ; but it remains true that until society seeks to raise its pariahs, the whole upshot of human life will prove a sad subject for reflection. And while we shall do well to allow largely for those forces of destru(5tion and disease which belong to moral affairs as to all others, we shall find that that instin6t of self- preservation, which underlies all life, is curiously tenacious of existence even in the sphere of what we may call morbid morals. When, a year or two ago, I gave some time to the investigation of slum life in a large town, hardly any- thing — not even the grime and the ignominy — impressed me more than the extent to which moral gradations were recognised among those ill-starred multitudes. Scandal was * See his Essay on Burns. People's Edition, p. 6. t See the Extrafts in Buckle, ii. 295. J In the Atlantic Monthly for May, 18S1. 55 as rife among them as in the best society. The woman who was a drunkard and a pilferer, and worse, looked down from a certain moral elevation on her neighbour who had lost all of her nine children and was suspected of having shortened their lives by her violence. Where all true decency was dead, there was still a strenuously-drawn line between ill-fame that was notorious and that which was only a matter of tacit recogni- tion. A block peopled by known ex-convi(5ls was let at dis- tinctly lower rents than the average ; though the standard of cleanliness and order was found to be higher. Reviewing it all, I remembered that all successful criminal management had proceeded on the plan of appealing to the germs of self- respecft and good feeling in the subjeft; and I could not but recognise that here, under the most pitiless and most decisive of all the caste divisions of society, the spirit of individual self-assertion, which is the stuff of the spirit of equality, had a strange vitality, carrying even a certain dark promise of better things to come. I would not, however, be thought to stake the whole gospel of equality on a moral scheme which amounts to an inculcation of the most advanced fraternity ; rather I contend that the ideal of equality is the more praftical of the two, being already visibly well on the way to realisation in some parts of the world. You may have the spirit of equality even in strife, and the times of strife are still with us. And while I disclaim the office of prescribing machinery, I venture to think that the lines of the progress to be made are not hard to see. Whatsoever you do in the spirit of respedt for the personalities of all with whom you come into contact, and in prevention of any humiliation of a fellow creature, that makes for equality, and so for happiness. And this spirit excludes all inequity of tone and temper; beginning with the home circle and abolishing that primeval subjed:ion of the woman-child to the man-child — the sister to the brother — which so strangely sur- vives to-day in so many English households ; proceeding at the same time to give the wife equality with her husband, and therefore companionship with her sons, as our neighbours across the Channel have contrived to do with all their mis- carriages ; going on through the more remote relations of life to the political and the international, till we are really a self- governing people within ourselves, and shall not only do justly by all other peoples, strong or weak, great or low, but shall have become incapable of the arrogance of imputing special follies and vices to other nations, in the fashion which even our judicial minds affe(5t, as if we had no follies and vices 56 of our own. In the immediate field of pracftical politics the bearing of the principle is plain enough. Instead of wondering how the nation is to get on without an all-powerful political leader, is it not time that, while fully recognising the still obvious need for organisation, parties should begin to think of acting by intelligent accord, giving to no man the keeping of the consciences of his fellows. An American poet has of late years given to his countrymen the boldest counsel that can well be given by a thinking man : " Resist much, obey little ; " and extreme as that may sound, it will be found, I think, to be more truly practical and more philosophic at bottom than the contrary dodtrine of our legal guide, who teaches that the fifth commandment was a better precept for a nation's life than any maxim of democracy. As to this, let that nation now speak which professes first to have received the fifth commandment. The spirit of man to-day is fain to think it has got hold of higher and deeper moral laws than that, and in the new faith sets up for itself a new ideal — the cultus of the future as against the cultus of the past. Its promised land is to be watered with no human blood, though it is even harder to reach than the old, and may for many a day and generation seem to recede as we strain towards it : it is truly a land that is very far off. But the way thither is not through the desert ; rather it lies through " orient lands of hope," which already yield a foretaste of the fruits and flowers of the realm beyond. JOHN ROBERTSON. October 31, 1886. WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN THE LIBRARY ON SUNDAY MORNINGS, 11 a.m. By MONCUKE D Reduced 1 price 3. 3. d. Travels in South Kensington 9 Emerson at Home and Abroad 8 The Sacred Anthology 10 Idols and Ideals 4 Christianity 1 Human Sacrifices in England 6 Demonology and Devil-lore . . 20 Thomas Carlyle 5 The Wandering Jew . . 4 6 A Necklace of Stoi-ies 4 Republican Superstitions 2 6 Farewell Discourses . . 2 1 . CONWAY, M.A. Farewell Discourses, in 7 separate Numbers, A Gnostic's Apology, The Gift and the Altar, Of One Risen and Unrecognised, The Criminal Law, Substitutes for Hell, The Palace of Delight, and Apologia . . . . . . each A Charge to be kept at South Place Intellectual Suicide The First Love Again The Religion of Humanity The Rising Generation . . The Oath and its Ethics . . Tennyson's " Despair " . . Life and Death of Garfield s. d. By Dr. Andrew Wilson, F.R.S.E., F.L.S., &c. Net. Leisure Time Studies, chiefly s. d. Biological . . . . . . ..50 Chapters on Evolution . . ..63 Leaves from a Naturalist's Note Book 2 1 Wild Animals : their Haunts and Habits . . . . . . ..63 The Student's Guide to Zoology . . 5 5 Elements of Zoology . . ..42 Manual of Health Science.. .. 2 1 Sketches of Animal Life . . . . 13 Common Accidents, and How to Treat Them 13 Zoology . . . . . . ..13 Animal Physiology . . ..10 Guide to the Study of Flowers . . 6 The Religious Aspects of Health . . 2 Inheritances.. .. .. ..0 2 In Pastures Green . . . . ..02 What is Religion ? 2 The Hopes of Liberalism . . ..02 By Arthur W. Hdtton, M.A. Early Footsteps and their Guidance 2 By Frederic Harrison, M.A. Pantheism and Cosmic Emotion . . 2 Politics and a Human Religion . . 2 By A. J. Ellis, B.A., F.R.B., &c., &c. Salvation . . . . . . ..02 Truth 2 Speculation . . . . . . ..02 Duty 2 The Dyer's Hand 2 The above Five Discourses in One Vol., hound ill cloth, Is. On Discussion . . . . ..OH Comte's Religion of Humanity . . 4 By Rev. P. H. Wtcksteed, M.A. Going Through and Getting Over.. 2 LESSONS FOR THE DAY. Vols. I. S II. Discourses Delivered at South Place Chapel by Moncure D. Conway, M.A. Price 3s. per vol. Each containing 26 Nos., neatly bound in cloth. Most of the Numbers may still he Imd, •price Id. each. By W. C. CouPLAND, M.A. s d. The Conduct of Life . . ..02 The Spirit of Goethe's Faust ..60 By F. Sydney Morris. Agnosticism versus Dogmatism . . 10 The Shadow and Sunshine of Life 2 By James Oliphant, M.A. The Essence of Religion . . ..02 By J. Allanson Picton, M.A., M.P. The Transfiguration of Religion . . 2 Six Lectures on " The Conflict of Oligarchy and Democracy," vols., bound in cloth . . . . ..21 Six Lectures on " Lessons from the Rise and Fall of the English Commonwealth," vols., bound in cloth . . . . . . ..13 By Karl Pearson, M.A. Enthusiasm of the Market-place and of the Study. . .. ..0 2 By Edward Clodd, Science and the Emotions . . 2 By Rev. T. W. Freckelton. The Modern Analogue of the Ancient Prophet . . . . ..02 By Geo. Jacob Holyoake. Hostile and Generous Toleration. . 2 By John Robertson. Emotion in History : a Glance into the Springs of Progress . . ..02 By Leslie Stephen. What is Materialism ? . . ..02 By H. C. March, M.D., Lond. Life and Death. Part I.— Death 2 „ II.— Life 2 Darwinism & the Evolution of Man 6 General Conference of Liberal Thinkers . . . . . . ..10 HYMNS AND ANTHEMS. Cloth, limp, Is. ; Cloth, hoards, red edges, 2s. ; Roan, gilt edges, 3s, No. 14.] ^i3Ut '4 FINSBURY, B.C. RELIGIOUS SOCIETIES: THEIR WORK & FUNCTION TO-DAY. A DISCOURSE DELIVERED IN SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C. BY W. C. COUPLAND, Esq, M.A, B.Sc. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. LONDON : PRINTED BY KINO AND SELL, 12, GOrCH SQUARE, FLEET STREET, E.r. RELIGIOUS SOCIETIES: THEIR WORK AND FUNCTION TO-DAY. Illustrative Readings. [Ralph Waldo Emerson's Address, delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15th, 1838: from "And now let us do what we can to re-kindle the smouldering, nigh-quenched fire on the altar " to the close. — Herbert's Spencer's " Principles of Sociology" (1885), Sections 654-655.] Discourse. OPENING a book the other day, summarizing our know- ledge regarding the succession of life on the globe, I found on an early page the usual table showing the order of superposition of the leading formations, but at the summit, in place of a verbal indication of the present world-period, the outline of a village church. Doubtless, to the author's view, the simple sketch appeared more eloquent than any words, marking not only the latest but the supreme birth of time. It had probably altogether escaped the perception of the pious scientist that the proximity of his crowning pidture to a record of ever-superseded effort might stimulate reflecftions unwelcome to the ecclesiastically-minded, — that, as in its day and gene- ration trilobite did not dream of saurian nor saurian of quadrumanous mammal, so the age of the village church may represent a transition-deposit in the still far from com- plete history of this planet. 58 As there was certainly a time when man had no religion and no religious rites, so a time may again come when he will stand face to face with Nature unabashed by its, to us, awful sublimity, hoping nothing and fearing nothing behind the outstretched wall of sense. Already the thunder, which flung the primitive man to the ground in abject terror — regarded as manifestation of a Divine wrath — is to the cultivated European little more than a vast volume of semi-musical sound ; and the vision of a dread Hereafter has become so dim that the most solemn of assertions can hardly be said to derive any strength from its sancftion, although in the eyes of elder jurists and divines it appeared at once a source and safeguard of veracity. Unquestionably many old species of reverence and awe are becoming obsolete, passing from the category of real feeling into obje(?ts of antiquarian and aesthetic inte- rest, — the village church is, perhaps, doomed to decay at no distant date, — but a doubt still remains whether the fountains of reverence and awe are becoming wholly dried up — whether, owing to changes in their intelleftual environment, they have not rather merely deserted certain familiar channels to irrigate regions to which they have hitherto been strange, with no loss of volume or diminished cleansing power. Certain it is that if our regard for the ghost is less, our respeft for the man of flesh and blood is more ; it is with hesitation and a heavy heart we doom to extinftion even the most dangerous of our fellow-mortals. And though our horror of a violated oath be less than that of a Homeric Greek, to cheat a friend, even to betray an enemy, is so far from earning applause for superior quick-wittedness that few acftions cover their per- formers with equal infamy. Religion, in primitive times, was the child of ignorance and fear ; is it incredible that in future ages it should be the offspringof knowledge and of love ? Fear and ignorance, however, fashioned the gods and built the temples of the past. Man gave no thanks until he had been smitten, and had he from the first been equipped with even the imperfedl science of to-day, I have very strong doubts if a single prayer would ever have been uplifted, or even the idea of an Archite6t of the universe have crossed his mind. 59 Now the question I wish to suggest is this: Because the rehgious sentiment has been engendered in us through a long and melancholy experience of human imbecility in presence of illimitable and seemingly arbitrary cosmic forces, does it follow that, with the perception of the definite and uniform modes of acftion of these forces, the sentiment itself, with all its pradlical consequences, will and must disappear? One of these prac- tical consequences would be that those who have arrived at such a convicTtion could hardly continue, as a concession to a less developed popular intelligence, to hold together as a religious society, and make use of any forms or ceremonies that were even the attenuated shadows of the cultus of older organizations. Some hints towards a reply to the tremendous question propounded may be derived from a reference to an analogous case. It is, I suppose, admitted by all scientific moralists that man did not at first possess a conscience or feeling of duty, but that such a faculty was developed out of a very feeble sociality and a very powerful instinft of self-regard, and that all those swift and fine judgments we are wont to pass upon our own and others' social conduct are the outcome of prolonged drill and the mere exigencies of living, no offspring of the per- ception of a clear identity of interest between the individual and the community, or a spontaneous response to an inward and ideal call. Now, undoubtedly, in the development of this moral sentiment two beliefs have played an all-important part, — the belief in an unlimited power of choice, and of merited reward or punishment in a future state of being. Without these two levers I for one feel sure that mankind would never have been raised to its present moral height. Even now their potency is incalculable. The joys of heaven, the pains of hell, still operate to hold the infirm of social purpose to his duty, and the language of all is so coloured by the idea' of an unconditioned will that the most enlightened of psycho- logists lapses into it as readily, and almost as inevitably, as the professor of astronomy talks of the sun's rising and the sun's setting. But where, at the present day, these — in the view of the transcendental moralists — indispensable beliefs 6o are wanting, we nevertheless as often find the sentiment of duty as strong and the recoil from suggested baseness as instantaneous as among the philosophical and theological elecft. Born of self, nourished by metaphysic and theologic ficftions, the plant of unselfish duty nevertheless comes up, and grows into an ever-expanding tree. And may not, perhaps, likewise in the matter of the religious sentiment,, mankind have been training for something glorious, it knew not what, — wandering by obscure paths, mistaking the proper objedls of its reverence, but losing no foot of ground, though the way has been circuitous enough ? The Divinity our sires sought beyond the clouds ; may it not be so close they could not see it for its very nearness? The supplications they addressed to alien powers with such fervour and solemnity — may such airy nothings not have purified their own breasts? What the religious sentiment has effedled — a gain that can never be lost — is this : it has suffused the material world with an indefinable spiritual beauty, and has assigned the human individual an intrinsic worth that the perception of his physical littleness vainly derides. When men sought to interpret Nature by their own consciousness, and drew their gods as gigantic projecftions of themselves, what was that but the first crude expression of an ideal prompting that, at a later date, led the half-illuminated Christian to see in a devout Jewish peasant the Son of Universal Man, and which will finally bridge the gaping chasm that parts the living knower from the lifeless known ? Such could never have been the gains of mere science. And on the pracftical side also religion tinges our aftions with the colours of the Infinite. A deed done for the common weal is right. True. And done with a living will is good. Yes. And, so far as the acTtion itself is concerned, the law is fulfilled to a tittle ; but who is there mibued with such an enthusiasm of humanity as never to crave a still larger objecSt — a still wider theatre for the play of his emotions? Does no duty, looked at from a finite point of view, ever appear to the very dutiful as wasted energy,, or sheer sacrifice ? Working for man does not necessarily imply working alone for man. And I believe that Positivism 6i just misses the lesson of the history of Religion by failing to see thedistincftion between these two things. The religious sentiment in man cannot, without self-destru(5lion, be content with humanity as an objecft, for these thoughts and feelings which are in us are not the thoughts and feelings of finite human nature only, but are grounded in, and take their form and diredlion from a substantial unity, which is at once being, thought, power. I have answered, then, my own question in no uncertain tones. I believe the village church will disappear, but that the ground it occupied will not be left vacant. No fresh, upward- pointing spire may be reared, for heaven is not above us but within us ; no altar will be raised, for there is no Divine ear to hear our prayer. Nevertheless some place there must be for the utterance of thoughts on the sublimest themes, and for the deep organ-roll that accompanies the plaints and aspirations of a struggling race. The aversion that many of us feel to the churches as they are now is not on account of their being too religious, but because they are not religious enough. The churches repel me because they turn accidents into essentials, and hide the essentials beneath a mass of finite accidents. Religious, like other institutions are not exempt from the decree written on the face of an ever-moving world — "To stand still is impossible. Either forward or backward." Accordingly we see them obeying one of two tendencies, — either attempting to Gorgonize the mobile features of our surface civilization by merging the relative in the absolute, or, caught in the stream of phenomenal progress, dissolving the substantial in the transient. We here have little to do with the former of these tendencies. For though we have only to turn the angle of the street to catch the note of an absolute creed that treats all the stirring movements of the day as airy bubbles that are not worth a passing thought, its echo does not reach far, and in truth onl}' here and there are to be found a faithful few who are in earnest with such a survival of an elder age. More potent, if not always more obvious, is the other tendency, the attempted reduction to the common understanding of the 62 Ideas of the Reason — the secularizing of all thought and feeling. While the adherents of the one will remain in their dim-lit aisles till the confining walls have mouldered, becoming ever more out of harmony with the world in which they find themselves, the other will slowly but surely sap the foundation of their venerable edifice, and then take the stones to build halls of empirical science, or wander forth into the busy street to lose themselves in the interests of the passing hour. Now it is between these two I take my stand, and declare that the true heir of the older religious organizations is a Society that can find room in its large thought for absolute and relative — finite and infinite — whose pulse beats loudly with the excitement of labour for a more blissful terrestrial future, but yet whose gaze is not restricted to the immediate objects of its surroundings, but sees all things as painted on a background of the eternal blue. I proceed to sketch the function of such a Society at once faithful to the best tradition of the best of our race, and keenly sensitive to the slightest stir of a wider thought and finer emotion of an advancing world. I make the assumption that the attraction which led men and women in former times to form themselves into communi- ties to sustain their deeper life is a profound fact of human nature. Do not for a moment suppose that deliberate reflec- tion has ever founded a religious union or ever will. Referring to the rise of the old world temples Emerson writes : — I " Know'st thou what wove yon woodbird's nest Of leaves, and feathers from her breast ? Or how the fish out-built her shell Painting with morn each annual cell ? Or how the sacred pine-tree adds To her old leaves new myriads ? Such and so grew these holy piles, Whilst love and terror laid the tiles." New communities are always starting into being, no doubt; as no result of conscious will, however, but budded as it were from the parent stock, impelled to develop a phase of faith or feeling that has hitherto lacked appropriate expression. The 63 combining impulse has not to be created ; what is open for choice is the expression and direction of that impulse. Now the impulse that leads to the formation of these communities has two main roots — a longing for coherent thinking in regard to all that touches the higher life of man, of comprehending, that is, the position of the individual in the scheme of things ; and an instinct that presages that the practice of life will be some- how furthered by an act of common worship. To know the truth and to expand the sympathetic soul — these have been the motives to religious unions in all times. These motives point to two distinct functions, one exercised by a leader or guide of the community, the other appertaining to the community itself. The Priest and the Laity, the Minister and Congregation — these are the two elements of the Society, opposed and complementary. As a community thrilled by a common feeling the congregation will have its single and united voice, praying, praising, or endeavouring to influence the world with which it has relations ; as anxious to learn its duty, and have its struggling thoughts interpreted to it, it will crave a guide, one who has closely meditated upon life-pro- blems, or whose fervid nature is able to touch the springs of worthy action. First, then, we have the work that the Community as a whole must itself do. This may take many forms. It may hold social meetings, private or public, serious or genial. I only note one or two objects, that rarely assume the promi- nence they deserve. One is that of labouring for the removal of impediments to moral and religious freedom, another of protesting against threatened or actual violations of national or international rights. No functions are so appropriate to the religious community. Encroachments of the civil power on the spiritual domain can only be effectually resisted by indi- viduals banded together in their spiritual organization, and a party press cannot speak in the name of the nation, still less in the name of the cosmopolitan sentiment. The spirit of religion, however, is confined to no place and to no time. The function just alluded to is rather negative than posi- tive, and it might seem as if I ought now to point to some 64 definite constructive work that the society should undertake. I stop short where I do, however, for reasons. The only other outside influence that occurs to me is some kind of organized philanthropy. And in some future age perhaps this will be a proper work for the society I have in view. But hardly now. The whole problem of effectively aiding the poverty-stricken, and bettering the general conditions of life, is complicated to such an extent — involving the subtlest links of causation in regions where our ablest economists and political thinkers but dimly grope their way — that rather than run the risk of magnifying the obvious evils I would say " stand back; wait for a time ; see whither the stream of unconscious tendency is flowing ; study the facts of the past more closely ; trust, till a clearer light shine, to the spontaneous self-adjustment and vis mediatrix, as I might style it, of the social nature of man." It is a temptation, and one perhaps honourable to our time, at any rate when it is genuine, and not a mere fashionable contagion, to fly to instant remedies for patent social ills, but it is a temptation that the head must resist even to the offence of the heart, in the interest of posterity. The minister of the future if he is wise will continually seek an opportunity of conferring with the society he is chosen to serve. A most undesirable practice obtains in the so-called secular societies, namely, of appending to the speaker's address a discussion in which it is open to any auditor to point out what he conceives to have been errors in the same, or to present his own contrary views of the matter. The intention may be good, the criticism may be just, but the evil outweighs the benefit. The evil is that a tone of mind is favoured inimical to the ends of pure ethical and religious teaching. "When the preacher addresses his congregation, he should assume as impersonal an attitude as he can. It is a sound instinct that avoids the use of the word "lecture" to describe his utterance. For a " lecture " suggests an appeal to the critical understanding alone, and an appeal to the critical understanding is not the end and aim of the weekly discourse. The address forms part of a service which in former times was styled an act of worship, a phrase that we 65 can no longer employ without the peril of conveying a false impression, although I do not know that any satisfactory substitute has yet been found. The Protestant practice has been for the religious community to hold a solemn meeting once a w^eek — on the day of cessation from the main life- business — and this practice is likely to be continued for some time to come. I have an inkling, too, that before long even many secular societies will crave some less cold and hard entertainment for their Sunday gathering than a scientific or political lecture. As prayer in any form yet known implies an address to some Being outside and above the suppliant, those who reject that conception cannot intelligibly use such a form ; but every emotional expression that would waft the members of the community into loftier regions of feeling should be sought and welcomed. Poetry and music are the natural embodiment and vehicle of exalted feeling, and poetry and music will be inter- spersed plentifully in the religious services of the future. And if the service is to be of a piece, whatever the theme may be, the preacher's address must be, if a lecture, yet also more than a lecture, an ethical monologue, that must be judged not by the rules of a narrow logic, but by the higher reason and the receptive soul. But what is unsuitable to the hour of original pronouncement is quite in place at a time specially set apart for the purpose — a strictly rational discussion and con- ference. If the preacher has well sifted his thoughts, and knows the ground he stands upon, such a dialectic will only help to bring to light inconsistencies, as it will afford the opportunity of elucidating points that in a brief address must be hurriedly passed over. And this naturally leads me to the part the minister has to play in the work of the society, an admittedly great, and perhaps all too great, a part. I said minister — shall I correct into ministers ? Yes, if the organization be large enough, and the means at the disposal of its members be ample. More brains, of course, more variety of treatment, more types of character, a fuller scale of emotion, and wider experience. But be it remembered, every added mind means a little less homo- 66 geneity of thought and feehng, means possible contradiction of fundamental belief, means shallowing of ethical influence- With a succession of unconnected teachers, the Church-ideal is entirely dissipated, and the religious service passes into the stage preparatory to dissolution of the intellectual entertain- ment of a leisure hour. If that be the desired goal, move towards it, and with swifter strides. But it represents no goal of the profounder soul ; it is, however, one of the goals which I foreshadowed when I spoke of the errant tendencies of eccle- siastical bodies — the goal of intellectual anarchy, where our creed becomes a patchwork of fragmentary science, and our rule of life a compass whose needle points to no one same north, but obeys the magnetism of each strong desire or enticing dream. Was I wrong, then, in assuming that a coherent creed and a consistent conduct were among the ends unconsciously groped after in the formation of the religious society ? These at least are the things we cannot get from any scientific and philosophical institution, any debating club, or literary union. Newspapers are the cheapest of articles now-a-days ; presumably, therefore, no one yearns to be edified by a leading article from the religious platform. Nay, though it be instructive indeed to listen to some literary or scientific expert dealing with light hand with some professional topic, this privilege too we may have without difficulty, for where is not the expert to be heard in this age of popular lectures? But still there is an unquenchable need ever welling up in the human spirit for a more commanding word and a more searching insight than journalist or specialist with their own absorbing work can pronounce and lay claim to — and it is these things that the cultus of the religious organizations of all ages had specially in view. If a nature rich and deep enough can be found, one man giving his whole time and powers to his appointed work is the ideal arrangement. Ideal indeed — for it is easier to formulate your demand than obtain the supply. Especially in this period of our national development is it difficult to obtain the required man. For he who would take this burden on his shoulders must forego ambitious ends dear to aspiring intellects — the distinction of literary or scientific 67 repute on the one hand, of practical influence and authority on the other. The struggle for existence is as keen in litera- ture and science as elsewhere, and no one now-a-days can hope for success who does not walk from early days in the narrowest path. And what rewards can you offer the practical genius equal to the solid gains of the forum or the less tangible but not less prized influence of political life ? And yet our minister must be at once a closet student and a man of the world — at home in the library of the scholar, and yet stirred by the trumpet-calls of the social and moral reformer, as the scholar too rarely is stirred. For, see, what is the work he is summoned to perform. He has (i). To seek the foundations of duty, and having based the moral law on pillars material and mental, that cannot be moved, to illustrate and enforce it from the sufferings of living men, and the warning records of the past. (2). He has to interpret, as best he may, the religious consciousness of mankind — that consciousness as expressed in the majestic history of the great Religions, in the sacred volumes of East and West — and to set free the living spirit from the dead letter. (3). He must be sensitive to all the upward movements of his own age, — must be able to appraise in general terms the alleged advances in the scientific, aesthetic, and practical domains, unmasking pretension, fraud, and sophistry ; in- different to the idols of the hour, though far from indifferent to its stir and struggle. (4). And on days, few, but well-chosen, he should be found shaking off the dust of the street from his feet, and entering with noiseless footfall the hushed chamber of the Mystic, not ashamed to hold communion with those strangely-gifted few, who, in the body or out of the body they could not tell, " Saw distant gates of Eden gleam, And did not dream it was a dream." So much only in outline, and by way of rough notes. I do not pretend to have exhausted my theme, or to have looked at 68 it even on all sides. I have had in view^, as has been suffi- ciently evident, not the condition and requirements of the mass of mankind to-day, but only that To-day that gives promise of being the parent of To-morrow. Enough for us to labour in our own small vineyards — the great world beyond can take care of itself. Here in these walls, with a noble past behind you and a brightening future before, here it is with you to say what the type of your religious society shall henceforth be. The crisis of your fate cannot be indefinitely postponed. Better indeed prolonged suspense than irre- trievable error ; only let method and end be clearly kept in view, without distrust, without delusion. " I speak as to wise men — and also to friends — ^judge ye what I say." W. C. COUPLAND. January 30, 1887. WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN THE LIBRARY ON SUNDAY MORNINGS, 11 a.m. By MONCUEE D E( educed price !• s. d. Travels in South Kensington 9 Emerson at Home and Abroad 8 The Sacred Anthology 10 Idols and Ideals 4 Christianity . . 1 Human Sacrifices in England 6 Demonology and Devil-lore . . 20 Thomas Carlyle 5 The Wandering Jew . . 4 6 A Necklace of Stories 4 Republican Superstitions 2 6 Farewell Discourses . . 2 1 . CONWAY, M.A. Farewell Discourses, in 7 separate b- ^^ Numbers, A Gnostic's Apology, The Gift and the Altar, Of One Risen and Unrecognised, The Criminal Law, Substitutes for Hell, The Palace of Delight, and Apologia.. .. .. each 1 A Charge to be kept at South Place 2 Intellectual Suicide . . . . 2 The First Love Again . . . . 2 The Religion of Humanity . . 2 The Rising Generation . . . . 2 The Oath and its Ethics . . . . 2 Tennyson's " Despair " .. .. 2 Life and Death of Garfield . . 2 LESSONS FOR THE DAY. Vols. I. S II. Discourses Delivered at South Place Chapel by Moncdre D. Conwat, M.A. Price 3s. per vol. Each containing 26 Nos., neatly bound in cloth. Most of the Numbers may still be had, price Id. each. By Dr. Andrew Wilson, F.R.S.E., F.L.S. &c. Studies, chiefly Leisure Time Biological . . Chapters on Evolution Leaves from a Naturalist's Note Book Wild Animals : their Haunts and Habits The Student's Guide to Zoology . . Elements of Zoology Manual of Health Science. . 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Allanson Picton, M.A., M The Transfiguration of Religion . . Six Lectures on " The Conflict of Oligarchy and Democracy," vols., bound in cloth . . Six Lectures on " Lessons from the Rise and Fall of the English Commonwealth," vols., bound in cloth By Karl Pearson, M.A. Enthusiasm of the Market-place and of the Study. . By Edward Clodd. Science and the Emotions By Rev. T. W. Freckelton. The Modern Analogue of the Ancient Prophet . . By Geo. Jacob Holyoake. Hostile and Generous Toleration. . By John Robertson. Emotion in History : a Glance into the Springs of Progress . . Equality By Leslie Stephen. What is Materialism ? By H. C. March, M.D., Lond. Life and Death. Part I.^Death ,, ,, ,, II.— Life Darwinism & the Evolution of Man By C. G. Higgenson, M.A. The Moral Significance of the Story of Faust . . s 6 d. 3 1 T> 2 1 . 2 2 1 1 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 6 2 General Conference of Liberal Thinkers 10 HYMNS AND ANTHEMS. Cloth, limp, Is. ; Cloth, boards, red edges, 2s. ; Roan, gilt edges, 3s, No. 15.1 autij 1 ku %dimm S o tieti) FINSBURY, E.G. CULTURE AND ACTION A DISCOURSE DELIVERED IN SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C. BY JOHN ROBERTSON, Esq. