Ex Libris
C. K. OGDEN ;

THE ETHIC
OF FREETHOUGHT

A LECTURE

DELIVERED AT

SOUTH PLACE INSTITUTE

Tuesday. March G, 1883

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

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-

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

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

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-

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

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.

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

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

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<j cable law god — even as Spinoza. You

will not be likely to fall into much error concerning his
nature.

Lastly, let me draw your attention to one point which has-
especial value for the religion of freethought. We have seen
how the disparity between finite and infinite tends to depress
man to the lowest depth of spiritual misery, such a depth as
you will find portrayed in James Thomson's " City of Dreadful
Night." This misery is too often the result of the first neces-
sary step towards fi-eedom of thought — namely, the complete
rejection of all forms of dogmatic faith. It can only be dispelled
by a recognition of the true meaning of the problem of life, the
relation of the finite to the infinite. But in the very natm'e of
this problem — as I have endeavoured to express it to-night —
lies a strange inexpressible pleasure : it is the apparently finite
mind of man, which itself rules the infinite ; it is human
thought which dictates the laws of the universe — only what
man tliinhs, can possibly he. The very immensities which
appal him, are they not in a sense his own creations ? Nay,
paradoxical as it may seem, there is much truth in the assertion
that it is the mind of man ivJiich creates the univeTse. Free-
thought in making him master of his own reason, renders him
lord of the world. That seems to me the endless joy of fi'ee-
thought. True freethought, which creative, sympathetic, and
above all, enthusiastic, is destined to be the religion of the
future.

Do you smile at the notion of freethought linked to enthu-
siasm ? Bemember the lines of the poet : —

" Enthusiasts they will call us— aye, enthusiasts even we must be:
Has not long enough ruled the empty word and the letter ?
Stand, oh, mankind on thine own feet at last, thou overgrown child!
And canst thou not stand — not even yet — must thou still fall to the

ground
Without crutches, then fall to the ground, for thou art not worthy t a

stand!"

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InEZ^^OT^^ ]F"OE^ TXSIES I>^^1^,

By MOXCUEE D. CONWAY, M.A.
Being Discourses delivered before South Place Eeligious Society, Fiusbury.

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^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,

DR, ANDREW WILSON, F.R.S.E.. &c.

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"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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

♦♦

THE HOPES OF LIBERALISM."

A DISCOURSE

DELIVERED AT

SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL,

FINSBURY, E.C.
On SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 188^,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

.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

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

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

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.

DR. ANDREW WILSON, F.R.S.E., &c.

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London.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 ;

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

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.]

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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-

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

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

HUMAN LIFE."

A DISCOURSE

DELIVERED AT

SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C.,

On SUNDAY, JANUARY II, 1885,

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

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."

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 !

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

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,

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,

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.

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.]

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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-

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

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

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

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

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.]

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.

EDWARD CLODD.

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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,

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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,

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

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,

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

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

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."

^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,

JOHN ROBERTSON.

PUBLISHED BY
E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON.

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PBINTED FOB THE PUBLISHER BT
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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.

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.

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-

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.

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

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-

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.

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

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,

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

■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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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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 ;

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<i means a dead body — a carcase. It forms part of
our word necropolis, and it is used in all the following pas-
sages : — " Women received their dead (ve/cpoi)?) by resurrec-
tion." " The sea gave up the dead {v€Kpov<i) which were in it."
" We that are alive, that are left unto the coming of the Lord,
shall in no wise precede them that are fallen asleep. For the
Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the
voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the
dead {veKpol) shall rise." " For the trump shall sound, and
the dead {veKpol) shall be raised incorruptible." The teaching
seems to be clear that the carcases {vcKpol) wrapt in the sleep
of death, are to be roused by a stupendous uproar, and will
then rise from the grave. Indeed, it is expressly said : ** All
that are in the tombs shall hear his voice;" and, as if to pre-
vent any spiritualizing of these words, it is recorded that, at
the earthquake of the crucifixion, " the tombs were opened, and
many bodies {awixara) of the saints that had fallen asleep were
raised, and coming out of the tombs, they entered into the city."
No wonder the orthodox theologian is embarrassed with the
riches of his faith. No wonder he tries to throw overboard
some of his creeds, in order to save the rest. But this is a
cargo that cannot be jettisoned. All must remain, or all is
lost. No man may pick and choose in matters of revelation.
Advanced theologians, reckless of consequences, have, how-
ever, so refined these early notions that nothing now is left of
them but the merest outline. The soul is an indestrudtible
entity encumbered by the body. At the moment of death, she

enters into an exalted intellectual felicity, not through miracu-
lous agency, but as a simple fact in nature. Now, a fact in
nature ought, one would think, to be susceptible of proof.
What proofs are forthcoming ? History, analogy, universal
belief, general desire, justice, the immaterial nature of the soul.

First, there is the alleged fa6t that resurrecftions from the
dead have actually taken place. It has been well observed
that " ten cases distinctly proved, on a carefully conducted
examination, made by competent persons, at the time of the
incident, might settle the question. But it cannot be settled
by the producflion of cases, however numerous, that depend on
assertions which were not properly examined at the time, and
can now never be examined."

Tivo analogies have been cited ; oneby Archbishop Whately,
of the caterpillar, of the chrysalid's torpor, of the second birth
and aerial flight of the butterfly. But the metamorphosis of
the insect finds its true analogue in the far more wonderful
transformation of the man, in the development of the human
body, which is changed from a water-breathing reptilian form,
to the type of earth's proudest son. The other analogy, by
St. Paul, is that of a grain of corn placed in the earth, and
bringing forth, presently, the blade and the ear. " That which
thou sowest is not quickened, except it die." Here again, the
grain of corn corresponds to the antenatal life, and the blade
and ear to man's maturity ; and so far from the buried grain
dying, the sprouting of the blade and the ultimate perfe(5tion of
the ear are proof that no portion of the seed ever perished at alL

To hold a statement to be true because it is widely believed,
is a dangerous argument to be used by any but the members
of a dominant faith. But the belief in immortality is not
universal, nor ever was. We can trace it to its origin. The
belief in ghosts and witchcraft preceded it, and was once
equally widespread ; but after a hard struggle with reason,
has almost vanished from among civilized men. But if the
belief in a life after death were, indeed, absolutel}- universal,
its true relation would be to the past, and not to the future ;
even as a profusion of hawthorn fruit tells of the summer that
is gone, and not, as yokels think, of the winter to come.

And is it not a bold thing to assert that immortality is
universally desired, in the face of the facts of Buddhism, with
its five hundred millions of believers, who regard the extincftion
of personal consciousness as the highest reward that a good
man can earn ? One may strongly object to die, and yet have
no wish to live after death. The desire of life is only an
expression of the universal instindt of self-preservation, funda-

mentally necessary in all sentient things ; and, as a matter of
course, this instindt is operative at any particular moment
when, to the healthy and unclouded intellect, death is threat-
ened or suggested. It may be conceded that natural desires
ought to be gratified ; and this desire of life is gratified, perhaps
more completely than any other. We are actually alive ; but
we have no right to expect an infinite quantity of anything,
however desirable, not even an infinite quantity of life. But
is infinite life desirable ? Yes, we are told, if it can be infi-
nitely happy. Much virtue in " if," Transcendental theo-
logians give us nothing to be happy with, but an immaterial
intelligence. Not for us are the joys of Odin's Hall of Heroes,
nor the pleasures of an Eastern paradise. Two things are
vouchsafed us to delight our souls withal, ceaseless praises of
a supreme person, and an endless pursuit of knowledge.
Aristotle acutely says that when we praise the gods, it is
according to our own idea of merit ; but in doing so we
refer them to a standard lower than themselves, which is
ridiculous. And what reason have we to suppose that
there is an infinite quantity of knowledge. The carbon
and hydrogen of the earth is not much unlike the carbon
and hydrogen of the sun ; and from external galaxies,
and from remotest planetary nebulae come streaming along
the evidences of carbon and hydrogen. But when our
immaterial intelligences have discovered a thousand new
metals, or have found out that every old one is a compound ;
when we have ascertained the ultimate unit of all force, and
the ultimate unit of all matter, what then, and what after ?
Besides, Helmholtz has truly said that " the aim of the natural
sciences is to resolve themselves into mechanics;" and we
know, further, that mechanics can be resolved into mathe-
matics. An infinity of logarithms ? Ah ! no, most persons
would prefer to rest quietly under the crocuses. Born on this
little globe, cradled by returning night, nurtured by the breath
of spring, the strength of winter, and the fulness of the warm
days, why should we be projected into space, when life is over,
in quest of scientific novelties, if only we may stay at home and
sleep in peace, praying with our eastern kinsmen, " Cover me,
O Earth, even as a mother, with her mantle, covereth her
child ! "

The next plea for immortality is that of justice ; and
to make room for this, the whole moral scheme established by
mosaic laws must be set aside. The wicked, it seems, are not
sufficiently punished in this world. If death were an end, they
would make too good a bargain. Now, if the wicked are those

who break ceremonial obligations, they may not, perhaps,
always suffer as they ought. But if the wicked are those
whose adlions are injurious to themselves or to society,
then, in the nature of things, their punishment is involved
in their conduct, and any punitive deficiency is usually sup-
plied by social and legal restraints. But if it should happen
that a criminal here and there should go scathless, as the
laws of health may be broken, sometimes, with impunity,
would it benefit him, or us, or anyone, to rake him about, here-
after, in a sea of torment ? For if evil men are to survive
death, evil must survive too. And the righteous, the salt of
the earth, what do they expect? What, in the name of justice,
is in store for them ? Why, if they see the truth, and have no
satisfaction in standing for it ; if they pracftice self-denial
without pleasure, envying, all the time, the self-indulgent ; if
they work without a love of industry, and learn with no thirst
for knowledge ; if they keep troth with grudging, and yield a
calculated loyalty ; if they think to barter earthly lust for
celestial glory — then are they, indeed, of all men the most
miserable, and there is no heaven worth the name but would
be disgraced to receive them.

With respe(5l to the need for compensation, we may quote
Archbishop Whately, who says that " as the goods of this world
are not regularly distributed, it may be urged that this irregu-
larity must be rectified in a future state, in which persons shall
receive a compensation for unmerited affli(5lions they have
undergone in this. But to what will a fair and ample com-
pensation amount ? To an eternity of exalted bliss ? The idea
is too extravagant to be entertained. The fair compensation
would be such a trifle in comparison with this, as not to be
worth noticing in an argument for immortality."

But the favourite plea of all, bred of human vanity and
of a swelling egotism, is that the mind of man is so wonderful,
so noble a thing, that it is impossible to believe that it
arises from any aggregation of mere matter and energy,
or that it can cease to exist when the aggregation of
matter and energy, with which it is now associated, is
dispersed by death. The mind of man is certainly a marvel ;
but it has come to be so by growth — by the minutest con-
ceivable increments in the particles of nerve-structure, as
regards both quantity and quality, through countless
generations that are passed ; by slowly improving memory,
and the gradual storing up of knowledge ; by the survival of
the fittest in a struggle that has been intellectual as well as
physical. Most philosophers agree that there are in the

universe two things — matter and energy — of which the quan-
tity is constant ; none can be destroyed, and no more can
be brought into existence. Is mind, then, a third thing,
of more importance than the others ? If so, is it constant
in quantity ? This was Plato's view, and it necessitated
his behef in metempsychosis. His argument for the immor-
tahty of the soul was a very simple one. He said that the
evil of the body was disease, by which the body was destroyed ;
and that the soul's evil was vice, by which the soul was
not destroyed. And if the soul could not be destroyed by
an evil of its own nature — a spiritual evil — still less could
it be destroyed by an evil of another nature — a material evil.
" But," he says to Glaucon, " the soul which cannot be
destroyed by evil, either spiritual or material, must be immor-
tal ?" " That is certain," replies Glaucon. "Then," he con-
tinues, "if the argument holds, souls must always be equally
numerous. For if none be destroyed, they will not diminish
in number ; neither will they increase, because if increase in
immortal natures came from something mortal (or material)
all things would thus end in immortality, which reason cannot
admit." And so Plato believed in the transmigration of souls.
But the modern transcendental theologian tries to teach us
first that conscious mind is something better and other than
matter and force ; and then that matter and force are always
engaged in making conscious mind out of nothing. He
affirms, in effect, that this conscious mind is an indestruc-
tible personality, and yet that it results from a fortuitous
coalescence of two minute mortal and material elements,
that never had, and never would have had, separately, any
consciousness whatever. It is as if a loom were always engaged
in weaving tapestry, and yet no silk or wool should ever be
used up in the process ; for conscious mind is produced, in
some way, by matter and force ; it becomes a personal entity,
and continues to exist after the dispersion of the matter and
force of the body ; but, inasmuch as the quantity of matter
and force in the world remains the same as before, this marvel,
the indestructible mind of man, has been made out of nothing
— which, in Plato's words, " reason cannot admit." Happily
we may escape from this difficulty by supposing, with Mr.
Spencer, that mind is a mode of force, or, as Professor Clifford
put it, that every atom of matter contains a certain quantity
of mind-stuff that becomes conscious in highly-organized
states ; or by agreeing with Locke, the champion of the orthodox,
who was able to write, " Omnipotency may have given to sorne
systems of matter fitly disposed (arranged) a power to perceive

and think ; or else may have joined to matter, so disposed, a
thinking immaterial substance ; it not being more incompre-
hensible that God can superadd to matter a faculty of thinking,
than that he should superadd to it another substance with a
faculty of thinking." In other words, to say that "matter fitly
disposed " does not think, but that something else thinks in
"fitly-disposed matter," is to explain nothing, but only to
darken a difficulty.

We are accustomed to regard all living things as mortal,
that is, not only as capable of being killed, but as dying of
themselves, after having passed through the stages of growth
and maturity. But though this is true in the first sense, since
there is nothing living on the earth that cannot be killed, it is
not true in any other sense that all things are mortal. The
beings that consist of a simple cell, and that constitute the
lowest form of Protozoa, do not die — they only multipl}^
Each one, on reaching maturity, divides into two, and each of
these into two others, and so on indefinitely, all remaining inde-
pendent organisms. In this case, each cell discharges for
itself all the funcTtions of a lowly vitality. But in higher forms
of life, in Metazoa, the cells, after multiplication, remain
clustered together in a sort of community, as a compound
organism ; and in order that higher funcftions may be per-
formed, there must be some division of labour. Cells that, as
individuals, discharged all functions alike, now that they are
parts of a structure, can do so, in the nature of things, no
longer. In such a community, therefore, some cells chiefly
contract, for example ; others chiefly secrete, and others
chiefly multiply. Yet, still, in many such animals, general
fund^ional power is not entirely relinquished, since if one of
them is cut in two, each half can reproduce itself, or a lost
limb can be restored. But as complexity of organization
advances, this power of reproduction becomes less common,
and it is at last restricted to special structures ; so that all the
remaining cell power of all the remaining cells can be used for
the sole advantage of the individual. The final death of the
larger part of an organism is, thus, the necessary price that is
paid for the present increase of its faculties ; and we are
suddenly confronted with the fact that our higher nature is
gained at the cost of an ultimate discontinuance of personal
life ; that while immortality is a great truth in nature, it lies,
not in this part of ourselves that is " us," but in that part
of ourselves that is " our children " — or in that part that
we do not require for our own individual evolution.

The dream of the philosopher is the sobriety of fad^, and

the ancient words of Aristotle are true. " The nutritive soul,"
he said, " enables each individual to leave behind a successor
like himself; which is the only way that he can obtain a quasi-
immortality, though all aspire to become immortal." And so
the whole human family is truly and acftually one organism,
with one body and one spirit. And this child of mine has come
to me, neither as a stranger from a mysterious land of shadows,
nor " trailing clouds of glory " from a distant heaven ; and is,
in verity, my own soul. At death, it will be only a portion of
me that will die ; another, may it be a better portion, will live
on in the light. And of this personal death, one thing is certain,
it is absolutely painless. Pain is an incident of life. Sometimes
for days, often for hours, always for an appreciable time, con-
sciousness has ceased when the end comes. But if dissolution
is painless, " O Death, where is thy sting? " And if we live on
in our children, " O Grave, where is thy victory? " The sting
of death pierces the survivor, and it is the procession of
mourners that graces the triumph of the grave. But the
bitterness of separation should not be allowed to cast its
shadow before, as in the verse of a modern singer —

" Last night I woke and found, between us drawn —
Between tis, where no mortal fear may creep —
The vision of Death, dividing us in sleep ;
And suddenly I thought, 'ere light shall dawn,
Some day, the substance, not the shadow, of Death
Shall cleave us like a sword. The vision passed,
But all its new-born horror held me fast,
And till day broke, I listened for your breath.
Some day to wake and find that coloured skies,
And pipings in the woods, and petals wet.
Are things for aching memory to forget,
And that j'o/^r loving hands and mouth and eyes
Are part of all the world's old histories —
Dear God ! a little longer, ah ! not yet ! "

This feeling of loss by anticipation is altogether morbid and
unreal, especially because it must alwa}-s be doubtful who is
to outlive the other. But the sense of a(5\ual bereavement is a
natural and a bitter thing.

''I told these grandchildren," says Charles Lamb, "how
their great uncle, my brother, used to carry me upon his back,
when I was a lame-footed bov — for he was a good bit older than
me — many a mile when I could not walk for pain ; and how in
after life he became lame-footed too, and I did not always, I
fear, make allowances enough for him when he was impatient
and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate he had

been to me when I was lame-footed ; and how when he died,
though he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had
died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and
death ; and how I bore his death, as I thought pretty well at
first, but afterwards it haunted and haunted me ; and though I
did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he
would have done if I had died, yet I missed him all the day
long, and knew not till then how much I had loved him. I
missed his kindness and I missed his crossness, and wished him
to be alive again, to be quarrelling with him (for we quarrelled
sometimes) rather than not have him again any more." The
transcendental theologian has no help for us here. The heart
cries out for the lame foot again, and the bitter-sweet quarrel ;
the dear human weakness and companionship — and not for the
adoration of infinite perfections, or for the pursuit of know-
ledge resolvable into mechanics. And it is a remarkable fact
that the orthodox theologian cannot help us either, for he is
unable to point to a single passage of his sacred writings to
justify his promise of a celestial restoration of the ties and
affections of earth. " Every one that hath left brethren, or
sisters, or father, or mother, or children for my name's sake,
shall inherit eternal life." " In the resurrection they are as
angels in heaven." The story of the child " gone before,"
that welcomes to infinite bliss its fond parent, is found in
heathen poetry and not in the New Testament. Assuredly,
then, in sustaining a loss by death, it is our duty to consider
that the feeling of want is in most cases a self-regarding one ;
and that the more a thing is missed, the gladder should we be
that, at any rate, we held it for a time. Was ever a mother
so dear ? How happy, then, to have loved her so long. Was
ever a child so sweet ? Happy that it became so ; and that
now it can never fall into thankless or evil ways, to our sorrow
or shame.

There was once a Roman matron, Marcia by name, sorely
stricken by the death of her father, of her husband, and of
her son, " the goodliest gentleman that a man might behold,
yet of great temperance and modesty." Seneca wrote, to com-
fort her, a letter of prodigious length ; and of the many consola-
tions that he offered, two are instruftive because of their total
inconsistency. "Thou hast no cause," he says, "to run
to thy son's sepulchre, he has fled away wholly out of this
world. After having made a little pause above us, to
cleanse him from those spots that were remaining in him,
and to shake off the rust of this corruptible life, he hath
been carried to far higher places, where he converseth with

the happier souls, and hath been entertained by that holy
company of Scipioes, Catoes, and others that have contemned
this life, and now enjoy a full liberty by the benefit of death.
There, Marcia, thy husband embraceth his son, joyful to see
him enlightened with a great brightness, and teacheth him
the courses of the stars, not by conjecture, but as one that is
truly expert in the secrets of Nature." These promises of the
old pagan philosopher are not unlike those of modern theology ;
but strange to say, in another part of the same letter, he offers
consolation of a very different kind. " Think this," he writes,
" that the dead are afflicted with no evils. Those things that
make the grave terrible are but fables. We know that the
dead are not enfolded in darkness. We believe not those
floods flaming with fire, neither the lake of forgetfulness, nor
the Judgment Seat. These are poetical, and thus have they
tormented us with vain terrors. Death reposeth «s in that tran-
quillity wherein we lay before we were born. Death is neither
good nor evil. That may be either good or evil which is
something ; but that which of itself is nothing, and reduceth
all things to nothing, betrayeth us to no fortune." Here,
then, are two utterly divergent doctrines cast upon the mind
of man like seed upon the soil ; " future life," and " everlasting
repose." As rival creeds they are, in a curious way, subject
to the operation of the law of natural sele(5tion. Which of
them will prevail over the other ? Possibility, probability,
truth, have very little to do with the result. Whichever
doctrine tends more than the other to produce a race of good
citizens, will survive and become fixed by heredity, however
baseless it may be.