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE ^E1^"TED BY 111X0 AND SELL, 13, GOUGH SQUARE, FLEET STREET, E.C. CULTURE AND ACTION. CULTURE AS STRENGTH AND STIMULUS. IT is, I believe, the facft that an invidious quality begins after a time to attach to the word culture, when we hear it habitually used to suggest an element in life which is held, by implication, to be something superior, something which plain people are likely to lack if they do not take particular pains to attain it. Now, it would be a pity that such a revulsion of sentiment should come between us and the very simple but all-important lesson that is conveyed b}^ the root meaning of the word. Culture is simply the tillage or cultivation of our faculties, the bringing them into play, the turning them to fuller account, the widening of their range, and the enjoyment of all this process of acftivity and expansion. For the funda- mental facft in our lives, from the point of view of the higher self-interest, is that the use of faculty — the reaching forward of the mind in any way to new experience — is a permanent source of satisfa(5tion ; and this implies that every kind of effedtive and non-injurious stimulus to the mind's a(5tion means the making of fresh possibilities of functional life. This is perhaps the final practical answer to what we may call aggressive or positive as distinguished from negative pessimism ; and it may be convenient at this stage to put the matter to some extent in the shape of a formula. It will, I think, be found that all states of conscious mental depression — all degrees and all phases of the pessimistic feeling that life is hardly worth living — consist of a recoil of the process of attention on ourselves, seemingly balked in our attempt to attend to something beyond. Whereas the fresh attention, the reaching forward, if it had been accomplished, would have meant either placid or pleasurable consciousness, the turning back of the mind upon itself yields onlya sense of impotence and emptiness. The spirit asks itself. What is the use of endeavour ? What does exertion really accomplish in this world ; and what are the satisfa(5lions we strive for, when we really look closely into them ? And if the spirit is given to the quoting of poetry it finds 70 ready to its hand an inexhaustible colle(5tion of gloomy apho- risms, of which '' dust and ashes " is the burden and refrain. And here there is to be noted the paradoxical, and indeed, seemingly absurd facl:, which we shall have to consider later, that the repetition of these melancholy didta is not at bottom a truly painful process — that we are not at our saddest when we contemplate life as a whole, and sum it up as a sad business ; but that such tristful sentiments make a curious relief from the first blind consciousness of disappointment or pain which started us on that line of thought. Now, what is the approximately true explanation ? Simply, that after its painful recoil on itself the mind has again performed an adl of fresh attention ; that the sense of mere impotence has passed into an adt of observation of life and of intelle(5tual generaliza- tion therefrom — a generalization of a melancholy kind cer- tainly, but still an active play of mind on its surroundings, and therefore a much less depressing sensation than the falling back of the intelligence on a sense of its own nothingness. The organism, in its blind way, has supplied its own cure. Of course, there is no certainty that the self-righting process will at all times occur. In a certain proportion of cases, it is unhappily only too certain, there is no speedy transition from self-contemplation to the viewing of things outside. The mind remains a mere consciousness of frustrate desire, a weary ache whose only variation is the change from the lassitude of exhaus- tion or necessary preoccupation to the renewing quiver of suffer- ing when quickened memory becomes one with pain. And it is only too easy to recall the kind of grief that thus clutches hearts in a grasp which seems as if nothing could ever undo it. Let no philosoph}' pretend to countervail the agony of a great bereavement. Consolations it may find ; occupations it will suggest ; but a great blow to the affedtions can as little be speedily cured as a great physical wound ; the duration in the one case being on the scale of the reach of the imagination as compared with the mere process of readjustment of physical particles on the other. And on that head it may be said in passing that there is grave reason to doubt whether the shock of bereavement was ever seriously mitigated for any human soul by the belief in an after meeting ; there being abundant evidence that such a sentiment is not really a dire(5l antidote to pain at all, but simply a particular means of turning thought into fresh channels — the process of solace resorted to indepen- dently of such a belief. But, even setting aside the great calamities of life, we have to confess that at times the mind may fail to sustain itself against the cumulative effedt of the lesser ones. Here, however, we are on the track of a cure. The failure of the mind in such cases to readl from its state of collapse means one of two things : either the physical depart- 71 ment is out of gear, in which case the whole is simply a form of illness ; or the resources of the mind are for the time exhausted, and, in default of sufficient outside stimulus, it remains paralysed — the frequent condition, it may be said, of many a hundred thousand human beings, rich and poor. Now, in perhaps two cases out of three, the mere physical solution is possibly the true one. It is hardly possible to be too materialistic in these matters. Every one of us must have noticed, a score of times, how a sense of impotence and discouragement, which sat heavy on us when we were physically and mentally fatigued, becomes transmuted into courage and confidence when rest has worked its subtle alchemy in all the cells of brain and body. These experiences go far to prove for us that the value of life, so-called, is like the values of every day economics, liable to endless variations, according to the state of supply and demand. The face of nature changes for us with the muscular action of our hearts, the vivacity of our brains, and the soundness of our nerves ; and these vary from day to day, and from hour to hour. Napoleon said, with frank vanity, but probably with entire truth, that he had met very few^ men equal to himself in what he called " two o'clock in the morning courage." Anyone who has known the kind of sinking of the heart that can come for a late watcher with the first grey tints of the dawn, will know the kind of fibre required to face danger at such a time with unshaken coolness. And if our physical courage is a varying quantity, so is the moral or intellectual. Setting this down, then, as a fac?t to be constantly acknow- ledged and reckoned with, we turn to the other factor in the problem — the position in which the mind stands as regards its intelleftual resources and opportunities. Here the case stands thus. Up to the point of the limit of its powers, the increasing culture of the mind, speaking broadly, constantly widens its possibilities of occupation, so that so long as the physical basis holds good, man has a pradtically infinite resource against recoil on himself in the praftically inexhaustible stores of knowledge or mind, food on all sides of him. The man whose culture is a constant process is thus at the other extreme from the absolute pessimist of the Buddhist type, whose whole intelligence is at all times either concentrated on itself or on the specific question of its relation to the universe — never seeking new positive knowledge from the outside world, never seeking to extend its powers, but, on the contrary, convinced that within itself alone is true knowledge to be found. Put it, then, that the formula of absolute pessimism is, Intelligence brooding on itself, and we may go on to say that the sensations of the really joyless pessimist are of the same order with those of the ordinary mind when it falls back on itself for want of faculty or incitement to range further. And since the great 72 majority are physically capable of such collapse, it follows that what we call culture is to be viewed as the g^reat antidote, available to all who will learn in time to use it. What it can do for us we can best see when we study the plight of those who lacked it. To take a familiar historic case, the suicidal temper prevailing among the cultured classes m the Stoic period of the declining Roman Empire was manifestly a result not of their culture in itself, but of its total failure to evolve by outward a(5tion. Well might Virgil say that happy would he be who could know causes. If but, instead of gazing fixedly on itself for light as to condudt, and making condu6t the whole of life, the Stoic mind could have let itself play freely in the sphere of real knowledge, such as it then was, and with a real interest seek to extend that sphere — if it could have untiringly sought for causes in nature instead of idly imagining them ; if it could have looked with seeing eyes into the human past and learned to note there even things apart from their causes, the whole intellectual situation would have been different. But for minds which had exhausted what range of culture presented itself to them, and felt no impulse to fresh adventure, nothing really remained but a state of brooding melancholy, at best gravely tranquil, at worst pointing to the door of death as the one way of betterment. And the equation is sub- stantially the same where you have, under conditions of religious emotion, a blind yearning for martyrdom, or, in an unexcited Oriental nature, a tremorless willingness to j'ield up life. The Chinaman who is willing to give himself up to die as a substitute for a condemned criminal on a small sum being paid to his family — this is, again speaking bio- logically, and not ignoring the favourable ethical judgment of the case, an organism in which the will and the several func- tions, bodily and mental, have ceased to crave for further exercise; in which imagination has ceased to rouse or curiosity to goad. So with the willing religious martyr ; life ceases to attract him ; he has exhausted what sources of interest lay ready to his hand ; and the new emotion which associates a fresh happiness with the a6\ of death carries him away unre- sisting. Well, there is no need in these days to make a crusade against martyrdom ; but it may be well to put plainly the contrast between the gospel of knowledge, which tells men how to find a fruitful joy in an expanding life, and that which, whether for primitive visionaries or modern devotees, treats life as worthless, and speaks only of joy beyond it. For this principle of the expansibility of life is the very birth of culture ; the undoubted result of the sheer acftion of human intelligence on all the material around it, in those modern centuries in which, after the long dream of theology, men turned in simple curiosity to the study of outside realities. As has been re- 73 peatedly pointed out, the very idea of human progress is modern ; it has no part in ancient thought ; and if, on the other hand, the ancients did have a conception of culture as a process of development of fundlion, yet this conception was necessarily limited by their inability to conceive of a constant expansion of the sphere of knowledge. But to-day that idea promotes action in every sphere of intellecftual life ; in experimental science, in invention, in scientific speculation, in psychology, in physics, in the re-examination of history, in archaeology, in the analysis of language and mythology — and, lastly, in pracftical politics and the criticism of society. And it is the abundant fruitfulness and the boundless promise held out by this element in modern thought that makes it so astonishing that a writer of Mr. Froude's intelligence should even in a moment of exceptionally petulant rea(ftionism say such a thing as that science has finally landed men in '' blank nothingness. " Science has yet only begun ; in Emerson's words, we are still but at cock-crow and the morning star ; and yet so deep are the stirrings of curiosity and hope with which it fills the general intelligence, that we might rather speak of it, as the poet does of lyric love, as" all a wonder and a wild desire ; " as a rousing of the mind of the world before the advent of an era in which it feels it is destined to sail " by unpathed waters to undreamed-of shores." Not from any one man's pre-eminent thought, not from any creed, not from any sacrosanct source or oracle has come to men this heritage of ever-widening interest in things, but from the patient and loyal labours of all of humanity that has gone before ; the true salva- tion of mankind being thus at last found in its own energies, now that it is learning to be faithful to itself, and to treasure its own gifts, so long trodden under foot in the vain ambition to transfigure its dwelling-place by a light that in sad truth " never was on sea or land." It is easy, however, to lapse into an ill-considered optimism if we look at the matter merely from the general point of view ; and the question of the benefits of culture, like that of the fitness of the optimistic or pessimistic temper, must finally be pro- nounced upon from the point of view of the individual organism — the proper scientific unit in all methodical study of sociology. Here, at the first blush, the testimony is almost too abundant — on the whole certainly much more abundant than the counter- vailing complaints of the vanity of knowledge, from Solomon downwards. We are inclined to say, after listening to some writers' paeans over the joys of culture, that " they do protest too much." Take, for instance, that famous allegation of Montesquieu, in his somewhat too complacent sketch of his own characfter : " Study has been for me a sovereign remedy against the disgusts of life, as I have never had a chagrin 74 which an hours reading did not dissipate." There is, I believe, a not uncommon disposition to sympathize with the lady who said that the one sentiment which that philosophic reflecftion aroused in her was a desire to throw some of the philosopher's sources of consolation at his head ; and indeed it reads very significantly in context with the immediately pre- ceding remark of the writer as to the fate of some of his early attachments. But while we adjudge Montesquieu to have been a somewhat exceptionally placid type, we cannot refuse to believe his testimony as to the happiness he found in the life of ideas. It breathes through all his writing, be it superficial or sagacious, in a tone of assured tranquillity or good-humour, which the reader feels to have come of long enjoyment of that best of all good society, the companionship of the library. And from a multitude of men who do not profess to have had Montesquieu's immunity from grief, there comes a cordial chorus of acknowledgment of the help and healing that culture can give. A whole book is easily made of the praise of books ; and indeed the theme is as old as literature. But the weightiest testimony of all is that of the lives that men have been enabled to live, under the deadliest discouragement, by virtue of the friendship and the self-forgetting they were able to find in the world of the imagination opened up to him by literature. One of the most memorable of these lives is that of the man whom surely all good hearts will always love, Charles Lamb. It is one of the lurid touches of irony in the records of humanity, that the English writer who in this century has talked most about heroes, should have spoken of Lamb only in words of Pharisaic contumely which are nothing short of brutal ; he being, as his biographer does well to explain, ignorant at the time of writing of those fa(5ls in Lamb's life which, for us who know them, make him a hero beside whom a number of the historic personages so designed seem rather poor creatures. Over the life of this sweetest of all humorists there stretch two shadows such as might have made of many a man a stricken hypochondriac — the killing of his mother by his sister in a fit of madness, and the recurrence every now and then of that madness all through the sister's life. First there were father and mother and sister to care for ; and there was another brother who might have helped ; but that brother, the richer, stood aside ; and Charles took up the burden so lovingly and cheerfully as never even to slacken in his brotherly goodwill towards the egoist. Then came the tragedy, a horror of great darkness, too awful to be whispered to the world in Mary Lamb's lifetime ; and now there was her life to be lovingly shielded henceforth to the end. Only in one way could it be done. For Charles Lamb during his life, with its sleepless love for the afflidted sister, there was to be no love of wife or child. We only once catch 75 the note of the deprivation, in his poem "The Old Famihar Faces": — " I loved a love once, fairest among women. Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her. All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." As for the ever-recurring blow of the sister's chronic alienation, we can in part gather its anguish from the picture given us by one who saw the brother and sister, at one of the times when Mary felt the fit coming on, walking together hand-in-hand through the fields to the madhouse, weeping, weeping, with a grief which looked forward and backward and found no place of comfort — surely as piercing a vision of human woe as many a line in Dante's Hell. And yet see how, all through this life till near the end, when the fine nature had partially deteriorated under the mere physical strain, Lamb not only kept up his humorous cheerfulness for his sister's sake but really found abundant good in life, good which he has embodied for us in some of the most exquisite writing in all literature. If he had done nothing but call attention to the values of half-forgotten work he would have done well by his fellows and proved a rare power of fortitude and self-discipline ; but in addition to that he has added something to the total territory of mind by the side lights of his genius on the every-day life he knew, and the lovely rendering he gives us of the tender joys of his and his sister's comradeship. It makes us think better of all human nature to follow them by the glimpses he gives of Elia and his cousin Bridget, scraping and pinching, and making merry in poverty, and smiling over it all again in prosperity. And who else has ever so touched with poetry the sheer literal satisfactions of life on the plane of the most ordinary experi- ence ? There is no musing on misery and the grave, but the mellowest praise of the world's good things : — " I am in love with this green earth ; the face of town and country ; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived, I and my friends ; to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age ; or drop like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. . . . Sun and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself. Do these things go out with life ? Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him ? And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios ! must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces ? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading ? " 76 Who ever before had thus touched with feeling such elements in life ; making even eating and drinking rank with perfedt fitness and naturalness among the pleasures of exist- ence, and with simple profundity seizing the fundamental poetry of the life of towns in that phrase "the sweet security of streets." But if Lamb could thus raise from his marred life the flower of a tender contentment, the cause was that to a moral genius as rare as his literary faculty he was able to bring the balm and nutriment of books. Of course, some men can get outside their troubles by methods of a lower kind ; but here, at least, there could have been no other adequate solace; and we have to remember that Mary Lamb, too, under her affli(ftion, found consolation in her brother's pursuits. If, then, two such lives as these could be kept sweet at heart and dignified in bearing by the ministry of a culture which, after all, was not very far-reaching, tried by the standards of to-day, we may, I think, take it as proved that less crushing troubles may be charmed into bearableness by the resort to the spells of the intellectual life. To take a less exceptional instance, is there not something attractive and satisfying to the emotional nature in the account of how Macaulay, finding himself balked for the moment in his political career by a passing contagion of foolish bigotry among his constituents, turned with a kind of ecstasy once more to the life of the study ; so happy to be again alone with his books that he hardly even winced under his defeat. These sensations of rising above the crosses of life into a serene air of contemplation and communion with the general mind of man — these are the appanage of the higher life ; and we should not refuse to recognize that we are on the outskirts of the same intellecftual region even when we read of how Charles Fox, after losing /i8,ooo at play in one night, could be found next morning on his sofa tranquilly reading an Eclogue of Virgil, finding respite from the stings of a certainly not over-uneasy conscience in that ancient music, which has lulled so many a scholar's ear across the crowded centuries. But it is not to be implied, in the citing of such instances, that to realize the boon which culture gives we have to become Charles Lambs or Macaulays ; nor is it even to be assumed that culture chiefly consists in the resort to books. There is an egregious one-sidedness in the fashion in which many literary men assume that culture lies not merely in reading but in certain kinds of reading ; narrowing the term down to cover what used to be significantly called polite letters — that is, a certain familiarity with poetry, fiction, and drama, ancient and modern ; an easy-going acquaintance with history ; a more or less accurate idea of different philosophic systems ; and as little science as you could conveniently get along with. Taken as an outline of a system of culture claiming to be ideally adequate, 77 that conception must simply go by the board. Even Mr. Arnold, who is clearly biassed on the academic side, views culture as consisting in the coming in contact with the best ideas on things in general ; and unless you are to fall back on a special definition of ideas it it clear that this must involve turning our attention to all sources of ideas as far as may be. What we are now considering, however, is not, What is the ideal cul- ture, but, What is the nature of the average reaction of culture on the individual and on the general life ? And to answer this rightly we have to realize that culture may take a hundred shapes and may go on in any degree. Our formula will perhaps keep us right. Culture has two aspe(5t:s, the obje(?tive and the subjedlive ; its value as a means of enabling us to live more efficiently as towards our fellows ; its value as a settlement of the issues raised by pessimism, philosophic or other. Now, the standards in the first case are obvious enough, or at least are not obscure ; and in the second or self-regarding side the central truth for us is, as I have said, that culture helps life by expanding it — by always holding out fresh possibilities of ideation, and so, in the familiar phrase, taking us out of our- selves. But this taking us out of ourselves is a matter of degree, and is possible for each and everyone of us, broadly speaking, in respecSt of his range and kind of faculty or capacity for effort. It is no more confined to the study of books than to the use of microscope or telescope or geological hammer, the artist's pencil, or the musician's instrument ; the essence of it, scientifically speaking, being the doing something which expands the powers and opens the way to new aftivities. Culture in this fundamental sense is being attained by the artizan at his harmonium, in his degree, as truly as by the clerk or professional man who takes up a science or a language, or by the student who takes up a new department of history. Each is making something more of himself than he was, and laying up a reserve of pleasurable possibility for the future. Everybody knows the old saying that if you do not play whist you are preparing for yourself a tedious old age ; but what shall we now say of those who have only whist to trust to ? One of the most familiar illustrations of the danger of being without range of occupation is the frequent case of the man of business who, after many years of frugal toil, bethinks himself of en- joying some leisure in his old age, only to discover, when he has settled down to rest, that he has no more faculty of being entertained. The world with its infinite range of attrac^tion lies open to him on all hands, but the powers he once had of being interested in things are atrophied by sheer lack of use. He had chosen to live in one groove, and when he leaves it he finds he can be at ease in no other. There is tragedy here too, surely ; and the lesson is not merely one for the man who 78 seeks no culture, but also for him who seeks it on one line only. To be sure, any sort of specialism in the way of study has immense advantages over the mere specialism of business ; but that too has its risks ; and there is prudence, though there is at the same time exaggeration, in Professor de Morgan's precept, that one should know everything of some- thing, and something of everything. It is not given to any of us to know something of everything, and it may be doubted whether many even among the specialists know everything of something ; but at least we can keep our minds open. It is impossible to trace, even in outline, all the forms of gain in the process ; but emphasis has specially to be laid on the fa(5t that the relation of culture to life is a constant reacTtion or interaction. On the one hand, culture is an expan- sion of experience ; on the other, every extension of experience gives a new fruitfulness to all the sources of culture. Who does not know how Shakespeare opens up for us with our widening scrutiny of life ; how dark sayings become clear one day ; how a remembered sorrow deepens the meaning of great music, puts a mysterious suggestion into starlight and the waving of trees, and makes the march of the clouds a long-drawn excitement where once it had been a vague passing perception? The more we have felt, the more we can feel ; and it is sheer fallacy to say, as do the a priori pessimists, that the extension is simply one of capacity to feel pain. On the contrary, the all-round extension involves this, that as art of all kinds plays on sad as well as on happy experience, the sadness is made to pay tribute to joy, since every good artistic produ(5l, literary or other, is in itself a source of satisfaction. Let anyone think of the effe(5t: on him of such lines as those in which Keats says that this world is one — " Where men sit and hear each other groan, I Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies, Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs ; Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes. Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow." It is the very essence of pessimism if you will ; but who does not delight in the distillation ; and who would not dispense with many very solid satisfactions to retain the special one of knowing Keats's Ode ? And is it not one of our consolations in thinking of his short life that he found his reward in attain- ing beauty in his song ? But if what is primarily sad in life can thus be made to minister good, equally certain is it that widening knowledge of everything around is a perpetual foun- tain of pleasurable sensation. Of all the foolish things ever said about the effects of new ideas, perhaps the foolishest is 79 that of the poets about the charm of nature being destroyed by the discoveries of science. Keats said it, and Edgar Poe said it, but it was the sheerest boyish petulance in both. It was not only not true : it was the absolute reverse of the truth. It may, indeed, be true that poetry has not yet quite caught up the results of the other intelleftual acStivities of modern times ; that it is too much given to haunting the past, and is thus imitative, and timid about new conditions. But the poetic motive is there for the eyes that can see it. Listen to the note that comes from Emerson, when he would express the manifolding of his sensations by what he knows of the world's history. " Nature is sanative, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity, under roses, and violets, and morning dew ! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love. Look out into the July night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate as the bonfires of the meadow flies. Yet the power of numbers cannot compute its enormous age — lasting as space and time — embosomed in time and space." Here is a much sounder and solider statement of experience than Arnold's poem on " The Future," moving and beautiful as that is, with its protest that the universe was more meaningful to primeval eyes than to ours to-day. That is after all only a poet's sigh ; the rigorous truth is in theother poet's prose. His feeling for the immensit}' of nature is an added something which nothing could make up to antique ignorance. The native Siberian, we are told, can see the satellites of Jupiter with the naked eye; but the European eye that is taught to look can see a vista and a galaxy beside which the barbarian's firmament is but a dark dome fretted with points of fire. To come finally to our first ground of the relation between culture and the general forward movement of society, we have to note the per contra to the fa(5l which forced itself upon us, that culture could, and often did, leave men fast in the clutches of prejudice ; their consciousness of their range of ideas only serving to make them more aggressive and more mischievous when they carried their prejudice into acftion. The drawback is one which it would be a serious oversight to ignore; but against it we are now able to set two balancing considerations. First, it is obvious that taking mankind in the mass, culture is the great solvent of prejudice of the cruder sort. As travel and intercourse with foreigners are sure correctives of the sub- rational antipathies of race, so the rubbing against ideas, even at random, is on a large scale irresistibly destrudtive of our old-world superstitions, our class jealousies, our local vanities, our social bigotries, and even to some extent of our hypocrisies 8o — perhaps the most adhesive coating of all. As in our inter- course with men we gradually learn to read their worst weak- nesses easily, and to estimate aright the boaster and the sentimentalist, so in our intercourse with moral and other ideas we learn to probe the emptier forms of declamation, which is a gain, even if we learn ourselves to produce some of a higher order. Happiness, according to Swift, who anticipated some pessimist conclusions, is a property of being well deceived ; but we find a happiness in ascertaining that we are less easily deceived than we used to be. And our next consideration is after all only an extension of this. Our safeguard against erring as great men of culture have erred, is that their lives have become part of our stock of experience. For they are finally to be regarded by the humanity which follows them as data in the general order of Nature, as parts of that connecfted whole to which it is our task to adjust ourselves ; and, if wc will, we may learn from them the open secret of their moral mechanism. The ancient " Know thyself," we have been told, is an impossible precept, to be superseded by the more praftical " Know what thou canst work at." But it is just the deter- mining difference between the ancient and the modern way of thought that what was of old indeed an impossible precept becomes for us a focussing of all the lines of human investigation to the most practical of all purposes. To know ourselves, in the new sense, will be to know Nature first, and then to know our place in it ; till we find the right relations for our moral action as fully as we have found them for the physical. The process of learning, for the race as a whole, is indeed a wasteful rne, as Nature's processes are ; but to know this is after all to grasp a truth which can reconcile us to miscarriages that would otherwise seem merely ruinous. Humanity carries in its history, like the mountains of Emerson's figure, the marks of many a dread convulsion and many a dark work of slow cor- rosion ; its face, like that of Freedom in Bryant's song, "is scarred With tokens of old wars, its massive limbs Are strong with struggling." But of mankind as of the planet its dwelling-place we can say that its own life for ever robes it anew in beauty and hope ; and the latest of its generations, for many an age to come, will indeed be '• Ancients of the earth and in the morning of the times." JOHN ROBERTSON. 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By H. C. March, M.D., Loud Life and Death. Part I. — Death ,, ,, ,, II. — Life Darwinism & the Evolution of Man By C. G. HiGGiNsoN, M.A. The Moral Significance of the Story of Faust . . . . . . General Conference of Liberal Thinkers .. ..reduced price d. 2 2 2 2 1 8 1 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 HYMXS AND ANT EI EMS. Cloth, limp. Is. ; Cloth, hoards, red edijes, '2s. .■ Itunn, gilt edges, 8s, No. 16.] 0iit^ 1 laa |Ulij!i0EB ^mi^ FINSBURY, E.G. THE COMMON THINGS OF HUMAN LIFE. A DISCOURSE DELIVERED IN SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C. BY F. SYDNEY MORRIS. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. PRINTED BY KING, SELL, AND RAILTON, ;2, eODGH SQUARE, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C. THE COMMON THINGS of HUMAN LIFE THERE is a marked contrast between the ancient religious attitude and habit and the modern. The old habit and attitude was one of contemplation of a mystery, meditation upon the supernatural, search for the divine apart from the human ; a disposition was prevalent to seek for " green pastures and still waters," holy shrines, sacred temples, sandtified solitudes, and holy services and ceremonial. The modern habit and attitude is much more pra(5lical, rational, human. Family, brotherhood, philanthropy, politics, have taken the place of the old channels in which energy was wasted and life stultified. There has been a change from the tyranny of ecclesiastical despotism and social to intellecftual freedom and democracy, from heaven to earth, from God to man, from the Church to the world. By this change some- thing has been lost. The old peace has been lost; but it was the peace of stagnation and meant corruption — so it is well. Rest has been lost; but it was the rest of credulity and meant superstition — so it is well. Quiet has been lost ; but it was the quiet of ignorance and meant death — so it is well. But much has been gained. The strength of service has been gained, life of progress, wayside flowers in infinite variety and abundance, the larger life, the life of humanity. We have gone from truth to truth, from strength to strength, from gladness to gladness. But still there is a tendency prevalent to contemplate the abnormal and the high, and to overlook the common and the near. And in doing so we make a great mistake and suffer great loss. You remember that George Eliot wrote somewhere, " Paint us an angel if you can, with a violet floating robe and a face paled by the celestial light ; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward, and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory ; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands ; those heavy clowns taking holiday ; those rounded backs and stupid, weatherbeaten faces, that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world ; those 82 homes with their tin pans, brown pitchers, rough curs,"&c. A great many do not understand this attitude of mind. One remarked somewhat sneeringly that George EHot's historic faculty was weak, that she surveyed the grand array of tombs in St. Peter's and remarked nothing but some peasants feeHng the teeth of Canova's lion ! This to me was her chief charm,, or one of her chief charms. So many have no eyes for simple human incidents and pidlures ! People persist in talking about the dignity, glory, heroism of human life, and they forget that it is a very simple, common- place thing after all. They talk about visions, revelations, great experiences and romances, forgetting that millions have to do only with very very different things. It has been too much the habit of men to close their eyes to facets and amuse themselves with fancies. This has been so with conspicuous men in the world's history. Take Gautama Buddha. It is very difficult indeed to penetrate the vast accumulation of legendary stories that have grown out of superstitious reverence for his memory, and discover the simple human character, gradually growing beyond his narrow traditional surroundings and pursuits, recognizing the need and claim of humanity, and making the great renunciation with a view to entering upon his great mission. The old world sun myth has found his per- sonality a gathering point, and now his personality is lost. The legendary Gautama has taken the place of the real. What do we know, also, of the Galilean carpenter's boy whom Christians worship as a God? That a pure-minded Jew, seeing farther than his contemporaries, and having great thoughts of duty and a disposition to sacrifice himself for the sake of humanity as he understood it, did live, I have little doubt ; one who, like Socrates, possessed a demon within, to whose advice and injuncftions he was prone to give heed, and so ran counter to the social conventionalities of his day and gained martyrdom as his reward. But who or what was he? Fidlion has obscured facft. Superstitious legend has buried for ever the reality and truth. I do not sympathize with the endeavour to prove that these and other prominent individuals were pure fi(?tions, that there was never a Gautama or a Jesus. It seems to me only reasonable to believe that the sun myth, as it travelled down through the ages, rested here and there upon some prominent person — glorified that person — and in glory- fying, destroyed him as a human power and influence. The fleecy clouds travel over sea and plain, but they hang about and adorn the summit of the mountain, and thus they add a charm and glory — all the picturesque beauty of new light and shade, wondrous forms and marvellously changing tints and hues ; 83 but in thus glorifying the mountain they make it impossible to detect its outline or guess at its a(5tual height. Jesus became a god, and ceased to be a man, and only became a god of very partial knowledge, unequal justice and temper, whose charafter was not perfe(5t, and whose precepts were not always sound, so that there has been loss and not gain in this substitution of fancies for fa(fts. So it has been with kings and queens ; and Thackeray was blamed very much for telling the truth in his " Four Georges," so familiar and agreeable had falsehood become. We see the same thing in history also. History has been largely fiction. Indeed, until quite recently there has been no history of the people. While fanciful stories have been told of the doings of courts and kings, the common fadts of the lives of the people have been ignored. Every people's movement has been a " rising," " revolt," or " rebellion," which had to be suppressed. All that was worthy of record were the deeds and words of the great, and these were usually exaggerated, and sometimes fabricated to meet the demands ot people of whom there are still very many, and for whom Thackeray found a very suitable and expressive designation. It is the same in art. Art has not given us the truth. It can- not be that all men in one century had round flushed faces and dimpled chins, and in another all had long faces, lank hair, and pointed chins. Here we see art, not nature. And in land- scape painting how has the natural been contemned, despised, and rejected of men ! A French artist, one Millet, who painted as few could paint, had his pi(5tures excluded from the Salon year after year. I believe throughout his whole life — because he painted common things ; his painting was excep tionally good, but his subjects were distasteful ! He loved to depi(5t humble peasants in their work-a-day dress, rough clothes, wooden shoes, and farm implements in their hands, working in the fields, or basking in the sunshine, or kneeling before some simple shrine. But the refined Parisians objected to be reminded of the existence of such a class of people, and thought it dangerous to remind others of their existence, for sympathy might be excited, and inconvenience might arise to themselves. In order to shut out the common facfts of the great mass of men's lives, those who can afford, surround themselves with an artificial kind of society ; " plant out," in more ways than one, unpleasant realities — realities that would constitute re- bukes or demands. Thousands have no conception of the struggle for existence that multitudes endure ; they take care that they shall not receive information upon such distasteful subjects. In politics we talk of national honour and glory ! 84 And we forget how national health, prosperity, morality, and soundness are affed^ed by the usual methods of seeking national honour and glory ! What are honour and glory bought at the price of human slaughter, savage barbarism, general demoralization, ruinous taxation ? He was right who wrote during the great French war : " Our ministers panders to a king's will, Drain all our wealth away to fill their armies, And feed the crows of France. Year follows year And still we prosecute the war ; Draining our wealth, distressing our poor peasants. Slaughtering our youths — and all to crown our chiefs With Glory ! I detest the hell-sprung name ! " All this is a poor substitute for general well-being, quiet industry yielding its proper fruits, general education and pros- perity ; and all the nations of Europe will, ere long, discover this. To-day they are nearly strangled by the terrible weight of war expenditure and war debt. The people groan, and will, when they realize the fafts of the case — the disgraceful facts — resist. For glory bought at the price of general distress and penury, and a heritage of woe for posterity, will some day be recognized as a mockery and a fraud ! In religion, also, there is a great deal of this same dispo- sition manifested. A Presbyterian minister indu(5ted to his charge the other day announced that it would be his great aim " to advance the glory of God." What a mission ! Why not discover the misery and degradation of man, and do something to remove it ? " Advance the divine glory." How proud he must be to have such a doughty champion ! But what is this talk about a glorious God, omnipotent Father, and the rest ? Behold the wasted child, the attenuated father and mother, the sad countenance, the broken heart, the long years of hopeless toil, and constant misery, and say again — Mockery ! Fraud '. Is it any wonder that men say : " Thin wasted hands on withering hearts we press, There is no God — in vain we plead and call, In vain with weary hearts we search and guess — Like children in an empty house sit all, Castaway children, lorn and fatherless." That is called blasphemy ! Then surely, as there is a righteous anger, there is a righteous blasphemy. And it is time that plain speaking should do something to depose a phantom and unmask a fraud, that men may be free to look upon the sufferings of humanity, and instead of contemplating and prating of the glory of God, may be found working for th^ 85 advancement of the highest interests of man. I am only speaking of a human creation. I am not speaking of that unknowable and unapproachable mystery of power and progress of which we see evidence everywhere, but simply of that which men have set up to worship, an idol which they gaze upon to the exclusion of the facets of their life and forgetfulness of human responsibilities and duties. So have the common things of human life been overlooked, while men have con- templated the abnormal, unnatural, and imaginary. And this habit has led to grievous mistakes in all departments of life. In society it has led to class distiniftions and usurpations and injustices, based upon ignorance of fafts. It is strange to what an extent self-deception may be carried. Hazlitt tells of a haberdasher whom he recollected who made a pradtice of walking every day from Bishopsgate Street to Pall Mall and Bond Street with the undaunted air and strut of a general officer ; and also of a prim undertaker who regularly tendered his person, whenever the weather would permit, from the neighbourhood of Camberwell into the favourite promenades of the city with a mincing gait that would have become a gentle- man usher of the black rod. And he fairly exclaims, " What a strange infatuation — to live in a dream of being taken for what you are not ! in deceiving others and at the same time ourselves ; for no doubt these persons believed that they thus appeared to the world in their true charadters, and that their assumed possessions did no more than justice to their real merits." But not only in harmless ways like that has this disposition been manifested. This thing has laid upon the many untold burdens, and visited upon them unnumbered shackles ! It has caused social inequalities that have produced evils and antagonisms it will take generations, perhaps cen- turies, to eradicate, and it has produced in the offending sections of the community that blindness which it used to be said the gods inflidted upon those they intended to destroy. For, as it has been put : " The bias of rulers and masters makes it difficult for them to conceive that a decline of class power and a decrease of class distincftion may be accompanied by improvement, not only in the lives of the regulated classes, but in the lives of the regulating classes. The sentiments and ideas proper to the existing social organization prevent the rich from seeing that worry and weariness and disappointment result to them indirecSlly from the social system apparently so conducive to their welfare. The baron of feudal times never imagined the possibility of social arrangements that could serve him far better than the arrangements he so strenuously upheld. Nor did he see in the arrangements he upheld the 86 causes of his many sufferings and discomforts. Had he been told that a noble might be much happier without a moated castle, having its keep and secret passages and dungeons for prisoners ; that he might be far more secure without drawbridge and portcullis, men-at-arms, and sentinels ; that he might be in less danger having no vassals or hired mercenaries ; that he might be wealthier without possessing a single serf — he would have thought the statement absurd, even to the extent of insanity. It would have been useless to argue that the regime seeming so advantageous to him entailed hardships of many kinds — perpetual feuds with his neighbours, open attacks, surprises, betrayals, revenges by equals, treacheries by in- feriors, the continual carrying of armour and arms, and a multi- tude of inconveniences and annoyances, and often ending with a sudden cutting short of life in battle or by murder."* But what he could not see his representative to-day sees clearly enough. Advantage has been gained by the ruling class by every modification of the ancient conditions which nevertheless they systematically resisted. " And with the loss of diredl control over workers there has grown up an industrial system which supplies the noble of to-day with multitudinous conve- niences and luxuries undreamt of by him who had workers at his mercy." And yet although history, which he who runs may read, teaches so clear a lesson, men remain blind to the need and the possibility and wisdom of adaptation (even in their own interests). In the department of politics this blindness has been especially conspicuous. Legislation has been for certain classes, a line has been drawn, a circle larger or smaller, and the rights of those outside that circle have been ignored or denied. Man has been distrusted. Man as man has had no rights ; he has acquired political rights when he has acquired property, or has reached a certain social position, or professed a certain religious faith, or what not. Every extension of the franchise has been persistently and bitterly opposed. Iniquitous burdens and tyrannies have been removed through fear, not from sense of justice. Every step in the order of progress has been a conquest on the part of the number out- side the circle ; something wrung out of, wrested from those within it, it has not been a voluntary concession, for the people outside were not considered to have any political rights, any just claims. As under the Irish Penal Laws, Chief Justice Robinson said, " The law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Catholic " — although such persons undoubtedly did exist by thousands ! So here, one class after • Herbert Spencer. 87 another have been denied a hearing, as being outside the circle, and having no legal status ; Jews, Catholics, Nonconformists, labourers, tenants, women, and so on. In some of these cases the struggle was long and weary, but at last vi(5lory was won, and now we are amazed that in a civilized country influential secftions of the community could have lain under heavy dis- abilities so long ; in some the conflict still rages, and the result ere long will be the same. And so it is in Theology. The common things of human experience and knowledge being overlooked, and theology being based upon what is called Revelation, many grotesque errors are generally accepted as truth. Thus we have the story of the creation and fall of man, coming to us from earliest days of crude speculation, through the channel of the "inspired history" of the "chosen people," still holding its ground in many quarters in spite of the theory of evolution which is based upon proved facts and sound deductions. Thus we have the Pauline doctrine of Redemption still preached from a thousand pulpits, although history shows that humanity has been its own redeemer age after age ; and has been steadily working out its own salvation through innumerable genera- tions. The doctrine of Revelation is held still, although it is clear that the charadier of the revelation has been purified and ennobled as the intelligence and civilization of man has ikdvanced from stage to stage ; showing 'clearly that human reason has led revelation and made it from time to time — and not revelation that has moulded and led reason. People still preach the doftrine of probation, and maintain that this brief earthly life of ours is simply the introduction to a long here- after ; that its only value is that it is an opportunity of becoming fitted for a future state of bliss, and that eternity depends not upon what a man does and is even during his brief years on earth, but upon what he shall believe just at the last as he passes hence, and this in forgetfulness of all the greatness and nobility of human life — all the duties and responsibilities, all the service and the gladness, all the pleasant associations, tender reminiscences and cherished nopes, all the gathered fruits of labour and toil, and all the future life and influence on earth " In minds made better by their presence, In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude ; in scorn, For miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge men's search To vaster issues ! " 88 And special Providence, too, is believed in by men, although God has never interfered on behalf of his worshippers and faithful children, and all that man has acquired or attained has been the result of his own effort and endeavour. And so, of all the doctrines of the orthodox churches ; and the same may be said of the practices of conventional religion — they are not adapted for common mankind. The idle, ecstatic, emo- tional, may find something in them. The services of the dreary period of Lent, through which we have recently passed, may be pleasant, and bring comfort to such as have nothing to do, and are grateful for anything that shall help them to pass the weary days of their selfishly indolent existence. But the man of a(5^ivity, of varied interest and energy, of vigorous thought, ambition, and endeavour — the strong man of to-day — what can he do with the services and ceremonies of conven- tional religion ? He needs a thing of precept, spirit, principle, and inspiration that shall go with him into his world of duty, responsibility, and pleasure, and not demand that he shall come apart from all that makes his life. Tell him that he is too much engrossed in this world, that it is a " sordid " and " sinful " world, and he ought to " come apart and pray," and he will resent it justly ! But tell him he is right, that he is in the path of duty, that it is a good world, and man ought to deem it and use it so ; that he is right in enjoying its sunshine and gathering its flowers ; but that he must be willing to accept its responsibilities also, and always remember the rights and happiness of others as well as his own. Tell him to remain in the world, but to remember that to be manly he must be upright, and walk in integrity ; that he must manifest consideration and sympathy ; that he must be modest and unselfish, and you do not unman and degrade him, but ennoble and sanftify him ! Oh ! the common things of human life and interest have been overlooked and despised. Ancient ecclesiasticism did this. Modern ecclesiasticism does this — and it does mischief. The real artist will detect the beauty of some simple form or combination of colour that is not seen by others ; he will paint some simple scene that another would have passed by, and you will be amazed at its pathos, and wonder at the attractive- ness of its story or its lessons. And the real poet will take some common experience or ordinary incident, and in its simple narration he will stir up your emotions, excite your enthusiasm, and move you to emulate some a.6i of heroism not deemed heroic, because so poor and commonplace. And the real musician will listen to the gentle breeze as it wanders 89 through the branches, or the murmur of the little brook, and these he will weave into a song that will move you to peni- tence or aspiration, tears, laughter, or song. So the real Reformer will see what are the burdens and injustices resting heavily upon large classes of men, unrecognized because so long endured — unresisted because the shoulders have grown used to them ; and he will labour for the liberation, not of the few from some exceptional burden which all will recognize as one — and which popular opinion will at once demand the removal of — but the burdens that destroy the life and hope of men. In the work of removing which he will have little sympathy and little assistance, and for removing which he may have little thanks. And the real man will not be found going apart from human affairs and spending his time in the contemplation of some sublime mystery, or the performance of some useless and meaningless ceremony. He will be found busy in this work-a-day world of ours patiently and bravely doing his work, enduring his sufferings and disappointments, and accepting good from day to day, as he may or must. We cannot stand apart or associate ourselves together in small companies or classes, and say we will not look upon common things, or have anything to do with common aims, and causes, and men ; we will deal with high and lofty themes ; we will maintain our dignity and preserve our influence, position, and power, whatever may be the fate of all beside ourselves. It cannot be ! The individual cannot stand or fall alone. All humanity must stand or fall together. Humanity is a unit. We are forcibly reminded of this continually. Some terrible disaster or swiftly-running plague respe(5ts no individual or class — it assails all alike. One said, " Behold the old Roman civilization surrounded on every hand by barbarism. By and by the grandeur of that classic life, that classic thought, that classic writing, that classic art, is swept to the winds by the down-coming from the north of the avalanche of barbarism that they had looked upon with scorn and negledt. They had tried to save the Roman and the Grecian world without saving the rest of it, and the barbarism overwhelmed and swallowed up the civilization. Or take another example : Never was there a period in the history of the world when culture and refinement and art and pleasure were carried to a higher pitch than in the last years of the French Empire, But beneath it was a life looked down upon with scorn and negledt by the rich and the great ; and that life by and by rose beneath the fabric that was resting upon it as a foundation, rose as the flood rises under the ice in spring, broke it into atoms, and whelmed the fair life that was above it beneath its cold. go dark waters."* The same thing is going on in Russia to-day. The nobles still maintain that they have a right to, and that they can deny their relationship to the rest of the nation, and refuse to acknowledge any responsibilities. What is the result ? It is no use sending off periodically a few score students to Siberia. It is no use putting to a cruel death, one after another, those who attack these so-called "rights" of a limited class. These examples are powerless to stay the torrent that is ever approaching ; they only show that they are blind and stupid, and the tide still flows on that will wash them all away ! Something of the same kind is going on nearer home — violent spasmodic attempts for seven hundred years have failed to stifle national aspirations and demands for full and ample freedom and justice — and must ever fail — for there is no possibility of saving the few while leaving the many outcast and negledled. Humanity is one. Narcissus, in ancient story, was extremely beautiful, but proud and disdainful ; he scorned the whole world, and wandered through the woods, nursing his pride, his constant attendant the nymph Echo. At last he came to a clear fountain in which he beheld the refledtion of himself. Nothing in the universe was to him so beautiful as that which he now beheld ; he was rooted to the spot, and spent his time in vain attempts to reach this lovely objecft of which he was enamoured. At last he grew desperate and killed himself, and his blood grew up into a flower which still bears his name, and this flower was consecrated to the infernal deities Pluto and the Furies. True story, though only a legend. Men proud, idle, selfish, yielding no fruit are valueless, and their destination is degradation and destrudlion. In the Chinese Analects we find these words : " The principles of the superior man commence with the duties of common men and women, but in their highest extent they illuminate the universe." And this brings us back to the con- trast with which we started, between the habit of contemplating the exceptional, the abnormal, and the habit of attending to the common and everyday things ; and in conclusion I may illustrate the ia.6t that people's ideas of the respeftive import- ance of these courses have been egregiously mistaken. It was said of John Milton that men have so thought of him as a poet that they have forgotten that he was anything else than a poet. The common facSts and relations of our humanity have been excluded by the lofty conceptions of his charafter. And so it would seem to be. The priest of song has no business with * Savage. 91 the grosser elements of life and work. He should be after the " order of Melchizedec," " without father or mother," not marrying or giving in marriage, not meddling with the con- troversies and contests of society, not eating or drinking, or not being seen to do it, or not caring whether he did it or not. He should be " spirit " and not " flesh," living in the " new heavens" and the " new earth " of ethereal fancies. Common services and common intercourses are reckoned alien from the true poetic temper, and if the poet is found to indulge in them, it rather detracts from his glory. And as the poet so of the saint. It has been deemed impossible for a saint — a really good man — to have the same experiences, plea- sures and pursuits, weaknesses and cares, as common people. If he is attending to his business, and doing his duty as a citizen, and devoted to his family just like any one else, then he cannot be an extraordinarily good man. If he is a religious man, then there must be something exceptional about his daily life. So strong and persistent has been this idea, that of ancient religious men, as we have seen, it is impossible to get any information about that common human life they lived, for it has all been buried away under piles of stories of miraculous deliverances and supernatural attainments and labours. Men have wrested them from commonplace mankind, and made them kinsmen of imaginary gods. The old " lives of the saints" are lives of men who never lived; had they so lived, they would have been monsters, not saints, and we none of us would have liked to dwell with them. This habit of fabrica- tion has done a great deal of mischief, for it has made prevalent a feeling that in proportion to the measure of goodness will be separation from the common interests of humanity, and hence all that really makes up human life has been depreciated and contemned. Religion that finds its inspiration and satisfaction, not in these things, but in belief in supernatural revelations and gifts, in a divine relationship and divine favour, in a " peace that passeth understanding," is judged the highest in this life, and the surest " promise of the life that is to come." Such a religion is irrational, imprafticable, and inhuman, A striking example of human religion we have in the case of John Frederic Oberlin, a charming characfter who, at the age of twenty-six, began his labours amongst a people who were in a deplorable condition in five hamlets in a mountainous dis- trict in the north-east of France, where there were no roads, scarcely any cultivation, and no schools worthy of the name. The first thing he did was to improve the roads. He sum- moned the people together — they were stolid, and he could not move them ; so taking a pickaxe on his shoulder, he said : 92 " Let all who feel the importance of my proposition follow me." Example did what argument failed to do, and the work was ere long accomplished. He set the people to new methods of industry, he sent smart boys to Strasbourg to learn trades, and they on their return taught others. He had the whole country drained, manured, planted. Comfortable cottages appeared on every side. The conditions steadily improved. Nothing that affected the interests of his fellows was beneath him. He was physician, farmer, carpenter, printer, binder, and preacher. He altered the language from an unintelligible patois into pure French. He loved his work, and when offered a sphere of more social dignity and emolument, he said " No. I have been ten years learning every head in the district and obtaining an inventory of their moral, intelledtual, and domestic wants. I have laid my plan. I must have ten j'ears to carry it into execution, and the ten following years to correft their faults and vices," and he stayed there to the end. That is not the kind of work the church has been disposed to appreciate, or the kind of man the church has been apt to canonize. But such a one attending to the common needs of men, and faithfully doing his daily work, is a thousand times higher than, for instance. Saint Simeon, of pillar notoriety, whom Tennyson imagines to have pleaded thus upon his lofty column : — " Bethink thee, Lord, while thou and all the saints Enjoy themselves in heaven, and men on earth House in the shade of comfortable roofs, Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food, And wear warm clothes, and even beasts have stalls, I, 'tween the spring and downfall of the light Bow down one thousand and two hundred tirhes To Christ, the virgin mother and the saints ; Or in the night after a little sleep, I wake, the chill stars sparkle, I am wet With drenching dews, or stifT with crackling frost. I wear an undrest goatskin on my back ; A grazing iron collar grinds my neck ; And in my lean weak arms I lift the Cross, And strive and wrestle with Thee till I die. O mercy, mercy, wash away my sin." There is no comparison between these two. The contrast is, however, suggestive. F. SYDNEY MORRIS. May 8, 1887. WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN TtiE LlBKAKl UW bUWUAl lUMlWUb, 11 a.m. By MONCURE D Reduced prices i. s. a. Travels in South Kensington 9 The Sacred Anthology 10 Idols and Ideals 4 Christianity . . 1 Human Sacrifices in England 6 Demonology and Devil-lore . . 20 Thomas Carlyle o The Wandering Jew . . 4 6 A Necklace of Stories 4 Republican Superstitions 2 6 Farewell Discourses . . 2 i . CONWAY, M.A. Farewell Discourses, in 7 separate Numbers, A Gnostic's Apology, The Gift and the Altar, Of One Risen and Unrecognised, The Criminal Law, Substitutes for Hell, The Palace of Delight, and Apologia.. 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COUPLAND. PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON. PRICE TWOPENCE. [Note. — The following concluded a series of three connected discourses, the earlier ones being entitled respectively " Laon and Cythna," and " Cardinal Newman's Poems."] AURORA LEIGH. WE were occupied last Sunday in considering, under the form of a notice of Cardinal Newman's poems, a theologian's view of the Nature and Meaning of the World, singling out, as you will remember, for special examination two great tenets — a Transcendental Deity, and a Life-Problem confined to Moral A(?tion. Although dealing with the Roman Catholic position, I passed over without comment much that is usually deemed chara(5teristic of that elaboration of Christianity, its sacerdotal regime, its mystic cultus, its Hagiolatry. I wanted to step at once into the centre of the system, feeling sure that if we could place ourselves there all else would easily find its place at the circumference, but that if that centre proved illusory the whole circle would collapse. I have the Cardinal's warrant for simplifying the matter thus : — " Only this I know full well now, that the Catholic Church allows no image of any sort, material or immaterial, no dog- matic symbol, no rite, no sacrament, no Saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself, to come between the soul and its Creator. It is face to face, ' Solus cum solo,' in all matters between man and his God. He alone creates ; He alone has redeemed ; before his awful eyes we go in death ; in the vision of Him is our eternal beatitude."* After a declaration so em- phatic and authoritative why trouble ourselves about the lesser details of Church Belief and Church Government ? Two fundamental dogmas of Catholic or Church Theology there are — a Creator-god, and a Universe framed for ethical per- fection alone. Regarding it closely, the former appeared a meta- physical Gordian knot, that the acutest reason could not untie ; whilethelattercontained implications so frightful that the human heart positively reeled under its burden, involving as it did the consequences that it was better for millions to die of starvation in extremest agony than for a single harmless lie to be told or one * Apologia pro vita sua. 94 arthing wilfully stolen. A morality-intoxicated Church verily the Catholic deserves to be called. Its primary principles, however, accepted, all else follows simply enough, and no one who takes a first step with full conviction can refuse to take a second and a third. In fact it is not the special dogmas we are called to criticize, but an attitude of mind, an attitude so remote from that of common sense that the assertion is per- fectly justified — " There is an eternal enmity between the World and the Church," — not that is between a surrender to material interests or mere fleshly desires and an aspiring temper or devotion to lofty aims, but between an order of things mirrored in natural perception and natural thought and an existence shaped by an acSt of constructive imagination, which, whatever its motive and basis, is not the offspring of normally aroused emotions and desires. If the " Church " were merely a glorification of our common truth-seeking impulse, our common loves and affecftions, our struggle after a more peace- ful and charitable social order, then Church, instead of being opposed to World, would be World transfigured, — but that is not dogmatic Christianity, whether taken in its first undefined shape as presented in its early formularies and sacred books, or in its developed phase of Mediaeval Ecclesiasticism. Now, all phases of Protestant Theology, sofar as they arr theological, share with Catholicism its non-natural view of the world and life. And to rationalize them, or naturalize them, or humanize them, is simply to empty them of what has always been deemed an essential content. Either *' God " (to use the leading term of Supernaturalism) is in the World or He is not, — either Man contains within him the principle of his destiny, or it is to be found outside him. Either through lower lives we come, working up to higher ones, or we are fallen spirits struggling to regain a lost heritage. Now I do not mean to deny that a coherent system can be worked out from either starting-point. I do not deny that we can have an other-world theory of life and destiny and can live it out. All I contend for is that if we would be thought-whole and heart-whole we must trust natural thought and feeling throughout, or we must take a spring from our common earth, and leap straight into a super-terrestrial sphere. Either we must have a mundane theory and rule of life, or we must frame a system of certain transcendent ideas, and make our world of fact conformable to them. But does not such a way of putting the matter, it may be asked, render it impossible to account for the influence of great prophets, devoted saints, and successful missionaries ? 95 How comes it, if theological systems are so unreal, that these eminent organs of the religious sentiment have taken the world by storm, and even if stoned in the body have been adored in the spirit ? The answer I give is this — they are not welcomed for the dogmas they teach, but for the life they infuse. Their creeds and dogmatic statements are usually absolutely incredible and uncredited, but their ardent appeals and self-abnegating lives kindle new hopes, and excite to a noble emulation. Of course no prac^tical preaching, no appeal to the higher nature in man, can be dissociated from an intelledtual or dogmatic expression, and it is even possible that this dogmatic envelope is to the mind of the preacher himself the essential thing ; but for all that it is the heart that is stirred and quickened, the vague ethical sense or conscience, no intelledlual faculty or organ of rational apprehension. Hence, not to the wise and prudent, but to the babes in knowledge the Gospel was preached ; not to the doctors of divinity, but to the social outcast and the weak in will. Is more proof needed that the power wielded by the founders of religions is due to a sympathetic relation between a soul moulded to universal ends and the mass of feeling that constitutes the nucleus of the spiritual life of mankind, whereas the creeds and formularies are of later date, attempts to define and render precise assumptions of faith that apostles and evangelists neither clearly appre- hended nor enounced ? Now, my quarrel with dogmatic Christianity is that it substitutes for a systematized natural consciousness a trans- cendental fabric that is external to, and not immanent in, the moral and intellecStual development of Human Nature. God, the Soul of Man, Judgment Day, Heaven and Hell, all these are terms of entities and objefts that belong to the category of imaginary constructions and not idealizations of concrete conscious existence. And saying that, I do not doubt that all the just enumerated terms can ill be spared ; retainable, however, only on the condition of their being submitted to inter- pretations which do not correspond with the intention of those who assert their sole right to use them. With Christian Theology the import of one and all is Transcendental, i.e., can- not be found in any element of the natural consciousness, but is supposed to be supernaturally revealed. Whether the chasm at present yawning between Church and World will ever be filled up, — whether the Church will be absorbed in the World or the World in the Church,' — these represent alternative issues easier to formulate than forecast. The poems of John 96 Henry Newman presuppose permanent alienation ; Elizabeth Browning's " Aurora Leigh " assumes that the work of supreme love may be consummated on earth, and that the world may be elevated and purified till it becomes the Church. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, born in iSio, deceased in 1861, was the inspirer of Robert Browning's inimitable poem and marital offering, " One Word More," dated one year before her chief gift to the world and our subje(5l of to-day, 1855. Of the three writers I have chosen, Mrs. Browning seems to me to be the one most fitting to be spoken of last, for though her Muse did not soar on so ethereal a wing as Shelley's, and her life did not attain by many years to the still uncompleted term of the revered divine, the balance of her mind was far better kept than that of either, and she seems to me to possess in fusion the art-genius of the one and the native spirituality of the other. As is usual where diverse gifts are aptly blended there is some loss of quality. Neither so pure a poet nor so mere a saint as this and that one, she is the completer human being and the safer guide. The Vicftorian Age may appropriately boast that it has possessed the greatest woman-poet our country has known ; and those who may be inclined to think that poetry is some- thing that belongs to an older age of the world, and that its exercise is to-day trivial, will assuredly be undeceived when they study the producftions of Elizabeth Browning. A pracflical bias runs through the whole of her work, and it is clear that with her verse presents itself as the only adequate vehicle for conveying the result of her fine intuition and ripe judgment. With her practical work and Art are not opposed, nor to be construed as utility and ornament ; but Art is deemed the efflorescence of utility, the shining of the essential glory through the visible and palpable forms of transient things. " Art's the witness of what Is Behind this show. If this world's show were all, Then imitation would be all in Art ; These, Jove's hand gripes us ! — For we stand here, we, If genuine artists, witnessing for God's Complete, consummate, undivided work ; — That every natural flower which grows on earth Implies a flower upon the spiritual side, Substantial, archetypal, all aglow. With blossoming causes, — not so far away. But we, whose spirit-sense is somewhat cleared, May catch at something of the bloom and breath, — 97 Too vaguely apprehended, though indeed Still apprehended, consciously oi not, And still transferred to picfture, music, verse. For thrilling audient and believing souls By sights and touches which are known to souls." The author's cardinal belief and endeavour is indicated in these words. A mission sufficiently pracftical as she adds : — " Thus is Art Self-magnified in magnifying a truth Which, fully recognised, would change the world And shift its morals." Mrs. Browning has but little faith in reforms imposed from the outside or from above, and in the amelioration of aggregates not individuals. The hero of our poem, born of a noble house, and inheriting an ample patrimony, is early in life strongly affe(fted by the vast social misery, and unreservedly devotes himself to setting the world right. He is doomed to disappoint- ment in his well-meant but not very far-sighted schemes. To strike a radical blow at class-distincftions he attempts to contraft an exemplar marriage, the nature of which may be erathered from his own words : — b " I take my wife Direcftly from the people, — and she comes, As Austria's daughter to imperial France, Betwixt her eagles, blinking not her race, From Margaret's Court at garret-height, to meet And wed me at St. James's, nor put off Her gown of serge for that." A plan frustrated, however, at the eleventh hour by the instin(5t of the girl herself, who feels that something is out of joint, though she can't exactly say what. Again, he tries to estab- lish an ideal household, with the external model of Fourier's Phalanstery, gathering into his ancestral mansion all sorts and conditions of men and women, and endeavouring to humanize their lives by sound secular instrucftion and a regulated home. The well-intended experiment is not per- mitted a prolonged trial. The Church's patronage not having been sought, it is denounced by the vicar, the squirearchy soon scent socialism, and the rank and file adherents of the estab- 98 lished order express their disapproval in their own plain fashion : — " I had my windows broken once or twice By liberal peasants naturally incensed At such a vexer of Arcadian peace, Who would not let men call their wives their own To kick like Britons I was shot at, once, By an active poacher who had hit a hare From the other barrel, (tired of springeing game So lay upon my acres, undisturbed, And restless for the country's virtue) .... ay, and pelted very oft In riding through the village. ' There he goes, Who'd drive away our Christian gentlefolks, To catch us undefended in the trap He baits with poisonous cheese, and lock us up In that pernicious prison of Leigh Hall With all his murderers ! Give another name And say Leigh Hell, and burn it up with fire.' " Which advice was duly taken, even the Phalansterians helping to feed the desolating flames. The intended moral of all which is, I take it, that though social reform be good, the reform must come from within not from without, from a desire not longer to be pent up on the part of those who need amelioration, and not from some beneficent dciis ex machind. If Elizabeth Barrett Browning meant this she spoke a word not without significance to those of an after-generation. Philan- thropy is in danger of becoming a fashion, a business, almost a cant, and to keep clear of the contagion requires no little self-restraint. When men and women, born and reared in luxury, suddenly become aware of the frightful wretchedness and brutalism that underlie the refined social crust with which they are directly familiar, they are, if sensitively moulded, at first acutely pained by the dreadful discovery. Then they hurriedly bethink themselves of palliatives, the first that lie to hand, and try to staunch bleeding wounds by indiscriminate charity, profuse largesse in coin or kind. A farther stage succeeds in which systematized benevolence is favoured, and societies of all sorts are formed to cope with evident evils ; while an enthusiastic few rush forward to level abuses at a blow, attempt to compel the morally halt and maimed and blind to come into a pre- pared feast, to wash them clean by force, and set at naught all 99 the conventions which have grown up in the course of centuries, severing social group from social group. Few indeed see that all these methods, though dictated by the worthiest impulses, lack one thing needful, and in consequence, while suppressing old ills in one direcStion, open the door to fresh evils in another. To a starving man, of course, a loaf of bread is more accept- able than any wisdom, and the urgency of the present blots the future out of consideration. But any continuous charity that omits to look beyond the result of the moment is scarcely dis- tinguishable in its effe(5t from total neglect. Where the distri- bution is more thoughtfully administered, still, if there be no attempt to look beneath the surface and grapple with the causes of social wretchedness, the waste of power is enormous. And doomed to inevitable disappointment must those self- sacrilicing altruists be who attempt to apply abstracft princi- ples to a concrete state, forgetful of the powerful hold of organized habits. Before philanthropy can be effedtive this truth must be fully grasped that the evils of Society are not accidental, but inherent in the social structure as it has come to be. The diseases of Society which are so shocking have been engendered by long-continued mal-adjustment of organ and function. The body politic is as much an articulated whole as the body natural. Aftion and rea6tion are constant throughout the system, and the body as a whole suffers when its members are disordered, as the members cannot be healthy if the whole fabric is not fairly made. But philanthropists are ready to adopt any course rather than that of grappling with the cause of disease. They will provide anodynes, sustain costly hospitals, unselfishly tend the sick ; but what they will not do (what they even exclaim against as something hardly to be named) is to push their diagnosis to the point of laying the finger on the source of the mischief, and then, by the light of this thorough knowledge, set about their saving work. For hundreds of years the Churches have arrogated to themselves the moral culture of mankind, and yet, notwith- standing an unparalleled and extensive machinery for en- forcing an outward discipline, and for operating inwardly upon the springs of action, the social condition of the Western World sickens the sympathetic observer. Distress and vice alike appal the sensitive mind, and form a sombre background to all the obvious well-being and order. And what wonder, since the human nature of the Churches is not the real human nature, but a distorted and invented human nature ; not the resultant of the play of inner and outer natural forces, but a thing 100 abstracfted from its historical antecedents, without regard to circumstances of time and place. The Churches prate of " sins," and " salvation " purchasable by divine offerings ; they do not inquire how " sins " come to be made, nor stop to try the effedl of a readjustment of the simple conditions of life itself. All souls are pronounced alike — alike tainted, alike endowed with free will, alike alone justifiable by one same method. Just as in a time of pestilence benighted sacerdotal bodies make their processions through the streets, chanting hymns for supernatural mercy, instead of cleansing the fever haunts and diffusing sanitary knowledge ; so the Christian Churches, to hardly more purpose, monotonously repeat their litanies week after week, write their books of abstra(5t ethics, preach their effete homilies, and trust that misery will shortly be unknown, if only be maintained " Close bonds " Between the generous rich and grateful poor." And if we look to non-theological systems do we find more appreciation of the conditions of social amelioration ? State Socialism is a short, but very dubious, short cut to Paradise. To make men happy is not to make them good, to get them food and fuel in plenty is not to render them better citizens of the State. Higher wages are no safeguard against intemperance, and short hours and more pay does not, unfortunately, mean more efficient and more honest work. If the possession of property is conducive to selfishness, such communistic experi- ments as have yet been tried at least have not been favourable to that rare product, which is almost synonymous with civiliza- tion, individuality of character, the salt of social existence. In non-theological reformatory methods Force usually plays a leading part. It is truly melancholy how, despite such abun- dant evidence to the contrary, people will go on believing that the world can be regenerated by coercive laws. Burglars can be kept out of my house by coercive laws, taxes can be obtained by coercive laws, the instrudfion of children can be secured by coercive laws, but no coercion can maintain the bonds of affe(5lion, or secure loyalty, or make men wise and happy. The progress of Society has kept even pace, not with increase of restriftions on personal freedom, but with enlargement of personal liberty. Free Trade, Free Speech, Free Printing, Free Eleftions, Free Churches — these are the triumphs of modern times. It is turning a deaf ear to the lOI teaching of History, it betrays a lingering distrust in the recuperative powers of the social organism itself to doubt that this free and instincflive play of social energies trusted to the end is the sole reliable method for bringing about the largest possible measure of human happiness and good will. So far as practical methods are concerned (a thorough compre- hension of the strudiural relations and history of society being the theoretical basis) they all resolve themselves into the per- mission of self-development, individual liberty being conceded to the limit of detriment to our neighbours either physically or morally. This is a principle capable of being applied to domestic relations, economic relations, internal political rela- tions, ecclesiastical relations. No stereotyped social system — no permanent dualism of capital and labour, no rigid uniformity of incomes, no fixed hierarchy of classes, no inflexible mar- riage laws ; but a social life expanding from within, feeling its way after stable conditions appropriate to its stage of growth, emerging surely out of its coarse animalism, and breathing at last the air of refined and ennobling pleasure. I said that the authoress of " Aurora Leigh " seemed to me to be a wiser guide than Shelley or Newman — wiser because, while accepting the old order of things, she breathes into it a higher spirit, and believes that that order may be made to serve the satisfaction of our healthiest ideals. Our Catholic divine can perceive clearly the development of Christian doc- trine and economy within the Christian Church, but can see no development in the world as a whole ; our Reformer-Poet would blow his revolutionary trumpet beneath the walls of the Jericho of imperfecft established custom, and expe(5l the walls at once to fall to make room for a new Jerusalem, which would be a precise copy of the fair fabric of his poetic dreams. Shelley's errors were the errors of an over-generous enthu- siasm, and his impatience was the offspring of noble impulses. He is a prophet thousands of years before his age. But Newman — what shall we say of him ? What teaching has he that the common world can accept ? Is his note a hopeful one ? his gospel a gospel of the future ? Alas ! it is no social gospel at all. It is a lesson for the soul in its silent solitude. His vision is of personal redemption alone, the per- fecStion of the sequestered saint. Of the two roots of human perfection of which Aurora and Romney Leigh sing, he knows but one — " God's love," to the other he is blind — " The love of wedded souls Which still presents that mystery's counterpart." 