Does belief in a future state tend in itself to make of a man a
good citizen ? This is not an easy question to answer. The
world abounds at present with Christians who are good
citizens. But there are always good men in every state,
though their goodness may not always be due to the dominant
faith. On the other hand, nearly all criminals believe in a
day of doom ; the religious persuasion of each prisoner is a
thing oflicially recorded by the governor of a jail ; and the
chief employment of Parliament is to draw the meshes of the
law ever more closely over all classes of the community. It
is, perhaps, natural to suppose that a very earnest belief in the
immortality of the soul would lead to a great neglect of what
must then seem the gross and fleeting things of earthly life.
We know that the early Christians abandoned the world and
had all things in common. We know that when the new faith
was first embraced by the Celts of Ireland and the Saxons of

England, men and women in crowds forsook their ordinary
avocations to spend their lives in poverty, chastity, obedience,
and seclusion ; though the needs and instin(5ts of humanity
have been, in the main, strong enough to keep such antisocial
impulses in check. But as we find, in these days, men who
profess a creed they are unable to prove, and who, acting as
though they believe it not, are yet unconscious of inconsistency,
we may take it that their belief is inherited ; and that religious
revivals are caused by the sudden perception of an incongruity
between conducft and faith. But if the natural tendency of
any particular creed be indeed antisocial, it should seem that
a contrary teaching must tend to a contrary result. Instead
of the vow of poverty, there should be effort towards the
comfort and culture that can exist only with the accumulation
of national wealth. Instead of celibacy, the happiness of
home, and the sacred circle of the family. Instead of obedi-
ence to authority, freethought and independent verification ;
and instead of seclusion, the throng of trade, the associations
of science, and the brotherhood of art.

If compensation is not to come hereafter, the more reason
for securing it now, to all creatures that need it. If punish-
ment is not to come hereafter, the more reason for realizing
now, that what a man sows, that shall he also reap. And if a
better life is not to be hereafter, for us, the more reason for
doing what we can that it may come, hereafter, for our chil-
dren. But let us be quite sure of this : that if a belief in the
finality of death tends to make men in general, vicious and
improvident, anarchical and cruel, then such a belief, however
just and true, will vanish for ever. Whilst if a belief in a
future state of blessedness or misery, helps to make men, on
the whole, prudent and industrious, kind and faithful, then this
belief, however, visionary, will become, as some think it has
become, ineradicably fixed in the mind of humanity.

The lemmings, or Norwegian rats, have inherited a curious
instinct, originated, doubtless, at a time when it was of service
to them, but under continental and climatal conditions alto-
gether different from those of to-day. As soon as these
animals are moved with the impulse to depart, they set forth
in swarms, and multitudes of them, plunging into the sea,
swim with eager hope for lands they never reach. Is this to
be the empty fate and the last folly of man ? Is the irony of
a delusive instinft to be outdone by the mockery of a false
intuition ? The answer depends, not a little, upon societies

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LIFE AND DEATH.

Part II.— LIFE.

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LIFE AND DEATH.

Part II.— LIFE.

->^«*

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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
<on the second day the eyelids close at the advance of a flame,

but not at the approach of a threatening body till the seventh
week.

Emotions, as might be expedted, are late in making their
appearance. Fear is iirst exhibited in the fourteenth week,
and anger in the tenth month ; until, at last, with the develop-
ment in the nineteenth month of the emotions of pride and
shame, we obtain a basis for the a(5lion of conscience, which,
though often regarded as a mysterious entity, is little more
than the anticipation of praise or blame.

And now, as the varied stimuli of external forces apply
themselves to the unfolding organism of the child, as the
torch of sensation lights up the caverns of his brain, already
stored with inherited ideas, the wonders of imagination begin,
and he lives in a land of enchanted splendour. The rudest
doll can fill a girl's soul with tenderness and delight ; and the
least romantic story will set on fire the adventurous spirit of a
boy.

" At evening, when the lamp is lit,

And round the fire my parents sit,

Then with my little gun I crawl,

All in the dark, along the wall,

And follow round the forest track.

Away behind the sofa back.

" There in the night, where none can spy,
All in my hunter's camp I lie ;
These are the hills, and these the woods,
These are my starry solitudes.
And there the river by whose brink
The roaring lions come to drink.

" I see my parents far away.
As if in fire-lit camp they lay ;
And I, like to an Indian scout.
Around their party prowl about.

** So, when my nurse comes in for me.
Home I return across the sea ;
And go to bed with backward looks
At my dear land of story-books."

A poet is able to interpret thus the imaginations of his
childhood. But the happy dreams of a boy do not flow in
words ; his conceptions are inspired by an inherited idealism,
which transcends all description. Afterwards, as language is
learned, and as thought becomes more and more verbal, the
powers of imagination gradually decline. Indeed, the use of
arbitrary symbols makes intellectual processes so easy, that
they become increasingly independent of the stimulation of
sense; and there is even some danger of their withdrawing

themselves from consciousness, and taking the form of in-
stindtive cerebration. The student who shuts himself out from
external influences not only loses all but a verbal imagina-
tion, he loses also a chief part of conscious existence.

In order to reap the full harvest of life, the union of two
things is needful — memories of well-being, linked with sensa-
tions of well-being ; and both are largely within our reach,
because both largely depend upon personal conduct.

The unworthy deed, the coarse utterance, the cruel reply —
of such is the unclean brood that nestles in the soul, tainting
the sources of a(5tion. That our impulses may be noble, we
must have lofty ideals and heroic examples. " We ought "
said Epicurus, " to choose out some good man, and fix him
*' always before our eyes." Or if we say, like the Hebrew
cynic, "there is none good," at least, from all that is bad we
can turn away. Alas ! whither can we turn ? Sordid sur-
roundings, the long unlovely street, the malodorous atmosphere,
angry and discordant sounds, repulsive colour, and distorted
form, are all stimuli of ill-being. From these how shall we
escape ?

If Nature were only nearer to us, and kinder to us, we
would always turn to her. But that last solace and supreme
refreshment is not often for us. Not always can we go apart
into the mountains, to behold her face of more than mortal
beauty ; or wander on misty moorlands where abides the
shekinah of light and shade ; or draw nigh to the breath of the
pine-trees where sobs the litany of the wind. So seldom is
this possible, in the difficulty of access, in the hurry of life, in
the darkness of tempestuous days, in the winter of our discon-
tent, that Nature herself must be passed by for Art.

There are, for all, some sacred precincts where happy sym-
bols may cluster; some altar, some shrine, some home, to be
hallowed with music or perfume. And beyond the circle of
this temple, is there not the commonwealth ? If surrounding
forces ait so potently upon us, should it not be a great obje(5t
of life to amend our environment, and, above all, that portion
of it that is human? " For which is better," asked Socrates,
" to live among bad citizens or among good ones? If a man
" with whom I have to live is corrupted by me, shall / not be
" harmed by him ? "

The philosopher of old saw that the members of a com-
munity must prosper or decline together ; and may not we, at
last, see more — that the multitudinous family of man consti-
tutes a vital unity — that the many are one ?

H. C. MARCH, M.D., Lond.
October 17, 1886.

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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

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THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STORY

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."

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.")

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,

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).

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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EQUALITY.

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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.

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

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.

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

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,

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

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

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.

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

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

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 —

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

" 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-

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.

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

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.

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Illustrative Readings.

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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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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-

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

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

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.

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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

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-

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

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-

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

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

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 ? "

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,

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

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

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

— 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.

March 20, 1887.

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FINSBURY, E.G.

THE

COMMON THINGS

HUMAN LIFE.

A DISCOURSE

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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

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 ;

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 !

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^

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

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.

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 ! "

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

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.

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.

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 :

" 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.

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[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.

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 ?

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

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, —

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 : —

" 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-

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

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 ? Is it not the broadening and deepening of con-
scious souls, and the inclining of their essential natures to a
union of perfeft accord? Very slowly the lesson is learnt —
our eyes are dazzled by sensible appearances, we see greatness
where greatness is not, imagine Progress wheie there is only
lessened fricftion; still the prophet-bard bids us hope and not
despair —

" The world's old,
But the old world waits the time to be renewed,
Toward which new hearts in individual growth
Must quicken, and increase to multitude
In new dynasties of the race of men ;
Developed whence, shall grow spontaneously
New Churches, new ceconomies, new laws
Admitting freedom, new societies
Excluding falsehood : He shall make all new."

W. C. COUPLAND.

June 26th, 1887.

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THE

RELIGION OF SHAKSPERE.

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

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

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
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No. 19.] [PART II.

FINSBURY, E.G.

THE

RELIGION OF SHAKSPERE.

TWO DISCOURSES

DELIVEKKD IX

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THE

RELIGION OF SHAKSPERE.

II.

THERE are three ways in which we might hope to gather
from a dramatist's works a notion of the nature of his
main rehgious opinions ; three ways in which a playwright
with a religious cast of mind might take us into his confidence.
He might give us contrasted sets of characters, some with one
kind ot religion and some with another ; and enlist, or show
he wished to enlist, our sympathy for one rather than another.
Or he might simply associate a certain religious cast of mind
with the better chara(5ters in his plays, and thus mark them off
from the less good. Or, finally, he might make some of his
chara(5ters actually discuss the religion or irreligion of the
others; taking care to make the balance lie in the way that
seemed to him right. It will be instantly admitted by every
reader, however, that in none of these three ways does
Shakspere give us the clue to his opinions.

Of course he presents us with some religious — I should sa}'
professionally religious — personages. We have, for instance,
the Friars in Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado about Nothing,
and the prelates in the historical plays, and Isabella, and such
serious charafters as Queen Katherine and the Duke of Venice ;
but the remarkable thing is that even the friars and the
prelates are no more religious in tone than the ordinary people,
their adlion being almost invariably directed to worldly ends,
by worldly methods ; and that the ostensibly devout people,
apart from the churchmen, equally fail to apply any other
tests to things than do those who affedl no devotion at all.
Take the case of Isabella, in Measure for Measure. We are
introduced to her as a candidate for the veil, who is so zealous
for her vocation as to desire an even stricter rule than already
exists in the convent ; and she speaks gravely enough always,

122

and indignantly enough on special occasion, of her brother's
morals ; but as the play goes on she — in a manner which
certainly suggests extreme disregard of consistency on Shak-
spere's part — lends herself to a line of aftion which, to say
the least, puts her on the normal moral plane of her time. I
do think Shakspere worked carelessly in this play, powerful as
it is ; but even the carelessness, so far as regards Isabella, goes
to show that not only was he not himself religious in the
ordinary sense, but he was not ready to conceive or portray a
mind of that tendency. It might, indeed, fairly be urged
against him that he never seems to enter into the religious
type of personality — that on that side he was virtually
unsympathetic ; and the only answer seems to me to be that
this particular limitation to his sympathies was a condition of
his perfect sanity in all other regards. Oddly enough, George
Eliot, who is accused of Godlessness, does really show more of
this sympath}' than Shakspere, as in her portraits of Seth Bede
and Dinah Morris — though these, after all, are idealised, and
do not duly bring out the strictly pietistic traits which belong
to the type. Dinah's marriage with Adam is much more
sympathetically conceived than Isabella's marriage with the
Duke. This last was perhaps rightly pronounced by Hallam
to be one of Shakspere's hasty half-thoughts ; but, as such, it
still goes to prove that he did not incline to projecft himself
into a devotee's consciousness. Beyond an occasional phrase,
the would-be nun expresses herself with no such religious
coloring as we might look for in her talk ; and when it
chances that she uses the old Christian argument for mercy
— that God had had mercy on the forfeit souls of the whole
human race — she falls back in the next breath on a reference
to the thunders of Jove. Decidedly Measure for Measure was
not produced in an evangelical atmosphere, in the modern
sense.

It would not, of course, be fair to draw large inferences
from the fac^t that Shakspere twice presents to us an odious
character in the ad^ of prayer ; but this too is not without its
significance. Claudius in Hamlet and Angelo in Measure for
Measure, be it remembered, are not adding hypocritically when
they are represented to us praying ; they confess that their
attempts to think of heavenly things come to nothing by reason
of their thoughts remaining below. This of course shows that
Shakspere was not at all ridiculing the a(?t of prayer; rather
he treats it with ordinary respedt ; but the noteworthy thing is
that he thus presents to us two men of decided religious belief
and of devotional habits, who are in no way restrained by

123

their religion from committing gross crimes. It is impossible
to think that this has no bearing on Shakspere's own religious
attitude. At least he believed that mere religious convidtion
was no security for right ad\ion ; and if on the other hand he
never associates religious unbelief with wrong-doing, it surely
becomes plain that he considered theological creed had very
little special connection with pra(5tical morals. All through the
plays we find men and women doing good or ill by simple
natural bias ; doing the good without looking to supernatural
sanction or reward ; doing the ill without repudiating such
sanction, but simply without considering the question of future
punishment at all. lago is no more irreligious than Othello :
he has as many religious allusions in his talk, speaking of
Christian and heathen lands, using ordinary phrases about God
and devil, and hell. The two men are alike in this, that their
creed never modifies their condutt ; lago working out his pas-
sionless wickedness, and Othello his passionate vengeance,
with equally little reference to theological considerations.

I have put it that the ways in which the specifically Chris-
tian view of things may be conceived to come out in a man's
opinions would be, — in his attitude towards history, in his use
of prayer, in his looking forward to a future life, and in his
holding some theory about the atoning functions of Jesus
Christ ; and I have submitted that on the first head there is
nothing to suggest Shakspere's conformity to the modern
Christian view. The evidence fails equally all round. The
words of Claudius and Angelo as to the futility of their half-
hearted prayers might be held to imply the doctrine that sincere
prayer, made with a clear conscience, would, in the language
of Scripture, avail much. But for positive proof that Shak-
spere held such a view of prayer we shall look in vain through
his works. That he thought divine help could come on human
solicitation never once appears, unless we are to take as ex-
pressions of his own opinion such things as the passage about
the cure of the king's evil in Macbeth, and the thanksgiving of
Henry V. after his victory. Hamlet says once, " I will go
pray ; " but to what purpose ? There are two Christian theories
of prayer ; that of divine interference or miracle, and that of
subjective benefit — the conception of prayer as a curative un-
burdening of the mind. But Hamlet is neither helped nor
healed.

When, again, we look in the dramatist for some opinion
on a future life, the scarcity of allusion to the subjecSt is so
striking that it is difficult to understand how any reader
looking for data as to Shakspere's beliefs can fail to have

124

been impressed by it. I have seen a report of a sermon by
Canon Baynes, in which, culling the two or three distin(5lly
religious expressions used by characfters in the dramas — this
without going into the question of the authenticity of the
historical plays — the preacher sought to make out Shakspere's
faith in immortality from a line in the 146th Sonnet :

" And death once dead, there's no more dying then."

There could be no more unfortunate reference, inasmuch as
the passage thus fastened upon, in the dearth of desirable
quotations from the plays, has, when read in its context,
really no bearing on the question of a future life at all.
What the poet does in this Sonnet, which is of a somewhat
metaphysical cast, is, first, to ask his soul why it starves
itself in the laborious effort to provide for the body's needs
and luxuries.

" Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay ?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend ?"

The meaning evidently is that the writer feels he is losing
intelledlual life in the attempt to amass money, whether for
the sake of dress or for the love of property ; and the facft
might either be that the young Shakspere was spending
money on finery of the costly sort then in vogue, in the
course of his love affair with a court lady, or taking himself
to task for beginning to amass the comfortable fortune on
which he ultimately retired. Either way, he is exhorting
himself to spend his time intelle(5lually, and cater for his
mind instead of his body, setting culture above comfort :

" Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,

And let that pine to aggravate thy store ;

Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross ;

Within be fed, without be rich no more ;

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then."

That is, let the body die in the sense of passing out of the
soul's consideration ; and in this dying of the body the soul
has its gain. It might quite well be that Shakspere in writing
his line had in his mind Paul's phrase : " The last enemy that
shall be destroyed is death ;" but, nevertheless, he was not
speaking in the theological sense ; and it is only by tearing
the last line away from its context that he can be made to
seem to do so. The truth is that all through these out-
pourings of his own most intimate feeling Shakspere indicates

125

no religious habit of mind whatever, in the sense of a creed
concerning things unseen and unknown.

But even moredecisive, perhaps, is the mannerin which death
and sin are treated-of in the great tragedies, and in the play of
Measure for Measure, in which, as in the other comedies of his
closing years of work, the deep note of brooding thought blends
with the lighter phases of the plot, and underlies the finally
fortunate action, giving the whole much of the profounder
strain of the tragedies proper. You remember how, while the
imprisoned young Claudio lies hoping that his sister will win
his pardon, the Duke, disguised as a Friar, sets himself to pre-
pare the young man's mind for death. Now, in all his professed
consolation there is not a word of life beyond the grave, the
considerations urged being exaftly such as might have been
put by an ancient pagan. Death is but a sleep, and we are
always willing to sleep ; life is but a going towards death, full
of burdens and vain striving : and old age is not worth calling
life. Neither does Isabella speak of heaven ; and when Claudio
breaks down in his terror at the prospe(?t of execution, his
outcry contains, instead of a reference to the Christian doctrines
of the future state be}-ond purgatory, a singular expression of
old beliefs in the possibility of the disembodied spirit being
blown about in the winds or entering into a state of madness.
Only at the close of his parting speech, telling him to prepare
for death, does the Duke use the single phrase " Go to your
knees and make ready." Once, again, in the Duke's account
of Barnardine as " a creature unprepared, unmeet for death,"
who must not be executed in such a frame of mind, we do
catch the technical theological note ; but never, even when the
Duke speaks to Isabella of Claudio as being aftually dead, do
we have the consolatory side, so-called, of the belief in
immortality.

Thus did the great dramatist deal with death : how then
did he envisage sin ? ^^^e have glanced at lago, but lago is
not so much a sinner as an incarnation of wickedness, and his
anatomy will hardly help us. The odious Angelo, again, sins
and repents with equal precipitation. The tragedy of human
sin in Shakspere is Macbeth, as Lear is the tragedy of elemental
evil ; and to that we look for his conception of the passage
of a human soul from rectitude to ruin. This tragedy is the
more useful a test-study because it has been claimed by a not
undiscriminating critic as an illustration of Shakspere's positive
theology. I refer to Mr. Edward R. Russell, whose essay on
The Religion of Shakspere* is one of the more reasonable

• Theological Review, Oct., 1876.

126

attempts to deal with the problem from the orthodox side.
There is, of course, the usual difficulty as to the sense in which
the word religion is used. Mr. Russell remarking that Measure
for Measure, the untheological charadler of which we have just
noted, is "in intention one of the most religious" of Shak-
spere's plays. But Mr, Russell draws distinctions. There
are, he candidly admits, some of Shakspere's plays, " written
in his latest period, which, though fraught with moral inten-
tion, bear no trace of specially excited religious feeling, and,
indeed, contain not a single religious feature except " — and the
exception is noteworthy — "the just operation of pure human
affe(5t:ions and the contrasted exhibition of reprobate vice." If
this were what we were to agree to understand as the gist of
the religion of Shakspere, there would be small need for further
discussion ; but Mr. Russell goes on to place the tragedy of
Macbeth in a different category. That play, he says, " is a
masterpiece of moral discrimination, with the Supreme Being
and conscience ever conspicuously present ; and the beauty of
the play as an exercise of religious dissecftion is that its dis-
tinctions are relatively true in reference to all shades of
turpitude." The last clause is somewhat vague ; but at least
we have a distindt proposition as to the recognition of the
cSupreme Being ; and Mr. Russell further declares that
Macbeth and his wife are " criminals equally cognisant of
religious truth."*

Now, these confident assertions compel reflection before
answer; and I can remember being led by Mr. Russell's dicfta
to look into the matter with special care. But the examination
only goes to show that not enough care went to the framing of
the statement in hand. A Christian disputant might with dis-
tinftly more plausibility have argued that Macbeth and his
wife illustrate the effedts of a lack of the restraint of real
religious belief on conduct. When we look for traces of the
theological beliefs of the criminals we find hardly a word,
hardly a suggestion, that can be fairly founded on. There are,
indeed, phrases embodying current tenets, but of a real belief
in the government of the world by the deity of current faith
there is no trace. Phrases to that effedt; are put in the mouth
of other personages: Banquo says (iii. 6), " In the great hand
of God I stand;" a minor character speaks of the help of
" Him above, to ratify the work," and there are the passages
(iv. 3) on the cure of the king's evil by Edward the Confessor,
and on the devout life of Malcolm's mother ; but such utterances

' Art. cited, p. 482.

127

fall far short of proving a pervading religious feeling. Macbeth
himself does indeed once chafe that he should have

" Mine eternal jewel
Given to the common enemy of man ''

only for the seed of Banquo ; but the idea never recurs, and
when he calculates beforehand the results of killing Duncan
he uses a phrase (i. 7) : " We'd jump the life to come,"' which
expresses downright indifference to the chances of a hereafter.
When he decides to kill Banquo he apostrophises the absent
man in the words that if his soul is to find heaven it must do
so that night ; but the phrase is a mere form which obviously
rests on no vital conviction. When, feeling his need of
blessing, he finds " Amen " stick in his throat, his religion is
again but a trick of habit, and his terror resolves itself on the
instant into the horrible fear that he has murdered sleep in
this present world, not fear of punishment in the next. And
when crime has followed crime, and he and his partner are
haggardh' facing the consequences, there is no word of a God
or of a menacing hereafter. Even when he alludes by habit
of speech to another world, he virtually negates it :

" Let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer.
Ere we will eat our meat in fear, and sleep
In the afiflicftion of these terrible dreams
That shake us nightly : better be with the dead
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasv. Duncan is in his ^rrave :
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well."

When the cry of the women over his self-slain wife reaches
him, he remembers how he could once be moved by the
suggestion of the supernatural, but feels that that is no
longer possible ; and, when the news of her end comes, he
has no thought of any life for her beyond the grave, but
mournfully speaks of death as ending all.

" Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more ; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

He still believes perforce in an equivocating fiend ; but he
no more reasons now from fiend to deity than he had done
when he was first hailed by the weird sisters.

Mr. Russell said the Supreme Being and conscience were
always present in the play. Conscience — yes ! and all the more

128

luridly present because its light is the only one that burns on
the course of things. This is a drama of conscience because
conscience is reckoned with as living consciousness, able to
decree and to read its own doom, and working out that doom
from day to day in fear and memor}-, and from night to night
in heart-shaking dreams. This was the sleepless minister
that limned the dagger in the air before the deed was done ;
that choked the murderer's voice with horror and flashed on
his sense the desolation yet to come ; that burned on his brain
the vision of his hangman's hands, which would

" The multitudinous seas incarnadine
Making the green, one red."'

This was the potent power that in the most elec1:rically
dramatic scene in all literature makes the crowned assassin
shriek at the spedlre of his murdered comrade, seen by no eyes
but his own. No notion of " religious truth," but the throb of
the whole guilt-poisoned sense, struggles through the stertorous
breathing of the stricken woman — all unable to unsex herself,
when all is done — in her terrible dream of blood, the blood
whose ineradicable stain eats into her own veins and withers her
away before her time. When did pulpiter preach such a homily
on crime as this ? How idle does the old-world mechanism of
theology become beside this living and palpitating vision, cast
forth by the magician from his own miraculous brain. He has
turned history to naught for all time. The real Macbeth, we
read, was a devout supporter of the Church, and was certainly
no criminal ; the murder of Duncan being but a chronicler's
fable. The investigating historian* pronounces him praftically
a ** mirror of sanc:tity in a graceless age," a royal revivalist
in an age of spiritual destitution ; and doubtless his wife
helped him in his work of evangelization. But the proved
historic faft remains for us but a dim recollection ; the imagined
course of things is the reality for posterity ; and Macbeth's name
only lives on the lips of civilized man because a mighty reader
of the human heart found it tied to an old story of crime which
he could transform into something more lasting than marble,
because what he worked in was the very stuff of life and thought.
This play, we have seen, is singled out, as exceptional, from
the other serious works of Shakspere's maturity, some of which
are admitted to suggest no religion except that of human feel-
ing. This being so, it seems needless to do more than indicate
the proofs. Which plays Mr. Russell would allow to be sub-
stantially non-religious we can of course only guess, but pro-

• Burton, " History of Scotland," revised ed. i. p. 346.

129

bably Lear would be admitted to be such a one. Assuredly
there is not in literature a profounder impeachment of the
theory that sees in human things the overruling hand of a
power that metes out to each personality a just lot. Cause
and effect we indeed trace through the dread series of events,
the headstrong passion of the old king coming out observably
in the headstrong wickedness of his unnatural daughters and
the headstrong reticence of the one that loves him, and who
dies before him in her attempt to come to his aid. Gloucester's
levity, too, recoils on himself in the suffering brought upon him
by his son. The better and the worse alike obey a law in
things ; but it is a law of destruction, of a fate untempered to
goodness or to vileness, striking impassively at the true and
the false as they come within the line of its blow. Albany at
the close declares that —

" All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue ; "

but what were Cordelia's wages ? Once more, if George Eliot
is Godless, what shall we say of this ? And conceive the bring-
ing to bear on that final scene of death the doftrine of a happy
reconstruction of all things in another world ; a recommence-
ment of the life of that direfully compounded family, with its
broken father, his murdered child, and her demoniac sisters.
Who has ever refused to say Amen to the petition of the faith-
ful servant, " \'ex not his ghost ! Oh, let him pass ! "

Of Hamlet, the great problem-play, it is plainly impossible
to treat adequately here in the present connection. It has a
whole literature of its own, not lightly to be summarised by
those who best know its intricacies. I^ut this much may be
said : that no theory of the tragedy will turn it any more suc-
cessfully than the other great plays to the account of the
opinion that Shakspere, in Mr. Mallock's phrase, viewed life
by the light of the Christian Sun of Righteousness. Those of
us who find in the play a conscious Pessimism have but to
answer that the problem before the man Hamlet had only two
possible solutions ; of which one, the killing of his uncle, was
that effected by the barbarian of the original Hamlet story,
who can hardly be pretended to act by Christian lights; while
the other, that of forgivingly leaving his uncle alone- — which
would, one imagines, be the stricftly Christian course of adfion
— is as obviously unimaginable to Shakspere as it is to all his
commentators, Christian and other. Curiously enough, the
former have all agreed in denouncing Hamlet for not taking
personal vengeance on his father's murderer. Mr. Lowell, who
avows his retention of theological habits of mind, takes up

I30

this position in his admirable if over-worshipful essay " Shak-
spere Once More ; " Schlegel and Victor Hugo rate the prince
as a sceptic ; the first finding him sceptical as to religion, and
the second seeing in him a sceptic as to life's worth ; and it
seems to be perceived only in unbelieving quarters that Shak-
spere meant to suggest this : that the killing of Claudius by
the son of Gertrude, the sometime lover of Ophelia, and the
sometime friend of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — however
Christian might be such a course of acition, and as to this
Shakspere would probably have had no practical scruples —
was not a solution that put things substantially right. From
this point of view it is to be concluded that if Shakspere had
looked at his dramatic themes in the light of simple Chris-
tianity, his plays would have given us considerably less to
think about than they have done.

In fine, Shakspere's dramas are of a perennial fascination
just because they do not repeat those formulas made so
familiar to us by the general literature of Christendom, but
present, on the contrary, the results of the penetrating gaze
on human life of a great percipient and sympathetic intelli-
gence. He remains our great teacher just because he never
professes to teach ; our most universal mind because he has
not echoed the things which the majority are taught to regard
as universal truth. He represents for us serenity and vidtory
over life because the peace he seems to have found in his
closing years was won by profound experience and infinite
refledtion, not by any acceptance of ancient solutions lying
ready to his hand. Much has been said of the note of
reconciliation that closes his later plays, as Cymbelinc, The
Tanpcst, and the Winter's Talc. The choice of such themes
cannot but be taken to indicate a tranquillity coming with
years ; but it came because the other stages had been gone
through, and it does not reverse the lessons arrived at in
these. Cynihclinc is no comedy; its dcnounicnt includes the
death of the king's wife and her son ; and the Wintcr'a Tale,
with its gap of seventeen lost years in the lives of Hermione
and her husband, a gap made by the mad folly of the unworthy
man, seems to me as sad a thing as many a tragedy. But
the lesson is that endurance is medicinal ; and that while we
cannot evade evil we can courageously sustain it. Shakspere's
final philosophy is the philosophy of fortitude, a fortitude
based on a wide estimate of things and a constant sense of
their relativity. In Lear there is central discord, summed up
in the cry of the blinded Gloucester :

" As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods ;
They kill us for their sport."

131

In The Tempest the discord is resolved, but the note is not
that of commonplace optimism :

" We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

I am here forced to remember that the critic* I have
already quoted finds in The Tempest " an answer to the
weary doubts of ages in the presence of calamities caused by
omnipotence, which seems malevolent in not having prevented
them." Mr. Russell's idea is that the magician Prospero " is
put, without profanity, almost in the place of Deity ; " and he
describes him as " a man perfeftly wise and gracious, scarcely
distinguishable in purity and benevolence from what we believe
of God." Such expressions as these throw a valuable light
on discussions concerning religious belief. Nothing seems
too extravagant to be said by way of setting forth human
conceptions of the mystery, as men profess to call it, of divine
existence. Prospero had utterly negle(5ted the government of
his kingdom while he had it, and so had been dethroned.
With all his magic he can do nothing to humanise or raise
the brute-man Caliban ; and when this creature and the others
plot against him, this is how he delivers himself:

" A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick ; on whom my pains
Humanely taken, all are lost, quite lost ;
And as with age his body uglier grows
So his mind cankers. I will plague them all
Even to roaring."

And this is how he rules the sweet sprite Ariel :

" If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak,
And peg thee in his knotty entrails till
Thou hast howl'd away twelve winters."

And this ruler, " plaguing them all even to roaring," is to
represent " in purity and benevolence, what we believe of
God." Verily men have made God in their own image,
and have bowed themselves before the poor work of their
hands. But that Shakspere did this, that Shakspere meant
us to see in the doings of his Prospero an answer to " the
w^eary doubts of ages in the presence of calamities caused
by omnipotence " — this, with all respect, we must really pro-
nounce to be not a proposition worth serious discussion. We
are bound to repeat that thus to conceive of Shakspere is not
to read his mind out of the plays, but to read into the plays

* Mr. Russell, art. cited, p. 483.

132

a set of preconceived opinions with which they are really
irreconcilable. The final effedt of such reasoning is the definite
collapse of the dod:rine that Shakspere is in any normal or
received sense of the term a religious poet.

To see a really religious dramatist, and by the contrast to
realise what Shakspere is, we have but to turn to the Spanish
Calderon, in his own country as great a name as Shakspere is
in ours. The Spanish mind in Shakspere's age really was
religious in a fashion which definitely marked it off from the
English, and as a result we have, as Mr. Lewes points out,* a
whole dramatic literature devoted to the setting forth of
theological ideas. Thus in one Spanish play we have, as
Mr. Lewes tells, t " a hermit whose life has been a life of
virtue, stained and distorted by one unpardonable crime, that
of religious doubt. He doubts the divine clemency ; doubts
whether he shall be saved. This damns him. His soul is
precipitated into the abyss at the same moment that a bandit,
who perishes on the scaffold for his crimes, dies penitent and is
saved." Here we have " religious truth '" in a form that admits
of no perplexity. And Calderon, who was a member of the
Holy Inquisition, abounds in such doctrinal strokes. In the
play entitled Devotion to the Cross, the life of the hero has been
a series of revolting crimes; but "in the midst of all this
villainy there is a virtue. He says that he has always sted-
fastly believed in God, and always raised a cross upon the
grave of his vicftims (a practice common with southern
banditti) and hopes in consequence of this stedfast faith — a
faith which no corruption of his soul could impair — that he
shall obtain salvation. And he obtains it." So again in the
Purgatory of St. Patrick, Ennio, a criminal of the most brutal
description, who boasts of his murders and villainies, is finally
saved because, having seduced a nun, he is stricken with an
ecclesiastical remorse. " This glimpse of the true faith," says
Mr. Lewes, " saves him. This terror of the offended church
and tribute to her awful power is the cause of his salvation."

In The Wonderful Magician, again, we have one sustained
theological disquisition, in which are successively shown the
superiority of monotheism to polytheism, and of Christianity
to simple monotheism ; the Evil One being represented as
baffled alike in argument and in deed when he deals with
monotheists and Christians. If there is any meaning in the
words, this is indeed viewing human aftairs in the light of the

* In his little book, " The Spanish Drama."
t Page III.

133

Sun of Christianity ; and the result, as seen in Calderon, alike
from the points of view of morals and of literary art, may be
commended to the attention of students of all schools; but
nothing is more clear than that the method of vShakspere is a
diametrically opposite one. Schlegel, who admired both drama-
tists to excess, says of Calderon that : " Blessed man ! he had
escaped from the wild labyrinths of doubt into the stronghold of
belief; ... to him human life was no longer a dark riddle.
Even his tears refleft the image of Heaven, like the dew-drops
on a flower in the sun."* And the same critic elsewhere lays
it down that in dramatic art " The enigma of life should not be
barely expressed, but solved." Nothing more is needed to
establish the contrast, for Schlegel was one of the first to say
that in Shakspere's most famous play the solution is awanting.
Mr. Lewes' comments fitly sum the matter up : " The riddle of
life is doubtless unsolved by Shakspere, whose soul was heavy
with its intolerable burden. It was lightly solved by Calderon
— but how ? It required no great effort of the mind to preach a
do(?trine constantly preached by the Church. Whoso looks
into Calderon for a solution of the riddle of life may find one,
indeed ; but, unless he be a devout Catholic, he will not estimate
it highly."

I can conceive its being obje(fted to the foregoing line of
reasoning in general that after all it proves too much. The
upshot, it may be said, is to make out that Shakspere rejected
the religion of his time all round, and was virtually a free-
thinker ; and it cannot be pretended that the data for this view
are sufficient. I answer that I have distinguished between
possibilities of speculative religious belief on the part of
Shakspere and the application by him of any such idea to the
criticism of life. It is on the latter question I have dwelt,
simply affirming that Shakspere criticises life by the represen-
tation of it, and not by the light of any theological system.
To call him a convinced unbeliever in revelation is a very
different matter; and on that head I only ask you to note the
negative character of the evidence. In all Shakspere the
words atheist or atheism never occur at all, though they must
have been often heard in his time, in which atheism is discussed
by Bacon. It is certain, too, that Shakspere must have heard
of the atheism of Marlowe, and impossible that he should not
have devoted some thought to it. The word infidel, again, he
uses four times ; but in all four cases it is either synonymous
with Jew or Turk, or stands as a random expletive. On the
whole, we may fairly say that whatever may have been his

* " Lectures on Dramatic Literature," Bohn trans, ed. 1861, p. 504.

^34

final attitude, he had nothing to say against unbelievers in
current doctrine.

Does all this, then, in any way alienate Shakspere from the
hearts of the majority of his countrymen ? Mr. Russell, who
grants that " with Shakspere we are bound in truth and good
taste to be especially careful and reticent in any religious
criticisms we may pass upon him,"='- and who, despite his own
inferences, admits that " it is unlikely that he made religion an
attentive personal pursuit," yet proceeds to say that " irreligion
must have been repulsive" to him. But what zs irreligion ?
Our laborious friend. Dr. Ulrici, reviewing the subject late in
life, says''- he is " no longer surprised that Shakspere has been
made a pantheist, a naturalist, a sensualist, and an atheist.
In this respect," he goes on, "the principal question to be dis-
cussed must refer to the ethical character of Shakspere's
dramas. For a truly ethical view of life is not compatible either
with atheism or with a consistent pantheism or naturalism."
But what is atheism or pantheism or naturalism ? Let us not
be blinded by words. We may debate on questions of abstract
philosophy for our lives long, ringing the changes on atheism
and theism, monism and dualism, deism and pantheism, and
be all the while on the same platform as regards our acitual
moral practice. Nine-tenths of these disputes are from begin-
ning to end essentially verbal, and if there is ever to be a use-
ful classification of creeds it must be one based on the con-
nection men effect between thought and deed.

The atheist says, not, as I take it, that there is no mystery
behind things, but that he, as a conditioned thinker, is without
God ; the question for the theist is : In what sense is he, on
the contrary, with God ? Does his God meddle with affairs,
overrule, adjust, reward, punish ; or does our theist see in
Nature the sheer operation of primordial law ? Does he con-
ceive Deity personally or impersonally ? If the first, then he
is pra(5tically at issue with the other. If he prays for rain and
sunshine, help and healing, then his theism is something real
and practical. I read that in a current story in one of the
magazines, a man who is saved from a shipwreck in which
everybody else is drowned, is convinced that he sees •' the hand
of God in this matter" — the divine goodness and wisdom
being to his mind exhibited in the singling out of him in
particular for preservation. Similarly, we constantly read of
people who, happening to miss a train which gets into collision,
see in their escape a " miraculous interposition," the cause of

* Art. cited, p. 466.
t Shakspeare's Dramatic Art, i. pref. p. vii.

135

the fate of the killed and wounded being piously left out of the
induction. Now, the religion of these people is real ; and they
will presumably do their best to bring up their children in
their extraordinary faith. It is, of course, exa(5tly on all fours
with that of kings and churches who thank God for victory
when the victory happens to be on their side. But if you
repudiate such theism, if your theory disowns such notions
of divine intervention, what quarrel have you with others whose
abstract theory differs from yours, but whose relation to a(5tual
life is the same ?

In this pradt;ical and vital sense, it is becoming every day
more plain, there is no difference between so-called materialists
and multitudes of nominal adherents of the Christian faith,
to say nothing of philosophic theism or pantheism. All alike
have eliminated the conception of deity from every-day life.
To the true believer, of course, this is a grievance. Just as,
long ago, Leibnitz logically enough denounced the mechanical
philosophy of Newton as atheistic because it removed God
outside the universe, so the consistent Christian may logically
protest that a theism which separates personal Deity from
human affairs is practically atheism. But whether we call
such a relation to life religious or irreligious is a mere question
of words ; and I have simply undertaken to show that if }ou
use the word irreligious in the old or orthodox sense then
Shakspere was profoundly irreligious. You here do not
interpret the word so any more than did the deist, Thomas
Paine, who said that to do good was his religion ; and for all
of us who applaud that utterance Shakspere is assuredly the
greatest of religious teachers. He has taught with incom-
parable power a doctrine that the Christian Church has at
times faintly and vainly hinted at, but by reason of her own
incurable limitations never could bring home to the general
mind — that in not one but a thousand touches of nature all
mankind are kin ; and he has so shown it all that we learn
to sympathise with the weaknesses of our fellows by the very
process by which we perceive the harmfulness of their flaws
and vices and egoisms. All moral progress will be found to
consist in a progress in sympathy ; and of whom shall it be
said that he has done more to promote that than this man
whose very calling has been arrogantly denounced and despised
by those who claimed to possess the only right method of
promoting goodness, and who in their darkness could not see
that the ultimate fundtion of this calling was to effetl the
spread of conscientiousness as no other art or device could do,
by bringing home at once to eye and ear, to sense, heart, and

136

mind, the moral truths that dogma and precept could never
enforce aright.

All men, it has been said, and we have seen some of the
evidence, find their own opinions supported in Shakspere ; and
we say that this universality, this breadth of range in which so
many little systems can live w^ithout jostling, is a supreme
proof of Shakspere's greatness. But does it not prove some-
thing more ? Does not this common capacity of sedts and
seftarians to meet in Shakspere, so to speak, suggest that
there is at bottom very much less real difference between
the warring systems than those who embrace them suppose ?
That they are after all brothers in heart, who have been long
sundered by vain subtleties, and who if they would but see it,
might meet even now in the effort to live aright, leaving off
their barren quest of that which cannot be found, and their
"doubtful dreams of dreams"? Why else should it be that
while the dreams shift and waver and are transformed from
year to year ; while what was thought to be everlasting truth
crumbles into dust as of vanishing skeletons, men perpetually
turn with the same eager interest to this world of immortal
imagination, this strange sea of human life, whose waters seem
to clothe with a new vitality the bleached bones of the primal
men ? What can the reason be but this, that here we do get
truth concerning life and conscience ; that here a man even as
ourselves, weak where we are weak, only great where we are
narrow, seized for us a view of the world-drama in which our
own concerns become newly intelligible because we see them
as part of the human whole ; that he has so sounded the depths
of being, and so revealed us to ourselves, that he almost seems
himself to count for us as a revelation, and, as the poet sings,

" All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow."'-'

JOHN M. ROBERTSON.

July 10th, 1887.

• Matthew Arnold's Sonnet on Shakspere.

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BY BREAD ALONE.

IN the 4th verse of the 4th chapter of the Gospel attributed
to one Matthew we read that, when the Tempter
challenged the Son of Man to prove his divine kinship by
changing stones into bread, the Tempted One replied : — " It is
written, man shall not live by bread alone but by every word
that proceedeth out of the mouth of God."

It may, perchance, be a matter of surprise to some now
listening to me that I, Lara the Heretic, should seleft as a
text for my discourse an aphorism from the teachings of one
whose historical being is more than questionable, whose ethics
are more than doubtful, and whose economics have been proved
by the sad experience of nearly 2,000 years to be totally
impraifticable. Such anomaly, however, if anomaly there be,
I do not now propose to discuss. I have chosen this aphorism
as my text for more reasons than one ; but chiefly for the
reason that beneath the superficies of its smartness as an apt
quotation, very a propos to the exigencies of the circumstances
under which it is said to have been uttered, I have found,
or fancied that I have found, a deeper meaning than was,
perhaps, intended either by him who uttered it or by him
who narrated its utterance. He who seeks for a truth as
such is not concerned with the credit of him who happens
to first translate that truth into speech. A diamond will
glitter no less brightly on the brow of beauty for the fadt
that it once lay lustreless in the mire of a Brazilian mine ;
and truth would still be true though shrieked from the lips
of a maniac. If this be so, then, shall we, the heirs of
all the ages, refuse any portion of our heritage because we
find the jewel lying, haply, among rubbish, or because its
brightness is obscured by impurities? I trow not. And so
let us this morning take up this gem from amidst its legendary

138

associations, and, freeing it from its outer calx, seek to call
from its inmost heart of fire some ray that may prove a light
to lighten our darkness, and to guide our feet into a way of
peace. If we look for a setting to our jewel, for a context to
the words I have placed before you, we shall find it in the
29th verse of the 104th Psalm : — " Thou hidest thy face, they are
troubled; thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to
their dust.^' These words, as you know, were addressed by a
bard of olden time to a conception which he revered as God.
Now, God is not only the etymological synonym for good, it is
also the personified entity in which man has for ages been
accustomed to incorporate all that he has been able to
conceive of goodness. That conception has varied with the
variation of his own mentality. It has enlarged with the
expansion of his intellect, and it has progressed with the
progression of his ethics. True it is that this formulation of
the God — or Good — Idea has assumed forms which to the
more cultivated tastes of to-day are more or less ridiculous or
repulsive ; but let us beware lest we apply this former term too
lightly. Let us not forget that the savage cowering in the
dust before his tawdry and hideous idol is, after all, only the
ruder prototype of the philosopher standing with bowed head
and downcast eyes before the inscrutable mystery of the
Unknowable. Let us, then, accept truth wheresoever we may
find it. Reverently because it is true, and with some tolera-
tion of its surroundings because those surroundings are sancfti-
fied by the sacred presence of truth.