102 How different this to the contemptuous words of the "Fourth Choir of Anffelicals ! " * ^to^ " As though a thing, who for his help Must needs possess a wife." Here we put the finger on the great social defe(5t of Catho- licism, a defedt which already marred the Christian system in its original, and especially Pauline, form. That flower " Whose calyx holds the multitude of leaves. Loves filial, loves fraternal, neighbour loves, And civic," is no divine rose to the Catholic Christian, images a relation which is simply condescended to in the ultra-mundane heaven where people " neither marry nor are given in marriage." How different here the view of the modern non-theological mind, which sees in man no complete and rounded-off whole, nor in woman a subordinate help-mate, but in the wedded pair the real personal unit, the moral unit of home and state. No wonder indeed that, with its view of sexual relations, the Church should spread its coercive law over the domestic sphere, forbid all spontaneous readjustment of that most sacred of ties, marriage being with it only a matter of temporal dis- cipline ; for any view of life that exalts marriage to its true height will plead for liberty here as for the principle of life at the heart of the social fabric. Marriage is only a social ideal if it is left to the play of free affedtion, and they are no true friends of their race who would deprive it of its supremely- vitalizing power by afiixing a seal upon imperfetl; unions. My contentment with " /\urora Leigh" shows that it is not by reason of their antiquity that certain phases and modes of thought appear to me unworthy of acceptance^ — that I recognize no need of a revolution of our whole mental fabric — that the Christian Church is not obnoxious because it strives to pierce to fairer realms of being than are open to sensuous sight. " Aurora Leigh " is saturated with the conviction of the power of a spiritual reality in the movement of the world — God in Nature, God in History. Aurora Leigh builds on the Past in her religious creed as in her social aspirations. The difference is brought out clearly when she says, " The man, most man, works best for men," * Dream of Gerantius. 103 whereas, in the view of ecclesiasticism, it is the man, least man, the man who renounces natural ties, whose eye is steadily fixed on some sublimer world, and who treats this earth-life as a hard necessity, that is the best friend of his race. We wisely build on the Past in our thought and feelmg, as we build on it in our social institutions and lives. We are the children of Christian parents, and Christian influences throb in our veins. We must beware lest, in our eagerness to make room for the flood of novel truth, we lose some substantial good which those influences enshrine. Christianity was no wonder dropped from heaven, but, like other things of earth, had its history, carried forward in richer and broader volume, sublime traditions, preparing the way for a grander religion still. We cannot shake it off like an old garment ; infused into our spiritual life-blood, it affedts our growth in mysterious and subtile ways. We can be tolerant of old forms when we are in possession of a vital spirit. The broader and higher our conceptions, the more free we are from the bondage of ecclesiastical fetters, the better can we appropriate the substantial good in the forms around us. Books of devotion that were a jargon to us in the immaturity of experience, or intolerably wearisome when the attention was claimed as duty — the age of dry reason behind us — become eloquent with meaning, and even refresh and con- sole. It is Christians who limit the power of Christianity, the Bibliolaters who render the study of the Bible vain and vexatious. They alone can extradl all the honey from the fervid wisdom of great religious natures who refuse to call any man Master, and are of the Universal Church that invokes no lesser finite name than Humanity. And this, I take it, expresses the prevailing attitude of a coming age, which will make no special interest of Religion, whose social thought and feeling will be so saturated with the religious spirit that none will be curious to ask what spirit it is of. "Aurora Leigh " is not a Christian Art-work, as divines or fanatics define Christian ; its Christian phraseology is tradi- tional and not part of its living texture ; but nevertheless it could only have been produced in a Christian sphere, and it is instinct with the true religious spirit. Its temper is the best modern temper, its aspiration essentially religious, and yet human to the very core. " ' Beloved,' it sang, ' we must be here to work ; And men who work can only work for men, And, not to work in vain, must comprehend 104 Humanity and so work humanly, And raise men's bodies still by raising souls, As God did first.' " Through soul for soul. The only substance is soul — capacity for knowledge, susceptibility to feeling, energy of will : so that the true human life is a life that enlarges and fills these powers. What is the end of terrestial existence towards which we strain ? 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THE universal truth of Comte's historic "law of the three stages " is understood to be in these days a good deal in dispute ; but taking it in that general sense in which alone judicious thinkers will seek to assert it, it will perhaps be found that the application of fresh tests, in respe(5t of different classes of mental phenomena, rather establishes than shakes its soundness and utility. It will, I think, be found to hold good in the main of the course of opinion in regard to that mind which many men of different nations are agreed to regard as the most comprehensive of all those which have expressed themselves in literature. When we say that opinion about Shakspere has gone or tended to go through those three stages — the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive — we of course use the terms with reference to the attitude or point of view of criticism, by way of showing that the progress of that has been not identical with but analogous to that of thought in general as dealing with the main problems of life. One does not say that men ever studied Shakspere in exactly the same spirit as that in which they studied the universe or anyone science : on the face of the matter it would not be intel- ligible to say that Shaksperology has passed like, say, astronomy, through the stages of first referring the phenomena to an inspiring spirit, next finding in them the expression of abstradt forces, and finally being content just to classify them and find the nature of their sequences. No one would recognise in such a formula the description of the course of critical opinion in regard to Shakspere and his works. But if we simply adjust our terms to the new relations, keeping before us the same organic idea, but accommodating it to a department of thought in which it has not hitherto been applied; lookmg out, io6 therefore, for surface differences and seeking only for a certain scheme of relation between different stages of opinion ; then we shall find that men's view of Shakspere has conformed to that general law of human thought. Of course the complete statement of the matter would be that just as they have studied nature in general, and the departments of nature, in the progressive fashion which Comte indicated, so their notions of all mental phenomena, including the phenomena of genius and the personalities of men of genius, have gone through the same process ; so that not onl}^ Shakspere but all great historic personages have been discussed according to the same order of development in criticism. But' to apply the principle through all literature would be to enter on a very extensive undertaking, demanding corresponding- powers and corresponding time ; and what I suggest is simply that we may deal with the one subject of Shaksperology in the light of the historic generalisation which is associated, rightly or wrongly, with the name of Comte ; this in order to get at what seems to be the truest and soundest notion of Shakspere's mind. Let us see, then, the nature of the judgment passed on Shakspere by those who admired him in his own time. Here it may be well to note distinftly that from the time when Shakspere had proved his powers by producing his greatest works, his eminence has always been recrgnised in his native countr}'. There 1 ave, i"deed, been fashions of taste by which he has been to some extent depreciated ; but there has been no generation since his death in which he has not been widely honoured as the greatest of English writers. His epitaph is not an ordinary piece of gravestone eulogy ; it is the utterance of those who felt they were commemorating a really great man. Ben Jonson's noble panegyric could not have been made more ample or more forceful by any one of those who have since resented the criticism which the panegyrist at other times ventured to pass on his friend ; the generation which came in just when Shakspere's work was done yields many expressions of boundless admiration of his genius ; and the magnificent tribute of Milton is evidently the outcome of a judgment already built up among those competent to judge. And while at a later period, marked by literary methods and standards distincSlly different from Shakspere's, very confident blame was mixed with the praise bestowed on him, it is none the less a mistake to suppose, as some have been led to suppose in our own time, that a really profound admiration of him only began with the beginning of the present century, when the cult came into 107 the hands of Coleridge and Lamb and De Quincey and Hazlitt in England, and Goethe and Schlegel in Germany. Even when the men of last century made bold to find fault, they still treated the poet as on the whole the greatest name in English literature ; and if they sometimes criticised with little insight, it may be questioned whether their rational attitude was not after all as conducive to right conclusions as the unfaltering reverence of a later school. In point of fadt, the last century criticism of Shakspere was the expression, as it were, of a premature positivism : it was the criticism of a society which had virtually reached the term of its development, as regards its inherent tendencies, and of which the future progress was to be, as we now know, the result of a fresh stimulus, involving the introduction of forces which could not be seen to exist before that stimulus was applied. English literature after Pope is stricftly a fresh departure, traceable substantially to the new social movement which had its most forcible expression in the French Revolution. All this may seem at first sight to clash with the law of the three stages ; but the true account is that that law operates in dependence on the other law of the ebb and flow of civili- sations, there being a current motion, so to speak, as well as a tidal motion, and a wave motion over all. In any one social cycle, human thought can be seen to undergo, in some se(5tions of the community, the changes we speak of; but when that cycle itself passes there are re-adjustments. In detail the matter is not simple, but complex ; this being indeed the reason why so many confidently hold that there is no truth in the law at all. If, however, we regard the time between the Restoration and the modern or industrial period as being in the main given to the fixing or crystallising of an artificially constrained society which was destined to be later disjointed and recon- structed, we can see the general course of Shaksperean criticism well enough as a process with three broad stages. First of all, the early admiration of Shakspere — except that of his companion, Jonson — is admiration pure and simple. He is a great genius, an incalculable faculty, not at all to be analysed, much less to be explained. Men speak of him in terms of general rapture, as they speak of the majesty of nature ; they do but gaze and worship ; their sole criticism is praise. And as for certain minds the theological stage of thought is known to survive, as regards their study of nature, long after others have made the further steps, so we find this simply worshipful attitude towards Shakspere not uncommon io8 in our own time ; that being indeed generally held to be the seemly or becoming position; just as a respecStful attitude in religion is usually inculcated independently of any question of intelligent study of the subjecft. For the multitude in this country, the study of Shakspere is in much the same case as the study of the Bible ; the habit of reverence being still, for the general mind, stronger than any of the critical influences which are known to be in the air. The metaphysical stage in Shaksperology again, relatively to us of to-day, is that which begins with the Coleridge group in England, and, on a systematic scale, with Schlegel in Germany. And this stage likewise survives ; being indeed in very good case among us at this moment, while in Germany it bids fair to flourish for generations to come. The sense in which such criticism is analogous to what Comte called the metaphysical stage in philosophy is this : that it goes about to evolve an abstract Shaksperean system of things, a Shakspere cosmology as it were, without any serious regard to evidence, on the principle that the sympathetic mind will find in Shak- spere himself all the light that is wanted for comprehending him. To Coleridge and Schlegel, broadly speaking, everything that Shakspere does is right. It is not that they never dis- criminate or venture to find fault, but that their ruling tendency is first to admire everything he did, and then to discover that the thmgs which please them are of necessity so many expres- sions of profound purpose on the part of the poet. Thus they are not content with finding new subtleties of excellence where he is generally admitted to be excellent ; but where common sense sees flaws and blunders they perceive a profounder ex- cellence still. The question is not in any case, What are the fa6ts, and to what do they point ? but, given the facets, how shall we show them to be the expression of a practically all- wise intelligence ? The old metaphysical scientist, dealing with certain phenomena, decided that Nature abhorred a vacuum : the metaphysical student of Shakspere, finding in a play a certain peculiar circumstance, puzzling to the eye of ordinary reason, proceeded to construd\ a formula by which this peculiar circumstance could be verbally accounted for. Thus, it is known to students that the order of time in many of Shakspere's plays is confused and impossible. Plain common sense would decide that he worked hastily, or that he stuck in scenes by afterthought after he had drafted a piece ; but the metaphysical spirit would have no such a posteriori solution ; and it decides that Shakspere meant the inconsistencies ; that he had two ways of conceiving time, one that of every-day life log and one ideal or mystical ; and that this may fitly be figured by saying Shakspere had " two clocks," one that of the kitchen and the other that of the spirit. Again, a careful reader of Hamlet notices that the prince is made to soliloquise on the life beyond the grave as one of which it is impossible for the living to learn anything, immediately after his father's spirit has been speaking to him of the life in purgatory ; and the non- mystical mind is puzzled to think why Shakspere should have so made Hamlet forget the most extraordinary event in his life. But metaphysic is equal to the occasion — or at least feels itself to be ; and Coleridge boldly lays it down that this apparent in- consistency is only a crowning proof of Shakspere's genius. The proof, to be sure, is not forthcoming, Coleridge having omitted to work it out ; but one cannot doubt that he would have found a formula if he had set his mind to it. It would have been ingenious, for Coleridge is never trivial and is often admirably sagacious ; but the idea at bottom would just be that as nature abhors a vacuum, so Shakspere does things because they are just the things Shakspere would do. Let us not make light of the loving zeal which would not doubt the omnipotence of the Master ; and which often found a true verdicSt of praise where lack of sympathy had caused shortsighted blame. It is because we have all that zealous and ingenious metaphysic behind us that we can to-day go on to study the great Shakspere problem with security and likelihood of success. The critics of last century were often shallow just because sympathetic mysticism had not intervened for them to show where the prosaic intelligence ran a danger of missing a great poet's meaning. And, above all, it has to be remembered that much of the material which to-day helps us to measure Shakspere's intelligence did not lie to the hand of the earlier critics, even if they were willing to profit by it. The modern method, the positive method, can indeed be seen to have arisen even before the metaphysical was carried far; the turn for fafts being happily special to some intelligences in all ages ; but it needs a development all round before that method can get a wide hearing. And so it is only of late years that many readers show themselves interested to know what were the actual conditions of Shakspere's art ; where he got his plots from ; how he modified them ; how his style altered as he grew older ; what books he seems to have read ; in what order he wrote his plays and how his mental tone seems to have changed ; what other men he may have worked with ; and what earlier plays he may have made the basis of some of those we call his. And last of all there is going on a curious inquiry no into some episodes in his own life which stood half in dark and half in light in the blended ambiguity and self revelation of the sonnets. On all hands the heart of his mystery is being pried into ; and it cannot but be that as his mind is studied in every other aspedl we shall ask with increasing interest and circum- spection, what was it that this great mind believed concerning the great questions of the government of this world and the springs of that life over which he had brooded so profoundly. It may be, perhaps, that we shall still be met with a warning which is half a censure, an intimation that we are foolish to think of ever tracing the lines of Shakspere's thought. The assurance comes from voices to which we cannot but listen with some attention. Mr. Halliwell Phillipps, a critic at once erudite and wise, which is perhaps not a common combination, not only warns us against the risks we run in gathering Shakspere's opinions from his characters, and his moods from his work, but declares that we " might as wisely think of stretching our hands to the firmanent as dream of the advent of an intelleftual power adequate to grasp the definite history of Shakspere's mind."* But surely this is to speak too sweepingly. The "definite history," indeed, in the sense of a complete history, we cannot have ; but why should we not come to know as much of Shakspere's mental development as we do of that of most other great men ? Forty years ago, students w^ere told that nothing new could possibly be said in the way of criticism of the plays ; but that dictum has been utterly set at nought by the event. Mr. Browning, again, takes up Wordsworth's line on the sonnets, that " With this key Shakspere unlocked his heart ;" and the later poet cries, " Why, then, the less Shakspere he." But, again, why so ? One does not propose to take up the implied confident challenge that we should try to find Mr. Browning's characfter in his poems, Mr. Browning's turn will come in due course, later on. But if Shakspere becomes the less great for us because we can penetrate his personality, it only proves that we had misconceived Shakspere : his work remains what it was. There is a sounder ring in the passage in which Emerson expressed the same opinion as to the difficulty of seeing round Shakspere's intelligence : " A good reader," he says, " can in a sort nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence, but not into Shakspere's. We are still out of doors. "t But since Emerson spoke we have found * '• Outlines of the Life of Shakspere," 5th edition, p. xvii. t " Representative Men : Shakspere, or, the Poet." Ill many aids to the reading of Shakspere ; and Emerson him- self had, characfteristically enough, said a moment before that " so far from Shakspere being the least known, he is the one person in all modern history known to us." In this, as in other matters, Thoreau's generalisation holds good: "What old people say you cannot do, j-ou try and find that you can." Of course the work will not be done in a day or a genera- tion ; it will take time, and the cumulative labours of successive intelligences. To-day we know a great deal more about the beginnings of Christianity than did Christians who were a thousand years nearer the event, and Shakspere becomes intelligible bit by bit. It may be that the last specu- lation as to the personal drama hinted at in the sonnets will prove to be a permanent conquest from the region of darkness ; and that we have found the name and the character of the woman he loved — loved unhappily and unworthily, as he con- fesses. But however that may be, it is only by closing our eyes to the burden of his verse, taken in connedlion with the known ia.6ts of his life, that we can continue to cherish the ideal of a man perfedtily wise, without weakness, percipient of all passions without passion and frailty of his own. If there is anything reasonably inferrible in the matter, it is this, that Shakspere's life was not what good women would like it to be. His married life was a partial bankruptcy; and when we have said that, we have said much. We are dealing with a man whose life had in it pain and shadow, bitter waters as well as sweet ; and the bitter-sweet which leave the worst taste of all. But if we are free to believe this, why should we be doomed to mere nescience in other regards ? We are misled by our perception of the impersonal character of his dramatic pro- du(?t. We see that he enters into all orders of mind, and with a marvellous insight reproduces each, so that we can never say with certainty that a single speech in his plays is his own voice, or a single doctrine purely his own opinion ; and we are disposed to conclude that he must always be an enigma for us. But this is a fallacy. The total produft of Shakspere has a significance that no one portion of it possesses ; the whole constitutes the expression of his thought on human life, and from that whole we can in some measure infer what was his point of view. It is not given to any man to deliver under any form the total impression he has received from life, without to some extent revealing his own nature for the eyes that have learned to read. If we can know something of Hawthorne and Tourguenief from their most impersonal books; if we can partly know Michel Angelo from his figures, and Beethoven 112 from his music, then we must be able to divine something of Shakspere from the world of his plays. There is a scientific truth in that phrase of Emerson's: " Speak, that I may know you " — that is, speak on something that I may partly generalise you from your particular utterance. Every time we speak, we tell more than we say ; and even when with the diplomatist, we use language to conceal thought, we reveal that it is in our nature thus to dissimulate. Lest it may seem that this process of inferring Shakspere from his total utterance partakes of the nature of the meta- physical method, let us be at pains to make sure how we come by our conclusions. We look upon him, to begin with, as a living organism, differing from normal humanity only in respecft of an extraordinary power of psychological insight, sensation, and sympathy, and an equally extraordinary gift of speech ; coming by his ideas as do other men, and influenced like them by his surroundings. What we want to know of him is, broadly, how he viewed the central problems of life and death and the riddle of human existence. We regard him, in the words of Dryden, as the one who " of all modern and [perhaps] ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul ; " and we want to know how such a mind reasoned on fate and will, the mystery of things and the received solutions of that mystery. In short, we want to know his religion. Now, a man's religion is really neither what he believes nor what he does ; but the relation between these ; so that neither his acfts nor his pro- fessions give us the whole truth ; but none the less must we look to his outward bearing as regards creed, and his a(5tual condu(5t, to get at the central fa(5t. It is necessary, therefore, to take into account the religion of Shakspere's time in general and of his immediate surroundings in particular. And as soon as we set about this watchfully we see that the religion of prae- Puritan or Elizabethan England was something inexpressibly different from religion as we see it about us to-day. From the point of view of recent evangelicalism the old society is essentially irreligious, though it had much less doubt about Christian dogmas than now prevails even within the nominal Christian pale. Pidlure a population in which the ideas of conversion, and spiritual life, and the risk of perdition, and the need of finding salvation by a process of inner ecstatic change, did not present themselves to, and were not thrust upon, the ordinary mind at all. The times were just at hand when all these fashions of thought were to take hold of the graver part of the nation, but as yet the religious temperament was in the main the 113 temperament of mediaeval lay Catholicism, unpsychological, childlike, openminded, taking creed in the concrete, and seeing the main part of the life of faith in the ceremonial of the church. Pras-Puritan England was not concerned about its soul ; and political Protestantism relieved it of the financial burdens of Purgatory without hurrying it all at once on the more trying business of ascertaining whether it had found grace and assurance of salvation. Heaven was the natural goal of all who took the sacraments and lived tolerable lives ; and the mysteries of the faith were viewed as a perfectly fitting part of the scheme of things, and to be taken as one found them, not to be brooded over in the hope of seeing any deeper into them. In so far as Catholicism in England had that spiritualising element in it at all, it had naturally separated itself by means of the monastery and the convent ; the great difference wrought by Protestantism w^as that it drove the spirit of religion into the common life, which it made at once darker and more conscientious, the one change partly neutralising the other, so that sincerity was chiefly apparent as fanaticism. But in Shakspere's day the shadow had not yet fallen. The aftershine of mediaeval day-dream still hung over the land, grown the brighter for the passing of the dark figure of the brutal king who murdered a Church as he murdered all men and all women who thwarted his caprice, or of whose presence he had grown weary. Dark deeds, it is true, were still being done in the name of religion ; deeds which silently wrought for the growth of the sterner spirit that was to come ; but these were truly spacious times, and the expanding mind and energy of the nation did not yet seem to take to heart the doings that were one day to be found impressed on its deeper conscious- ness. With all its riot and its violence it was a sunny time; were it only because men had not learned to see a darkness behind the sun. Life was cheap, bloodshed terribly familiar; but the joy of living still overshone the fear of death and the thought of sin. Coming into the midmost eddy of this glowing life from his own sunny Stratford, Shakspere evidently neither brought nor found any spirit of religion in the modern sense. Ac^tors at all times are little drawn to pietism ; but in those days there was not even a Church and Stage Guild to mediate between the spiritual sphere and the spectacular. It was the less con- ceivable, because the cursing of the stage by any section of the Church had not yet become a constant quantity. The young Shakspere, in short, lived in London a life that was intel- le(5t:ual, exciting, stimulating, educative, but certainly not 114 religious. His early poems have not a word to show that he had ever heard of the Christian creed ; they breathe of the world of art and sense and passion ; and though they are far too analytic to be truly pagan they may be said to belong essentially to the phase of Christian Paganism which was the sequel in European life to Pagan Christianity. No intelligent reader can for a moment imagine the young Shakspere of the polished poems and the early plays adopting even what of theology there lay to his hand, much less his anticipating the theology of Cromwell and Bunyan. He is too sane and too clear-eyed : he has no hobgoblin visitants and demoniac whisperers ; it is incredible that he can have wrestled with himself on such questions as whether he was saved by Christ's blood, whether he could fall from grace, whether those immediately about him would be saved or lost. He cannot have fasted and prayed and brooded on hell and heaven : that torture of the mind was hitherto only possible for those who made religion a vocation ; and while fanaticism had already marked Scotland for its own, two-thirds of English life was yet ruled by the creed of maypole and pageant and poetry, the old time view of things which kept our island world still kindred with the south. But to Shakspere, as to most men, life changed its hue as he grew older. It lies on the face of his work that as years went on there came to him dark visions of life and destiny, which were to him what the sense of divine wrath was to a later generation. With the widening sense of the relations of things there could not but come to him those obstinate questionings which dog us all on our life journey ; the most comprehensive of all minds must needs grapple with the problem which forces itself in some fashion on the most limited. A religion in some sense he must have : that is to say, he must do more than merely give a conventional or unthinking assent to certain dogmas concerning things unseen ; he must either connecSt these doctrines vitally with his life or shape for him- self out of his own thought and experience some guiding theory of things. What traces, then, of such application of theology to condu6t, or of such independent philosophy of conduct, do we find in Shakspere's brain world ? I repeat, it is the application we are to look for — the real element in religion, not the set of forms and phrases which so many men inherit as a kind of intellecftual excrescence or superfluous tissue which never becomes part of their vigorous mental life at all. What is the religion of an average Christian to-day for the man himself ? How far does his creed rea(5l on "5 his conduct ? There is nothing uncharitable in saying that a vital connedtion between these is the exception and not the rule. Satire has made the hiatus a commonplace for us, as regards the life of our own time ; and we are assuredly not less critical and analytical in these days than were our forefathers. Now, the great faCl: in Shakspere's life and work is that while there are various data on which may be reared a hypothesis of his acceptance of one or other religious doctrine, or of his goodwill towards one or other sect, there is no basis whatever for an inference that he tried his fellow creatures, or life as a whole, by sectarian standards. On the superficial grounds of his presentment of friars in his plays — taken with the legend that he died a Papist — Catholics see in him one secretly inclined to their Church ; not thinking to ask themselves whether the dissimulation of his ordinary life would in that case do much credit to either him or them. Dr. Ulrici,* again, finding that the Stratford chamberlain once paid over twenty pence for a quart of sack and a quart of claret given to "a preacher at Newe Place" — Shakspere's house — decides that the poet cannot have been a Papist, but was probably friendly in his later years to the less fanatical Puritans, with whom he may have been brought in conta(5t by his daughter Susanna, who is known to have been pious. The two quarts of wine seem but an indifferent certificate of the preacher's Puritanism : but such is the evidence. Then as to the poet's Protestantism, we have in Henry VIII. the prediction that in the days of Elizabeth God should be truly known. But the critics grew more and more certain that Henry VIII. is at most partly written by Shakspere, and there asserts itself the fatal probability that this one touch of downright theological sec- tarianism in his ostensible work came not from him but from Fletcher, the passage being notably in Fletcher's style. At every point the great mind of the Master eludes the question of those who claim to sum up truth and morals in their for- mularies and ecclesiastical enclosures : these are assuredly " still out of doors," and will remain so. Surely it is the last absurdity of sectarian thought to dream of proving that the mind of admittedly the widest range of sympathy known to men had taken sides for one or another shibboleth in the barren strife of dogma, reducing the august and ancient drama of history to a background for the fantastic bickerings of shallow zealotry. The sectarian view, clearly, we are not concerned to refute ; * " Shakspeare's Dramatic Art," Miss Schmitz's trans., i. 232. ii6 but there remains the central question : What was Shakspere's theology or life philosophy ? And on this there is, with what- ever justification, considerable difference of opinion. Dr. Ulrici, after all, will not lay stress on Shakspere's Puiitanism : nay, he puts it that the dramatist "everywhere points to the inmost essence of all religious life, to a purely moral sentiment, free from all arrogance and conscious virtue, free from all justifica- tion by works and the letter of the law" — but he must needs add, and here is the perplexity — " trusting to the grace of God and the divine government of the universe."