And now, having in some measure cleared the way before
us, let us revert to our text, and, translating it from the broken
utterances of adolescence into the stronger speech of manhood,
write it thus : Man shall not live by bread alone, but also by the
wisdom that proceedeth out of the heart of Goodness. And so, too,
in the context, we may now say of Goodness, as David said of
God, " Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled ; thou takest away
their breath, they die, and return to their dust.''

Yes. IntellecSt may justly boast her well-won triumphs in
the academic arena. Science may proudly hold aloft her
blazing lamp till the dazzled millions gaze agape at its glory —
and Philosophy may kindle her beacon-fires on the utmost
peaks of human thought — but if this mild-eyed angel of Good-

139

ness hides her face meanwhile, then indeed we are troubled,
and when she, departing, wafts away with the rustling of her
wings the breath of our better life, then truly do we die, and
return to the dust and ashes of our barren materialism.

Man shall not live by bread alone ! Bread alone may
satisfy men's cravings for a time, as for a time it has satisfied
mine. It will suffice to maintain the existence of an intel-
lecftual vegetable, and, for a shorter period, that of a mentating
animal. But, after this, there comes a stage in our mental
evolution when bread alone ceases to be enough. There comes
a time when a something is evolved from the developing
organism, which stands as high above mere intelleft as
intelle(5l stands above mere sensation. Call it soul, spirit
mind, or what you will, it bursts the chrysalis-chains of
intellecftual formalisms, and, spreading forth its radiant wings
in the light of a better day, it soars up into the blue heaven
of a cloudless noontide, outstripping the farthest-piercing
rays of the lamp of science, and scaling height beyond height
on its upward and onward course till even the beacon-fires of
Philosophy flicker faint and wan behind it down the vistas of
an immeasurable past. What and whence this seraph-presence
is we know not. Out of the night behind Nature it emerges,
swift as the lightning from the cloud, or the first lucent ray
that heralds the dawn of the tropic morning, one brief moment
— all too brief — it gleams athwart the darkness of the Inane,
and then, speeding along its parabola-path, it cleaves the veil
of futurity for an instant, and is lost for ever in the night
beyond Nature.

Like that mysterious Noumenon behind phenomena, which
has been called the Unknowable, we know it only by its effe(5ts.
Here it is the dominant note in the organ-chords of Homer —
now it whispers with zephyr-breath through the silver strings
of the harp of Hafiz ; now it is limning the dark horrors of the
Inferno ; and now it is smiling on the canvas of Raphael, in
the eyes of the Madonna and in the dimples of the Divine
Babe. It peoples the solitude of Tasso's cell with the bright
throngs of Jerusalem Delivered; and through the night of
Milton's blindness it sheds the dayspringof Paradise Regained.

This radiant angel spreads her wings over a humble wooden
house at Stratford, and lo ! a train of such creations as never

140

man saw before, march across the magic page of Shakespeare.
Again she waves those wondrous wings — a voice rings forth
in melody from the moorland slopes of Ayrshire — and behold !
the re-awakened genius of a land of song twines the laureate-
wreath round the brows of Robert Burns. Meanwhile, too,
grand symphonies of wordless song are swelling forth beneath
the master-touch of Mendelssohn and Beethoven; Shelley
strikes his transcendent lyre, and the music of the spheres
seems hushed, that a universe may listen to the wondrous theme ;
and Goethe, greatest of the great, arises to teach the world that
Genius did not die when the isles of Greece ceased to resound
with song, or when Rome saw the sun of her Augustan Age
eclipsed in the lurid night of luxury and material magnificence.

By what name shall we call this bright Presence, which thus
ever and anon illumines the shadows of a way that is all too
dark ? We know but its manifestations, and these we call
music, poetry, painting or sculpture. To the generalization of
all the highest forms of aesthetic faculty we have given the
name Genius — a term which for all the definitions that have
been attempted, remains a name still and nothing more. And
yet is not this mysterious entity of us wholly ? Is it not blood
of our blood, brain of our brain, and soul of our soul ? Is it
not human in our humanity, and yet divine in our divinity —
inseparably interwoven in the fibres of our being, — a golden
thread which runs gleaming on from age to age through the
duller warp and woof of our every day homespun ? It is the
realization of the Promethean fable — the spark of fire divine
that animates and transfigures the grosser clay of our animal
organism. In one word it is that part of man which cannot
live by bread alone.

It will not be uninstru(5tive to dwell here for a few moments
on a brief consideration of the chief theories which have ob-
tained and still obtam among men with regard to this essential
principle of our humanity — or, as I feel almost tempted to say,
of our divinity. These theories may be numbered by that per-
sistent three which ever confronts us wheresoever we may turn.
Two of them, starting from different hypotheses, proceed to
diametrically opposite extremes. The third is a via media.
The three paths are alike only in this — that each proceeds out
of a fathomless mystery within, and disappears into inscrutable

141

mystery without. The theologian, premising the God-Idea,
postulates the Soul of Man as an emanation from the Divine
Essence, projected by the creative will into the created organ-
ism. " And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a
living soul.'" Such is the formula which crystalli2es the
theologic dogma of dualism. The dust of the ground animated
by the breath of life. On the other hand the Materialist
premises the dust of the ground, and, from the acftion and
intera(5tion of its particles, evolves the breath of life, — making
thus soul and body one — the one a process and function of the
other. Thus briefly may be indicated the Charybdis of
Theology and the Scylla of Materialism. To follow the one
path is to plunge into the bewildering whirl of a transcendental
shadow-dance. To follow the other is to seek shipwreck
between the twin reefs of an inexorable dilemma.

The postulate of matter mentated by matter mentating is a
circulus in probanda from which there is no possible escape. Of
the via media between these two broad and easy paths, so
numerously frequented, and so confidently trodden, we may
say in familiar metaphor that straight is the gate and narrow
is the way of Agnosticism and comparatively few there be that
find it.

It is a path to be trodden only by resolute and yet reverent
feet. Here the compass of Science points, not to a demon-
strable magnetic pole on earth, but rather to the lode-star of
Faith which through the night behind phenomena sheds its
ever-constant ray across the storm-tossed seas of speculation.
Here we walk by sight, it is true, but only to the marge of the
phenomenal horizon. When this limit is reached the firm
footstep of Investigation falters and fails. The soul may
spread her bright pinions and soar into unexplored regions
beyond, but her flight is by faith rather than by sight, and
towards a goal that may never be attained. But of such
themes as these enough for the present. I do not propose to
dwell any longer within the ultramundane regions into which
a full consideration of my subjedt must necessarily conduftus.
Those regions, though bathed in cloudless sunlight, and fanned
by breezes of everlasting freshness, are too elevated for pro-
longed sojourn. Our eyes, accustomed to see, for the most

142

part, through a glass darkly, are soon dazzled by the fierce light
that glows upon the shining peaks which rise above the cloud-
line of our sensory horizon ; and the atmosphere of these far-
off slopes is too rarefied to be long inhaled by the lungs of us
dwellers on the plains, whose native air is of a much denser
quality. I will, therefore, now seek to diredl your thoughts
for a few moments to the nearer and more familiar aspe(5ts of
the subjedl-matter of my theme.

In his introductory survey of the causes conducing to the
progress of Humanity along the pathway of social evolution,
the Author of the History of Civilization commits himself to
the statement that Intellectual truths are the cause of progress.
Moral truths he considers to be stationary, while intelled1;ual
truths are very progressive. Although I am, of course, sensible
of considerable diffidence in critically approaching a statement
invested with the authority of Henry Thomas Buckle, yet I
must, nevertheless, express my conviction that the dicJtum I
have just quoted is only the expression of half a truth. There
can, I think, be no question that intellec5tual truths are the
cause of progress ; but that they are the cause of all progress
— as implied in this dic5tum — I do not feel able to admit.
Intellecft has done much, very much, for the advancement of
our race along the planes of pure reason and material pros-
perity ; but if we seek for the motive force which has impelled
mankind along the higher planes of moral and psychic develop-
ment — we must, I think, look outside the circumscribed domain
of mere Intellecft.

A brief review of the intellecRiual and moral state of modern
society will, I think, afford adequate proof of the validity of
this position. No other period of the world's history, so far as
that history carries us back, has been signalised by such head-
long intellec5tual progress as the century which is now drawing
to its close. Out of the lurid clouds of the battle-storm which
darkened its two first decades, the Man-typical of the Western
nations emerged, armed with new and tremendous powers
The Hand of Clay had grasped that Iron Sceptre, under
whose irresistible sway the hitherto unbridled forces of nature
were so soon to become the meekest yet the mightiest of
slaves ; and with this rod of empire in his hand, and crowned
with the steely diadem of Intellec5^, the man of to-day has

143

advanced to the conquest of a universe. He has wrested the
thunder-bolts from the hand of Jove, and chained the light-
nings to the car of his royal progress. The terror of his
fathers illumines his palaces and his streets. Finless and
wingless, he has dived beneath the ocean and soared beyond
the clouds. His daring gaze has penetrated the awful abysses
of space ; and with rule and line he has mapped out the sun-
strewn fields of Immensity. The star-ray, wandering for ages
through the ethereal depths, has been captured, and passed
through the prism of his specftroscope that it might reveal the
secrets of the far-distant orb from whence it sprang when
David ruled in Salem. His voice has rung back through the
dim seons of our planet's immeasured past, and at his imperial
bidding the hand of Nature has unfolded the rock-bound
volume of earth before his inquiring gaze. He has summoned
the shades of his ancestors from their tombs of the prehistoric
past that they might tell him the story of Man ere the birth
of the Muse of History. All this and more has he done, and
the triumph-roll of his mighty deeds is not yet full. But,
alas ! this is not all the story of the Iron Century. Like the
king of old, the Man of the Present has ascended the roof of
his Palace of Intelleft, and, looking over the fair city of his
creation, he has exclaimed in the pride of his heart: — "Behold
great Babylon that I have built !"

So — satisfied in his soul, and at peace with himself — he has
descended to the Feast of Bread Alone. Dainty viands and
various load the splendid board, yet, in the meaning of my
text, Bread Alone is there. Many are the guests, and gay the
goodly company of feasters. Only one place is vacant, only
one cup stands uncrowned and untasted. Suddenly, when the
revel is at its height, and the life-wine glowing its brightest,
the portal opens — a chill blast sweeps through the perfumed
air of the guest-chamber, and the Skeleton Guest stalks, grim
and silent to the seat prepared for him. For a time his
presence seems unnoticed. The revel proceeds unchecked, yet
not unchanged. The melody of the song seems marred by
some subtle dissonance — and a minor chord seems to mingle
with the full-voiced strain, like a wail of agony piercing the
triumph-songs of vi(5torious armies. The wine still flashes
in the tinted light — but some livid gleam seems to shoot

144

athwart its brightness. The laugh still rings up from the red,
smiling lips to the gilded roof-tree ; but as its echo comes
back, it seems to die away in a long-drawn note that jars like
a death-rattle through the music of the revelry. At length the
Silent Guest arises from his seat, and raises aloft a beaker
brimming with wine. For a moment he holds it high in air, —
then dashes it untasted to the ground. Instantly the laugh is
hushed, and the song dies away in a wail of discord. Then
amid the hush that follows, the grim Guest stretches forth his
fleshless hand, and, rending aside the silken draperies that
cover the wall, writes with his bony finger on the surface
beneath, the Mcne, Mene, tekel Upharsin of the tribunal of
Destiny.

The words of awful omen stand out for an instant black
upon the whited wall — then over the palace roof bursts the
thunder-bolt of Doom, and the fair fabric dissolves into thin
air like a vision of the night — leaving only a shapeless mound
of dust and ashes to mark the place of its vanished glories.

The allegory may be hard to read for us who live to-day
amid the whirl and bustle of the world, with the laughter and
the song ringing loud in our ears ; but go and stand a moment
amid the silence and desolation of Luxor and Sais, of Nineveh
or Babylon — and the meaning is so plain that he who runs
may read.

The men of these cities have lived by bread alone — and lo !
they have died the death, and the place of their habitation
knoweth them no more !

Do you think my parallel overdrawn, or my picture too
highly coloured ? Have we no Skeleton Guest at the banquet
of our Nineteenth Century prosperity ? If you think so come
with me in the spirit, and let us pace the midnight thorough-
fares of this great and glorious London, this capital of the
world, this metropolis of an empire, compared with which the
realms of the Caesars were a petty kingdom, and the domains
of Alexander a province. How softly gleams yon golden Cross
in the moonlight that bathes the vast dome of that stately
cathedral ! But look again — and this time nearer earth ! How
ghastly wan looks the paint and powder on the face of yon
wretched harlot, as she stands beneath the glare of that electric
light ! How pitilessly, too, does its blaze beat down upon the

145

rent rags and haggard face of yon starving outcast, as he creeps
barefoot past our Bank of England, with its stored-up millions!
Or let us go and stand outside yonder Mayfair Mansion, whose
windows are ablaze with light, and where " bright the lamps
shine o'er fair women and brave men." Down the soft-
carpeted stairway and out through the wide-open portals flows
a stream of witching strains, mingled with sweet-voiced
laughter and the odorous breath of flowers.

Out into the cold dark street flows the flood of mingled
light and melody, and we stand for a moment as though
entranced by some fairy spell. But alas ! the charm is soon
broken. We have not stood there long before the brightness
grows suddenly dim, as though seen through a mist of tears,
and the music seems to die away in a sob, as Lazarus wearily
drags his sore-smitten body past the palace gates of Dives.

Yes, the Skeleton Guest is with us still ; and still with the
bony hands of Want and Misery does he rend aside the silken
hangings of our festal chambers to write upon our walls that
fatal sentence : " Weighed in the balance and found wanting,"
— even as, in days gone by, he wrote it upon the walls of the
imperial palaces of Rome when Theodosius slumbered in
Ravenna and the Goth thundered at the gates of the Eternal
City.

And shall the fate of Rome and Carthage, of Byzantium
and Alexandria be also the fate of the Ocean Queen ? Shall
she, like them, gorged with a surfeit-feast of Bread Alone, and
drunken with the strong wine of material prosperity, fall a
helpless prey to the Goths and Vandals of a future age ? Let
us hope, and, what is more, let us work that it shall not be so.
Peradventure. a few just men shall save the City of our
affecftions. The gods of our youth are dead, though the organ-
thunders still roll adown the incensed aisles, and the choral
flood of praise and prayer still swells upward to the fretted
roof. Even so did it still sweep on through the pillared halls
of the Serapion when Isis and Osiris were but names and
nothing more.

The land still rings, it is true, with the ravings of Revi-
valism and the discords of Salvation bands ; but it does not
need very keen scrutiny to discover that the flame of the living
Faith is waning upon the altars of the Church, and slowly

146

flickering down to extin(5tion amid the ashes of a creed out-
worn.

But these are not the only altars, and this faith whose flame
is fading is not the only faith that is left to us.

As man's faith in his gods decreases so does his faith in
himself increase. As the lurid altar-flame of Theology dies
down so does the lamp of Science burn brighter, and the beacon-
fires of Philosophy blaze higher. It will not be an evil ex-
change provided that with the dross of Theology we do not
also lose the pure gold of Religion.

You of this South Place Society have proved by your long
years of stedfast unity that it is possible to purge away the
dross without losing the gold.

Amid the strife and clamour of a hundred and fifty con-
fli(5ting se(5\s and schisms you have kept the even tenour of
your way from the darkness of the House of Bondage to the
Promised Land that has lain before you, smiling in the sunshine
of mental freedom. In a land crowded with churches, and
swarming with priests who vehemently declare that Religion
is inseparable from Theology, you have demonstrated that a
church can live without bishop, priest, or deacon, and that
Religion can flourish without and apart from Theology-
Here within the walls of this sacred fane — none the less
sacred because no god is worshipped in it — and hallowed
moreover by the memories of men worthy to be held in honour —
you have reared an altar to Man that has never been defiled
by the mnemonic bread and wine of a cruel sacrifice, and here
you have spread a board on which the banquet is not of Bread
Alone. Here may you sit down to " the feast of reason and
the flow of soul," undeterred by the anathemas of the priest
or the scowl of the presbyter. From the wisdom of Plato and
Socrates to the pi(?tured page of Shakespeare and the melo-
dious mirth of Burns, all the wide realms of the soul are yours
undarkened by the Shadow of the Cross and unblighted by the
fiery breath of Hell.

In the memories and the teachings of those who have gone
before you, you have received a precious heritage — a heritage
of freedom, and of strength to use that freedom wisely. Look
to it, I beg of you, that you transmit these gifts of the past
untarnished to your heirs of the future.

147

Remember what one of our later poets has said of the
claims of the Future Age upon the Man of the Present : —

It demands thy thought in justice,

Debt, not tribute of the free ;
Have not ages long departed

Groaned and toiled and bled for thee ?
If the Past have lent thee wisdom

Pay it to Futurity !

So in the treasures of the Past you have received not only a
heritage but a mission. If I have read the signs of the times
aright, a day is not far distant when the world will have need
of such as you and your children. The Cross is crumbling
to dust on the summit of the world's Calvary, and the sceptre
is falling from the enfeebled grasp of Jehovah. The old order
is passing away. The sway of the gods is losing its hold
upon the minds of men. See to it, therefore, you who stand
in the vanguard of the Army of Man, that anarchy does not
supervene upon earth when the thrones of Olympus fall.
When that hour strikes and the echoing knell rings hollow
through deserted shrines and the solitude of forsaken altars
it will be for you, and such as you, to repeople that solitude
with vocal throngs whose anthems shall re-awaken the echoes
that now reply to a feebler strain. Be of good courage, now
and in the future, as you have been in the past. Gods come
and go ; creeds wax strong and wane again into weakness and
decay. Altars are reared, and crumble down into dust and
ashes. The flames of their sacrifices blaze up to the zenith
of faith, then flicker down and die in the night of denial and
death. But the pulses of the great Heart of Humanity beat on
through all the ages, and send rushing through the arteries of
the world that mighty life-tide of thought and feeling, of love
and hope and deathless aspiration, on the surface of which all
these gods and creeds and faiths are but as eddies and ripples,
gleaming awhile in the sunlight of the soul, then vanishing
from sight as the mighty stream sweeps onward.

On the bosom of this broad flood the argosy of your hopes
has been launched. So far the voyage has been prosperous.
Keep but stout hearts aboard, keen eyes to look ahead, and a

148

firm hand at the helm, and the distant haven shall be reached
in safet}' — that fair haven of heaven on earth : —

Where in the Promised Land of Rest and Peace
The Truth shall triumph and the conflicft cease ;
Where Life's long lesson shall at last be taught,
And man's redemption shall by man be wrought.

GEO. C. GRIFFITH JONES.

July ^ist, 1887.

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ETHICAL CULTURE AS A RELIGION
EOR THE PEOPLE.

TWO DISCOURSES

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A Religion for the People.

-•^H>-

Part I.

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.

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FINSBURY, E.G.

THE MORAL AND SOCIAL ASPECTS OF
THE PRESENT CONDITION OF
PRIMARY EDUCATION.

A DISCOURSE

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WILLIAM LANT CARPENTER, B.A., B.S(

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(a) from Chap. ix. of Mr. Colter Morison's" Service of Man, "and (6)
from Chap, iii. of Mr. Arnold White's " Problems of a Great City."

The Moral and Social Aspects

OF THE

Present Condition of Primary Education.

— »<x*-

It may be convenient to institute a brief preliminary enquiry
into the present condition of primary education, before pro-
ceeding to dwell upon the moral and social results of that
condition. As the subjedl is a very wide one, I propose to
confine this enquiry to two main points.

1. Whether the present condition is satisfa(5tory to those

engaged in administering it in the schools, whom we
might expect to be most deeply interested in its
success.

2. What the practical result is on the national life, as

judged by the career of young people during the
few years immediately succeeding their school life.

(i.) In a recent article in the Contemporary Review, by
Archdeacon Farrar, I find the following : — " Premising that the
Education A(5l of which he speaks has raised the number of
schools from 8,281 to 19,173, and has very nearly trebled the
total number of scholars — now 4^ millions, and that the present
annual expenditure on national elementary education is very
nearly 7 millions sterling, a vote for which, as Prof. Huxley
has said, ' Should be looked upon as a vote for national
defence.'