* In no way that I can find does Dr. Ulrici explain what he means by these phrases ; and their virtual pointlessness, coming in as they do as a mere tag at the close of his sentence, is surely very significant. A religion which consists in a " purely moral sentiment " and yet is declared to trust in the grace of God — what are we to make of this ? The further Dr. Ulrici carries his exposition the scantier do his grounds appear ; since he will but assert at most that Shakspere's " view of life generally coincided with the leading ideas of Christianity," t and that " in his latter years he was personally attached to the specific Christian articles of faith and that he also recognised them outwardly." " Generally coincided," " personally attached," "outward recognition" — such, we may say, is the allowance of bread that goes with the Puritan preacher's sack. But in order that we may fully see what orthodoxy can find in Shakspere, let me cite an utterance from nearer home. It is to Mr. W. II. Mallock we owe the judgment that while George Eliot, on the one hand, is " the first great godless writer of fiction that has appeared in England," Shakspere, on the other hand, " may or may not have been a religious man ; he may or may not have been a Catholic or a Protestant ; but whatever his personal views or feelings may have been, the light by which he viewed life was the light of Christianity. The shine, the shadow, and the colours of the moral world he looked upon were cast or caused by the Christian Sun of Righteousness." X Now, in a world in which commonplace is such a main ingredient alike of spoken and written utterance, an entirely surprising proposition has at least the merit inherent in its strangeness; and in regard to such an assertion as this we may, in Shakspere's own phrase, " therefore as a stranger give it welcome." We note first that Mr. * Work cited, i. 236. t Ibid. \ " Atheism and the Value of Life," pp. 15S -9. 117 Mallock confessedly abandons the secflarian position, and only professes to find in Shakspere's page what he impres- sively terms the light of the Christian Sun of Righteous- ness. But here again, as before, we are brought up by the difficulty of knowing what really is meant ; and once more we are fain to ask ourselves what it is, in the think- ing of ordinary Christians, that answers to such a figure ? What is the difference, in short, between the look of life to such a mind as George Eliot's and its aspect to a believing Christian of a fairly imaginative type— say a mind like that of Canon Farrar ? One takes such a representative mind instead of such a one as Cardinal Newman, because, while one can gather well enough how the latter and greater writer contemplates human existence, his is felt to be an abnormal case ; while Canon Farrar may be taken to satisfacftorily and competently represent cultured Christianity of a fairly liberal kind. What then is the difference between such godliness and the godlessness of George Eliot ? I trust I do not misconceive or misrepresent the matter when I say that the main features of differentiation on the religious side are these : a notion that Christianity essentially transformed human life on the moral side when it came into the world ; a more or less soothing belief in a life beyond the grave ; a habit of finding mental or emotional relief in the pra(5tice of prayer ; and a somewhat confused idea as to the fun(5tion of Christ in the matter of atonement for sin. Taking this, then, as the light cast on life by the Christian conception of things to-day, how far do we find it correspond with the mind-mirrored world on which we gaze in Shakspere's plays ? On the first head — the view of a moral contrast between Christian and non-Christian life — it must instantly occur to every reader that there is absolutely nothing in the dramas in which Shakspere portrays antiquity that gives countenance to the orthodox opinion. No two picl;ures could be further asunder than the Roman world as he re-creates it and the out- rageous accounts of that world now being multiplied among us by clerical pens, in which all the evil — and more — is thrown into blazing relief, and the good mostly slurred over. Shaks- pere would have read such literature with amazement. His relation to antique life is one of admiring sympathy, without a touch of the professional Christian's prejudice. In what respedt; are the men of his other historical plays morally superior to those of the Roman tragedies? He may or may not have been right in his conception of antiquity ; we know indeed very well that he is extravagantly anachronistic in his ii8 local color ; but that does not alter the fact that he never shows a trace of a sense of any moral inferiority in Paganism. The Christian Sun of Righteousness strikes for him, in that far-off world, no shadows that do not exist for him in his own civilisation : rather he seems to find in it, so far as his repro- ducftion goes, a clearer air, and a life that can better bear looking into than that on which he looked with his own eyes. We might indeed say that it is impossible that Shakspere should have looked at the ancients through the speftacles of Christian historiography such as we have them to-day; that his age consciously took its best culture from antiquity ; and that it was incapable of the modern sentiment about the dark- ness of ancient heathendom and the blessedness of being born in a Christian land. But putting the a priori argument aside, the truth is plain from the plays themselves. In the realm of Shakspere's imagination the springs of human conduct are at all times essentially the same ; and the hearts of men and women beat in unison across the ages. He is the poet of universal nature, and his work refuses to lend itself to the narrow purposes of creeds. As for his relation to the dodlrines of a future life, the efficacy of prayer, and the forgiveness of sins, it is equally impossible to discover that he carried these into his criticism of life. The truth is, it would be more plausible to say that Shakspere assented to the articles of the Christian faith than that Christianity gave him the light by which he saw life. I should not pretend to say either that he vaguely accepted or that he positively disbelieved such a do(?trine as that of the Trinity or the Divinity of Jesus. All we do know of his life tells against the theory of his having any theological leanings ; but we do not know enough either of genius in general or of Shakspere's in particular to be able to say that, wide-minded as he was, he would have been able to anticipate the conclusions of later thought as to the nature of supernatural religious systems. We must not take Lamb's thesis of the sanity of genius entirely without qualification : there remains a solid truth in Dryden's couplet. Just as Shakspere's admirers have erroneously credited him with superiority to all serious weak- ness, when the sonnets proved such weakness ; so there is a possibility of crediting him with a kind of intellectual quality which did not belong to him. Of his young contemporary Marlowe it is impossible to say how he might have compared with Shakspere had he lived : we are only entitled to say that in his early work he showed a more striking power than Shakspere did at the same age. But it is concei\'able, on the iig other hand, that Marlowe, who showed an extraordinary inde- pendence and originality in his personal criticism of the Christian system, may have had this kind of critical penetra- tion with ultimately less gift of general insight and sympathy than Shakspere. Great faculty of some kinds may exist in very different combinations ; and it does not at all follow, as has so often been said, that Shakspere, with his wide range, would necessarily have been able to write a Novum Organiun. Equally it is impossible to infer with safety his freedom from all common delusions. One may, indeed, reasonably argue that some kinds of superstition must have been impossible to such a mind ; and when we iind stress laid on the conventional preamble to his will, in which, after the fashion of the time, he is made to commend his soul to God, ti-ustingin life everlasting through Jesus Christ, we may safely conclude that the formula affords no clue to the state of mind of Shakspere ; who really cannot conceivably have believed that he could affedl the future of his soul by bequest. But while his acilual opinion on so-called religious mysteries, as apart from their bearing on actual life, is thus a matter for inference, and can only be pronounced upon negatively, there is, Mr. Mallock notwithstanding, the amplest evidence that his relation to the humanity around him, in his whole period of intelle(5lual creation, was absolutely human and non-theo- logical. While occasionally in his plays a personage, speaking in characfter, utters a theological sentiment, the moral canons constantly implied in the total a(5lion are absolutely apart from theology. A study of the great plays will show us this in detail ; and the perception is one which I venture to say will grow more and mOre on every thoughtful reader as he continues to read with the view of getting at Shakspere's inner judgment on things. He knows nothing of non-natural sin. Right and wrong are to him matters of relation between man and man ; the tribunal he ever tacitly recognises is that of the universal conscience ; and when he silently corrects its fallibilities, it is but by the light of a wider vision, never by the appeal to super- human oracles. If George Eliot is Godless, Shakspere is assuredly so : nay, anything in her work that can prove her so falls short of the testimony in his case, for the doctrine of inevitable moral retribution and of an inherent righteousness in destiny pervades all her stories,' tragic or cheerful ; while Shakspere at times seems to break up the very foundations of order, and proclaim, with a terrible impassiveness, that evil can triumph and good be whelmed irr ruin, with neither God nor law to save. If you go through the great tragedies 120 looking for an assurance of a righteous government of the world, you shall find a most portentous reticence. Ben Jonson makes a chara(5ter affirm divine justice in the teeth of fate : " O you equal gods Whose justice not a world of wolf-turned men Shall cause me doubt or question." But I can recall no quite equivalent utterance in Shakspere ; and in Lear it is hardly a mere dramatic voice that declares a contrary creed. " Eccovi ! " said the awed Italians, with bated breath, point- ing to the weird figure of the musing Dante, " that man has been in hell ! " But Shakspere's spirit had gone a further journey ; outsinking the pit, outsoaring the seven heavens. For these, when all is said, are but contained within one Church's dome, and our poet had scanned his planet with a larger ken, to which the works of men's hands took their right place and proportion in the eternal drama of humanity, wherein the stormy generations and their creeds are merely transient players. y«/>' yd, 1887. WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN THE LIBRARY ON SUNDAY MORNINGS, 11 a.m. By MONCUEE D Eeduced prices. s. a. 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The expression, Ethical Culture, means much more to the members of our ethical societies than it can possibly suggest to those unacquainted with the work we are engaged in ; and in ia6l to strangers it nearly always suggests some- thing quite contrary to what we understand by it. But I am sure that the idea which you who are here this morning have formed about Ethical Culture is adequately correft, so that I need not set out with a definition. It will be sufficient if, as I go on, I bring out the meaning fully. A religion for the people can only mean a religion for everybody ; for the rich as much as for the poor, for the culti- A-ated in taste no less than the crude, indeed for all, the ill and the well, the hopeful and the despairing, the weak and the strong. But it happens that there are two classes w^hom, it is said, Ethical Culture never can take hold of and lift up as Christianity and Judaism did. While it is quite generally conceded that for the cultured, the rich, the high-born, the successful, it may do very well, there seems to be grave doubt as to its fitness to be a religion for the unfortunate and the illiterate. Now if I did not from the bottom of my heart believe that our ideas and the social forces which they v/ill create and bring to bear upon men, will take a deeper hold upon the heart of the people and lift it higher than ever the do(?trines of the churches have done or could do, I would never utter one single syllable in favour of Ethical Culture. And if any one sympathizes with us and yet believes that our ideas cannot reach the uneducated and the less fortunate, he ought to stop sympathizing until he is convinced. For that they are un- able to reach these classes is enough to condemn beyond appeal, any docrtrines that may be set up in the place of historic religions. What, a religion that can give out spiritual warmth and light only to the few ! That is a contradidtion 150 in itself. Any idea, any institution, no matter how true or inspiring or beneficient it may be in itself, is never further from deserving the name religion than when it is locked away and hidden under forms and sj-mbols and language which only the educated can penetrate. And what is more, any truth, no matter how beautiful and interesting, no matter how clear and simple, any social force, no matter how powerful, if it be not at the same time life-giving to the morally dead, if it cannot quicken into hope and peace, — if any idea or social power, I say, cannot transfigure and glorify our common lot and cha- racter, then never think of calling it religion. Admit at once that the sun has set ; do not pretend that the moon with its dead light will serve as well. Feeling, as I do, that what we mean by Ethical Culture is fitted to be in the highest sense a religion for all sorts of men, yea especially for the illiterate and the unfortunate, it stings me to the quick when I hear the exa(5l opposite declared. I want to be up and doing, to settle this question one way or the other, to prove by a fair experi- ment whether our critics or we are right, whether ours is or is not a gospel to the people. No arguments, no talk, no discus- sion, will prove to others that we are in the right. We must demonstrate it by submitting our ideas to a pracftical test. But by talking about it and considering it among ourselves we may come to the conclusion that the probabilities are not so much against our success, and we may be induced to begin an ethical mission immediately among the uneducated and the unfortunate, among the discontented classes — that is, among those who constitute the great majority of society. I should like, therefore, to point out the special moral forces and ideas by which we shall be able to lift the people to a worthier, gladder life. In the first place, I would recall to your attention that the power of the old religions lay in great part in their appeal to the natural dread men have of being caught at evil doing. In the scheme for the moral government of the people God was among other activities represented as a special committee for moral vigilance. The people were told and believed that there is one above who knows everything that is going on. The wickedest heart and the foulest den of iniquity are open to him, he is there watching, he sees the concodtings of evil in the solitary brain as well as in the secret groups of men. All the fiendish traps that are every day set and successfully sprung upon the unsuspe(5ling, the weak and the ignorant — plots which society now in general only learns of when it is too late, — he is aware of from the beginning ; not only this, 151 but he keeps stritl record of all offences done, and in his own good time will appear as witness for or against every man of us, every city, and every nation. This idea has had a mighty influence for good, in keeping men up to the line of duty, sometimes appealing to motives of fear, sometimes to love and noble shame. If no other means in its place of appealing to man's natural dread of being caught at his evil doing should be established, the great mass of mankind would, I believe, sink back into animalism, or fly into reckless anarchy. But other means may be established more powerful over the illiterate than the idea that God is witnessing and noting their conduct. Indeed this idea has always had a fatal weakness about it, which becomes more and more apparent the more intelligent people grow. In the first place, there is no proof in any man's experi- ence for it. God gives no signs of his presence, or such faint ones that only experts in theology can detect them. The perpetrators of evil, although alert to the slightest approach of danger, never see his shadow cross their path or hear his step. God's way of hiding himself almost defeats the chief object of moral vigilance, which is to anticipate and prevent wrong doing by making men certain that they are being observed. When no one but God is about, it is to the man who does not believe in God strikingly like being alone. And when people discover that there is no real evidence of any intelligent watchman in the universe except men, that idea will lose entirely its praftical power, and it is already losing it. But what renders God's vigilance still more inefficient with men who think, is that according to universal ex- perience he never reports on anyone, however much he may see. You may be quite sure that if no one but God saw you do an evil deed, no one will ever find it out, except in natural ways, or unless you betray yourself. Human society reaps no benefit from God's record of crime, because he keeps the Book of Life locked so safely away, and because he delays his coming forward with the evidence until the end of the world. In the meanwhile, through the countless ages that to us mortals is like an eternity of time, mischief is doing its sure, quick work ; envy and hatred and pride and malice and passion and greed and wantrnness, are bringing forth their hideous brood — the direfullest shapes of human misery. I cannot therefore much regret that religion, at least so far as this idea is concerned, is losing its hold upon the people. T CO And I regret it still less because I believe that it has lulled the social conscience into an agreeable slumber. I cannot help thinking that the idea that God is ferreting out crime — a most unpleasant task — and will some day bring offenders to justice, has dulled good men to the necessity of their doing it. At pre- sent in every city throughout Christendom whole districts are given over to utter abomination, most shameless and glaring. I could not have believed that vice might parade itself thus unmolested- And only to think that one capable man, devoting his time to one of the city's plague spots, arming himself with a knowledge of the law, and organizing the worthier families about him, could soon, despite the fact that policemen may be in the pay of foulness, wash and cleanse these neighbourhoods and clothe them in their right mind. As I walked one night last summer through one of the lower parts of New York City, it seemed to me already to be raining fire and brimstone, and I cried out in my heart : " What, are there not even ten righteous within the city ? for, peradventure, through ten it might be saved." It must be that the dominant religion has dissipated the moral forces of society, by turning them into useless channels. Ethical Culture, as a religion for the people, offers in the place of God's vigilance an adequate increase of men's vigilance, in the place of a presence believed in, a presence actually seen and felt and heard — men and women looking and hearing, preventing, warning, condemning, rescuing. The dread of being caught by one's fellow-men offers, I believe, the strongest check that can be found to one's evil impulses. The possibility of incurring the contempt even of strangers, holds us back from our sweetest transgressions ; and the thought of the merest chance of being found out by those who respect us and love us tenderly, cuts into the soul like a knife, it spreads sharp pain through the finest pleasure, so that we recoil from our fondest schemes. It is a profound pity that the impulse to appear noble and pure is not made more use of. It is a moral misfortune that the chances of not being caught are so very great. " I die content " were the triumphant last words of a criminal, " for I assumed a false name, and my family will never hear ol my disgrace." At present every man's neigh- bours leave whole tracts of his charac^ter and conduct unex- plored, and the devil in him takes advantage of the facSl. On principle, the majority of honest men and women allow free sweep to vice and crime and rank injustice, if only it do not spoil their own household. So far as their own interference goes, citizens give over the community at large to iniquity. Note the bold insolence with which the capitalists of crime 153 openly defy the laws, and the mocking manner in which the abettors of drunkenness and lust and legal theft flaunt the fatl in our face that no one dare molest their traffic. O that the noble, pure, gentle, and strong men and women of our cities would only not shut in their light, would only give free sweep to their moral life ! Then, not a street, not a shop, not a house, not a room would remain unvisited by the angel of purity and love, bringing gentler manners, higher thoughts and nobler aims. Instead of the insane laughter of defiant vice and the pitiful wail of violated innocence, instead of the pathetic sighing of women and children, overworked and underfed, and instead of the bitter threats of revenge and retaliation for injustice done, would rise on every side an anthem of joyful human trust, corresponding to the gladness and thanksgiving which the ancient religion awakened in the hearts of men toward the god of their nation. This, of course, entails upon us a duty and a responsibility which the missionaries of the historic religion might naturally not have felt. Indeed, I sometimes think that for every doctrine which we have given up we have assumed a corresponding responsibility. Next to the fear of being caught in evil doing, the motive most powerful for good over the minds of ordinary men, and especially of the poor and illiterate, is the desire for personal approbation when they have done well, and the fear of offend- ing and disappointing someone who cares for them. This longing for personal fellowship in the inner moral life is, I believe, the deepest need of the human heart. All men, in their sense of weakness and shame at the thought of their own past transgressions, in the consciousness of their responsibility to make life everywhere better and sweeter, in hours of wider affection for humanity and the whole sentient world, when they are lifted out of self and see a life of perfe(5t justice and purity to be the only real life, indeed, at all times of deeper moral insight and purpose, feel that personal sympathy and communion in the inner moral life is an imperative necessity. It is not merely a sentimental longing. Men might well do without it if it were only one more pleasure, a serener peace, a quieter joy to be attained. The poor are accustomed to do without. But it happens that fellowship in devotion to the ideal is the very source of sustained moral enthusiasm. It is men's moral nature, longing to be fed and strenghened that urges them into fellow^ship. The feeble impulse to be hoi}' whispers within them that if two or three were gathered together in its name there it would be strong in the midst of them. And if you expeft any man by his own unaided strength to 154 become purer and grow in unselfish love, }ou have not learned the first lesson of moral experience. For, on the one hand, it is by contagion, by touch, by infection, by a poisonous social atmosphere, that moral debility and disease get into us. Who is a liar, and it is not harder for me to speak the truth ? Who is a hypocrite, and I do not feel the courage of my opinions sink within me? Who cheats in business transactions without making it harder for every man to practice fair dealing ? Who gambles, without spreading the love of feverish excitement ? Who speculates wildly in commerce, and we do not all begin to covet the wealth which we have not earned ? Who avoids the public duties of citizenship, and does not thereby tempt every man to shirk his responsibility and to give over legislation and administra- tion into the hands of thieves and despots ? We can lift our charai5ter very little above the sea level of current morality. Who is vain, and makes display in dress and equipage, who has contempt for honest work, who is proud and exclusive because of aristocratic birth, and we do not all begin to put a fictitious value upon such things ? What man is impure in conversation, and does not give a signal to the demon within us to stir up fumes, which like magic steal away our moral vision ? But then, on the other hand, who is merciful or just or faithful or patient or long-suffering, who is there that spends his life in the glad service of others, who dies for the world, and you and I do not find it easier to be merciful and just, to endure without murmuring, and to offer ourselves to the world ? It is by contact, by transmission, that we get life, or rather that our latent life becomes active. It is by communion with heroic persons that we are perhaps first stirred to daring self-sacrifice. It is the loving faith that someone, somewhere, is pure in mind, that turns our lower desires into bitter self-disgust. Such a one demonstrates to us the possibilities of virtue. But where are men, and especially the poor and the ignorant, to find this fellowship they need ? For all the chances seem against their finding it. " Our daily familiar life,'" says George Eliot, " is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds. And those who sit with us at the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unadted good." But if the trivial words and deeds of home life are a screen behind which men hide, what shall we call the stupid conventionalities of society, the set phrases and forms of religious tradition, the heartless 155 rules of business, the proud prejudices of race and class and sect ? Are they not stone walls of separation, mountain barriers, chasms? Who will defy these and come near enough to deliver the soul from the depths of its own loneliness? Who, knowing, will help us to check the un- spoken evil and draw into light and life the world of un- a(5ted good within us ? " The strong men keep aloof; Lover and friend stand far ; The mocking ones pass by." Where, we ask again, shall men find the fellowship they need and seek ? The theistic religion comes forward with its easy solution. It assures the unfortunate and the illiterate of an unseen friend, infinite in strength and mercy, and turning to us, who would leave out of account the idea of a personal God and yet hope to move men, it asks almost in pity for us, " Pray, what have you to offer to the downcast, the neglected, and the bereaved ? " Herein the believers in a personal God find the chief ob- jection to Ethical Culture as a gospel for the people, that, as they think, we would shut men off from the only fellow- ship in the inner life which could meet the need and craving of their moral nature. If I have heard one, I have heard twenty, wise men say; "O yes, ethical culture, morality without theology, is all very well, but it cannot propagate itself among the people. You have cut yourselves off from the source of moral enthusiasm, from communion with God, the All Holy One. But try your experiment," they say, "you will do no permanent harm, and your ultimate failure will teach others a lesson. And when you fail you will know whither to point men for strength and peace. That fellow- ship which the world does not offer, and yet which as a moral being every man needs and craves, he will find again in com- munion with a loving God, who knows him in his inmost thought and desire, who accepts him as he is, who forgives, who heals and strengthens him with tender mercy." What have we to answer to all this ? In the first place we readily admit that fellowship with a personal God is a source of sweet consolation. It is not therefore because we have any doubt that a certain kind of peace comes that we reject it. People do get a comfort from it ; we may have felt it ourselves. It comes as a natural result of faith in God's presence. It would come, even though the divine presence were a mere creation of men's fancies. 156 If I imagine I see a friend coming up the street, but am mis- taken, I have the same pleasure as if it were really he, as long as the illusion lasts. We [frankly admit, then, that it does bring consolation. In the second place, we are ready to concede that if we shut off communion with a personal God, and have only the fellowship of man left, we make an awful blank in our lives; for man is not standing ready to receive us, as God is said to be; and when we are admitted, it is to no such banquet as when we sit down with him. This is what dw^ellers with God call the awful blank of atheism, and it is awful. It is a dreary waste and a desolation ; I will not deny it. Men stepping into it are apt to shudder and draw back. But I should rather call it the awful blank of inhumanity. It is not the absence of God, but the absence of man from our heart. It never was meant to be filled with the light and life of God, but with the light and warmth, the laughter and song, the rain and the dew, the moon and the stars of human love. To doubt that this would fill up the loneliness we feel when we turn away from the divine and find ourselves barred out from human fellowship, is moral infidelity. No, the sense of being aliens in this world is not the void of atheism ; it is true you may fill it with a personal God, but you ought to fill it with man, and you ought not to fill it with anything else, — that would be to give up the good fight, to become reconciled to evil, to strike a blow at the sovereign power of human love. In short, the doctrine of God as a loving friend is anti-social, is against the interests of the poor and oppressed, and retards the coming in of universal brother- hood. For, if men have the peace and strength that comes of God's love, they have so much less need of fellowship in the inner moral life with men. Their craving for spiritual sym- pathy is gratified, though they have opened their heart to no man. Thus mankind is cheated of the highest moralizing power in the human breast, the desire for holy communion, by satisfying that desire from a source outside of the human family. Each man alone with his Lord. I know the theo- logian will protest against this statement. He will say that if we love God, then we cannot help loving our fellow men ; for God loves them, and we offend and grieve him if we negledl one of the least of his. According to this method love to God is made the mainspring to the service of man- kind. As if one should ask, How can you love your brother whom you have seen if you do not first love God whom you 157 have not seen ? I answer : I do not know how it is, but I know that I can. And people who doubt it, I must think, have never taken a fair look at the real workings of our moral nature. They represent God, 3'ou see, as loving the world directly, so that the sight of its suffering pains him, and the sight of its joy makes him glad ; while us they represent as loving it wholly because he does. But unless deep down we too love the world, how^ does it come that God when con- ceived as loving it, so excites awe : how is it that we cannot hear of another's loving it without finding our hearts steal out to him ? Yes, we feel that all creatures that suffer are ours, and that if anyone is merciful unto the least of ours, he is merciful unto us. Friends, if you hold up the Christian's ideal of a loving God in the strongest light of your moral insight, you will see that it is in outline the perfect human character projected outward, that it is a vision which the human soul throws out from its own depths upon the clear blue sky of inward meditation. No sadder error has ever been committed than to mistake it for a reality and rest in the sight of it. We must make it a reality, else it has no exist- ence. It is the soul's prophecy of itself, it is the soul anticipating itself, it is our moral nature, now hidden in un- consciousness, lifting itself like a new continent into the light of day ; it is the birth of the soul into unselfishness. We would keep this ideal constantly before our eyes. But because we do not mistake it for a real existence, but regard it as a thing to be made real in our lives and in society, we main- tain that ethical culture in this respect is better fitted than theistic religion to bring salvation to the people. But, besides gratifying the need of spiritual sympathy without compelling a man to open his heart to any brother man, the doctrine of communion with a personal God has another anti-social effect. It relieves men of the sense of their greatest responsibility. The social idea of morality de- mands that we offer ourselves to others. But if God will do just as well, what is the use of all this incommoding of self? It is a great relief to feel that one mightier than we is tend- ing to the outcasts, the abandoned of society, the vulgar who offend our taste. But herein lies the greatest evil of theo- logical ethics. It relieves us of responsibility. God is doing, it says, the very thing, or is willing to do it if we let him, which we ought to do. He is stooping with infinite tender- ness and love over every soul. Unless the doctrine of com- munion with a personal God diverts men from direct love for the world, and in that way from their duty, then I can find 158 no explanation whatever for the apathy of devout believers toward the social needs of the day. Let us then deny our- selves that gratifying belief, in order to deepen our own sense of responsibility. And by so doing we shall also bring others to a sense of their responsibility. If we give up the divine comfort and cry out the more for the human, many a heart will be touched to come out of its solitary hiding place, which would have felt no demand upon it otherwise. Now I know well enough that here too the theist is ready to defend himself. The belief in God's love, he declares, does not weaken a man's sense of his own responsibility, and he pomts to the fa6\ that those who love God most are the ones who have loved men most. What he states is a facft, but it is no proof that men would not have loved man very much more, and more pra(5lically, if they had not been taught to look upon the ideal of characfter as a real presence to worship and adore, and if they had been taught to pour out all their heart to the world, and not to seek the peace of fellowship with a super- human being. The teaching of non-theistical ethics is: "leave there thy gift before the altar and go thy way. First be recon- ciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift." But remember that all the world are thy brother, and that thy offence is against every man. Surely if because of the magni- tude of our offence and the number of those to be reconciled, some of us never get back to the altar, it will not be counted against us. But before leaving this comparison of our views with the historic religion we must acknowledge that there is a phase of theistic ethics which has nothing morally unwholesome in it, if it be only carried out and applied universally. In fac^t, it is exacftly the same do(?trine, only couched in theistic phrase, as that for which I have been pleading. It is that God a6is only through human instrumentality. For if this be true, see what it means when applied. If no man is befriending the poor, then God is not befriending them, for he works only through human instru- mentalities. If fathers or mothers or sisters are not shielding the youth of this city from the dangers of ignorance and appe- tite, then God is not shielding them ; he works only through human instrumentality. If men do not hear the cry of toiling children, then God does not ; for only through human ears and eyes and hands does he hear and see and reach. But while the preachers affirm that God works only through human instrumentalities, they limit what they say to material things ; they simply mean that he does not carry coal and potatoes and shoes and books to the needy ; but the higher work they still 159 think he does himself. He visits souls who are in need. Now it is just this higher work which it seems to me a truly good God never would do directly. If he does not carry bread and meat to the hungry, but rather than that lets them starve, because he wants us to do it, surely he would never carry them spiritual love and joy for the same reason. I have no objedtion to those who say that God never works even the works of love except through human instrumentalities, but who attribute these to him ; for it all comes back to the same thing as if he did not act at all. God becomes identical with the good in men. The preachers who preach this do(5trine are, in my opinion, the modern Elijah ; while those who to-day preach that God ac^ts diredtly upon men's minds to comfort and strengthen, are the modern prophets of Baal. And Elijah has said to these, " Call ye on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the Lord, and the God that answereth by lire, let him be God." And they have called on the name of Baal from morning even unto noon, saying, " Baal, hear us," but there has been no voice, nor any that answered. And now it is noon, and Elijah is mocking them, and saying: "Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth and must be wakened." But Elijah knows that the only true God is always in a journey when men are in a journey, and always sleepeth when men are asleep, and must be awakened. Know- ing this, he will stop men's talking and call them back from their pursuing and shake them out of their sleep. Then it will come to pass at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice that the fire of the Lord will fall, and the people who see it will say : " The Lord who answereth by fire, by the fire that leaps from human hearts, the Lord who worketh not except through human instrumentalities, he is the God." But if God, as I have said before, never does anything himself, if he never puts any extra weights into the scale on the side of justice and love, if he never rights anything over and above what men do, if he never acts except through men, then it all comes to the same thing as if he did not adt at all, and we find ourselves back on the ground of ethics minus theology. And now in drawing our thought to a close for the morning, I would like you to notice that while I have objected to the doctrine of God's ever watchful eye, and the preaching of per- sonal communion with him, I have had nothing to say against certain other attitudes of the mind toward the ultimate power of the universe. Indeed, certain conscious relations toward that power are essential to moral culture; but they are so. clear i6o and simple, that a child may understand them and feel their force. If anyone has ever taken a minute's thought, he must have discovered how dependent he is upon a power outside his own will. He has no strength, either good or bad, of his own making. The more he thinks of it, the deeper must grow his sense of dependence. And seeing that God, or whatever we may call the great power in all things, does not consult his whims, he finds it easier not to consult them himself. If we continually keep in mind that we are not the powers of life and death, it takes the conceit out of us, and the vanity and folly. And in that way it brings us to quick resignation in times of disappointment. It draws the bitterness and sting out of bereavement. It makes us loving brothers and sons. There is also another attitude of