" It is painful to confess our disappointment as to the high
hopes which were once attached to the spread of national
education. That the Act of 1870 has produced many blessings
we thankfully admit, but it has failed to achieve anything lilcc:
so much as we had once anticipated. A stronger and ever

176

stronger convidtion is arising in many minds that our existing
scheme requires radical revision. It produces poorer in-
telledlual results than the educational systems of France and
Germany, and at far greater cost. It is too doctrinaire — too
much infected by a somewhat coarse standard of payment by
results — too much an education of books, and facts, and cram,
and inspection, and examinations — too little an education of
the hand and of the heart."

*' After twenty years of education," says Rev. S. D. Barnett,
as the result of his experience in East End, " we have neither
taught self-respect nor the means of earning a livelihood. Our
streets are filled with a mob of careless youths — and our labour
market is overstocked with workers whose work is not worth
4d. per hour."

Education undeniably has created false notions as to the
degradation of the labour which wets the brow with honest
sweat. It is not turned to account as it should be for the per-
fecting of physical work by mental application. Instead of the
majority of well educated lads becoming, say, carpenters, and
exercising their brains on the carving of a door or the making
of a table, they refuse to become carpenters at all.

The head-master of King Edward's Foundation School in
Birmingham, " receiving annually some 50 per cent, of scholars
from public elementary schools — and these, naturally, the
brightest and most intelligent — has recently had borne in upon
him the consciousness that an elementary school scholar is a
product of an abnormal condition of things. With power of
mechanical accuracy within a narrow range of work which was
phenomenally high, the scholar's power of independent thought
is abnormally low. He showed singular lack of mental alert-
ness, owing to small encouragement that had been given to his
inquisitiveness, and an absence of intellectual interest owing to
the tedious monotony and enforced slowness of his progress
through the standards. And the longer the scholar has been
in the public elementary school previous to his translation to
the secondary school, the more pronounced and clearly marked
are these weaknesses; and no doubt remained in his (Mr.
McCarthy's) mind but that these defects were traceable to the
baleful influence of * payment by results.' "

About a year ago, the London School Board, dissatisfied
with the present state of things, determined, on the motion
of Mr. Bousfield, to appoint a Special Committee (of twenty
members) to " consider the present subjects and modes
of instruction in the Board's Schools, and to report whether
such changes can be made as shall secure that children

177

leaving school shall be more fitted than they now are to perform
the duties and work of life before them."

This Committee held 22 meetings, and took evidence frora
various classes of persons able to throw light on the present
instruction in Board Schools — on its effect on the children —
and on reforms of School Work, which were necessary and
practical.

Their report — a very lengthy one of 180 folio pp. has just
been printed — and it deserves most careful consideration.* I
can only indicate its scope in the barest outline.

Defining the object of elementary education as " the har-
monious development of all the faculties, bodily and mental,
with which the child is endowed by nature," it points out that
the greater part of the benefits of education are moral benefits,
and that " fearless truth, bravery, honour, activity, manly
skill, temperance, hardihood, welded into a great national
character" are objects of national education. But when we
come to enquire if the present system does produce such har-
monious development of all the children's faculties, bodily
and mental, that they leave school filled, as far as possible for
the battle of life, there is an almost universal consensus of opinion
in the negative on the part of witnesses of all classes. Professor
Huxley's utterance at Manchester last November is quoted as
a summary — " Elementary Education is too bookish, too little
practical. The child is brought too little into contact with
actual facts and things, and there is no education of those par-
ticular faculties which are of the utmost importance to indivi-
dual life, the faculty of accurate work, and the faculty of dealing
with things instead of words."

This is not the time or place to consider the remedies for
this, proposed in the 32 recommendations made to the Board
by its Special Committee, but at the conclusion of their report
they say that " they believe the changes recommended would
be beneficial in all elementary schools, and that they feel they
cannot exaggerate the importance of the question with which
they deal, for it vitally affects the future of the mass of the
London people. ' Everybody suffers when education goes
wrong. The failures are the lives of men. The teacher's
workshop is strewed, not with shavings and wasted wood-^-but
with wasted years, and broken lives.' "

Perhaps the most powerful recent testimony, however, to
the deficiencies of our present system is to be found in the
proceedings of the National Union of Elementary Teachers,

* It may be obtained from the Printers to the Board.

178

in their annual conference at Cheltenham during Easter week.
To this Union, of 326 separate associations more than 15,000
out of the 40,000 teachers belong — and the inaugural address
of its President may be fairly taken as representing their
matured opinions, received as it was with great enthusiasm.

Its general tenour was that of utter and complete dissatis-
faction with the present state of the educational system, and
especially condemnatory of that part of it known as '' payment
by results."

I take the following extracts from the report in the Chelten-
ham Examiner : —

The President then delivered his inaugural address. He said he
did not know that he could do better than preface the remarks which
it was his duty to make than by asking the question why they were
there — why 650 of the representatives of the teachers of England
had again given up their Easter holiday, and dipped their hands
somewhat deeply into their pockets to spend a week at Cheltenham ?
Would that he could say that they had assembled to congratulate
themselves and the nation on a good year's work. The British
public might, he thought, with advantage be told through the press
represented there, that it was because the teachers of England were
not only not satisfied, but because they were extremely dissatisfied
with the way in which the elementary education of this country was
now being carried on. The public might further be told that they
(the teachers) had met for no personal benefit ; but to do what they
could to retrieve the results of official foolishness in the past, and
as far as in them lay to place the country where she ought to be,
and where, but for the Education Department, she would be among
the nations of the Continent. With us uniformity was the great
idol which our Nebuchadnezzars had set up. All children are alike,
all teachers are alike, all Inspectors are alike, all sorts and conditions
of men and neighbourhoods are alike, and under all circumstances
the same result :are demanded ! To English Code makers and
officials no lesson was conveyed by the parable of the talents. To
them it appeared to be unknown that therein every man was
rewarded according to his several ability. No wonder that the
result of such a system was failure. Whether we took the opinion
of so-called educational authorities like Mr. Mundella, business men
like Sirjohn Bennett, officials like Mr. Matthew Arnold, or practical
men like the teachers themselves, all from their personal experience
and from their contact with the stern logic of facts, testified that
in education England was practically nowhere. Could it be
wondered at that they were there that day — that England was, in
educational matters, a laughing stock to the Continent, and that a
Continental Inspector should have reported to his Government that
in the schools of England one could see exactly how everything

179

ought not to be done ? That large schools and small schools, urban
schools and rural schools, schools in good neighbourhoods and
schools in bad, schools where all comers found a welcome, and
schools where selection reigned supreme, should be judged by the
same standard and compelled to produce the same results, stamped
the system as being one of the greatest pieces of folly on the face of
the earth. Such a system was perfectly unknown on the Continent,
and would not be tolerated there for a moment. There educational
and not financial considerations reigned inside the schools, and
complete liberty of classification existed, instead of an insane system
of individual examination. If the present system be giving a
thoroughly good education to our children ; if the children and
teachers are happy ; if the children leave school, having contracted
a love of learning ; if our workmen have as much knowledge, and
are as thoughtful as Continental workmen ; then, he said, the system
was a success. If things, however, were not thus ; if our children
were not being well educated ; if real education be practically un-
known in our schools ; if children left school as early as they could,
heartily sick of the whole concern ; if English workman had less
knowledge, and were therefore less thoughtful than Continental
workmen ; if England as a result was being worked out of the
markets of the world ; and if instead of peace worry was the order
of the day; then he said the system had failed, and it and its ad-
minstrators should be swept away.

The Education Office in Whitehall had 275 clerks and
officials, but no teachers were allowed there. In fact, concern-
ing them, Punch in 1883 wrote : — " Is there any chance of our
ever having at the Education Office anyone who has ever seen
a child ? " Professor Tyndall said the shafts of ridicule often
pierce where solid arguments fail. To teachers these words
from Punch came home with the conviction of truth. They
might well form a motto and heading for every educational
journal ; and they should certainly be engraved over the
Council Office door.

Mr. Mundella, at Sheffield, said : — " The radical defect of
the age and generation with young men was that they did not
work, did not throw their souls into their industries as was
done by their fathers. The temptations of the theatre, of
amusements, and of the cigar, were too strong for them."
Yes, Mr. Mundella was right ; the temptations of the present
age were too strong for those who left our schools. Had Mr.
Mundella made his inquiries in England instead of in Germany,
had he taken advice from English teachers instead of English
officials, had he even taken the advice which was sent to him,
he would have saved himself half his trouble. English teachers
could have told him which way the wind blew. They could

i8o

and would have told him that as the tree is trained so will it
be. They could have told him that people do not take kindly
to that which they detest ; and they could have told him that
owing to the wretched monotony of our system many boys left
school disgusted with the whole affair. He would then have
known that a thoughtful lad might probably become a thoughtful
man, but that under our present system all the thought in our
elementary schools is done by the teachers, and not by the
taught. But he had hitherto dealt with the system as far as it
affected the children and the nation.

The work of the whole meeting is thus summed up by the
Cheltenham Examiner of Wednesday, April ii, 1888 : —

The Easter Conference of Teachers.

" The week of judiciously-mingled discussion and recreation has
ended as happily as it began. The debates, conducted with praise-
worthy energy and ability, have shown that the most pressing evil
of the Code, which at present governs elementary education, is pay-
ment by results. The plan is doomed, and its date of extinction
depends entirely upon the amount of pressure of public opinion
which the teachers may be able to bring to bear upon Parliament
and the Education Department. Much has been hoped from the
Education Commission now sitting, but those who profess to know
assure us that the report will be of a mild, official character, from
which little real improvement may be expected to follow."

So much for the Teachers' view of the question. Let us
now enquire a little into the results of the system as it affects
the subsequent conduct of the children who have been under
their control.

"Nobody will deny," said Lord Derby, recently, "that the
years between 13 or 14 and 20 are the most important years
of life." On the contrary — whatever people may say — in
practice this is exactly what, in our corporate capacity as a
State, we do most emphatically deny ! Instead of our treat-
ing them as the most important years of life, they are the
very years which the State declares to be of no importance
whatever. In the same number of the Times that contains a
report of Lord Derby's speech occurs a letter from one of its
correspondents, who asks — " How is it that the ' unemployed
mobs ' are so largely recruited by the recent products of our
School Boards, lads from 14 to 20 years of age ?" Answering
his own queries, he continues — " Because School Board
influence stops short just when it should be fruitful of good
results. There is in this country no sequential teaching, no

i8i

technical teaching, no effort to carry further the listless treat-
ment which turns out boys at 14, unready for any trade,
untaught in any of the larger lessons of life or of citizen-
ship."

To the mind of anyone who seriously looks forward to what
will probably be the social and industrial condition of our
country a few years hence, unless certain prevailing tenden-
cies are at once checked, what can be more deplorable than
the deterioration of the children which takes place after
leaving our elementary schools ? Their chief educators are
the street, the cheap music-hall, and the low periodical with
its filthy tales. As soon as they are 13 years old their parents
are allowed to work them in factories for ten hours a day,
and what is the consequence of all this ? Let Mr. Besant
answer.*

" Boys and girls at thirteen have no inclination to read news-
papers ; after their day's work and confinement in the hot rooms
they are tired ; they want fresh air and exercise. To sum up : there
are no existing inducements for the children to read and study ;
most of them are sluggish of intellect ; outside the evening schools
there are no facilities for them at all ; they have no books ; when
evening comes they are tired ; they do not understand their own
interests ; after a day's work they like an evening's rest. The street
is always open to them ; here they find the companions of the work-
room ; here they feel the swift strong current of life ; here something
is always happening ; here there are always new pleasures ; here
they can talk and play unrestrained, left entirely to themselves,
taking for pattern those a little older than themselves. As for their
favourite amusements and pleasures, they grow yearly coarser ; as
for their conversation, it grows continually viler, until Zola himself
would be ashamed to reproduce the talk of these young people."

Under our present education laws, what is the usual his-
tory of a child among the working classes ? He or she leaves
the elementary school as soon as the " Exemption-standard "
is passed, that is to say, at an age which is constantly becom-
ing earlier as the children are more quickly passed through
the various standards. This exemption-standard, being under
the control of the various School Boards, varies in different
parts of England. In many rural districts, and in a few
large towns, like Leicester and Norwich, it is as low as the
fourth, in many towns it is the fifth, while in London it is the
sixth. Let us look at the state of things in Wolverhampton,
which, in some respects, may be regarded as a typical town,

* Contemporary Review, March, 1886.

l82

and where passing the fifth standard exempts children from
further attendance. In 1884-5 the average age at which this
was passed was 11 years 7 months, but in 1885-6 it was 11
years exactly, that is, the average age had positively lowered
seven months in a year's time. In this latter year only 78
children were in Standards VI. and VII., out of 2,657 children
examined ; hence, not 3 per cent, of the children attended
school after passing the fifth standard, i.e., after 11 years of
age ! In most towns the average leaving age is about 12, in
London it varies from 12 to 13 ; in very few cases is it above
13. Hence, speaking broadly, it may be asserted that the
school life of the English working man's child comes to an
end at 12 years old ; of the vicious character of the influences
which "educate" it subsequently, at this critical time of
life, while the character is being formed for good or ill, I have
already spoken.

What do our schoolmasters, employers of child labour, and
others, say to the practical effect of this early exemption ?
Many Board School teachers have frequently spoken to me
and to my friends in the strongest terms of the lamentable
change for the worse, wrought upon the minds and bodies of
some of their fairest scholars in a year or two after they have
left school. It is no uncommon thing to find a child that has
passed Standard V. in school, unable even to pass Standard III.
a few months after leaving it. An inspector in a country town
in Dorset was told by the chairman of the School Board, who
was also chairman of Quarter Sessions, " A lot of these bright,
sharp boys that you have seen to-day will leave, because their
parents know that they can leave, and in three or four months'
time they will be coming before me, as chairman of the
Quarter Sessions, for robbing orchards and things of that
sort, and I shall have to punish them for what is really not
the boy's fault." In a very powerful letter in the Manchester
Guardian last September, the writer says, " A foreman in a
large mill informs me that he makes it a point to ascertain
how far the boys and girls employed about him are keeping
up their school knowledge. He finds that only 4 per cent,
are making any progress, and that these go to night schools ;
the others, 96 per cent., are relapsing into their primitive
ignorance, &c." It is greatly to be feared that this represents
the proportion fairly in most large towns ; at any rate, it
does do so in those in which inquiries have been made into
the question.

What, therefore, does this imply ? First, we build up at
enormous expense a colossal system of primary education,

i83

costing the country many millions annually, and then we
allow the results of it to be very largely wasted, if not
utterly lost. We are doing the work of Sisyphus ; we
are rolling up the big stone of ignorance and its attendant
evils, and when we have got it nearly to the top, we let it
come down and crush us. The garden which by daily culture
has been brought into such an admirable and promising con-
dition is given over to utter neglect. We cease to educate at
the most important, the most plastic, the most receptive
period of life. The years between 13 and 17 are the critical
and formative years for every human being. Then the physical
energies of the body, as in a spring tide, thrill out into every
limb and organ ; then, if ever, is there need for education to
guide, restrain, and inspire ; for these are the years in which
character is formed, almost unalterably, and in these years does
the need and use of knowledge first begin to be comprehended,
since it quickens and diredls the mind for the true under-
standing, the wise enjoyment, and the right conduct of life.
Here then, I say most earnestly, is the paramount problem of
our time in the education of the people.*

But, it may be urged, is not this unavoidable ? Have we
any right to interfere further than we do with that birthright
of every true Briton, the liberty of the subject ? My reply is,
that no country has ever suffered more from the abuse of indi-
vidual liberty than England has done. It was from this cause
that we did not get even a measure of compulsory education
till long after continental nations, and we are still far behind
them in the care we take of our children. Democratic govern-

* The following Table shows the extremely small proportion, and the yearly
decrease even in that, of children above 14 years of age in our elementary
schools : —

Year ending
August.

Total
schools

Rate of
grant per

Number on Register.

Proportion

of total

inspected.

scholar.

Under 14.

Above 14.

above 14.

s. d.

per cent.

1880

17,614

15 5f

3,881,466

44.358

I-I4

1881

18,062

15 8J

3.999.635

45.727

I-I4

1882

18,289

15 10^

4.134.045

45.567

I'lO

1883

18,540

16 li

4.230.557

42,747

i-oo

1884

18,761

16 7i

4.297.298

40,023

0-93

1885

18,895

4.372.72S

39.420

o-go

1886

19,022

17 2j

4.465.781

40,044

0-89

Average attendance 74*33 per cent.

i84

ment everywhere insists upon good education, and expects each
citizen to fulfil his duties to the State. This is the mainspring
of the remarkable movements for the education of the negro,
and for that of blind and deaf and dumb young persons in
America.

What then, briefly, do we find in other European countries ?
In Switzerland there is a compulsory day-school till 13 years of
age, and compulsory attendance until 16 at an apprenticeship
school for two hours on five evenings a week, or for two hours
before breakfast. A candidate, who fails at the examination
held at 16, is liable to be detained at school until 20, and if he
then fails again, he is kept at evening school, instead of being
allowed recreation, during his period of service in the army.
In Hungary, there is compulsory attendance at night-schools
and Sunday-schools as long as lads are apprentices. In Austria
and Germany, in 1873, a system of " continuation " schools
{Fortbildimg Schulen) was made compulsory everywhere. The
details differ in various States, since each one manages its own
education. In Saxony, for example, boys who leave the primary
school, if they do not go to a higher one, must attend for three
years (say till 17) at least five hours per week of continuation
classes, and they are encouraged to attend twelve. Even the
young waiters in the restaurants, up to 17, attend thus, and
are taught one or two languages. In these countries opinion
is ripening into a conviction that the education, even of the
poorest class, should be continued, in some form or other, up
to 16 years of age. In a very striking letter to the Times, dated
from Berlin, on October 4, 1887, Mr. Samuel Smith, M.P.,
says : —

" Wherever I have gone, I have inquired how they deal with the
ragged and squalid class of children, and I have been told in every
city — Zurich, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, Chemnitz, Dresden, and Berlin
— that such a class practically does not exist. I do not mean that
there is not poverty, and plenty of it, in Germany. Wages are
much lower than in England, and many have had a hard struggle
to live. But there does not seem to exist to any extent that mass
of sunken, degraded beings who with us cast their children on the
streets, or throw them on the rates, or leave them to charity. Some
half-a-million of children in the United Kingdom are dependent, more
or less, on the alms and rates of the community, and probably another
half-million are miserably under-fed and under-clad. Nothing to
correspond with this exists in Germany. The poorest people here
would be ashamed to treat their children as multitudes do with us.
Indeed, I have not seen, since I left home, a single case of a ragged
or begging child."

i85

** No country spends so much effort as ours in attempting
to cure evils after they have become incurable ; none spends
so little in preventing their growth. If you wish to cope with
the horrid life of the slums, you must begin with the children.
If you want to stop the squalid pauper marriages which take
place in London — often at 17 or 18 years of age ; if you want
to transform our beery casual labourer into an intelligent, self-
respecting artisan ; if you wish to fit our superabounding popu-
lation to be good emigrants and colonists — you must begin
with the children. Keep them at school till habits of industry
and application are formed, till they get a higher ideal of life,
and till they are filled with a divine discontent with the animal
life of the slums. Until you do this, Commissions on the
dwellings of the poor will report in vain, the United Kingdom
Alliance will preach to unwilling ears, social purity societies
will yield scant results, and England will remain cursed with
a degraded proletariat till doomsday."

It is not only in England that this is felt. Some of us are
accustomed to consider the educational system of the United
States to be in advance of our own. A venerable friend in
Boston, Rev. Dr. Morison, thus wrote me thereon, only a fort-
night ago : —

" The evil you speak of, is making itself felt pretty seriously here,
especially in our large manufacturing towns, and mostly among the
children of our foreign born population. The disease, for such it
becomes, is also finding its way into our small country places where
the population is so scattered that it is difficult to get the children
together in schools. Here in Boston, within a few years, there has
been a very important movement, under the influence mainly of a
few noble women of large pecuniary means and larger intellectual
and moral endowments. . . . And now that she has proved
the feasibility of such a thing, she has offered these schools, with
their apparatus and the trained teachers attached to them, to the
city government, to become a valuable preliminary part of our public
school system. The offer has been accepted. And the new interest
and impulse thus given to the processes of education will, it is
hoped, help to prolong the period of school education at both
ends."

And what do we do in England for the continuation of
Elementary Education? Until two years ago, practically
nothing. The few night schools that we had were simply gap-
fillers, educating at night those who, by the accident of cir-
cumstances, had been passed over by day at the ordinary period.
Even at these, the total attendance in the years 1883-5 ^^^

1 86

less than one per cent, of the day attendances,* The inspectors'
reports regret, in no measured terms even for offtcial language,
the practical extinction of evening schools.