the mind which we ought to cultivate toward that in which we live and move and have our being; an attitude most exhilarating and encouraging, and, therefore, especially adapted to win favour with the oppressed. It is the feeling that we may win more and more all power to the side of universal welfare. Not only the impulses and de- sires of the human breast, but by means of science, the poten- cies of organic life, and the circling forces of inanimate nature. O all ye powers of the Lord, ye sun and moon, ye stars of heaven, ye showers and dew, ye must join us in redeeming the world from misery and sin ! Morality is no private affair. Morality is the universe under the guidance of our unselfish love. A realizing sense that the power which manifests itself in nature may be drawn into allegiance with us, makes us bold for the right, and persistent in fighting the wrong. But do not mistake this relation for one of personal communion in the inner moral life. It does not require that God knows us or loves us or is worshipped by us. And, finally, there is another state of mind which I hope no one will think I wish to do away with ; for I do not. I would simply change the interpretation which people give to it, for I do not believe it is what they think it to be. It is that feeling which in the darkest hour of bereavement steals into us with a warm familiar light. A peace floods the soul ; we are no longer alone. It appears at the moment when resignation becomes complete, and private sorrow melts into universal sympathy. Only a few days ago a woman, whose heart had been bleeding because death had torn her child from her arms, told me that she had had this sweet experience, just when the blackness of grief had settled thickest upon her. She called it an awakening to the consciousness of God as a loving father. i6i But as she told me, and as I heard her relate how, since that comfort came, she had sought out the poor and the dying everywhere, especially little children, and wanted to be a mother to them, I could not help thinking that what she had awakened to was the consciousness, not of God as a loving father, but of the whole world as her beloved child. I would interpret her feeling as the flooding joy of personal fellowship with the whole world. It was the true moral con- version, the new birth into the moral life. This idea I would bring to the poor and suffering. I would say to them : " Seek the peace and strength you need in the hearts of your fellow creatures, if you do not find them open, keep on seeking, and keep on ; let men know that you are starving for the true bread and the true wine of life, unselfish love, and never give up ; for if you knock long enough at the door of men's hearts, they will take pity on you and let you in. Your very impor- tunity will overcome their obduracy. And if they point 3'ou to God's mercy and sympathy, and want to hand you over to him, do not heed them, but tell them it is their sympathy and mercy you want. Then only shall you prove yourselves faithful servants to the new love that is in you. The less fellowship you find in the world, I would urge, the more per- sistently you must cry out for it. The greater the temptation to seek the fellowship of God, the more imperative the command of the love in 3'ou to remain true to the world." We might be rich in the joy of the divine fellowship, but if we are true we will become beggars and outcasts, until that perfect fellow- ship which men now suppose God offers us, every man and woman on earth stands ready to give. September 18, 1887. l62 Part II. Before we enter upon the special theme of my discourse, I should like, in order to prevent a misunderstanding about our ethical movement, to point out certain fundamental charac- teristics of it. In the first place, if in what I said here last week there was one breath of atheism, then I misrepresented both myself and the ethical movement. It is one thing to say as atheistic ethics does : " There is no personal God, therefore let us take up with the next best thing, and love our fellow men ; " and quite another — as different as day from night — to say: "The highest thing is to love where there is the greatest need." And this is what I said : because fellowship with living men bears upon it the sovereign seal of the moral sanction, there- fore will I know no other fellowship until that be perfected. But, again, if it was not atheism, neither was it theism. I should be equally friendly to both these so long as they would not try to bolster up our moral life with negative or artificial reasons, but the moment they do that, I should be equally hostile to both. For it is Lard to say which is the worse : to take up with duty because there is nothing better — because there is no God, as ethics based on atheism would do, or : to take up with God because without him we lack incen- tive to duty, as ethics based on theism would do. Nor, in the third place, was there any touch of Agnosticism in the arguments I gave. The reasoning of agnostic ethics would be : We do not know that God loves us, therefore let us turn to what we are sure of — our duty. But duty is a jealous God, and will allow no such reasoning in its devotees. " What, am I not the highest ? " says the voice of Duty, " Thinkest thou that if the veil were rent and thou stoodest face to face with what is now the mystery of being, thou shouldest find it fairer than I am ? Then hast thou never known me." Nor, again, is ethical culture another name for positivism, although the two have much in common. But if that were a reason for calling it positivism, all humanitarian sentiment would have to be called that. Now it happens that positivism starts out from agnosticism, and that it is pledged to many details of social theory which we are not. Furthermore it demands an emotional contemplation of humanity which we i63 think we have no right to impose upon ourselves or any one else as a duty. One of the leaders of English Positivism once said to me: "Your ethical movement cannot succeed, unless you place the idea of Humanity in the centre of your system, and transfer to that the emotions which are now bestowed upon God. But while our ethics is humanitarian, we think — and our experience confirms — it to be better and wiser to em- phasize duty more than humanity, although, of course, in no such sense as to worship it — which would be absurd. In making morality and not humanity the centre, we appeal more to the creative energies. Duty touches the spring of action. Humanity is a word of the heart, Duty for the will. Rather than adoration and worship, we would awaken the sense of obligation — something to be fulfilled. But if we do not base ethics on atheism, or theism, or agnosticism, or positivism, what do we base it upon ? We answer: Ethics is the science of good character and right con- duct, and it is based on our moral experience and our moral judgment, and should be kept independent of all theology, just as the science of correct thinking is, or political economy, and all other sciences of the mind and society, and as all practical arts are. We are pledged to no philosophical theory as to the nature of God and the universe, or as to the limits of human knowledge. And so long as the atheist, or theist, or agnostic, or positivist does not derive his sanctions to right actions from his speculative theories, we gladly welcome him. We would leave the speculative thought of each individual as un- trammelled as you do here at South Place, and assert that character and conduct are independent of philosophical specu- lations. We would then unite on the basis of character and conduct, and try to build up these as best we can in ourselves and others. Let us now turn to our special theme. When it first became clear to me that the chief objection to ethical culture as a religion for the People was that it would not be practicable, that it did not supply motives which would stir common men, I was inclined to retort : " Whether it will work is not the question, but whether it is right, whether it deserves to succeed." And I am still of the conviction that this is the true attitude of mine to hold. It is a low motive to keep aloof from any cause for fear it may not be able to push its way amidst the avarice and lust and vain glory of the world ; the most precious things are oftentimes most fragile. II the highest motives will not stir the people, it is they who are at fault, not the motives. If our idea is right and true, we must i64 go ahead with it against all odds; then, if we fail, even our failure is success. The moral impulse knows no defeat but unfaithfulness to duty. And yet, while I still feel in this'^^way as strongly as ever, I am beginning to see, more and more clearly, that if in the nature of things any scheme of social redemption could not work, we should be forced for that very reason to regard it as not the right scheme. If it did not fit social needs and did not touch fundamental human instincts, that would prove it to be a creation of fancy, a fanatic's dream, and therefore to be wrong. A medicine that will not cure the disease, is not a medicine. So I turned to see whether our motive-thoughts were really strong as well as good. And now it seems to me that they are strong, and I rejoice in it. With this feeling I tried to point out last Sunday some of the reasons for believ- ing in the pradlicability of bringing morality into the fore- ground in religion, of making it the starting point and appeal- ing to purely natural and moral motives to right action, that is, motives which do not require the idea that God watches us or loves us. I tried to show that if we do our duty in guard- ing and warning we shall be applying motives stronger than belief in God's vigilance, and that if we do our duty in justice and affection we shall help create the kingdom of joy on earth. The chief difference between our teaching and that of theistic religion lies in the one condition : — if we do our duty. We throw the burden and the hope upon men. Besides friendship with a personal deity, as theism teaches it, Christianity offers still another means which ethical culture cannot, of satisfying the need of fellowship in the moral life without making any demand upon men — the living presence of Christ as the Comforter and Saviour. This must, without doubt, bring to a sincere believer inward peace, and prove a strong incentive to right conduct. But to seek out Christ as the unique inspirer and sustainer of our moral life, as the only name whereby a man can be saved, is again anti-social. It lets Christ do what we ought to do, the higher work. It is impossible to set him up as the onl}^ source of moral inspira- tion without undervaluing the inspiration which you and I might become to each other, and without doing injustice to the thousands of self-sacrificing men, both known and un- known, from whom together we have inherited all the bene- ficent institutions which we possess. If anyone feels that he owes everything to Jesus, the Christ, let him not be ashamed of it, but I cannot help think- ing people really do not mean it when they say they owe all i65 to Christ. For they are full of gratitude for the moral good they get from others, and are not slow to confess it. If they Jo really believe that they have received more from him than h-om all others together, although they have had loving and wise father and mother, then it must be because they have gazed at the unseen finger they trust to until they have no eyes to see the visible hand ahold of them, and they are numb to its touch through their constant grasping at the intangible. But there are men who have had little reason for gratitude to father and mother. They were not born of love, they were kept alive because they could not without danger be got rid of. They were neglecfted and ill-treated, they were taught vice. And it is with reference to these classes, the unfortunate and illiterate, that Christianity asserts its special claim of being a religion for the people. It points how often in these days of ours, if such men ever come to know the joy of being loved and cherished, it is in an ideal friendship with a man whom they have never seen, a man of another time and nation, but they have heard that he loved everybody, even great sinners, even the poor. Many a human heart, just on the brink of despair, has been caught back and saved by the thought that although to no human being yet to Christ their life is precious. They turn to him and find solace and strength ; they owe him everything. But ah, the mockery of it ! The millions of human souls living together in this city, and the only true friend that some can boast is a man now dead almost nineteen hundred years. In the sight of this sad state of things, and the fear that it may last always, who can blame us for thinking that Chris- tianity as a religion for the people has failed ? Who dare discourage us in our hope that a religion will succeed which instead of preaching Christ and his love, preaches the re- sponsibility of every man to go forth and offer in all humility the best that he has, himself? It all depends upon us who are its disciples, whether Ethical Culture be a gospel for the people or not. We must be brave in the consciousness of our high responsibility. We must have the courage of whatever unselfish love there may be in us. And we need feel the less ashamed of having nothing better to offer than our own fitful, broken fidelity, and affection, inasmuch as by offering it, it ceases to be fitful and broken, and inasmuch as on every side men who have had most experience are saying that what the poor and the negledted need more than all else is human friendship and sympathy. " Many have been the schemes of reform I have known," says the man who more than any other is raising the buried life of the oppressed i66 population of East London, '' but out of eleven years' experi- ence I would say that none touches the root of the evil which does not bring the helper and the helped into friendly relations. The personal intercourse of the highest with the lowest is the only solution of the social problem. He who has even for a month shared the life of the poor can never again rest in his old thoughts." And the society which has done so much, both in England and America, to shield the charadlier of the needy from the evil effefts of indiscriminate alms' giving, declares that the best — indeed the only — way of awakening self-respeft in the degraded, and hope in the despairing, is through friendly visitors. Not one word are these to say about Christ and heaven and hell, but they are to be thoughtful and considerate and earnest and gentle, offering homely counsel. They are simply to go as one goes to one's neighbour in distress. Thus we hnd that even Christians fall back at last upon this natural and purely ethical means of raising the poor ; and I venture that if we, in the name of Ethical Culture and what it means to us, visit the fatherless and the widows in their affliction, while at the same time we keep ourselves as unspotted from the world as possible, the people will soon come to look upon our mission as religion pure and undefiled. Thus far I have dealt simply upon individual friendship. But we may apply a greater power than that to elevate the people. Each man may be brought into vital moral touch with a whole community as a unit, not simply with each individuall}'. He may be united in heart, and thought, and will, with a body of men in devotion to the ideal of human character. It is such organic communion in the inner character, where the strength and life of all flows into each, which makes each man mightier than himself. If}ou read the history of the great moral movements of the world, especially at the time of their origin, and during the period of their regenerative power, you will see how they were so organized as to knit men's souls together like the flesh and bones and nerves of one living body. It was to a great extent so among the ancient Pythagoreans, so with the Essenes, so with the immediate followers of Christ. It was the same with the Benedictine monks, and the Franciscan and Dominican Friars. Each of these movements had strength in proportion as men's minds were fused together in the spirit of their high enterprise. I count it as the greatest lack of modern society, that there is no organization which is purely and fully a fellowship in the higher life. Of forming many societies there is no end in these latter days. i67 We have societies for the cuhivation of some special virtue like temperance or purity. We have besides hundreds of societies for the checking of the various phases of cruelty and corruption, each of the multitudinous forms of economic injustice. Valiant men are everywhere forming into little companies for moral attack. But whatever else such organizations may accomplish, they do not satisfy the need of fellowship. Now the Churches are to an extent organized fellowships in the moral life ; but, alas for the people, they are something more than that. They require for admission to their member- ship not simply an honest avowal of the desire thereafter to lead a manly, upright life, and to put one's self in the way of doing so — a meek and contrite heart is not enough for them. They must constrain a person to believe strange matters which nobody can understand, and which, if under- stood, can have no moral significance. Until the churches give up theology as a test of membership and as a requisite for holy orders, they need never hope to organize the mental and social life of the people. In the last ten years there has been a growing effort to bring refined pleasure and intellectual delights to the poor. But these philanthropic enterprises do not attempt to train and guide the social sympathies in the way I mean, or to transform the whole life of the man. They do not infuse a unity of mind into a natural group of people. Yet that is what can be done, and should be attempted. But what I have spoken of thus far is only half of what we have to offer the illiterate and the unfortunate. I have only spoken of the means, the forces, the living power, which we shall use — forces which are universally admitted to have a weight which neither utter ignorance nor the heaviest despair can withstand, the personal presence of good men and women, watchful, and kind, and wise. Through them we shall find our way to the heart of the people. But independently of personal and social forces, there is another way in which we shall with equal certainty reach the people. The very ideas of ethical culture, its doctrines and fundamental principles, are able to arouse men to high social enterprise. In the place of heaven which awakens contempla- tion, we set before men the vision of a glorified earth. Stung by its splendours, men will leap to execute it. It was always the glorified earth that the heart of man longed for. It was only as the hope of ever realizing it faded away that the vision of another world began to shed its strange i68 unnatural light over this earthly existence. But that earlier hope is again shining out, and now it is the idea of heaven that is paling away. The people are mocking the parson who offers them the consolations which soothed the oppressed during the dark ages : — Said the parson, " Be content. Pay your tithe dues, pay your rent. They that earthly things despise Shall have mansion in the skies. Though your back with toil be bent," Said the parson ; " be content." The people do not care any longer for the mansions in the skies. What they want is a home for the heart here. By a glorified earth we mean not simply an improved physical condition, but opportunity and time to enjoy the ideas of science, the best music and literature, the sweetness of river and sky, and chiefly we mean the highest moral life and its immediate consolations, the fullest development of the consciousness of duty. Christianity has not brought to the great mass of the people, nor in a serious way tried to bring, the completest temporal life. The same philanthropist whose words I quoted before says : " The fact that the mass of the people live without knowledge, without hope, and often without health, has come home to open minds and hearts. The best is the privilege of the few. The working-man's wages cannot procure for him the knowledge which means fulness of life, or the leisure in which he might possess his soul." But to bring these blessings is one of the chief aims of ethical culture. I may pass over the means of acquiring greater leisure for working-men ; the working-men will surely effeit that change before many years. The special work which a gospel to-day is called upon to perform is for the intelleftual and spiritual life. There is nowhere as yet any thorough, successful attempt to bring literature and science to the working people. The University extension movement in Eng- land does not reach the artisan class. And it is a little curious that the only labourers, so far as I know, to whom we are bringing the finest fruits which the human mind has pro- duced, are the prisoners in a certain Reformatory in America. And it is still more curious and preverted — and suggestive — that our working classes, while they have raised a jealous pro- test against convict labour, have not put in a word against convict culture. The majority of them do not know what it is, i69 as according to the official report the prisoners at Elmira do, to " read for pure pleasure the history of the Renaissance, and to search the pages of Dante for illustrations of the text of Chaucer, and to ransack reference libraries for specimens of early English." Lately I have seen something of the intelledtual life of the people who live in a crowded tenement- house district, and if you are acquainted with it you will not wonder that in reading the following account of the Secretary of the Elmira Prison, I almost wished I were there to enjoy the stimulating intellecftual atmosphere which pervades that institution. In the literature class there are now five hundred pupils — criminals, remember. " English literature was in the beginning voted a nuisance," says the report, " but in a little while the class gathered momentum and became thoroughly a fact. The change was accompanied by phe- nomena which are unique from an educational and psycho- logical point of view. Anyone passing along our corridors and galleries," the report continued " might now have witnessed a curious specftacle — that of a student of literature reading by gas-light, not the accustomed novel or light history, but the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, the tragedy of Hamlet, Emerson's May Day, or the story of Evangeline; pondering over the weight}^ pages of Bacon, or keenly trying to read between the lines of Browning's Paracelsus." Now it is right to open up these richest mines of gold and silver to our thieves, but think of the great mass of our people who by their honesty and industry merit these things, — they are in woeful need of intellecftual guidance and instruction. Ethical Culture is a religion for the illiterate, because it intends and hopes to do away with illiteracy altogether; it sees that illiteracy ought not to be ; furthermore, it is demonstrating that it need not be. But in the meantime, before all these fair dreams of ours have been realized, before the evils of poverty are done away with, what has ethical culture to offer the people ? Chiefly, the moral blessings, the immediate consolations, compensa- tions, and encouragement which our ideas of man's duty will dispense. And these ideas deal with almost the whole of life. The same men and women whom we send as friends and guar- dians among the unfortunate and illiterate shall also be their moral teachers; they shall present, in the way the special case may require, the ideals of manhood and society. They shall point out the way of life. But of the many ideas which make me believe that we have a special mission to the poor and the down-trodden, I have time to indicate only two this morning, 170 and these only as illustrations. A few Sundays a^o I attended a Church mission for the poor, which is doing a brave work ; but one of the doctrines which were inculcated was to me like blasphemy against our moral nature, and it is the cardinal doctrine of missionaries to the people. A few young men had remained after the regular meeting, and the clergyman was insisting that no man could keep a temperance pledge or could be temperate and upright unless he looked to Jesus Christ for help and strength, that it was impossible, that we had no power to do right except as we sought his grace. That is just what the preacher said. He would break the moral spirit of his hearers utterly, that, in an agony of self-abasement, they might cry out for superhuman help. It was not enough that they were poor and illiterate, and without the higher pleasures and satisfactions of life ; he must rob them of the priceless jewel — the joyful consciousness that every man has of the power to do his duty. I wanted to stand up and say: " It is not true, what you are preaching, I know it is not ; I know many a man who is temperate and pure and keeps his word, yet he never has a thought of Jesus as his Saviour. Young men," I wanted to say, "you can be temperate, you can be manly, it is in you, you have the power in yourselves. O stand up in the dignity of your young manhood ! You may be poor and illiterate, even intemperate and dishonest, but let no man dare say that you are incapable of overcoming all tempta- tions." The doctrine that our moral impulses do not well up out of our own nature, but are injected upon supplication to a superhuman being for help, is so palpably false and degrading that it should be silenced. Only the other day a young man told me that he was deeply interested in the work of the White Cross Societ}', " but," he added, " why do they keep saying that a young man cannot possibly resist temptation unless he ask Jesus to help him." He had never found that necessary. Now, in my opinion, to tell men that they have no power of themselves to do right is as fatal and untrue as it would be to tell a school child that of itself it was an idiot, that it had no power to add and subtract, or to read and write correctly, unless it every day prayed God to give it the power. The power to do right is a part of ourselves. It is as much a part of ourselves at least as the power to think, to see or to eat, and there is no more need of asking some superhuman being for it than for these. There is only need of exercising it, no matter how weak it may be ; and I am impatient to spread this morally exhilarating thought among the people, to refute this false teaching of nearly all missionaries to the 171 people, to appeal to the highest that is in men and make them aware of their own moral possibilities. And I believe this thought will find favour and work healing among the poor. It will build up self-respect, and stimulate moral endeavour. The other idea to which I alluded which we have to offer is especially for the sorrowing, for those in affliction, for those whose whole life seems doomed to pain and disappointment. It is this — that all pain, all privation, is' somehow transfigured and hallowed, and sanctified by a complete consecration to duty, and to the good of others, so that it ceases to be pain. It is still sacrifice, but it is not pain. If we love all men, and if we come to see that somehow suffering of every kind may be made to serve the good of all, then — •such is our moral nature — ^all the evils of life will be transfused with gladness, just as the petty trials and annoyances which the mother must under- go for her child are yet so penetrated by her absorbing love, that instead of counting them as pain she finds delight in them. I believe every affliction, every bereavement, every disappointment may be made to serve the good of all ; and that simply by its being borne without murm.uring, by its being accepted as our own. The spirit of resignation sheds upon a human life an almost superhuman beauty, a sanctity before which every heart kneels for benediction. No man, no woman, can brave suffering with heroic patience, and not touch the dullest neighbour into reverence, and awe, and humility Therefore, under our teaching, the unfortunate, the poor, the incapable, are not without the highest consolation. For the knowledge that affliction may be made to serve others will to him who loves his fellow men convert all suffering into sacri- fice, will give a holy meaning to pain, will fill it with supreme worth, so that all anguish shall take on the glory of martyr- dom. The man Jesus looked upon all his sufferings as borne for the sake of others, and therein found peace and strength. We may look upon all our sorrows in the same hallowed light. By bearing them we shall become purified, and, being purified, we shall purify others ; and purifying others, we may rejoice. For that is the perfect work, the only satisfying life. Unto the humblest falls the highest mission. What then have we to offer? To the neglected, a friend ; to those in moral danger, a guard; to the weak, encouragement; to the erring, self-respect ; to the ignorant, knowledge ; and unto the sorrowing, an in- ward joy. I have spoken of the social forces at our command, and the ideas we would inculcate. But I cannot close without a word as to the method of teaching ethics. People have a 172 notion that the leaders of our movement expect to stir men by a bald appeal to their intelle(?t. " You may philosophize all day to men about morality," I have had friends say, " but that is not going to make men moral." Certainly not, we answer, but whoever thought it would ? We have no intention oi philosophisi^ii^ about morality. Last winter in conversation with a practical philanthropist, I ventured to suggest that what the poor and unsducated classes need, more than all else, more even than bread, is practical ethics brought home to them. But the philanthropist replied that in his opinion what the people need more than anything else is poetry. On further conversation, however, we found we both had meant the same thing. For I had had in mind, not ethics set forth in general rules, or cold statements of abstrac^t principles, but addressed to the imagination and heart, while he meant not all kinds of poetry, not immoral or indifferent poetry, not simply rhyme and metre, but only what appeals to our noblest instincts, and that, whether in the form of anecdotes, or poems, or eloquence, or in living burning deeds. In short, we agreed that what all men must have to lift them out of the mire of dead routine and animality is the poetry of ethics. To make clear the difference between the prose and the poetry of ethics, and to show the greater power of the latter upon the untutored mind, let me illustrate. Plutarch tells the story of a Greek boy, Bessus, who, being charged with wanton- ness for killing some sparrows, said he did so because the little birds kept unjustly accusing him of having murdered his father. Until then no one had ever suspected the lad of this crime, which he had in fadt committed. This story Montaigne speaks of as being on every child's lips, and it is older than Plutarch. Now why has it had such life and found its way into uncultured minds ? Why, because it concentrated a universal truth of moral experience into a shape that the simplest minds may grasp, and that is always possible. The same truth told in plain prose would make no impression whatever. It never would have been found on children's lips. If Plutarch, instead of the story, had simply said that the consciousness of having committed a crime will make a man imagine that others have found out his secret, even where there is no possibility of their knowing it, no one ever would have remembered his saying this ; not because the truth it contains is cold and dead, but because its statement would be plain prose. Let me illustrate again. I remember once hearing a friend of Emerson's tell the story of an unruly boy whom he had 173 many years ago in his school in Boston. It was a school where the children were never punished in any way for mis- demeanours ; moral suasion had been found sufficient. But this unruly fellow could not be overcome by kind words and affection. He teased the other children until they could not stand it ; he delighted in annoying everybody. So one day the teacher called him up before all the other pupils and said to him : " There is no doubt that you take delight in causing others trouble and pain, and as it is our principle here to try to make every one happy, we should like to make you happy ; so I want you to take this ruler and strike me on the hand with it as hard as you can."' The boy was not to be put down by any such trick as that. He took the ruler and gave his teacher a hard blow. The teacher waited a moment, and then said ; " Now I want you to strike me again but harder ; it was not half hard enough."' The boy again struck him with all his might. By this time all the other children in the room were sobbing and crying. The teacher again extended his hand, but the boy could hold out no longer. The ruler dropt from his trembling fingers, and he burst into tears. From that time no child in the school-room was more open to moral suasion than he. This story fills me, whenever I recall it, with reverence and awe. It has made the truth that the innocent by suftering shall perfect the earth a living reality to me. Such is the power of the poetry of ethics. The plain statement that the innocent, by nobly bear- ing the wrongs done by evil doers, may win the evil from their wickedness, does not move me. Such is the feebleness of the prose of ethics. The whole difference between the two is that the prose of ethics is the soul's electricity diffused throughout its whole atmosphere. We have only a vague sense of it as a quality in the air. But the poetry of ethics streams across our sky with an expanse of living palpitating light, or it parts for a moment our clouds and darkness, and we see into an immensity of luminous glory beyond. It forces the reality of the moral universe upon us. Mere eating and drinking, and fine garments, and houses, and carriages, and ornaments, social homage and fame shrivel into nothing, while to stand unblamed in the light of conscience is everything. The more distinc^t our vision of the perfe(5l way of living, the more beautiful it grows, and more satisfying. The deeper our consciousness of the imperfec^tion of human life and characiter, the more tragic and pathetic it appears. The prose of ethics, that is, a general or scientific statement of the facts of moral experience and of the ideal of duty, is teeming with poetry. 174 The light which streams from conscience bathes in opal beauty every individual life, it penetrates and makes radiant with the splendour of pure joy every family on earth ; the citv where it gleams has no need of the sun, neither of the moon ; blessed too are the nations that walk in the light of it. The warmth of its beams reaches to the uttermost limits of man- kind ; yea, it floods the universe with its effulgence inex- haustible. We behold a glory in the sea and sky, and on the distant mountains, which is not their own. We lose ourselves in light. Such is the poetry of the moral life. Such is the gospel of ethics. September 25, 1887. YfORBS TO BE OBTAINED IN THE LIBRARY ON SUNDAY MORNINGS, 11 a.m. By MONCUEE D Reduced prices. Travels in South Kensington The Sacred Anthology Idols and Ideals Christianity . . Human Sacrifices in England Demonology and Devil-lore . . Thomas Carlyle The Wandering Jew . . A Necklace of Stones KeiJublican Superstitions Farewell Discourses . . 