Let us now consider what are the requirements and condi-
tions of education to be given in the evening. Plainly, in the
first place, it must be such as will attra(5l, interest, and recreate
tired children. It has to compete with the social gambollings
of the street, or even with the gaudy, specious amusements
which too often allure them. In the second place, it must
touch and draw forth the opening nature of children of that
age, so that their instincftive impulses and growing powers,
both of body and mind, shall be rightly nourished and trained.
Lastly, it must bear diredtly upon the practical work of their
daily life, upon the pure enjoyments that are possible to them,
and upon the noble duties that will devolve on them.

These objects are in great measure carried out by the
Recreative Evening Schools Association, t and it is not too
much to say that this scheme, in so far as its inception and
organization are due to the influence of any one man, owes its
origin to the Rev. Dr. Paton, of the Congregational Institute,
Nottingham. It was founded on Jan. i6th, 1886, at a crowded
meeting at the Mansion House, and, under the presidency of
H.R.H. the Princess Louise, has done excellent work since,
by conducing evening classes in connecftion with the London
School Board in 92 out of the 128 schools belonging to the
Board. In a recent letter to the Times, signed by the present

* Night

Schools.

Proportion of Night

Year ending

No. of

Number on

Average

Pupi s to Day Pupils.

Schools

August.

Inspected.

Attendance.

On register.

In at-
tendance.

Per cent.

1880

1-363

77.307

46,069

2*oo

1-62

1881

1,222

64,741

39.222

1-62

1-31

1882

1.015

53.258

33.135

1-29

I '04

1883

932

47,624

28,293

I-I2

o-go

1884

847

41.567

24.434

0*96

077

1885

839

40.854

24.233

0-93

074

1886

841

42,423

26,089

0-95

076

Average attendance, 60*22 per cent.

t Its offices are at 37, Norfolk Street, Strand ; Secretary, J. Edward Flower,
M.A., who will be glad to receive offers of assistance of any kind in its work.

i87

and the late Chairman of that Board, " it is estimated that,
through the dire(5t; instrumentaHty of the Association, the
attendance in the evening schools of the country was doubled
in one period of twelve months." Such is the size of the
metropolis that no less than 80,000 children leave its schools
every year. There are, therefore, nearly half a million boys
and girls in London, between the ages of 12 and 18, roaming
the streets, and crowding the low places of amusement, for
whom this Association seeks, with the assistance of the School
Board, to provide healthy amusement combined with instruc-
tion, and whom it desires to assist in fitting for the active
duties of life.

For the purposes of this Association, London is divided into
40 districts. In 66 of the 102 schools no less than 116 courses
of systematic instruction in some branch of elementary science
are being given by voluntary lecturers, some of them men of
well established scientific position, and nearly all of them
are illustrated by the lantern. In many of the schools
manual training, in one form or another, has been largely
cultivated, giving that concurrent training to eye and hand
which is so generally recognised as the foundation of all
technical education. In nearly every school physical exercise
in some form is an essential part of the training ; altogether
more than 500 voluntary teachers are engaged in the London
work alone.

Besides organising all this work in London, the Association
is occupied in extending its special work in other towns, and
at present its work is being imitated in no less than fifty towns
in various parts of England, where several evening schools
are being re-opened after being closed for lack of attendance.

Lastly, as an illustration of the use of this work in filling
up a gap, in our provision for the wants of the people, I may
perhaps be permitted to quote the remarks of H.R.H. the
Prince of Wales, speaking at the People's Palace, December 10,
1887 :—

" The age of entry here for boys and girls is 15. The average age
at which children leave the elementary schools is probably under 12.
Efforts are being made by the Recreative Evening Schools Associa-
tion, which I hope will meet with the success which they deserve, to
utilise the school-rooms in the evening by giving to boys and girls
between the ages of 11 and 15 attractive lectures, gymnastic and
other entertainments, thus keeping them out of the streets, and
forming a link between the Board Schools and higher institutions.
. . . Those who assist such work as this are rendering many a

i88

home happy by keeping boys and girls out of mischief, and richly
deserve the gratitude of the fathers and mothers of Great Britain."

It affords me very great satisfaction to be able to state that
this subject is now attracting the attention of Parliament, and
that on Friday next, April 20th, unless that private members'
night is appropriated by the Government. Mr. Sam. Smith,
who has secured the first place on the paper, will move : —
'' That it is desirable to establish a national system of evening
continuation school, where children shall carry on their educa-
after leaving the elementary day schools."

I would strongly urge upon any of my hearers to-day, who
may have influence with M.P.'s, that they should at once bring
that influence to bear, and get these gentlemen to be in their
places when this motion comes on." It is not improbable that
if the result of the debate on this motion is sufficiently
encouraging, a Bill may be introduced to give practical effect
to the resolution. So recently as the day before yesterday, I
attended a meeting in the Conference room of the House of
Commons, at which the motion was discussed. The impor-
tance will be urged of raising all round the present " exemption
standard," and of giving permission for the last one or two
standards to be worked out in evening schools instead of by
day. It is obvious that this will have the practical effect of
keeping boys and girls longer under school influence, and there-
fore out of the streets, and at the same time it will not interfere
with their working during a part of the day — either in shops or
factories, or in the case of girls (as was well pointed out by
Mrs. Webster at our conference) it will enable them to remain
at home and assist their mothers in the housework during the
day. Thus, although the compulsion is still continued, the
work is really made easier as regards the conditions of home
life, and hence will be regarded with less distaste.

None of the charges proposed by the Bill that has been
drafted, but not yet introduced, are very radical — for public
opinion has yet to be formed in this matter. As President
Lincoln well said, " With public sentiment, nothing can fail —
without it, nothing can be altered." Abundant evidence is
forthcoming as to the efficacy of the plans proposed. It will
be observed that none of these changes are very radical, that
they are all in the dire(5lion of more elasticity in the pro-
gramme, and that abundant evidence is forthcoming as to the
efficacy of the plans proposed. Moreover they have the addi-
tional advantage of not increasing the amount of the Govern-

• Either on April 20th, or, as seems more probable, on a later day.

iSg

ment grant (except, of course, by an increase in the scholars),
since a better distribution of the amount at present granted is
all that is asked for. The issues at stake are, however, so
tremendous, that in this case I think that the most instructive
consideration for us is the cost of doing nothing. We are grap-
pling with the root-cause of the social question. No money,
in however large amounts, can prevent the recurrence of dis-
tress arising from unthrift, vice, self-indulgence, and reckless
and improvident marriage. In order to deal with these facTtors
in the problem of our great city, we must capture the boys and
girls who will be the fathers and mothers of five or ten years
hence. If, when captured, their lives and habits are moulded
at the impressionable age, from 14 to 21, so as to become good
citizens, and not reckless pleasure hunters, unaccustomed to
resist the impulse of passion or the suggestions of desire, we
are, in point of fadt, sterilizing the unfitness latent in them,
and thus preventing the formation of a new national debt of
vice and crime. In 1885 the birth rate in St. George's,
Hanover Square, was 20 per month and in Bethnal Green 40,
just double. The death rate was practically the same — 21.
The marriages of men under age are just ten times as numerous
in Bethnal Green as in St. George's, which has one-fifth more
population than Bethnal Green has. In facft, 15 per cent, of
Bethnal Green marriages in 1884 were of men under age.
What thoughts are suggested by these simple statements of
fa(5t ! The population of the British Islands is, in round
numbers, 36,000,000, and, according to Lord Halsbury, it is
increasing at the rate of 300,000 per year. If the figures I
have just quoted be taken as typical (and I believe that thej^
may), it is clear that the very class whose increase we can
most easily dispense with grows at the most rapid rate.
Under the heading, " Lazarus and Dives," a correspondent of
the Standard remarked recently : — " Every poor man seems to
think that the command to ' increase and multiply ' is one that,
is absolutely incumbent on him to fulfil. The obligation to
feed, clothe, and provide for those whom he has thus brought
into the world must devolve upon his richer neighbours. What
is to be the final result ? " In the professional and independent
classes, in this country, the average age of marriage is 31*2
years for men, and 26*4 years for women. Among miners and
labourers, the figures are 24' 16 and 22*46 respectively. Fa(5ts
like these lead thoughtful men to use such phrases as " the
survival of the unfittest," and " this desolating tide of children,"
and to agree with Henry George when he says that —

" The Huns and Vandals whowillshipwreckour modern civilization

igo

are being bred, not in the steppes of Asia, but in the slums and
alleys of our great cities.

" With their seething overcrowded, vicious, stimulating life, they
tend to be in an evil sense, centres of furious vitality — an ever-grow-
ing torrent of children, poured into an environment of wretchedness
and vice."

The deepening feeling of his inanity, the progress of medical
science, the improvement of sanitation, wise legislative inter-
ference with those baser instincts which are reckless about the
destruction of communities, and as a consequence of these con-
ditions, the increase of longevity, the diminution of infant
mortality, the prevention of famines, the infrequency of war,
and the mitigation of all its horrors — all tend to make the
growth of population exceedingly rapid. In the decade 1871-
1881 nearly 300,000 more persons survived, and 20,000 more
were born, than would have been expected from the returns of
the previous census. The Earl of Derby recently said : " The
question of Malthusianism is again upon us, and by this is
meant nothing more than that population tends to increase at
a rate more rapid than any normal increase in the production
of food."

" For the evils which arise from over population and the
growth of great cities, there is no remedy which the Church
can recognize," says Archdeacon Farrar, " except, on the one
hand, in the steady, thoughtful, and systematic improvement
of the social environment of the poor, and on the other, in the
patient inculcation of the laws of prudence and self-restraint.
The name of the pure and virtuous Malthus must not be dis-
honoured by associating it with dangerous or immoral theories.
The one general remedy which he urged was moral restraint,
and the one rule on which he insisted was, ' Do not marry
until you are well able to support a family.' It would be as
unjust to connect his name with any suggestions of recent
times, as to connect it with the vice and infanticide of Tartary
or Tierra del Fuego."

To my mind, the saddest portion of the passages which I
read to you this morning is, the confession of that clergyman
who said that he had given up all hope of influencing boys and
girls to see the folly of premature engagements and unions ;
the only ray of hope is in his sentence '•' A good deal of the
evil is due to want of occupation of mind." To be successful,
we must get something into the mind of our young people
instead of vice. " I know one boy in connection with my own
work," said recently a well known East End Missionary, "who
was saved from a wicked life through a piece of fretwork. He
was a thoroughly bad boy, and I expected that he would not

igi

stop with me. A little piece of fretwork was put into his
hand. He took it home with him, and was so much taken up
with it that he took it out of his pocket every minute and
looked admiringly upon it. That boy, until he came to me,
had never attended a bible class or Sunday school, but that
little piece of fretwork took the place of wickedness and vice."

Such occupation of mind is best provided, I contend, by
such measures as I have advocated — a reform in our present
educational methods in their present stages, and — more im-
portant still, a continuation and extension of those methods
through those important years during which, at present, such
ineradicable mischief is done. Our only hope lies in theyoimg
children, who are impressionable. To change the physical
and mental habits of the present generation is well nigh im-
possible, but we can prevent the perpetuation of such a state of
things, and I contend that to sneer at all social legislation in
this connection is simply immoral. That prevention is better
than cure is a truism — but too often we only recognize the
abstraft truth of the saying, and fail to realise the pracftical
application of it in a specified case. In this particular one, I
am inclined to agree with ".Peter the hermit," and to admit
that it is our only remedy.

In what I have said, it may be thought that I have given
undue prominence to one particular aspect of the question. It
may be so — but it is one which has forced itself more than any
other upon my attention during many years' personal acquaint-
ance with the conditions of the labouring classes, first as
manufacturing partner in a large business in Bristol, and
subsequently as a London Board School manager. Moreover,
it is the one to which prominence is seldom given, partly from
a natural reluctance on the part of a speaker to deal with such
topics. I have long been accustomed to consider ministers of
all denominations greatly to blame for not speaking out more
upon this subject — and it was with the greatest pleasure that
I saw recently that the Archbishop of Canterbury had publicly
told a large East-end audience that drink and premature
marriages were the two chief causes of their troubles.

Closely connected with this subject is that which with
terrible significance is called The social evil. If we probe
deeply, we shall find that its roots spread and increase with a
fearfully rapid and pestiferous growth during the years of early
adolescence. A devoted " Rescue " worker in the East End of
London says : —

" I do not think we are half alive to the importance of taking hold
of the children at the most important age of their lives, just as they

192

leave school. We must prevent this flood of young life, from pour-
ing itself into that reservoir of wretchedness, which we have so often
spoken of as Outcast Loudon."

About 20 years ago a book appeared, and ran through a
great many editions, with the following remarkable preface : —

Critic. — I never read a more improbable story in my life.

Author. — Notwithstanding, it may be true.

It would be well, I think, for most of us to carefully and
thoughtfully peruse that book again. It purports to be the
history of Ginx's Baby, and relates (i) what Ginx did with
him ; (2) what charity and the churches did with him ;
(3) what the parish did with him ; (4) what clubs and poli-
ticians did with him ; and, finally {5), what Ginx's Baby did
with himself.

This last chapter, you may remember, vividly relates the
suicide of Ginx's Baby, when grown to man's estate, and
conclude's thus : —

" I did not know then what form it was that swilled down below
the glistening current. Had I known it was Ginx's Baby, I should
perhaps have thought ; ' Society, which in the sacred names of Law
and Charity, forbad the father to throw his child over Vauxhall
Bridge, at a time when he was alike unconscious of life and death,
has at last driven him over the parapet into the greedy waters.' "

Philosophers, Philanthropists, Politicians, Papists and Protestants,
Poor-law Ministers and Parish-Officers,^while you have been
theorising and discussing, debating, wrangling, legislating and
administering — Good God ! gentlemen, between you all, where has
Ginx's Baby gone to ?

But to conclude. On such aspects of our educational
system as are concerned with Technical Education, the
threatened loss of our industrial supremacy, &c., I have in
this discourse, designedly not spoken. The public mind is
beginning, slowly, but I believe surely, to appreciate their
importance. The moral and social aspect of the matter is that
which, it seems to me, now needs the most careful and prompt
consideration by us all. It is wonderful how blind we mostly
are to really effectual ways of solving the social problem. If
socialists will only frighten us into common sense, they will
have done us a service never to be repaid, I think. It is idle
to say that the gravity of the near future is as yet full}^ grasped
by society at large. But no watchful mind can doubt that the
time is at hand when the nation will have to grapple with the
solution of problems past solution. When that time comes,
it will be night, when no man can work I

wuMb lu bii uuTAiiiiiu m im mmn un bunuAi MUMiwiib, ii a.ffi.

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IN a well-known passage of his Autobiography (Chap. V.)
John Stuart Mill has told us of the mental crisis through
which he passed — how his object in life, " to be a refor-
mer of the world," lost for a time all its charm and value, and
there seemed to be " nothing left to live for." As he says,
" No doubt many others have passed through a similar state ";
and, indeed, perhaps no one, save those of singularly
fortunate natural temperament and exceptionally happy sur-
roundings, no one certainly who has reflected much on human
life can have escaped at least a temporary feeling of the kind
which Mill so pathetically describes. We know how readily
this confession of despair has been used to serve the purposes
of theological apologists, who, finding themselves somewhat
baffled by the demands of reason, turn eagerly to the impetuous
logic of unreasoning feeling, and in the utter unsatisfactoriness
of this earthly life find an argument for the consolations of the
old faith. The alternatives seem to be supernaturalism or
pessimism — in some more or less explicit form.

Anyone who takes up a humanist position in ethics, i.e., who
professes to believe that, apart from all supernatural sanctions,
the individual ought to regulate his conduct by considering,
so far as he can honestly judge, what will tend to the well-being
of humanity as a whole, or at least of human society in some
fairly large sense — any such person is bound to be able to give
a reason for the faith that is in him, whether he be challenged
by himself in a despondent mood, or by the professed adherent
of supernaturalist ethics, or by the professed pessimist. Our
own personal tendencies to doubt and despair can hardly be
met by intellectual argument, but generally need strenuous
moral efforts, or even physical remedies — as they depend so
much on the state of health. But in any case, in order to be
honest with ourselves, we must see whether we can meet the
objections of the orthodox Christian and of the more or less
orthodox Buddhist.

194

One type of objection may be disposed of without much
trouble. Remove supernatural sanctions, it is said, and there
will be no check on the greed and lust of animal human
nature : and so we must defend orthodoxies (even if in our
secret hearts we don't believe them) for the sake of social order.
Well, perhaps for the sake of some kinds of social order the
maintenance of orthodoxies we don't believe in may be
necessary. The " Saviours of Society," of a certain sort,
must support one hypocrisy in order to support another.
The despot puts the policeman at the service of the priest,
if the priest, in return, puts hell at the service of the despot.
Those who use the argument that, if men shake off the
old creeds they will soon take to cutting each other's
throats, can never have grasped what is meant by the substi-
tution of human for supernatural sanctions, and the consequent ^
resolution of immoral acts into acts hurtful to the health of the
social organism. To take, first of all, the very lowest ground-
any one who pushes the gratification of selfish impulses to such
an extent as to become a pest to the bulk of the community
must be kept from mischief, or got rid of in some way or other.
"If you feel no motive," says George Eliot, '^to common
morality but a criminal bar in heaven, you are decidedly a man
•for the police on earth to keep their eye upon." It is also
worth while to remind ourselves that the Hebrew Ten Com-
mandments, though supposed to have been given by a super-
natural revelation, rested on no sanction of a future life.
" Moses and the prophets," as Strauss puts it, " knew nothing
of the immortality of the soul, and yet Moses and the prophets
they were still." The sanction they did recognise was the
judgment of God on earth, and that sanction, even though
stripped of its theological guise, remains to us still. "The
day of judgment is the history of the world " — a saying which is
only a special expression of the scientific doctrine of " natural
selection." If no othertext in the Bible remained true for us, it
would still be truethat " Righteousness alone exalteth a nation."
A society whose members are unfaithful to one another, who
will give up no selfish indulgence for the sake of the common
good — a society of profligates, cowards, and traitors is an alto-
gether impossible society. The most corrupt society that exists
can only be kept from dissolution by some leaven of goodness
working in it. There must be honour even among thieves —

195

that is the ultimate test, that is the laboratory experiment,
which proves the necessity of altruism, or rather, to put the
matter more correctly, which proves that the individual cannot
realise himself except in a society of other individuals, whose
claims upon himself he is willing to recognise. The personal
satisfaction of the individual cannot exclude, but must include,
the realisation of social well-being.

There is no need of disguising the fact that the disappear-
ance of a belief in supernatural sanctions does lead to an
alteration in parts of the moral ideal. Some virtues may
change their rank in the scale, when judged by the standard
of social well-being. Many things that have been condemned
come to be regarded as innocent, and some things that have
been fiercely reprobated take their place among the highest
duties. We should, perhaps, bring down St. Simeon from his
pillar and set him to any honest work; while the anathematised
heretics of the old creed might become the saints of the religion
of humanity. We should not remove St. Paul nor St. Francis
of Assisi from their niches in the temple, but we might put
Giordano Bruno and Spinoza beside them. But a certain
inevitable change in the ethical ideal — inevitable if there is to
be progress and adaptation to changed conditions of life — is a
very different thing from the disappearance of all ethical
ideal whatsoever. What the world needs is a more and
more thorough-going and consistent application of the test
that conduct is good or bad according as it tends to social well-
being or the reverse, and that those who do anti-social acts
and encourage anti-social feelings must be reformed — or, if that
is not possible, repressed. Otherwise any society will go to
pieces, however fervently its members may repeat the words of
the Nicene or Athanasian creeds. The nation that has per-
sistently done evil shall without doubt perish everlastingly,
whatever may be its theological beliefs or ritual observances.

But it is often urged, in press and pulpit, that the humani-
tarian spirit is merely an outgrowth of orthodox Christianity,
and can only for a short time outlive the decay of its parent
stem. What a strange ignorance, or rather ignoring, of history
have we here ! Much of the humanitarian element in Chris-
tianity existed before the rise of the Christian Church. To the
Stoic philosophers we owe the first distinct expression of the
brotherhood of mankind : and philosophers, we must remem-
ber, only make explicit in thought what is already felt by many.
Nay, certain sceptical Greeks condemned slavery as "unnatural,"
whereas there is hardly any subject on which Christian theo-
logians. Catholic and Protestant, have quarrelled less than on

196

the righteousness of slavery — until after the French Revolution.
Much of the modern humanitarian movement has coincided
precisely with the decay of orthodoxy. Much of the humani-
tarian spirit, now fortunately prevailing even in the narrowest
of Christian churches, is the result of the reaction upon the
old creeds of the very revolt against them.

If we look for what distinguishes Christian ethics from the
ethics of the Pagan world, we cannot find it in the kind of
duties enjoined, but in the range of persons towards whom
these duties are owing. Christianity did not introduce the
duty of loving our neighbour as ourselves ; but the parable of
the Good Samaritan teaches that "our neighbour" maybe the
alien in race and the heretic in religion — a lesson which the
Christian Church has not always willingly received. Like the
other " ethical " religions, Christianity has suffered from the
constant recrudescence of the older religion of mystery and
magic, the substitution of forms and formulas for righteousness
of life. The " defenders of the faith " tell us now-a-days that
our duty to God is higher than our duty to our neighbour and
that our love to our neighbour has no firm root except in our
love of God. Turn from these official exponents of Chris-
tianity to the words of him whom Christians worship as God
manifest in the flesh — words the more certain to be genuinely
his because the least likely to be acceptable to a later age of
definite ecclesiastical institutions and ceremonies :

" Many will say unto me in that day, Lord, Lord, did we not
prophesy by thy name, and by thy name cast out devils, and by
thy name do many mighty works ? And then I will profess unto
them, I never knew you : depart from me, ye that work iniquity. "
— Matt. vii. 22, 23.