9 10 4 1 20 5 4 4 2 o , CONWAY, M.A. Farewell Discourses, in 7 separate Numbers, A Gnostic's Apology, The Gift and the Altar, Of One Risen and Unrecognised, The Criminal Law, Substitutes for Hell, The Palace of Delight, and Apologia.. .. .. each A Charge to be kept at South Place The First Lnve Again The Eising G meration .. The Oath and its Ethics . . Tennyson's " Despair " . . Life and Death of Garfield 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 LESSUXS FOR THE DAY. Vols. I. d II. Dii3our333 Diiivared at South Placj Chapal by MDNcuR-d: D. Conway, M.A. Prica 3i. i>2r vol. Each containing 26 Nos., neatly bound in cloth. M^-and from very early days men have planted trees that, not they themselves, but their children might eat the fruit of them. There is this race- instinct to work upon at the lower end of the scale, and at the higher end is there not the unselfish desire to hand on to others a better inheritance than we have received ? But per- haps it is hardly right to call this desire unselfish ; for a man cannot realise his true self save in the work he does for the good of others. In the pessimist's virtue of sympathy we find the escape from the individualism that makes pessimism inevitable. It is worthy of note that Mill dates his recovery 200 out of his hopelessness from the time when he read in Mar- montel's " Memoires " of the boy's resolution to supply the place of his dead father to his afflicted family. " A vivid con- ception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my burden became lighter." Even an imaginative participation in the effort to alleviate the sorrow of others brings us back to our true kinship with humanity, and saves us from the despair that follows the terrible sense of isolation. Of the endeavour to make our lives better, which we may call by the familiar phrase, " the endeavour after salvation," there are two main forms — individual and social. In the first the individual strives to save his own soul ; and, if he is thoroughly possessed by this ideal to the exclusion of any other, he will do so by withdrawing from the temptations, but at the same time from the responsibilities of ordinary human society. This ascetic life, either of the solitary recluse or of a select community, if regarded not as a mere temporary expedient, but as a " counsel of perfection," implies an utter hopelessness about the regeneration of society, whether accompanied or not by the belief in a better life after death. The ordinary religion with which we are familiar — the religion of the man who saves his soul on Sundays, and is a more or less energetic citizen on weekdays — is a compromise, or a transition, between two ultimately inconsistent ideals of life. The refusal to despair of human society upon this earth and the endeavour to make human life better by social and political reforms implies faith in humanity and in progress. We cannot build on negations, and we are not doing so. Which had the greater faith — Pope Pius the Ninth anathematising the whole course of modern thought, or Mazzini in exile foreseeing the triumph of the cause for which he lived and suffered — the cause not of Italy only but of oppressed humanity everywhere ? Did the early Christian martyrs, who expected,4:he speedy destruction of the world and faced death in the sure hope of Paradise, show more faith than did Condorcet ? Though the Revolution was devouring its own children, and he had to hide himself, in daily expectation of death at the hands of his fellow-Republicans, he did not yield to despair when despair might well have been excused him, but spent the days that remained to him in writing on the Progress of the Human Mind. Yes, it may be said, but such faith is baseless. Is it ? When it was believed that mankind had fallen from an original state of innocence and bliss, when men were still dominated by the myth of the Golden Age, there was greater excuse for a ^01 despondent tone about the future of human society. At the best there could only be a recurring cycle. Evolution was the movement from good to bad. But the historical and scientific researches which have ruthlessly dispelled the beautiful dream of a Golden Age are the very foundations on which our faith is based. We still often hear it said : " I had rather think of man as a fallen angel than as an elevated ape." Why should that be preferable, supposing it were true ? If man were a fallen angel, there would be less reason for hopefulness in the possibilities before him than there is now, when we learn to what heights he has occasionally risen from the level of the brute. If existing social and political institutions, existing religions, existing morality, represented universally a decline from primitive perfection and purity, how much worse would be the outlook than it is now, when we regard advance as the normal course and degeneration as exceptional ! Let any one who is disposed to think despairingly of the average morality of the present day turn, not to some sentimental idealisation of the past, but to impartial accounts of what have been called " the Ages of Faith " : or let any one who is disposed to think despairingly about the tone of our present political con- troversies turn back to the days of Sir Robert Walpole, and mark how much progress has been made in the interval. A study of " the good old days " is a very excellent corrective to pessimism about the present and the future. Our opinion of the badness of the times in which we are living is largely due to the fact that we have come to consider as evil many things which our predecessors accepted as matters of course. But this critical spirit is one of the very conditions of progress. This social faith is based, however, not only on knowledge of the past, but, as we have already seen, on that social instinct which links together not only those who are living, but " those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." On the instinct alone, though -it suffices as a motive for the conduct of mankind in general, we could not base a reply to the pessimist ; for he would say it is the delusion, from which reflection sets us miserably free. But that infer- ence is only possible to those who (like Oriental mystics) are ignorant of social development or (like their Western imitators) ignore it. As this instinctive solidarity of mankind rises more and more into a consciously accepted principle, we have the very force that is needed for a social faith, for a purely ethical religion. Neither logically nor morally can we isolate our lives and conduct from the lives and acts of others. The primitive instincts which made man a social animal, more 202 even than the ants and the bees, reappear as the gospel of brotherhood, as the new commandment that we love one another. III. When it is said that morality must be based on faith, this is very commonly understood to mean that we must at least have a practical certainty of the ideas of God, Free Will, and the Immortality of the Soul. It is supposed that, though these ideas are incapable of theoretical proof, a belief in them is a neces- sary condition of morality. If morality, however, cease to be regarded as a matter between the soul of the individual and God, and come to be regarded, as we have been regarding it, as necessarily of a social character, we must make it clear that in a certain sense of these great religious ideas, instead of being beneficial, they are even hurtful to morality, while in another sense they may be accepted as an expression of prin- ciples practically recognised in all right action. I can only now put this very briefly. The faith which, as we have seen, gives its force to social effort, requires a perpetual recognition, in thought and feeling, of the solidarity of the human race — in other words, of the continuity of moral causation. Whoever thinks that his conduct, which he may call only self-regarding, does not affect other human beings is denying the basis of morality. Now the idea of God has, alas ! often served to sever this feeling of community with other men, instead of serving as the symbol of that unity. Where people, instead of merely professing to believe in miracles, actually do believe in direct Divine intervention, plague-stricken crowds throng churches for prayer, instead of cleansing the filth from their streets and houses. Intolerable evils are calmly accepted as the judgments of God's anger, when they are really due to human negligence, human selfishness, and human ignorance. When God's name is used to justify oppression and cruelty, and to consecrate crimes against the sacred cause of human progress, an indignant atheism may well seem the more pious creed ; but if the name of God be used for what is best and holiest in human nature, need we avoid the sacred name as the expression of our moral ideal ? " 'Tis God Himself becomes apparent, when God's wisdom and God's goodness are display'd, For God of these His attributes is made." + + ■■:■■ t- + * * 203 " God's wisdom and God's goodness — Ay, but fools Misdefine these till God knows them no more. Wisdom and goodness, they are God ! — What schools Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore ? This no saint preaches, and this no Church rules ; 'Tis in the desert, now and heretofore." * The idea of Free Will has again and again been used in denial of this very fact of the continuity of moral causation. How often have measures of social reform been opposed on the ground that they weakened individual responsibility — as if men's characters were perfectly isolated phenomena, and not affected at every moment by their antecedents and surroundings ! Man's freedom consists not in a mysterious exemption from the law of cause and effect, but in his capacity for thinking and so rising above the mere blind processes of nature. And may not the idea of immortality be a pre-scientific way of envisaging this continuity of moral causation ? It is not only the great and famous whose deeds and thoughts live on after them : every act of every one of us — nay, every thought and feeling exercises its influence for better or worse on those who come after us. " The growing good of the w^orld," as George Eliot has beautifully expressed it, " is partly dependent on unhistoric acts ; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." If this idea were more generally recog- nised, people would be less ready to neglect the consequences of what they do in this life, while endeavouring to secure their personal safety in another, and less ready to tolerate misery here on the understanding that it will be compensated in a happy land, far — very far — away. We have no right dogmati- cally to deny anything that does not directly contradict what has been discovered to be true : and if any of us feel able to entertain the hope that all the unfulfilled promise, which is one of the saddest things in human life, may somewhere and somehow find fulfilment, we must on the ground of scientific truth, as well as for the sake of practical ethics, take care that this hope is held in such a way as not to conflict with a recog- nition of the unbroken chain of moral causation here. We must still face our practical problems, as if there were no future life to redress the wrongs of this, knowing that, if in any sense there is a future life, there can be no better prepara- tion for it than in " being faithful over a few things " here and using rightly the talents entrusted to our keeping. * Matthew Arnold, Suiuut on Tlie Diviuitv. 204 It is very noticeable how, even within the circles of the old creeds, the view of this life as an education that may be carried on hereafter is taking the place of the older view of this life as merely a time of probation to settle the eternal destinies of the individual soul. There is a vast practical difference between basing morality on the sanctions of heaven and hell and allowing the fact of the incompleteness of the highest moral effort to suggest a hope that nothing good may be altogether lost. This moralisation of the old idea is, in great part, due to the teaching of our poets, especially of him whom England and the English- speaking world have just lost. That other dead poet whom I have quoted, Matthew Arnold, has in a Sonnet on Immortality uttered the same manly and vigorous creed about the value of human life and human effort. " The energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun ; And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing — only he, His soul well-knit and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life." ?N No. 25.] •,•4/ , w- ♦ ^0iit!j llaa ©tiriciil ^uub, FINSBURY, B.C. THE ECONOMIC POSITION OF Educated Working Women. A DISCOURSE DELIVERED IN SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C., 071 FEBRUARY 2nd, 1890. BY CLARA E. COLLET, M.A. (Lond.) PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON* PRICE TWOPENCE. " ' Because, precisely, Vm an artist, sir. And woman, if another sate in sight, rd whisper, — Soft, my sister ! not a word ! By speaking we prove only we can speak, Which he, the man here, never doubted. What He doubts is, whether we can do the thing With decent grace, ive've not yet done at all. Now, do it ; bring your statue, — you have room ! He'll see it even by the starlight Jiere ; And if 7 is e'er so little like the god Who looks out from the marble silently Along the track of his oivn shining dart Through the dusk of ages, there's no need to speak ; The universe shall henceforth speak for you. And ivitness, '■She who did this thing, was born To do it, — claims her license in her work.' And so with more works. Whoso cures the plague. Though twice a woman, shall be called a leech : Who rights a land's finances is excused For torching copper:, though her hands be white, — But we, tae talk! ' ' It is the age's mood ' He said ; ' lue boast, and do not.' " E. B. Browning.—" Aurora Leigh," Book viii. the economic position of Educated Working Women, MRS. BROWNING'S advice to women, much needed as it is at the present time, was somewhat harsh and unprac- tical at the time she gave it, more than thirty years ago. At that time it would not have been possible for a woman " to prove herself a leech and cure the plague " ; for on the one hand she was debarred from obtaining the necessary qualifica- tions, and on the other she was prohibited from practising without them. The hospitals and lecture rooms were closed to her by prejudice, and practice was therefore forbidden her by Act of Parliament. Even had she obtained admittance to the dis- secting room and hospital by quiet perseverance and tried ability, she could not have hoped by such means alone to re- move the obstacles which were placed in her path by legisla- tion. The charters necessary to empower the Universities to confer degrees on women could never have been obtained, except through determined agitation; and if the agitators themselves did not seem competent to exercise the powers which they wished conferred on women, they performed the work for which they were most competent and made the path clear for those who could not have removed the obstacles themselves. The poet and the novelist had no such difficulties to contend with. Such women had no greater hardships to endure than men. If men disbelieved that a woman could write a powerful novel, she had only to do it to convince them of the contrary. But generally speaking, women were pro- hibited from doing what they could, on the ground that they could not if they would. It was not universally so ; in many cases girls who showed mathematical or logical power, for instance, were discouraged from exercising it, because reason- ing power was considered undesirable in women and likely to hinder their chances of marriage. But, on the whole, women's incapacity for intellectual work was put forward as a reason for forbidding them to attempt it. The futility of forbidding women to do what they w^ere incapable of doing was never perceived b}' the opponents of the movement for the higher education of women, who based their opposition on this ground. 206 Nor did it avail much to point this out. Behind this asserted disbehef in the power of the educated woman to compete even with the average schoolboy, lay a real conviction, that if she could do so successfully, the more desirable it was to prevent her having the chance of proving it. It is on record that in the days of King Ahasuerus, more than 2000 years ago, great terror was excited lest " the deed of Vashti should come abroad unto all women, so that they should despise their husbands in their eyes, when it should be reported that the King Ahasuerus commanded Vashti, the queen, to be brought in before him, but she came not. And in order that all wives should give to their husbands honour, both to great and small, Ahasuerus sent letters into all the King's provinces, that every man should bear rule in his own house." As in the days of King Ahasuerus, so thirty years ago, it was felt that humility in women should be cultivated at all costs, and that if they became aware that all men were not necessarily their intel- lectual superiors they would break out into open revolt. Women had been told that they should obey their husbands because the latter knew best. If that were denied, the claim to obedience would have to rest on the possession of might instead of right. This reiterated assertion of their inferiority has rankled in women's hearts. For the last forty years it has been the source of most of the bitterness expressed openly on the plat- form, and the cause of invidious comparisons leading to mutual and undignified recriminations. It has affected the direction towards which the efforts of educational enthusiasts have been turned. Their one aim and object has been to show that capacities supposed to be essentially masculine are pos- sessed by women also; to make it possible for women to compete on equal terms v,'ith men and to prove that they are not always the last in the race. That the question of equality or inferiority was a wholly irrelevant one was not their fault ; they had to answer the arguments of those who held the keys, and they were not to blame if these arguments were foolish. We owe much to the women, who at the risk of great unpopularity and much social loss, fought the battles by which the doors were opened, through which others passed without one effort of their own. It is because their work has been successful, not from any depreciation of its value, that I maintain that it is time to review the outcome of the last ten or twelve years, during which women have been free to compete with men in the 207 College and the University, and to take a new departure. London and Cambridge have admitted them to examinations on equal terms, although the latter still refuses them the hall- mark of the degree. Newnham and Girton have had to extend their premises ; Lady Margaret and Somerville have been established and have obtained some concessions from Oxford ; University College, London, I\Iason's College, Birmingham., the Welsh Colleges, and other men's colleges, admit women to their class rooms on equal terms with men. London, Ire- land, and Edinburgh admit them to their medical degrees ; the Women's School of Medicine is prosperous, and they have admission to a few hospitals. At London and Cambridge they have done themselves credit in every branch. So far as recep- tive power is concerned, it is now at least admitted that the rather-above-the-average woman is quite on a level with the average man. So far, so good. But although our self-respect may be considerably increased, what is our economic position? There are not yet 800 women graduates of London and Cami- bridge. Of these the majority are assistant mistresses in public or private schools, visiting teachers, lecturers, or head mistresses. There were in 1881, according to the census of that year, 123,000 women teachers and over 4,000,000 girls between the ages of five years and twenty ; and yet already this little handful of graduates is told that it is in excess of the demand and that it must take lower salaries in conse- quence. In our public high schools not one in four teachers is a graduate ; in private schools the proportion is much smaller. I do not propose to discuss this question and will only make two remarks on it. The first, that after an expen- sive college course, which is only less expensive than that of a man because a woman is less extravagant in her personal expenditure, a Girton or Newnham student who has taken a good degree, may hope for an initial salary of :)ri05 to £120 non-resident, rising by ver}' slow degrees to about ^^140 to ^^150 a year. Secondly that every graduate should remember that when she accepts a lower rate still, she is making it easier to lower the salaries of the great majority below her. If all women graduates, and they are not many, agreed to a minimum, less than which the}- would not accept, the mass of teachers, already underpaid, could not be told as they are at present, that graduates could easily be obtained for the sum they ask. The teacher with a higher local certifi- cate could hold out for her ^90 a year, little enough in all conscience, because she would know that no graduate v>'ould take less than -Tioo. 208 But the head mistress engages so few graduates, not merely because of the higher salary demanded, but because she is quite content, or rather because the British parent is quite content, that his daughter should be taught by less competent persons. If we look for the cause of this indifference we shall find that he does not attach the slightest value to the educa- tion which she is receiving. For some uuknown reason girls seem to think it absolutely necessary to learn Latin ; he does not wish his daughter to be at any disadvantage with other girls ; therefore he lets her learn Latin ; if other girls are taught well, his daughter must be taught well ; but if other girls are taught badly, he is quite content that his daughter should be so also. He perhaps learned Latin himself for some similar reason at school, and so far as he knows he derived no benefit from it, and he is quite certain he derived no enjoyment from it. The mass of parents do not wish their daughters to be teachers ; and they pertinently ask, what good are classics and the higher mathematics and advanced natural science to girls unless they intend to teach. A few can answer honestly, "We enjoy the study. It is delight to us. Plato, Sophocles, ^schylus speak to us with a more living voice than any of our modern thinkers. Mathematics is not merely a discipline to us but an absorbing occupation, taking us completely out of ourselves for the time being. A natural science is to us not a mere mass of ascertained facts unrelated to each other, but a system of interdependent laws giving a new meaning to life ; its very incompleteness is a charm, for it gives us the oppor- tunity of being ourselves discoverers." A few can say this honestly ; several, under the influence of a teacher whom they adore with that school girl devotion so common in our high schools, persuade themselves that they feel some of the enjoy- ment that a properly constituted mind would feel. What they really enjoy is the teacher's enjoyment, which is infectious. There is no subject so dry or so useless, that a living, healthy, human teacher cannot persuade girls to think it interesting for the time being. But the majority of girls — and boys too for that matter — are Philistines and care for none of these things. They do their work conscientiously enough, because it is their work. They derive benefit from it as from a kind of mental gymnastics, and so far as their school days are con- cerned no harm is done, and they have benefited by the mental discipline. When a girl or boy is about seventeen, the future career is considered. In the case of a son, the father to some extent 209 takes into account the boy's natural bent and also the chances of obtaining a post for him. Thenceforth his education takes a definite direction. If intended for one of the professions the course is easily mapped out. In other cases the boy may be sent to the University, not so much for an academic as for a social training ; very frequently he leaves school and at once begins his training for business or mercantile pursuits. If his father is a merchant, or large employer of labour, he will perhaps be sent elsewhere to learn all parts of his business, and then take some responsible post in his father's firm. If this is impossible, relatives or friends or business connections may be able to offer him a post, and no stone is left unturned. There is no question either of his being content to have a low salary because he can live at home. Nor does he, if he has any sense, deliberately choose to enter an overstocked market, merely because the men who succeed in it are admitted to be men of high intelligence. If he has a high opinion of his own talents, or if he prefers shining by reflected light to earning an income, he does perhaps become a barrister or a doctor, without much fitness for the profession. But at least those who take up business prefer to enter a labour market where there are comparatively few men of ability yet to be found, and where the supply of them is not so great as the demand. The girl of seventeen is never helped in the same way, in many cases because it has never occurred to men that girls could be so assisted. There are many other reasons, which I do not propose to dwell on here. I am not addressing myself to those who do not wish women to earn their living, but to those who, having accepted the fact that many girls must work for a living, would be glad to help them in any w^ay that might be suggested ; and I am also speaking to those women who prefer, no matter what their private resources may be, to be trained for some occupation which will call for the exercise of mental powers which they know they possess. I am also confining my remarks to working women educated for their work in life, and am not referring to the large numbers of women who take up work without any other training than the general education acquired at school. If the woman, who from 17 to 22 has been trained for her profession, cannot obtain the salary which, as Mr. Pollard has shown, is necessary to keep her in good health and provide for her old age, there is no need to say that the untrained school girl enters the labour market at a greater disadvantage. Now, on what principles is a girl's career determined ? In a large number of cases the 210 parents take it for granted that she will be married in a few years, and they feel they can support her at home in comfort until then. Fortunately the girl herself does not always take this view; she thinks it quite possible that she never will be married, and she also sees that in that case she may in middle life be left with an income quite inadequate and necessitating a total change in her habits of living. If she has any public spirit, she will not undersell her poorer competitors, and will see no reason why she should not be paid the full worth of her services ; she will be glad to know that her services are really wortli her living. But all that she sees before her, unless she has exceptional talent, is teaching. It is the same with girls who have to earn their living and whose parents can only afford to give them an expensive training in the hope that a remuner- ative income may afterwards be obtained. They also must be teachers ; it is the only brain-work offered them, and badly paid as it is, it is better paid than any other work done by women. The result is that we see girls following the stream and entering the teaching profession ; after a few years, grow- ing weary and sick of it, tired of training intellects, and doubt- ful about the practical value of the training, or altogether care- less of it ; discontented with a life for which they are naturally unsuited and seeing no other career before them. We see others who have a strong practical bent, giving themselves up to purely intellectual studies, because they are the only ones possible to them ; and, on the other hand, clever girls, who have no scholastic ambitions, are left to fritter awa}' their talents or exercise them with no aid but rule of thumb-principles to guide them. The prizes, the exhibitions, the glory are all given to encourage scholarship. Brain-power is worshipped, and as people with brains are not encouraged to exercise them in a practical direction, the possession of brain-power is not ascribed to those who do not display capacity or liking for classics or mathematics or the abstract sciences. And the whole tendency is to compete with men where men are strong- est. And here, socially, morally, and economically we are making a great mistake. We are narrowing women to one kind of education, which would cut off the majority of them from sympathy with the men in their own class ; they imbibe a false idea that culture means the possession of useless know- ledge ; and because men in the commercial world have a know- ledge which enables them to perform services for which others are willing to pay, they are regarded as necessarily uncultured and mercenary. The leisured and professional classes take the 211 precedence in the girl-graduate"s eyes as being better educated and having less sordid aims. But, fortunately for England, the majority of men are neither leisured nor professional, and the organisation of industry and the extension of commerce give scope for the exercise of the highest powers. Socially, therefore, the educated woman at present is isolated from her class and suffers in consequence. Morally she suffers, for she is not developing her natural powers. A woman's emotional nature is different from a man's, her inherited experience is dif- ferent, her tastes are different, and — greatest heresy of all now-a- days — her intellect is different. It is a common thing to say that there is no sex in intellect. If the upholders of this theory mean that from two given premises the same conclusion must be drawn by men and women whenever they think rightly, of course, no one can deny it. But this purely deductive work can be done by machinery. The real work of intelligence is the induction which supplies the premises, the selection of premises suitable to the purpose in view and the application of the conclusion. The working of intelligence is prompted, strengthened, and directed by interest and emotion ; and here it is that men and women dilTer, and always will differ, a woman inheriting as she does, with a woman's nervous organi- sation, a woman's emotional nature. It is on this difference between men and women, amidst much which is common to both, that I build m}- hopes of woman's success in the future. I do not urge women to compete with men, because they can do what men can, but because I believe they can do what men cannot ; and I believe that those branches in which men have attained the highest pitch of excellence are those in which v.'omen are least likely to find pleasure or excel. Creditable as have been their performances in the Mathematical Tripos, I am glad to see that their success in the Natural Science Tripos is much greater. Instead of glorying in having once in a score of 5'ears a Senior Classic, I take pride in the fact that in the four years since the Mediaeval and Modern Lan- guage Tripos was instituted, women have always been in thic front rank, and I notice with fear and trembling that, although during the first three years there was always a woman in the first class, and no men, last year, although there was no deterio- ration in the women's work, they did not have the first class all to themselves. I look forward to the day, but I hope it will be long before it comes, when the men's colleges shall re- joice because they have a man in the first class without a woman to share the honours. There are many things which 212 men are doing alone, which could be done infinitely better if educated women helped them ; and nowhere is this more obvious to me, although probably not to them, than in business. While there is much that can be done well by the human being, indifferently, whether man or woman, there is much that can only be done well by the male human being, much that can only be done well by the female human being, and much that can only be done well by the two in conjunction. And if men in business only considered their daughters' future in the same light as that of their sons, they would find many branches of business in which they could be most useful, and earn a good income. Girls inherit, to some extent, their intellectual capa- cities from their fathers, just as boys do from their mothers. And many a bright, clever, lazy girl would suddenly develop a most unexpected taste for study, if she had before her the prospect of domg practical, and to her most interesting work, as one of her father's managers, or as foreign correspondence clerk, or as chemist or artistic designer in a large manufactory ; or as assistant steward on her lather's property, or as a farmer on her own freehold, if (rents having gone down) he is unable to leave her an income. For all these a course of hard mental training is necessary or at least desirable ; and the girl would be receiving culture on the one hand, and would have a chance of developing her natural gifts on the other. Many a girl, accustomed to a country life, would much prefer the occupa- tions and life of a farmer to that of a teacher, provided she is allowed to have the college life and the free intercourse with other girls, which is the main attraction of Girton and Newn- ham. The work would be far more interesting to her if she came to it with the enthusiasm of a scientist with theories to be tested. What is drudgery to an uneducated person may often be pleasurable to an educated one. No one can study the organisation of industry at the present time without noticing that there is great room for improve- ment ; good organisers are extremely rare ; and even in the internal management of a factory, perhaps the least important part of the work of a great manufacturer, much could be done which is rarely done at present. The admittance of educated women to a share in factory management should really be re- garded in the light of co-operation with men, not competition with them. A man and a woman looking at a work-room are struck by different features, and each can be suggestive to the other. This is especially the case wherever women are em- ployed. Were I a socialist with capital, and did I believe as 213 the socialists say they do, that the employer makes large pro- fits by underpaying his work people, and grinding them down on every possible occasion, I should start business for myself, attract these underpaid men to me by high wages, and show the world I was right by earning enough to recompense me for my trouble, by shortening the hours and improving the condi- tions of labour ; and then, if I still believed that my possession of capital was the only advantage I possessed over my work people, and the sole reason for my occupying the position of employer, I would convert the business into a co-operative society. To me it seems a most singular thing that instead of doing this the socialist abstains from employing labour at all, and reviles the employer instead of setting him an example ; and that the utmost that his ally, the philanthropist, ever does is to appeal to the public to lend capital to a productive co- operative society, draw up an elaborate scheme for dividing profits, and give one more proof of the value of the individual employer by never having any profits to divide. Having little respect for the schemes of State socialists, and becoming more and more convinced of the indolence and the cowardice under- lying the high tide of sentimental philanthropy, which is flooding us all at the present time, I am firmly persuaded that improvement in the organisation of industry, in the relation between employer and employed, in the morality of the busi- ness world, is the vital problem of to-day. Nor can I conceive how a young man of the employing class, if moved with any real enthusiasm for its solution, can conscientiously withdraw from the field offered him in his father's business, and confine himself to literary and rhetorical attacks on the existing system. University men and university women who have, in addition to the knowledge acquired by living amongst business men, had the opportunity of studying and reflecting on the great mass of economic literature could, if they chose, without abruptly breaking off from the old regime, throw fresh light on old problems; could suggest improvements here and im- provements there. Extravagancies in their theories and views would be checked by their acquaintance with practical realities, while the freshness of their enthusiasm, the disinterestedness of their ambitions would not be without its effect on their more experienced and case-hardened seniors. And although I do not claim for women a higher morality than for men, yet here again the difference between them is in many cases such that where one sex is morally weak the other may be morally strong, and that, on the whole, co-operation may be morally better for both, and may in the long run help to purify the commercial world. 214 The question of capacity is a more difficult one for me to answer, but an easier one for the individual girl, if she is not afraid of ridicule. And it is at this point that I would reiterate Mrs. Browning's advice. To any really clever girl who asked me for advice as to her future work I should say, " What do you think you could do best if it were possible for you to do it ? Whatever that is, do your very best to get training in it, to show by capacity at one stage that you could master the next if you had the chance. If you do this, you will find that the men, who laughed at women for thinking of doing such work, v;ill frequently be the very ones to make an exception in your favour and to help you over the next difficulty. If you wish to be a farmer, and to study every department of your work and be thoroughly grounded in agricultural science, make the best of your opportunities where you are, attend classes if possible in the technological department of a good college ; and if the agricultural colleges are closed to women, when you have done everything you can without them, get one of them to make an exception in your favour. W^hatever it may be that 3'ou wish to do, prepare yourself for it, and, instead of bemoaning the ill- treatment of women in general, persuade those in authority of your fitness in particular. And when you have gained your end help every girl you can v>'ho shows similar capacities." One effect on the economic position of educated working women of such an extension of employment would be to enable them to measure their value. Teachers are paid out of fixed income, and their salaries are almost entirely determined by standard of living. If employed in business they would be employed for profit, and if they increased profits their value would rise, and could be measured ; they would be paid ac- cording to their worth and not according to their standard of living. Education would be better adapted to practical needs, and teachers would be held in higher honour accordingly. Large numbers of clever girls would be spurred to exertion, whose intellectual powers have hitherto lain in abeyance, because no education was offered them corresponding to their needs. There are other arts, which women already practise, which it would be well for them to study on a scientific basis. Not only the future wife, mother, and housekeeper needs a knowledge of physiology, the laws of health, and domestic economy, but to a still greater extent the future Poor Law guardian. Board School manager, factory and workshop inspector, and sanitary officer ; and both household manager and public officer should study tlie relation between domestic 215 and national economics. Nor can any man do a greater injury to women in this respect than by placing a woman in a respon- sible post for which she has not been proved competent. The incapacity of a man is referred to the man himself; that of a woman is credited to the sex. But although a man may foolishly vote for a woman to be placed on the School Board or Board of Guardians merely because she is a woman, without knowing anything about her, I am not afraid that he will ever give her a well-paid post in his own business unless she is fit for it. Women who give their services for nothing are rarely told the truth ; it will be a good thing for them when they receive, instead of flattery and thanks, criticism and payment. I can only touch on one point more. I may be told that the effect of encouraging all girls, who display strength of character or intellectual power above the average, to make themselves pecuniarily independent, and to devote their energies to some special and definite occupation vv'hich will call forth their pov/ers, will be to make them too absorbed or unwilling to enter upon marriage, and that the next generation must suffer from the strongest and most intellectual women holding aloof from wifehood and motherhood. Others, on the other hand, may say that their work will suffer, because the expectation of marriage will hinder them from doing their best. The latter objection will not, I think, be supported by those who are acquainted with the work of women graduates. There is much truth in the former one. Women who have been trained for a special work, and who like their work, either do not marry at all or marry comparatively late in life, and it may at first sight seem injurious to the race that this should be so. But I think this is a mistake. The men and women of the most marked individuality do not make the best husbands and wives, especially if they marry before they have become aware of their own character. Although a theory prevails to the contrary, I believe that women come to intellectual maturity later than men. They have a magnificent power of self- deception, of persuading themselves that they think and believe the things which those they care for think and believe — they are so little encouraged to think for themselves that many a woman, married when but a girl, has later on discovered that she has a character of her own, hitherto unrevealed to herself and unsuspected by her husband. Marriage, as George Eliot has said, must be a relation of sympathy or of conquest. But such women, if sympathy has not really existed between them and their husbands, are never conquered ; they may be slaves 2l6 or rebels, but never loyal subjects; and history is full of records of the disastrous early marriages of clever women. On the other hand, Hannah More, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie, Caroline Herschell, Harriet Martineau, all women of brilliant intellect, have left their mark on history as good and happy women ; and we can all of us give a long list of such bright and contented lives from the unmarried women of our own acquaintance who have found their vocation. If they have missed the best in life they have always been true to themselves. The economic independence of women is as necessary to men's happiness as to women's. Their true interests can never be opposed or antagonistic, however much those of an individual man and woman may be. There is no hardship to women in working for a living; the hardship lies in not getting a living when they work for it. And the great temptation from which all women should most earnestly strive to be freed is that which presents itself to so many at one time or another — the temptation to accept marriage as a means of livelihood and an escape from poverty. And if men would escape the degradation of being accepted by a woman in such a spirit, they should be anxious to do all in their power to make women free, to remove all obstructions raised by prejudice ; and when a woman can do anything worth doing " to give her of the fruit of her hands and to let her own works praise her in the gates." No. 26.] 