And again :

1
" Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least, ye did it
not unto me." — Matt. xxv. 45.

And in a similar spirit it is said :

" He that loveth not his brother, whom he hath seen, cannot
love God, whom he hath not seen." — /. Epist. John, iv. 20.

In such passages is not the service of man made the
measure and the test of the only acceptable service of God ?
And, if we turn to the history of the Christian Church, are we

197

to say that the humanitarian spirit is the outcome of theologi-
cal dogmas, ecclesiastical institutions, and ritual observances,
and not, rather, that it is the humanitarian spirit alone which
has given these their moral efficacy and vitalised what, without
it, become dead corpses, begetting corruption only ?

II.

If, however, supernatural sanctions lose their hold on our
minds, do not the consolations of religion disappear along with
them and leave the way open to the chilling creed of the pes-
simist ? Social reform is not then put aside as something sub-
ordinate and secondary to the preparation for a future life, but
is put aside altogether, because human life at its best is not
worth having. Now, what characterises the pessimism, alike
of the sated but unsatisfied pleasure-seeker and of the Oriental
ascetic, is its absolute individualism as an ethical creed. The
pleasure-seeker says : " Pleasure is good ; but because it
vanishes away in the getting, and the surplus of pain is greater,
therefore life is evil." The ascetic accepts the pleasure-seeker's
standard for judging life and accepts his conclusion about life,
but the practical inference he draws is that, since his indi-
vidual desires cannot be satisfied, they must be starved.
Neither of them advances to a position which places the end
outside the pleasure and pains of the individual. Neither of
them recognises that human desire, alike in its lowest and its
highest forms, is social and not merely individual. If we are to
balance pleasures against pains, it is very difficult to escape
the conclusion that pains preponderate.

" Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen,
Count o'er thy days from anguish free,
And know, whatever thou hast been,
'Tis something better not .Jo be."

This pessimism is no new product of a complex civilisation.
When man had secured sufficient repose from the daily struggle
for existence to look around him upon "all the works done
under the sun," one of his earliest reflections was, "What profit
hath man of all his labour ? All is vanity and a striving after
wind." Older than the great systems of Greek ethics is the
tale that tells how the satyr Silenus was forced to reveal to his
captor the terrible secret of human life — that "not to be born is
best of all things, and the next best to die soon." To the Orien-
tal ascetic or mystic there is " nothing new under the sun " —

igS

no forward movement — no meaning in politics, no meaning in
history : and among those hving under despotic government,
where a change is only a change of masters, such despair is
intelligible enough — in the few who reflect. But in their
Western imitators this despair is a treason to humanity : and
this imitation of Eastern apathy is a disease arising from
unhealthy conditions in modern society. Modern pessimism
is justifiable, however, as a reaction against the easy-going
optimism of a less sympathetic age. In the exaltation of
sympathy for suffering is to be found the redeeming and the
valuable feature in the pessimist ethics. But the hopelessness
of the pessimist in the face of suffering comes from his utter
disbelief in social progress and in all the attempts to remedy
this suffering by improving the conditions under which men
must live.

These remarks, it must be explained, apply to the philosophy
of Schopenhauer, who only transferred Buddhist ideas into the
Western world, but not to Von Hartmann, whose ethical creed
is not necessarily inconsistent with the creed of any social
reformer, except in his account of the ultimate meaning of it.
We have, according to Von Hartmann, to co-operate with the
world-process that finally all the restless striving of the
universe may end in the peace of annihilation. We cannot
now consider this manner of stating the destiny of the universe.
We might, perhaps, raise the doubt whether it is logically
possible to ask the question, " Is existence in general good or
bad?" With the thoroughly consistent pessimist, as wjth the
thorough-going sceptic, it is impossible to argue. Anyhow, for
us as practical persons, here and now, wishing to know what
to do, is it not enough to say, " Within the world we know and
can affect there is a worse and a better" ? or, if any one chooses
to say, "All is bad," may we not answer " There is a worse
and a less bad"? Happiness may be unattainable — unattain-
able at least by delib^ate effort — but the existence of pain
and of «;/happiness is a sufficient stimulus to urge us to do
what we can to diminish them. For a vast multitude of
human beings round us, the life they have to live — even the
very best life they could under their conditions live — may seem
to us hardly worth the living ; but so many of the evils we
see admit of a remedy. Many of them would disappear if in
any way the average moral dispositions of mankmd can be
raised (that everyone is ready to admit) ; but many even of
the moral evils are due not so much to the absence of good
and kindly dispositions as to blind helplessness and to want
of co-operation. Ignorance and individualism are the two

199

great impediments to our progress. Human life has never
yet had anything like a fair chance ; and we may most wisely
defer the question whether life in general is worth living till
a time has been reached in which at least the greater portion
of men and women shall have opportunities of developing their
capacities, such as are now with difficulty obtained by a very
few, and too often at the cost of others : and if at each step
we see some new reform in front of us — well, that only shows
we are not yet in a position to answer the question about
life in general.

Still, though we dismiss the pessimist's objection in this
way, we can't help the question coming up : What is the end
of it all ? Suppose human society to become as perfect as
possible, this earth of ours has no privilege of immortality, and
long before the planet perishes all living things will disappear
from its surface. Is it worth while working for human society,
if annihilation, whether we will it or no, is to be the end of all
our effort ? This counsel of despair we can only meet in the
same way as before. Whatever may be the uliimate destiny
of human society, we must at least do the best we can to make
it better while it lasts. If nature is inexorably cruel, that does
not excuse us from doing our best to lighten the burden of
human life. " Let justice be done, though the heavens fall."
How uncertain is the length of our individual life to each one
of us! But does that uncertainty justify us in committing
suicide, or folding our hands and doing nothing, because we
may only be able to do very little ?

If, again, the complaint be made that a possible general
amelioration of the lot of mankind in a distant future affords
no consolation to the suffering individual now, we can only
answer that such an objection ignores the actual instinctive
solidarity of human beings. We are not such desperate indi-
vidualists by nature as certain moralists and religious teachers
have made us by reilection. Many of ^e lower animals will
face death for the sake of their little ones>-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."

No. 25.]

•,•4/ , w- ♦

FINSBURY, B.C.

THE ECONOMIC POSITION OF

Educated Working Women.

A DISCOURSE

DELIVERED IN

SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C.,

071 FEBRUARY 2nd, 1890.

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,

W. C. COUPLAND, D.S,

PUBLISHED BY
E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON

PRICE TWOPENCE.

I'RINTED BY

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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<y is to dam up every channel of natural impulse ?
\sceticism is always the parent of licentiousness. Do you
want to make a greedy child ? Starve it. Deny it all indul-
"■ences. So if you want to cause a boy's or a girl's mind to
be absorbed by the love-passion, watch over their movements
with Argus eyes and sedulously keep them apart. The lesson
seems to me clear. The true method and the first step is to
abandon utterly and completely this Oriental, view and
pra(5tice, and to carry further the innovation which was made
when the sexes w^ere allowed to mingle within the family-
dwelling, and from the first years, and throughout life, in all
meetings of business and pleasure to encourage the most un-
fettered communication and co-operation. In my belief the
gain will pass the limit of present imagination.

Two ends pre-eminently will be secured thereby. First,
society will obtain the whole benefit, which it is still far from
having yet obtained, derivable from the sex-contrast itself.
Whatever may be achieved by men and women in isolation is
nothino- to what may be achieved by men and women in con-
stant mutual stimulation and alliance. We have an inkling of
the truth of this in the moral life, though even in that we are
very far from attaining all the good within our reach ; but the
<^ain is not confined to the moral life, it extends to the intel-
feaual sphere and the region of practical affairs.

In the second place, when all artificial barriers are flung
down, and from the earliest years the sexes mingle freely, the end
will be secured that ascetic schemes have vainly striven to attain

the tempering of that ruthless passion that has steeped the

world in blood and misery. One of the greatest of conceiv-
able reforms is the abolition of the separation of the
sexes in schools and of the restriction of teachers to
their own sex. Schools should be mixed, and the teachers
rather of the opposite than of the same sex. You timid con-
servatives are afraid, are you, of juvenile follies? Well, ask
vourselves searchingly why it is that the amatory instinct is so
potent for evil, and you will find the answer is this — that it is
due to human dulness which ignores its presence save under a
single guise. We allow it only expression as physical passion ;
we will not let it assume the form of sexual friendship. As
for the delicacy and bloom of innocence being destroyed by a
policy of free communion, it is the very way to preserve it :

233

for there is nothinj^ clearer than that in the intercourse of early
years there is a strange blendino-, when not interfered with, of
blameless familiarity and timid awe. There is a spontaneous
attraction and yet subtle check which will keep the boy and
girl in their natural places, as the planets are kept by gravi-
tation in their orbits. And the school left behind there
should still be the same companionship and the same intimacy,
thereby extinguishing the vile coarseness of male thought and
the prurience of female imagination. Then love and marriage
and sexual friendship may be beautiful and healthy and
honest ; and so far as it lies in human power to make a happy
society, such a society will grow up, and those vices and
crimes whose records now form the saddest pages in the
book of historv will cease to be.

No. 27.J

0iitl) Mua (Ktjjital ^ocietu,

FINSBURY, E.G.

THE GREEK IDEAL
AND MODERN LIFE

A DISCOURSE

DELIVERED IN

SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C.

J. H. MUIRHEAD, M.A.

PUBLISHED BY
K. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON

PRICE TWOPENCE.

PRINTED BY

KING, SELL, AND RAILTON, LTD.,

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THE GREEK IDEAL AND
MODERN LIFE.

IN the 4th Book of the Republic, after showing that division
of labour in the State is a kind of shadow of justice,
or (as perhaps the word ought to be translated) of right-
eousness, Plato goes on : " And righteousness is the realitx
of which this is the semblance ; dealing, however, not with the
outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and
concernment of a man ; for the righteous man does not permit
the several elements within him to meddle with one another, or
any of them to do the work of others, but he sets in order his
own inner life and is his own master and at peace with himself,
and when he has set in tune the three principles within him,
which may be compared to the middle, higher, and lower divi-
sions of the scale and the intermediate intervals — when he has
bound together all these and is no longer many but has become
one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then
he will begin to act, if he has to act, whether in a matter of
property or in the treatment of the body or some affair of politics
or private business ; in all which cases he will think and call
righteous and good action that which preserves and co-operates
with this condition, and the knowledge which presides over this.
Wisdom ; and unrighteous action that which at any time
destroys this, and the opinion which presides over unrighteous
action. Ignorance." Then after further conversation Socrates
in the dialogue concludes : *' Virtue then will be, it appears,
the health and well-being and beauty of the soul, and vice its
disease and weakness and deformity."

For clearness' sake let me draw out the points or character-
istics of the Greek ideal as indicated in this passage : —

I. First and most prominent is what I might call the aesthetic
view of virtue. Virtue is a harmony between the various parts

238

of a man's nature, it is the harmony or beauty of the soul.
The same idea recurs in Aristotle ; the difference, in the main,
being that while Plato looks at the soul as a whole, and thinks
of its virtue or goodness as a musical harmony drawn from the
naturally discordent elements of the passions, Aristotle is more
concerned with good conduct, which he likes to present as an
artistic product carved out of the circumstances and opportuni-
ties of life as a statue is from the raw material of the marble.
As the different parts of the marble have to be chastened and
harmonized with one another, so the circumstances under
which we are called upon to act, circumstances such as (in the
matter of giving) the time to give, the person to whom to give,
the manner of giving, the amount of the gift, have all to be taken
into account in relation to one another and to the act or product
as a whole. Hence it is that throughout Greek Ethics the
phraseology of art and morals tends to mingle. Hence it is,
too, that the favourite expression for morality as a whole is not
the right or goodness or duty or any of the terms most
familiar to us in this connection, but nobilityor beauty (t6 KaUv).

2. Closely connected with this is the thought that virtue
is the natural and proper state of a man. In the passage I
quoted, it is the health or well-being of a man ; while vice is an
abnormal and morbid growth corresponding to sickness and
disease in the body. Courage, which may be called the car-
dinal moral virtue in the Greek catalogue is only in Greek
the quality-of-a-man just as the Latin virhis simply means
the quality of manliness. All the vocabulary of Greek Ethics
implies this view, representing morality at every point as a
form of harmonious energy or activity — in a word, as life ; while
vice is a species of dislocation, or decay of manly energy — in a
word, a kind of death.

3. There is the intellectual virtue of Wisdom which both in
Plato and Aristotle overshadows all others. It is here, after
all, and not in moral perfection that the true good and home
of the soul is to be found. The pursuit of truth for its own sake
is set forth by Plato in many a glowing passage as the most
worthy end of a man, and Aristotle, in a remarkable passage, sets
aside all other virtue as secondary and unsatisfactory as com-
pared with the blessednessof the contemplative life. Morality,
m our sense, has to do with the regulation of the passions ; it
is thus as it were tied to them ; it depends upon them ; whereas
thought and reason act freely. Again, morality requires for its
proper practice a certain outfit, the liberal man must have that
wherein to show his liberality, the brave man must have the arms.

239

and opportunities of the citizen soldier. Contemplation, on the
other hand, requires no material conditions for its exercise.
Again, moral virtue is between man and man, and therefore
makes us depend upon one another, whereas a man can think
by himself. Finally, "true happiness can only be found in
leisure. We work that we may have leisure ; we go to war
that we may have peace. But moral virtue can only be dis-
played in work (whether industrial, social, or political) and in
war." It therefore can never be coincident with true happi-
ness, which implies freedom from the labour and discord of
life.

4. This introduces us to the last characteristic which I wish
to mention as distinctive of the Greek ideal : its aristocratic
character. It is not a possible end for everyone. It can onl}-
at the very best be realized by a few. This is true even of the
moral virtues. Thus it is only possible to be brave if you are
a soldier and have a country or a city to fight for. But the
greater part of the population of a Greek city were strangers
and aliens, either slaves or foreign traders, either without a
country which they could call their own, or possessing but the
base imitation of one. They were not even, as a rule, permitted
to fight for the city where they lived. Military service was a
privilege reserved for the full-born citizen. And if it was
true of the moral virtues that they were only open to a few, a
fortiori, it was true of the intellectual virtue which consisted
in the pursuit of truth. This, the highest life, was by its very
nature open only to a select body, even among the citizens. It
was the virtue of the best among the best, of an aristocracy
within an aristocracy. Christian sects have been reproached
with narrowing down the number of the elect to themselves, and
then proceeding to damn gg per cent, of their own diminished
numbers. But I venture to think that not even the strictest Cal-
vinist ever drew so narrow a circle for his heaven as did the Greek
philosophers, who described true happiness as by its very nature
the monopoly of the cultured few. From this it followed
that the good life for the Greek was not only compatible with,
but presupposed, the existence of a subject, non-privileged
class. If the Athenian citizen was to be free to pursue the
noble life in politics, in war, in the law courts, and in the
schools of philosophy, there must be others to do the rough work
of the world, to hew the wood and draw the water, to till the
land and distribute its produce. Such a class was found in the
slaves and aliens, who so far from being recognized as fellow-
citizens were in some cases scarcely regarded as men. Even

240

the most enlightened exponents of Greek sentiment describe
the greater portion of the human race as by nature slaves, and
destined to be at best the living instruments or tools of a higher
civilization.

In what I have now said, 1 have given you a sketch of the
leading features of the Greek moral ideal. It is a rough and
hasty one ; but I think not an unfair one. The details of it are
worked out most fully by the greatest thinker and moralist
of antiquity, perhaps of the world. And yet when we turn from
it to consider our modern idea of the good life, we seem
at first to find little or nothing in it which we can
sympathise with or appropriate. Nor is it to be denied that
there are great and notable differences, chiefly in favour of our
modern view. I wish here to do full justice to these differences,
for I shall have occasion in a mmute or two, not only to point
out a fundamental agreement, but to show that the difference
is by no means all in our own favour.

First, then, to take the last point in the description I have
just given you, as indeed the most obvious. Here it has become
a commonplace to note the great expansion that has taken
place in our moral ideas, owing to the recognition, in theory at
least, of all men as members of a common brotherhood. The
forces that have brought about this recognition it is not my
purpose here to describe.* It is sufficient here to remark that
its effect upon our ideas of the nature and claims of morality is
sufficiently striking. The circle of those in whom we own rights
is immensely expanded. We own them not only in every member
of our own community, but in a sense in every member of the
community of mankind. All men and women, rich and poor.
Englishman, foreigner, or savage, even criminals and idiots,
provided that they exhibit in the smallest degree the common
marks of humanity, are to be treated with the respect that is
due to human personality. They are to be recognized as
possible members of a universal commonwealth. And not onl}
do we recognize in them the ne^^ative right to freedom and
property, we own also, in theory at least, a positive duty even
to the lowest of our race and species. We admit in theory at
least that no material and natural circumstances such as birth
in distant and inaccessible lands, age, sex, poverty, weakness,
sickness, or incapacity, exonerate us from the duty of doing
what means and opportunity suggest to improve the condition

'-''■ The chief of them were undoubtedly the Roman Empire, the
Stoic Philosophy, and the Christian Religion.

241

and open out new possibilities to our fellow men. These dis-
abilities, which to a Greek would at once have put an individual
or a community outside the pale of humanity as he understood
it, are even considered an additional claim upon our pitiful
regard. It has not been without the moral approval of the
better part of Christendom, that men have sacrificed their duty
to their country to go to labour as missionaries and teachers in
foreign lands, or their duty to their family and friends, to work
for the imbecile, the sick, or the poor.

Corresponding to this extension of the field of moral rights
and duties, is the different conception which we have of the
nature of the true human life, into which all have a right
(because all have the possibility) of entering. With this life the
descriptions which Plato and Aristotle have given of the happi-
ness of the good and the wise seem to have but the remotest
connection. It was of the essence of that happiness to be
open only to the few. From whatever point we look at it, the
leisure and the opportunities of the educated and privileged
Greek citizen were necessary conditions of its enjoyment.
Birth, property, education, physical and mental endowments
were not only aids to the highest life, they were indispensable
requirements. From this point of view we have travelled a
long way when we can believe, as the greater part of
Christendom (at any rate in theory) believe, that these things,
so far from being a help, are often a hindrance to the spritual
life. Instead of them, poverty, obscurity, weakness, even
physical and mental distress, have been thought to be favourable
to moral and spiritual attainments. In weakness the Christian
has thought that he was made strong.

Another point in which modern morality contrasts with
Greek, is the deeper claim which morality has upon the
individual. Not only is morality wider in respect of the
external life, but it goes deeper in respect to the internal.
I do not think any good purpose is served by ignoring how
much even the best of the ancients fall behind our modern
standard in the claims they put forward on behalf of the virtue
which we call purity or chastity. The precepts of the
Sermon on the Mount demanding perfect " purity of heart,"
and of St. Paul claiming that every thought " shall be brought
into subjection" (however far they are from being actually
realised in any of us), yet, I take it, are recognized by all as
that which we ought to live up to. Yet such maxims are
conspicuous by their absence from Greek Ethics. I do not
say they have not their parallels here and there. Not long ago.