0ttt!i llaa ^tl|ital ^mb, FINSBURY, E.C. TOLSTOI'S "KREUTZER SONATA.' A DISCOURSE DELIVERED IN SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C, BY W. C. COUPLAND, D.S, PUBLISHED BY E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON PRICE TWOPENCE. I'RINTED BY KING, SELL, AND RAiLTON, LTD., 12, GOL'GH SQUARE, AND 4, BOLT COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C. TOLSTOI'S KREUTZER SONATA." TWO email volumes, superficially classifiable as works of fiction, have recently succeeded, within a remarkably short space of time, in attracting the attention of the reading public of both hemispheres — the one proceeding from the most, the other from the least, free of political states — " Looking Backward," by the American, Edward ])ellamy, and '' The Kreutzer Sonata," by the Russian Count Leo Tolstoi. Judged by the common criteria of books of fiction, neither production can be assigned a remarkabh' high place. The resuscitated Bostonian has been anticipated by the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and the less dignified Rip van Winkle ; and I suspect that the reader, delighting in the sensational effects of the French school, would deem Count Tolstoi's recent creation commonplace in conception and dciiotienient. Yet the sale of the latter has been great even in France ; and while the other imaginative works of l>ellamy are known to comparatively few, "Looking Backward'" has become •'familiar in (men's) mouths as household words." The plots are not thrilling, the literary style is not extra- ordinary, and yet these books all at once acquire fame and influence, when higher artistic productions must wait for fit appreciation, and profound treatises only find their way to the tables of professional reviewers. In real truth, however, they are not original forces, but symptoms — straws, discernible by the common eye, that show which way certain winds are blowing. The different kind of reception accorded these booklets is also not without significance. " Looking I3ackward " was first hastily set down as a harmless jV/^ d'esprit, then smiled or frowned at as a Utopian romance, and finally seriously studied and eagerly discussed as a forecast in essentials of a 2l8 far from remote future. The '' Kreutzer Sonata," on the other hand, was received with alarm and indignation, suppressed in the land of its birth, interdicted for a time in the very country that was proud of its successful forerunner. Here at home it is placed in the Index Prohibitorius of select libraries, and unprocurable at virtuous railway book-stalls. The explanation of all this is not very far to seek. It evidences the state of the public mind in civilized communities in regard to two overwhelmingly important questions for our generation, and doubtless for many generations to come — questions that go to the root of human existence, and therefore of necessity strongly excite its hopes and fears. Old orders change, giving place to new ; but those primordial needs remain — Food and Love. The economic problem comes first in point of urgency, and accordingly the world is riper for its consideration. Hence the peaceful progress of the American romance. Twenty years ago had " Looking Backward " been launched upon society, the ban might have been placed upon it too ; for we must remember that it is only a few months since Socialism ceased to wear the aspect of a dread demon to otherwise enlightened Germany. But at this moment the most con- servative-minded hears without dismay the assertion that the present industrial regime (however postponed may be its death- law) is virtually doomed, and is alive to the fact that, in whatever form it may arise, a new economic system is prepar- ing, in which the present glaring evils of competition and private appropriation will be finally removed. But it is far otherwise with regard to the Sex Problem. Here there is neither wide agitation nor frank admission of required readjustment. And }-et in every country there is an uneasy and growing feeling that things are terribly awry, and a secret longing for the dawning of a better day. And just as happened when the wide-spread dissatisfaction with the existing industrial system was first suspected by the governing class, so is it likewise in the arising discontent with the tra- ditional conceptions and arrangements of family life — recourse is had to the old-world methods of removing the means of knowledge, and of stifling open discussion, as the effectual way of preserving the status quo. But to seal the eyes is not to blot the sun from the sky. No institution is immortal any more than men themselves. Of this Count Tolstoi for one is firmly persuaded, and he preaches an eloquent sermon in the guise of a romance to bring the truth forcibly home. The text 219 of this sermon may be found in the 5th chapter of the Christian Gospel according to St. Matthew, and the 28th verse. A few words must suffice as indication of its contents. A sociable party, men of various occupations and one lady, are travelling in a railway carriage, when the conversation drifts towards the question of Marriage. The first chief speakers are the lady and an elderly merchant, who is a stern upholder of the ancien regime. " How is it possible," says the lady, *' for a woman to live with a man if she does not love him ? " " ' Those distinctions were not made in former days,' said the old man, in a gruff tone. ' It is quite a new thing in our Russian life. At present as soon as the least thing happens, the wife says, ' I shall leave you ; I quit the house.' How can you argue with such women ? No ; the only principle for them is fear.' " " ' Fear of what ? ' asked the lady. ' Fear of her husband,' replied the merchant." " But you will allow, I suppose, that woman is a human being, and has feelings like her husband. What is she to do if she does not love him ? " " ' Not love him ! ' exclaimed the old man in a stormy voice, as he lowered his e}ebrows, ' then she must be made to love him.'" The merchant quitting the train, the lady remarks: '*' The essential thing which men like that don't in the least understand is that love alone can consecrate marriage, and that the only true marriage is that which is consecrated by love." Whereupon a passenger, who has been hitherto silent, strikes in with the ua'ive inquiry, " What is this love by which mar- riage is consecrated?" *'' What love ? ' answered the lady. ' The ordinary love between married people.' " Her interro- gator presses for clearer description, when the lady curtly remarks, " Every one knows what love is " — a statement which meets with the singular request to define the word. " It is simple enough," is the response. " She reflected for a moment and then said, ' Love — love is the exclusive preference of one man or one woman before all others'" — to which the perti- nacious Socraticist replies, " A preference for how long? For a month — for two days — for half an hour ? " This stickler for arithmetical accuracy turns out to be a man who has murdered his own wife ; and when all but the reporter of the story has left the train, he offers to recount his experiences, which form the substance of the volume. He is the son of a notable, a rich land-owner in the Steppes, has graduated in the legal faculty of the University, and after leading a self-indulgent life according to the ideas of his class, has married at the age of 30. Although his wife seems 220 to have been possessed of ample outward attractions and inward gifts, things do not go well from the first. The}- quarrel even in their honeymoon. The care and interests of family life do not draw them an}" closer. " Towards the fourth year of our marriage it was tacitl}- understood that no intel- lectual communion was any longer possible between us." Their existence drifts into trivialities. An old acquaintance of the husband, a professional musician, now appears on the scene, who is known or suspected to have led a wild life, but who is deliberately invited into the family circle apparently that the hero of the story might have the satisfaction of self- torment, for he is no stranger to the passion of jealousy. Shortly after occurs the duet between the wife and this musician — the performance of Beethoven's " Kreutzer Sonata," which gives the name to the book. The chapter in which it is described is a striking one, both for the remarks on the influence of music and its fine psychological observations. Two days after this the husband has to leave home on political business. The musician apparently also came to take his leave. But on the evening of the second day of absence a letter from the wife mentions that the friend has been to fetch some music, and had proposed to play again, but that she had refused. Then, as the narrator himself puts it, " the wild beast of jealousy began to roar in its den." He returns suddenly to Moscow. Arriving at his house he hears that the pair are at supper. Snatching up a dagger he stealthily enters the room. The musician escapes. His wife exclaims, ** Come to your senses ! What are you doing ? What is the matter? Nothing has happened. Nothing — nothing whatever. I swear it ! " He stabs her fatally. Is shortly after arrested — remains in prison eleven months await- ing trial — is tried, acquitted ; and ends his story with the observation " Yes, that is what I have done. That is what I have experienced. People should understand the true signifi- cance of the words of St. Matthew . . . for the words apply not only to another man's wife, but also, and above all, to his own." The foregoing is only a meagre outline, ignoring that which constitutes the fascination of the work, which cannot be con- veyed in abstract — the wonderful laying-bare of the workings of the hero's mind — the tracking through all its windings the maze of semi-rational thoughts, gross vanity, jealousy, and malice, which create for its victim a moral hell, and leads at last to the open catastrophe. Then there are the interspersed 221 and often exaggerated comments on "pseudo-science" and the doctors, and bizarre speculations, in which the writer clearly steps forward in his own person, — the whole presenting a medley so strange of graphic narrative, subtle psychological analysis, and fantastic theory, that the author's purpose is difficult to grasp ; and one does not wonder at the opening statement of the preface to the twelfth French edition, " I have received and I still receive numerous letters from persons unknown to me, who ask me to explain to them in simple and clear terms what I intend by my publication, ' The Kreutzer Sonata ' " — a request with which he proceeds to comply. Then, for further elucidation, we have the didactic story just published in the Fortnightly Review, entitled " Work while ye have the Light : A Tale of the Early Christians "' — which certainly does not err on the side of vivid realism. The first thing that naturally occurs to a critic is that the frame-work of the novelette is far from happily chosen. The life of the rich Russian aristocrat here depicted is hardly calculated to serve as a parable with the author's end in view. That a man with ample material resources, burdened with no public duties worth speaking of, and devoid of higher tastes, should have found domestic life a bore, and a source of con- tinuous irritation almost from the wedding-day, is far from surprising. That, further, such a man should have been the prey to the most unworth}-, and even unjustifiable suspicions, culminating in an irrepressible act of violence, is also quite in order. But that an}- lesson could be learnt from the develop- ment of such a situation, save that the situation should itself be fundamentally changed, is not apparent. The moral to be drawn is one not having reference to general ethics — it is a general social one. Ill-chosen, however, as the situation may be for the author's special object, it is patent that the Count himself does not intend his presentation to be of confined scope, for there is no limitation in his theoretical comment. The evils pointed at may be less flagrant in the middle and humbler classes, but he evidently regards them as inherent in all. For what is the state of the case according to this ethical novelist ? If the matter be closely looked into there are (he hints) two, and only two species of " affection " — the one of the earth earthy, the other of the heaven heavenly. If the thought of sex is ever consciousl}- united with that of love it belongs to the former description — the latter is sexless, and is pure spiritual attraction. It does not matter whether the 222 union be legalized or unlegalized, whether it be the result of a private agreement or be sanctioned by all the rites and benedic- tions of the churches, if its end and aim be of no higher order than that manifested in animal life it is accursed, and is alien to the spirit of pure religion. Says the illuminated hero of the i3tory — "But if man, as in our society, advances onl} towards physical love, even though he surrounds it with deceptions, and with the shallow formality of marriage, he obtains nothing but licensed vice. He will be acquainted only with that immoral life in which I succumbed and made my wife succumb also — the life which we are agreed to call ' virtuous family life.' " In brief, Count Tolstoi's book is a challenge to the world, Christian and Pagan, secular and religious, to justify its professed sexual ethics, and to come to a clear understanding regarding its attitude towards the relations it condemns. The book, therefore, is addressed to one and all^to those who, from external education or personal conviction, accept the whether ordering of the sexual relations shaped by the Christian Church, deriving from the purified Judaism of the First Century — and also to those who no longer see any authority in ecclesiastical pretensions and traditions, the basis of whose ethical creed is experiential, not transcendental. Now, in point of fact, the Church has found the problem of Sex too much for it. The natural man in the long run has come out victorious. Asserting Monogamy as the divine-given ordinance, interpreted in the most literal sense — blessing alone a union which extended through the whole natural life — it has been only able to secure palpable outward conformity, and been proved impotent to discipline the character, and to secure inward obedience. The very tightness of its legislation has defeated its own ends. " As after I have taken the vows I am to be a captive to the end of my days, I will have my fling first," says the impulsive youth. And owing to the fatal confusion of the legal and the moral, which sacerdotalism has done so much to foster, an individual, who has undertaken no church pledges and subscribed to no civil bond, is supposed relieved from higher responsibilities ; and the very same act, which would be visited with pains and penalties, social and ecclesiastical, after such pledges, is regarded as venial in their absence. Now, supernatural religion is slowly, but certainly, losing its hold. Ostensibly almost all society acknowledges its claim. Marriages are still for the most part " celebrated " in ecclesias- 223 tical buildings, and by the representatives of the ecclesiastical authority, but often enough rather because it is a sign of good breeding than as a homage to any divine authority. The sanction sought is really that of social opinion, not of a divine will. One step further — and the relations of man and woman, or of man to the community of \vhich he forms a part, will be avowedl}' detached from theological systems and support, and be exclu- sively determined by the end of individual and social well-being. Supernatural religion will fight its last battle round the domestic relations — a testimony not to the uniqueness of the subject, but to the supreme importance of the interests at stake. The interest at stake is the greatest of all interests save one — self-maintenance. To live at all we must eat, and how to subsist is the primary problem. But when the cravings of hunger are satisfied, the next imperious craving of human beings is for fellowship, and of man before all for the society of woman, and of woman for that of man. These are the bare facts. We can deny them, but at the cost of self-suppression. Being conditions of life, to ignore them is death. But no one that I know of, save the Indian Fakir, has gone the length of asserting the Duty of Starvation. The Ethics of Jesus never rose to so sublime a height as that. Nay, we are told with emphasis that " The Son of Man came eating and drinking," so that his contemptuous countrymen styled him a glutton and a wine-bibber. But the suppression of the sex- impulse does seem to have been an essential part of the early Christian creed, as it has been regarded with peculiar respect and admiration by the consolidated Church of the West. The virtue of chastity extolled by the original Church was perfect chastity, not regulated continence, and Count Tolstoi is strictly correct when he says, "Christian marriage never existed and never can be. There exists only one Christian point of view on marriage. That point of view is this: The Christian — and I am not speaking of him who thinks himself one because he is baptized and communicates every year, but of the Christian who guides his life by the doctrine of Christ — cannot regard the sexual relations otherwise than as a sin ; and the so-called rite of marriage cannot alter it by the value of a hair, and he will never desire marriage, but always seek to avoid it." And Count Tolstoi, as a Christian, as a genuine Christian, one of the few of the species remaining, sees no way out of the im- broglic, no salvation from ancient and new vices, no possibility of an earthly paradise, but by a return to the teaching of the 224 earliest Church, by a new birth, in which the old Adam is entirely subverted, and a new man created that is neither male nor female, every human being at once a brother and a sister. And the whole " Kreutzer Sonata," — with its laying- bare of youthful vices, its unpleasing pictures of woman's foibles, its cynical confession of self-indulgence, and much more that have procured for it the disgrace or the honour of a place in the " index" of the respectable citizen — is penned with the one aim of opening the e3'es of men and women of the present day to the sole satisfactory solution, according to this regenera- tor, of the great social problem, that is hardly longer to be styled the Problem of the Future. There is something terribly judicial in the attitude of this Russian novelist assumed towards the self-satisfied Christian world. " You are all either hypocrites or self-deluded," he insinu- ates. " Either you act one thing and profess another, or you are not aware of the significance of your own religion." No wonder that a writer who can speak of the " vice of marriage " is an outcast from modern drawing-rooms — no more strange than that the great Reformer of Nazareth was bound to a cross for blasphemy. Men who transcend the ethics of the hour, far more than those who fall below it, are likely to suffer such fate. It is well to listen to an earnest man clearly seeing the evils of his time and profoundly impelled to prescribe a com- plete remedy ; and no one who has a deep concern for moral progress can afford to put aside Tolstoi's offered panacea with contempt. Assuming truly that human nature is indefinitely modifiable, he sees no difficulty in the effecting a radical change in human feeling such as to the mass of mankind at the present time must appear utterly inconceivable. And when I read the more guarded presentation of the case in " Work while ye have the Light," I find much that is not only beautiful, but possible, in the view of love shadowed forth by the 3''oung Pamphilius. In dwelling upon the often bitterly egoistic struggle for exclusive possession, on the utter regardlessness of the pain of rivals, we are led to forcibly realize in the sphere of the sexual relations the same brutal egotism that renders economic competition so horrible, and that is rousing at last the social con- science to desire a system in which the harmony of interests shall supersede the antagonism of self-regarding desires. But what I miss in the Russian Reformer's writings, just as in the beautiful effusions of " Christian Socialism," is an indication of practical method — suggestions how with minimum friction to emerge from the present imperfect regime into the fairer existence of 225 our ideal hopes. And I cannot help suspecting that, like all enthusiasts, in his disgust at the imperfect actual and zeal for the paradisiacal finality, Count Tolstoi has not only failed to offer practical suggestions, but has even mis-stated the problem itself. The old Oriental Dualism peeps through, of a sub- stantial disunion of body and mind, flesh and spirit. Flesh is evil and base, spirit is good and holy. Melt then away the fleshly dross, and come out'pure spiritual gold, is the practical inference. Such language as " the highest ideal, the most perfect condition to be attained by woman, that of a pure being, a vestal, a virgin," condenses a whole philosophy. Tiie error is twofold — first in the assumption of the essential un- worthiness of the animal instincts, and secondly in the false view of individuality. Man is fond of vaunting his superiority to the rest of the animal world. Possessing powers of imagination and thought which it does not possess, he grows intoxicated at the spectacle, and forgets that however exalted above his companions in respect of ideality of thought and feeling, he is still and must for ever remain fundamentally one with them. It is no disgrace and reason for suppression that certain impulses are "animal." On the contrary, it is rather their justification. If you desire to depreciate animal instincts, you must show that man can surmount the animal constitution. When you can see the possibilit}^ of a man that needs neither to eat nor to drink, is not liable to disease and death — then if you- please cover the sinning animal nature with ignominy. But further I desire to know why these animal instincts are base and to be suppressed ? Is it because they are liable to excess ? Hardl}-, for every conceivable act, even the most spiritual, is liable to the same fault. Your canonized saint is often not ethically far removed from your contemned sinner. He who becomes less than brute, and he who would be more than man, before the bar of a cosmic conscience is a criminal egoist, opposing his particular will, or sentiment, to universal law. Not as a concession, accordingly, to human frailty is marriage in its right, but as the ideal for men and women. And this further because the wedded pair h the true human individual ; and however it may be in " heaven " on earth it is a sorrowful loss, and not a theme for rejoicing, when either man or woman stands apart in proud isolation, and cannot lose themselves each in other. As the Gipsy Sibyl says in Browning's poem — " If any two creatures grew into one They would dn more than the world lias done, " 226 Only this, too, is an ideal, just a little less unsure of fuliil- ment than the Russian reformer's — parted, however, from the latter by the whole interval that separates a true from a false basis. It is an ideal immanent in the world's constitution — no efflux of sickly mysticism, or child of fancy too delicate to bear the breath of common air. A thorough social reformer should be well equipped in three respects. First, the facts of the case must be well under- stood, comprising a clear perception of actual affairs and knowledge of how the}- have come to be what they are. Secondl}^, his mind must be in possession of an ideal in close relation to the actual. And thirdly, there must be some conception of the means required to bring the actual somewhat nearer to such ideal. For the first there is needed extensive observation and historical knowledge, the second depends on moral insight, the third chiefly demands practical sagacity. The first consideration is wholly a question of matter-of-fact. Thus, in regard to the problem in view this morning, what sexual relations do obtain at the present time, and what are their antecedents ? To master such a subject in its length and breadth requires, of course, long and protracted study, and generations of sociologists must come and go before the ground is thoroughly surveyed. The collecting of present facts may not be a matter of very grave difficulty. But as regards the historical antecedents, and the essential facts of human nature whose accidental expression they are, ignorance is still ver}' dense. Once for all let it be comprehended that at this point imagination or will cannot do duty for observation and positive knowledge. Sighs and prayers, and tears and reprobation are at this first stage out of place ; and also not least, wilful ignorance and concealment. Wc must have knowledge of the facts. We — i.e., all the problem concerns. Let others declare how many and of what sort they be. Observation has taught me that they are more numerous than we habitually think. There was a time — it is not so verv distant — when it was thought highly injurious to pure and refined feeling to be acquainted with the workings of the bodily frame. Even the male half of the world thought it enough to leave such curious inquiries to a professional class ; and I have heard with m}- own ears so-called educated men rather pluming themselves on the circumstance that they had crammed up all the physiology they ever knew in those days, and had forgotten even that. But as for the female half of the world — proh pudor ! Essentially indelicate such prying into Nature's 227 secret laboratory ! What a shock to the gentle youth's feelings to know that the fair and innocent maiden with whom he is conversing could, if required, describe the processes of nutri- tion, and was not densely ignorant of the structure of her own frame. Well, still the world grows just a little bit ; and the next thing we find is that some women — few it is true — are so far forfeiting their native delicacy that they desire to know not only how the corporeal machine comports itself in health, but also what happens when thrown out of gear — and they even ask, these shameless women, to have the same opportunity for acquir- ing knowledge, in the same class-rooms and hospitals, if in no other way, as their fact-seeking brothers. I remember, when this was beginning to be seriously mooted, a man of the highest reputation declaring in a conclave of educated men that he would rather see his daughter dead first. And yet though we still have separate colleges for women and men, and women physicians only for women, people are growing so accustomed to the changed state of things that they will soon forget there was ever a protected tree in Eve's physical Eden. The world moves — though slowly. But shall our sons and daughters read the " Kreutzer Sonata "' ? And a chorus of indignant voices exclaim, " Away with the unholy thing, vile and disgusting, soiling the purity of pure-minded men and women." Well, the "Kreutzer Sonata" is not a scholar's class-book. It is an indirect contribution to knowledge of social fact. But, nevertheless, half-fiction though it be, the question of principle may be raised through it. Is it desirable that young men and young women should study the facts and laws of the social organism as they are coming to study the facts and laws of the physical organism ? If the student of medicine, when he leaves ths dissecting-room and the hos- pital ward, can leave all traces of the work-shop behind, and step into society a polished gentleman, and young ladies can be as refined as young gentlemen can desire, although they are no longer ignorant of how the blood courses in their veins, and how the human frame is put together — is it so terrible a thing to conceive that a time may come when, in regard to the greatest of all concerns, there will be universal knowledge, certain and accurate, of what a healthy society implies, and perhaps of the evil an unhealthy body politic involves ? On the contrary, will there be any hope for a fairer society until the veil which now superficially hides the canker and sores is drawn aside, and good and evil which follow by necessary law in the moral world, as harvest follows seed time, are 228 traced to their roots ? No doubt there are crooked bye-\va}s and ghastly vices to which not only young men and maidens, but aged men and women too, had best be strangers. Such abnormities, being of very limited scope, and of the nature of simple depravity, knowledge thereof will aid no single soul on his dim journey, — they fall only to the department of the pathological expert ; but of widespread diseases knowledge early in life will be an undeniable boon, for in the sphere under view, more than elsewhere, to be forewarned is to be forearmed. A knowledge of actual fadts is of slight utility, however, with- out a searching analysisof their antecedents and permanent con- ditions, the causes mutable and immutable whence they arise. Present society is the outcome of former states of society, and the circumstance that social institutions and arrangements, though perhaps stationar\- for long periods, do ever and again change, prevents one counting upon the permanence of any outward form. Moreover, there is one point we are apt to forget, or perhaps I should rather say to be frequently unaware of, viz., that virtue and vice, as health and disease, are very indefinite and relative conceptions. It is perplexing the experts more and more where to draw the line between sanity and insanit}-, and it will baffle the wit of our moral scientists, I think, to draw a rigid line between the healthy and the unhealthy in the social body. Now my own definition of social sanity in; respect of the sexual relations would be a state of things which favoured the utmost development of the psychical and physical powers and the fullest satisfaction in living, having regard to the environment at any particular time. I take it that this will include a reference to both individual and collective well-being, for if there be maximum satisfaction in living the individual's weal is provided for, and if the physical power be maintained to the utmost, the well-being of posterity is secured. And the problem is not satisfied without just regard to both. A theory that sacrifices the Present for the sake of a merely conceivable Futuie, or that is wholly absorbed with the welfare of the present, is partial. This assertion carries with it the requirement not only that we know what relations now obtain, and how they have come to be what they are, but what are the psychical and physical conditions which underlie them, and are thtir permanent causes in the constitution of the world. Now this is where our Russian regenerator goes wrong — where some other passionate philanthropists, whom I could name, go wrong 229 — who pass straight to the second division of the subject, the formation of an ideal, without a thorough examination of the complex psychical elements and the permanent organic nisus, so to speak,which are essential components of the strange creature man. Count Tolstoi says in the elucidatory preface to his " Sonata — " History shows us a movement unceasing and without recoil, commencing in the most ancient times, from in- continence to chastity, from the complete confusion of the sexes towards polygamy and polyandry, and then, from inconti- nent monogamy towards chastitv in marriage" — and his inference is that there must be one step further, for to the true ^religionist he declares that marriage at its best is always " a fall, a weakness, a sin." I do not admit History as a final arbiter in social questions. History itself must be interpreted. History simply tells how things have come about, not why they were so and no other ; still less does it legislate as to the what should be. History is, alas ! not prophetic— it may afford materials for guesses, but experience is always bound to the variable environment, To learn my duty I do not go to History, I go to the human heart, and the basal conditions of existence themselves _ History has glorified what to us now is criminal, has en. deavoured to stifle and anathematized what are regarded to-day as the noblest of aspirations. (I may just remark in passing that the Count's summary of sexual progression is not as simple as he imagines— not all sociologists are in agreement that the primitive state was one of sexual communism, any more than that the ideal state is an asexual Utopia.) History is of the nature of a great experiment — a fumbling after the Normal and the Right — and as all experimentation undoubtedly indispen- sable. The Moral Prophet — the Shaper of Ideals — if he is to have a practical effect — will have an open eye for the results of such large experiments ; for Ideals, however lofty, are mere aesthetic products unless they submit to the test of concrete experience. And it is an overwhelming plea for a large individual freedomthat it permits visions of ethical imagination to be reduced to the concrete, so that from the success or failure on the small scale we may make shrewd guess as regards the large scale. Now one thing at least is certain — whether we are yet prepared to uplift new ideals or not — that in regard to our sex relations great changes are at hand. Many arrange- ments good for our fore-fathers are unquestionably no longer 230 good for us ; some are too costly, others too cramping, stunt- ing intellectual and emotional growth. People endure and sub- mit, but often with inward resistance. They submit to ceremonies but they don't trouble themselves about their import ; they are told that this is proper and that improper, and they echo the sentence, but almost as in a sleep. But at the same time they •are apt to confess with a shrug " Something is wrong : there needeth a change." Who should wonder that it is so ? No function of our social existence can be isolated. The reconsideration of the inter- relations of man and woman is an inevitable sequel to the economic changes in progress, under diffusion of knowledge, larger world-ideas. Neither Church nor State is longer hedged round with peculiar sanctity : why, then, the Domestic Institu- tion ? To the emancipated modern conscience Right no longer exists by mere Might. Any institution that claims to represent an ideal must justify itself before the bar of Reason. There is no ultimate ■authority but that — comprehending in the term Reason the ineradicable needs of the human soul. To say that a certain institution is indispensable for the maintenance of Social Order IS no justification. The most anti-social crimes have repeatedly been committed in the name of Social Order. Social Order is not fixed by a Dcus ex machind ; it is a something that we are factors in the shaping. To parody an old saying, Man was not made for Order, but Order for Man. How shall I know Order when I see it ? Define to me its infallible marks. State and Church cannot make marriage sacred, because State and Church are outside powers, with external sanctions. Moral order is internal. Its sanction is a sanction of the soul. I hold it to be a crime at the present day for the Political Power to define the conditions of private social unions. The State has no moral right to favour or prohibit any form of sexual relationship. Such relationships, being purely ethical, are beyond its jurisdiction. All that the State has a right to do — and what it is bound to do — is to see that personal independence is not forcibly encroached upon, and, while we have an individualistic economic regime, to enforce on parents the obligation of providing for their offspring till adult years. The confounding ethical with political juris- diction has been almost as great an impediment to Human Progress as the confusion of ecclesiastical and ethical legis- lation. The numberless crimes that must be laid to the 231 door of the State through this fatal confusion is awful to con- template. Think of the murders, the injustices, to say nothing of the secret deceit and per\ersions caused by our Law of Marriage — the iniquit}- even extending to the children of non- legitimated unions branded as outcasts. Here, if anywhere, is scope for an ethical propaganda, the preaching of a Higher Truth which shall vivify the stupefied sense of mankind. Finally comes the question of method, of detailed practice. Having measured the Actual against an Ideal, arrived at by the higher , imagination and moral insight controlled b}' experience, there is the final problem to be solved — How from the existing state of things to move surely towards such an ideal ? From first to last it should be steadily maintained that we must keep within the sphere of the practicable — for the desirable is the practicable. I have said all that I intend to say in regard to what is virtually a proposal to annul the whole question, by asserting an Ideal which renders the distinction of sex no longer rational. And any creed which implies the radical independence of the two sexes must be placed in the same category. The old regime made Woman a dependant on I\Ian — a slave, a home-drudge, a clinging-plant ; the arising spirit asserts more and more unequivocally complete equalit}". From the cradle to the grave woman henceforth shall be man's equal. She is to have the same civil rights, the same freedom of action. There shall be mutual regard, mutual consideration, and the strictest justice. If modesty is to remain her crown as heretofore, it shall be his too — if she is bound to purity and fidelity, he shall be bound no less strictly. In all that appertains to the intellectual, the political, and the moral life, I see no reason why the equality should not go the length of identity. Nothing can test the range of identical nature and capacity but unhindered freedom of development. Still the differences are no less profound, and these have their significance never to be ignored. But whatever the work for which each is best fitted, however the life-tasks are distributed, one thing is certain, that social progress is henceforth only possible by full, free, and spontaneous co-operation. Of all the moral levers of the world there is none equal to that of the magnetism of sex — and yet how perversely we refuse to see it ! How vainly the world has striven after its valued " chastity " by sundering the sexes. And the fruit has been — Purity ? justice ? No — licentiousness, oppression, jealousy, cunning, greed. I venture to affirm that in direct proportion to the restraint of external 232 inter-communion between the sexes has been the development of immorality and intemperance. What wonder ! Is it not obvious that the surest way to intensify imagination and cravin