242

in an archaeological note, I happened to observe a little
inscription that had recently been excavated beside a way-
side spring with the motto in a neat Greek epigram, which had
the merit of reading both backwards and forwards the same
words, "cleanse your thoughts and not your faces only."
I merely say they are not prominent or insistent, as indeed
they could hardly be in a society like that of ancient Athens.
Considering this extension of claim both in respect to the
external and the internal life, it is not wonderful that in another
point the modern should differ from the ancient view of
morality — I mean in the general form under which they
severally present morality. I have already shown how, to
the Greek, the higher life was presented under the aspect of
life, well-being, self-development, or if you like, self-realization.
In the moral and intellectual life a man was asserting him-
self. Indeed, the favourite type of character might be called
self-assertive even in the lower sense of the word. The
magnanimous man in Aristotle is " he who being really
worthy, estimates his own worth highly; he is bold
in his language ; being apt to despise others and to speak
with sincerity, except when he uses irony, for to common
people he is ironical. . . . He is not apt to admire, for nothing is
great to him. . . . He possesses rather what is honourable and
unfruitful than what is fruitful and useful, for it shows more
independence. The step of the magnanimous man is slow,
his voice deep and his language stately ; for he is not likely
to be in a hurry , . . . and he whothinks highly of nothing is not
vehement; and shrillness and quickness of speaking arise from
these things. This, therefore, is the character of the mag-
nanimous man." Much of this may be Aristotle's fun, but
it serves to illustrate my present point, namely, that the
assertion of self, not necessarily in the lower sense of the
expression, is the leading note of ancient Ethics. It is doubtless
mainly through the influence of Christianity that the other side
of morality has come to be emphasized — the side, namely,
from which it presents itself as self-denial or self-renunciation.
Goodness, in its first aspect at any rate, is not presented to us
as life, but as a species of death — death to oneself and death to
the world. How prominent this notion was in the first
centuries of the Christian era, both inside and outside the
Christian Church, is evident from the spread of asceticism and
the Stoic philosophy. It was natural and necessary that it
should be so. It was natural and necessary that this negative
side should develop in connection with the enlarged claims put

243

forward, as I have just been showing, on behalf of morality.
This enlargement tended to widen the breach between the
natural life of pleasure and self-seeking, and the higher life of
personal holiness and social benevolence. The latter then
came to appear as . the complete abandonment or the
" crucifixion " of the former. Position, wealth, luxuries,
natural endowment, marriage and the family, even the love of
life itself had to be cast behind by those who felt the inward
call of the new ideal. There was indeed in the highest teaching
both of Christians and Stoics another side to this ; the death
to self was only the portal to a new life ; to lose the natural
life was to find the spiritual. Nor was this spiritual life
always conceived of as one beyond the grave. To the founder of
Christianity and to the greatest of his followers it seems to
have been conceived of as a higher and more desirable form of
earthly and purely human life. Nevertheless to the masses
the negative, pain-giving, and repulsive aspect of the new life
was the most prominent, while the allurements to it presented
themselves as a kind of return to the lower life in another state
of existence. That this view has not yet entirely died out is
evident, I suppose, from the existence of such an institution as
this Ethical Society, whose fundamental principle is a protest
against it. However this may be, it is undeniable that the
Religion of Pain (as Christianity has been called) has had a
profound effect upon our modern view of morality by raising
to honour and prominence a feature of the good life which was
almost totall}' ignored by the ancients.

With this deepening and purifying of morality, with this
shifting of the emphasis from the cheerful, joyous, and
harmonious aspect of the good life, to the severer, painful, and
discordant elements which it involves, the artistic view of it has
fallen into the background. Good conduct is no longer pre-
sented a as fine art ora graceful product, which (if we happen to
possess the proper tools in birth and education) we may chisel
out of the raw material of life ; but as obedience to the stern
voice of a universal and exacting law. This is evident from the
whole tone of our Ethical vocabulary, in which such unfamiliar
phrases as "the fitting," "the noble," "the beautiful," even
" end " and " virtue " itself have been replaced by their sterner
equivalents of " obligation," " the moral law," " the moral im-
perative," " duty," and the like — indicating, one and all, the
revolution that has taken place in the way of conceiving the
moral life.

With these differences and contrasts before us, we have

244

next to ask — Is there any sort of identity between tiiem ? As I
have dwelt so long on the contrasts, I must hurry over this part
so that I may have time to dwell for a few minutes upon my
last point, viz., the value to us at the present day of the ancient
ideal.

It must be sufficient, then, to state that when we examine the
matter more closely we see that the differences are superficial —
the essence of virtue in both cases is the same. It has expanded
and deepened, but it is the same fact throughout. As the
child is father of the man, so the Greek ideal is father of the
modern, in spite of changes in dimensions and external form.

It would be a bold and presumptuous thing to attempt a
new definition of goodness. But whatever else it is, we shall
all, I think, be agreed that it consists in transforming in some
way or other the natural life of unreflecting selfish impulse and
desire into means for the furtherance of a common good. This
is the essence of our modern conception of virtue.

I do not say that there is much resemblance between the
common life to which the Athenian citizen vowed allegiance
and the common life which the member of a Christian com-
munity in modern times recognizes it as his duty to forward.
Aristotle would hardly have acknowledged a Florence Night-
ingale or a " General " Booth in the hospitals or in the slums
as the same type of character as an Athenian or Spartan
soldier in the trenches or on the battlefield. On the other
hand, as has been well remarked, " the Quaker philanthropist
can scarcely recognize a brother in the citizen soldier of the
ancients."* Yet on close examination we see that these
apparently divergent types have this in common, that the}'
control the natural impulses of fear of pain {i.e., of danger and
death), in view of a higher, because a common good.

I come now to my last point : Has the Greek ideal, in
spite of the grave defects to which I have already alluded, any
positive value for us at the present day ? I have alread}
mentioned the gain to morality that Christianity and other
movements have brought with them. I hope I have done full
justice to them ; for I now intend to point out that it has
not all been gain.

I. The very narrowness of the Greek ideal made the good
which it set before the citizen, something clear, definite,
and comprehensible. It was the noble life in a very

* See T. H. Green's admirable treatment of this whole subject.
Proleg. to Ethics, Bk. III., c. v.

245

clearly marked and obvious circle of relations. If I may
revert to the metaphor from art which the Greeks imported
into Ethics, I might say that just as art has been defined as
" making a little space beautiful," so morality in Greece con-
sisted in making a little field (the field of the citizen's life)
noble. The end then was set before him by the very form of
the life amid which he lived. It was something obvious and
compassable. He who ran might read it. On the other hand,
the expansion which morality has received in modern
times, the manifoldness and complexity of the conditions
under which it must be practised, tends to shut out from
our view the fact that it can be looked upon as a
rounded whole. It is difiicult or impossible to make
for ourselves an}^ picture of it, or indeed to conceive of it
as a compassable end at all. While this is so with regard
to the noble life, there is, on the other hand, an obvious and
palpable end presented to all, and comprehensible by
all in the satisfaction of our sensitive nature. We have
been fain, therefore, in despair of a better (and philo-
sophers not less than common people), to represent the
end to ourselves as the fullest possible satisfaction of this.
This we have called the "greatest sum of pleasure," "the
greatest happiness," "pleasures for evermore," and the like; but
under all these expressions one thing is meant and implied :
that the end is, in one form or another, and at one time or an-
other, the unlimited command of personal gratification. Whether
in this respect we are worse sinners in England than elsewhere
I do not know. But you remember that Emerson makes fun
over this aspect of our English religion. I may be excused
quoting a sarcasm which so genial and tolerant a writer
permits himself when he refers to the English Church Prayer-
book, to show that we care little for moral and spiritual bless-
ings for their own sake but bluntly ask for our Sovereign
" grant herinhealth andwealth long to live," while the most pious
aspiration in the Diary of good Sam. Pepys is that a new coach
which he has just acquired may,bythegraceof God, be continued
to him. How far in all this we have fallen away from the Greek
ideal is obvious even to the most cursory reader of Plato and
Aristotle."

In this respect I think we have a great and important lesson
to learn from the Ethics of the Greeks. The source of the

* Cp. on this contrast the story in Herodotus, I. 30, quoted in
the same connection in Paulsen's Ethik.

246

difference in this respect between the Greek ideal and our own
is difficult to trace ; but it is undoubtedly partly to be looked
for in the fact that civic life with its opportunities for fruitful
and satisfying activity occupies so small a place in modern ideas
of morality. Christianity has done inestimable service to
humanity in the purification of family life, and the elevation of
humanity at large ; but it has left out of account, owing chiefly
to the circumstances in which it arose, the intermediate field
of the State. Greek Ethics supplies the missing link, calling
on us to find in the life of the citizen and patriot a more satis-
fy^^S good than any mere accumulation of the means of personal
enjoyment either here or hereafter.

2. With this defect in our modern view is connected
the blight which has fallen on the ancient virtue of wisdom.
This virtue had two forms. It had its purely intellectual
form, under which it corresponded very much to scientific
research and philosophical study among ourselves. The
English race has in the past, and as a whole, been notoriously
deficient in interest in this aspect of the spiritual life. For
its sins in this department it has of late years come under the
lash of M. Arnold's delicate raillery. I do not intend to try
to imitate so accomplished a preacher on this subject. In its
secondary form, wisdom has a more practical aspect, and
might be translated " practical wisdom." The older writers
rendered it by " prudence," and this mistranslation is typical
of the degradation it has suffered in modern times. From
being the root of all goodness, and the flower of moral educa-
tion, as it was to the Greek, it became infected with the
prevailing self-seeking and prudential type of morality. To
the Greek it was a subtle quality of heart and mind inter-
penetrating all life, leading its happy possessor instinctively to
appreciate at each conscious moment of life the claims of
conflicting impulses, and to choose that course of conduct
which makes for the harmonious development of life as a
whole. To us it has come to be applied to that species of
cunning which enables a man to make a good speculation or
elude his creditors when he goes into a bankruptcy court, or at
best to the insight into the ways of the world which enables
a man to promote the interest of his own narrow circle, sect,
or party, irrespective of the moral gain or loss which will
accrue to life regarded as a whole. I am not sure that
Christianity in its popular form is not in some degree respon-
sible for this. It emphasizes feeling and emotion in the place
of reason basing not only the beginning but the maintenance of

247

the good life on an emotional experience. I am not depreciating
the place which emotion ought to occupy in the good life.
Goodness is raised to a higher power and reaches a kind of
perfection not otherwise attainable in those who are sustained
by enthusiasm for some great and good cause. I only say that
to be a safe guide, enthusiasm must go hand in hand with
moral and intellectual development. In one who is altogether
a stranger to the Greek virtue of wisdom, enthusiasm is a
dangerous ally. It becomes fanaticism, and ultimately wrecks
many a promising social and individual reform. This is a
warning that is especially needed at the present moment in
connection with a popular scheme of social regeneration. In
view of this and similiar efforts it is well to remind ourselves
at times of the fact that was so patent to the ancient Greeks
that righteousness of life, whatever it may be at the start, is in
its development as much a matter of trained intellectual insight
as of enthusiastic feeling.

3. One other point I should like to mention, as one in
which the ideas of the Greeks about morality may be useful
and inspiring to us. It relates to the point with which I
began — the view of morality as a fine art. The view has its
dangers; but it has also its value. I pointed out that we had
lost it, owing to the introduction of new elements into the
moral ideal, chiefly the elements of pain and struggle. In
becoming severe and exacting, in demanding a completer self-
surrender, in deposing or ignoring the more graceful and aristo-
cratic virtues which were dear to the heart of the Greek, good-
ness has lost its aesthetic charm. Wq speak, indeed, of the
" beauty of holiness," and you sometimes hear it said of one
who is dead (not often of one who is alive), that he or she " has.
lived a beautiful life." But these are little more than phrases;
often I fear the mere cant of religious consolation. The idea
they represent is almost wholly inoperative in practical life.
And yet it might, I believe, again become a power. We might
with profit set before ourselves the idea of a life of harmonious and
balanced proportions such as the Greeks conceived. There are
indeed new elements to be worked into the finished product, a
completer victory has to be won over self, a wider span of
discords has to be harmonized ; but the harmony that is made
of them may only be all the fuller and richer for that.
Similarly the problem of creating a life which can in any
sense be called beautiful for our fellow-citizens is a much
harder one than for the Greeks. Here, too, wider differences
and discords have to be harmonized. It is not a question of

248

harmony and proportion in a small city commonwealth, of
mutual understanding between a few thousand cultured Greeks,
it is a question of the welding together by common interests and
common affections of huge industrial populations, of national
aggregates, and ultimately of the whole world. This is our
problem. Who can doubt that it is a harder one than that
which the Greeks had to face ? Who can doubt also that when
solved, the product will be a more perfect and beautiful one? It
will be more beautiful because it will he undimmed by the
shadow of slavery and social wrong.

Some such ideas as these were perhaps in the mind of the
poet when he wrote the familiar verses in Abt Vogler :

Why else was the pause prolonged, but that singing

might issue thence ?
Why rushed the discords in but that harmony might

be prized ?

It is possible that there are after all the elements of a rich
and varied harmony beneath the apparent discords of modern
life. If so, Morality is the Art of drawing them forth.

No. 28.]

0Ht!j Mm ^thiCiil Societn,

FINSBURY, E.G.

THE

A DISCOURSE

DELIVERED IN

SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY, E.C.,

JOHN M. ROBERTSON.

PUBLISHED BY
E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON.

PRICE TWOPENCE.

i^iBA-iDxisra-s.

I. Marcus Aurelius (Long's trans.), ii., i6 (excepting last seven

words) ; vi., 20 ; and vii., 55.

II. (a) Bacon's Essay "Of Anger," down to words "anything

that is not revocable."

(b) Emerson : " Montaigne, or The Sceptic ; " paragraph be-
ginning " The philosophy we want."

THE PLEASURES OF MALIGNITY.

IT is Professor Bain, I think, who has introduced into
psychology '' the phrase "the Pleasures of Malevolence,
which I doubt not has seemed to many of you a strange theme.
The phrase is a perfectly serious one, and it points to a very
important fact in human nature, though human nature would
fain repudiate the implication. The eloquent Dr. Chalmers,
as Professor Bain reminds us, sought to demonstrate f that
malevolence has no pleasures ; that he who hates, even if he
exult in the injury to his enemy, must be conscious that all is
not well within him ; and that the tyrant who has the power
to wreak to the uttermost his every caprice of passion does but
vainly pursue a joy he cannot attain, and in reality lives a life
of agony. The purpose of this thesis is the old one of showing
that evil is somehow alien to the scheme of things ; that we
are *' meant," somehow, to be good and kind ; and that if we
do ill by each other it must be our own fault, since our natures
were "designed " for benevolence onl}-. The field of theology
is heaped with the wrecks of such arguments, which vainly
seek to reconcile contradictories, and gain their point by the
device of the schoolboy who in an elaborate equation makes
out, by the substitution of a ^///s for a w?;i«s, i = o. If there
be design in Nature, we do what we were designed to do : if
we can frustrate the design of Omnipotence, the datum of design
is meaningless. We must just then turn and take the old path
to truth — observation and reasoning.

Now, when we consider the matter strictly, there is seen to
be a certain measure of practical truth in the declamation of
Chalmers. It is true that the feeling of positive hatred can
never long be a pleasurable one ; that " all is not well within
us " when we plan or long for vengeance ; and that a condition

* See his "The Emotions and the Will," 3rd ed., p. 187.
t In his dissertation on " The Inherent Misery of the Vicioui:
AfFections,"

250

of resentment is one of unrest and wearing strain. If, as
Coleridge says, " to be wroth with one we love doth work like
madness in the brain," no less true is it that all active
hate soon verges toward physiological distress. But that is
not at all a proof that malignant feeling is incompatible with
pleasure. The strain is simply that inseparable from all intense
feeling ; and if it is ever great in the case of malevolent feeling
it is because that feeling has itself been very strong. Have we
not Shelley's sigh over the burden of " love's sad satiety," and
Keats's picture of

"Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu ; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips ;"

and his avowal,

"Ay, in the very temple of DeHght
Veil'd melancholy has her sovran shrine."

Nay, is it not found that the extremer forms of passion actually
meet in unhinged organisms, so that Milton's iigure of " lust
hard by hate" becomes a physiological truth ? These facts are
plainly to be explained not by moral but by physiological laws,
and the general truth they prove is, not that pain has been
annexed to all malevolent feeling, but that it is correlative with
all excessive emotion whatever, as is implied in the simple ad-
mission that any emotion may go to excess. So that up to a
certain point malevolent emotion may be as pleasurable as any
other. So clear is this that I even hesitate to say that that
person is fortunate, if such a one exists, who has never known
a malignant joy of any kind — that is, any joy connected with
any one else's pain or discomfiture — for to be wholly devoid of
the capacity for such joy would seem to imply, in the present
stage of human evolution, mere want of sensibility. True, the
test of predominant goodness in character is just the degree of
rapidity and certainty with which one passes from a malignant
satisfaction to pity or a comprehensive sadness over all mani-
festations of evil ; but that is another matter. It is still part
of the paradox of our being that the destructive feeling is at
times momentarily inevitable to the process of moral judg-
ment.

Some will doubtless object to the term malevolence or
malignity as applied to what is called a just indignation, as if
anybody could possibly be indignant without feeling that he
was justly so. The terms " noble rage " and " righteous
wrath " testify to the conviction that at times we do well to be

251

angry. But it is mere confusion to apply the terms malignant
and malevolent only to angry feelings which we believe to be
wrong or unwarranted, and to separate the notion from all
anger which we believe to be justified. Let us clear our
minds of cant. When we call our neighbour malignant, he,
or she — it is frequently she — is satisfied of the justice of the
feeling we condemn, else the anger would not be there ; and
when we ourselves are indignant with the best cause in the
world we may easily be " malevolent " in the eyes of another
neighbour. And even when we and our neighbours combine
to detest somebody with no friends, be it the Whitechapel
murderer or the man who blasphemes our Gods, an enemy of
society or a reformer of it — and it is sometimes hard to say
which is the more hated — in either case we are exemplifying
that elemental destructive force which, paired in unconscious
Nature with its opposite, as repulsion with attraction, is seen
in conscious Nature in the wars of beasts and of races, modi-
fying and refining up through invective and competition to the
subtleties of epigrams and barbed compliments, and the moral
exultation good people feel over the downfall of evildoers.

It is one of the drawbacks of an undiversified study of ethics
— for every single study has its drawbacks — that it tends to
carry us out of sight of our cosmical significance and relations ;
and it is well at times to go back to the premiss that we are all
evolved out of the cosmic gas, and contemplate ourselves dis-
passionately as mere "fruits of the unknown diedalian plan "
equally with the birds and the landscape. There is no fear of
our being morally the worse ; we can never be the worse for
knowing ourselves better.

Now, there can be no question that a great deal of our
pleasure in life comes of this pervasive unkind feeling towards
others. Some of us may have it only in the primordial and
comparatively innocent form of the consciousness that we are
better than many of our neighbours. But it can take more
active forms than that without making us notoriously un-
popular. To some avocations it is a sine qua noii. Not to
speak of politics, or social purity propaganda, or popular
preaching, it is clearly one of the conditions of literary
criticism ; for if we did not dislike inferior books and resent
the waste of our time over them we should have no enthusiasm
for the books that repay our reading. And it may be con-
tended that there are few purer forms of malignant pleasure
than that which comes of being critically severe on a bad
writer without experiencing or showing that bad temper which

252

we all admit to be a form of discomfort. An English critic,
writing of a passage in which Sainte-Beuve makes pitiless fun
over an imitator of Chateaubriand, remarks, " I think Sainte-
Beuve must have enjoyed himself very much in writing this,
for it is extremely clever, and profoundly ill-natured." And
all of Sainte-Beuve's tribe, down to the smallest, will admit
the probability ; though they may demur to the phrase
"projoundly ill-natured," as applied to a case of malevolence
where the pleasure lies much more in the wit itself than in the
sting it may inflict on another. All humour, we may safely say,
is safeguarding in its general effects, and at least precludes
more injurious emotion on the part of the humorist, even if
the person laughed at does not join, as he sometimes can, in
the laugh against himself. We know, indeed, that humour
itself takes its rise, or that one of the elements of humour does,
in the pleasurable excitement of the lower grades of humanity
over the spectacle of suffering. Savages, we know, exhibit enjoy-
ment in witnessing the struggles of a drowning man who has
done them no harm ; and even among such a comparatively
civilized populace as the Chinese, it is said, people will laugh
at the sight of a slipping ladder with men upon it. Among
ourselves, the frequently confessed sense of amusement at the
spectacle of a man falling on ice is a modified survival of the
same organic tendency, which should qualify our impulse to
express horror at the br.italities of ancient Pagans. But
while the sense of the incongruous, so valuable as a palliative
to stress of serious feeling, is thus developed, like everything
else, out of very ugly beginnings, it is finally on the side
rather of social than of anti-social sentiment.

Lest, however, we obscure the question by only thinking of
non-serious malignity, let us turn to the case of that pleasurable
exaltation which is so often seen to accompany angry feeling
on the part of serious persons towards those whose wickedness
they denounce or expose. And let us make the point clearer
by taking a particular case. In a recently published biographical
sketch of a lady now living, it was told how she brought to
public disgrace a young ofBcer who had sought to seduce a
young servant girl. The lady, learning of the facts, instructed
the girl to make an assignation wath the young man in a public
place, and to this place at the appointed time she brought or
sent a number of young artisans who, having been informed
of the nature of the case, assaulted, maltreated, and publicly
derided the offender, who finally had to slink away in an
ignominious fashion. And we are told that if the lady who

253

arranged the episode had been able, she would have had the
officer cashiered. The whole story, I understand, has given
much moral satisfaction to the majority of those who are
active on behalf of social purity. They feel that the vicious
and heartless purpose of the offender was rightly punished, and
that it would have been well if he could have been cashiered,
and reduced to the lowest ignominy.

Here there can be no question either of the warmly male-
volent feeling or of the pleasure accompanying it, or of the
association of that pleasure with strong and serious moral
convictions. The persons applauding will of course call their
feeling righteous ; they may even call it divine. Lord Wolseley
has written that there must surely be some spark of divine fire
in the exultation of the warrior when he comes to grips with
his foe. It certainly seems a pity that a word should be
reduced to having no function whatever ; and I for one should
make no demur to Lord Wolseley's proposition if there were
added to it this corollary : That there is also a spark of divine
fire in the feeling with which some of us, on reading that and
similar utterances of Lord Wolseley, privately apply to him
opprobrious terms, of which, for public purposes, we modify
the forms, but hardly the spirit. Seeing, however, that this
impartial employment of the term " divine " might lead to
confusion, it seems better to argue without it. I would call
Lord Wolseley's divine fire simply a particular manifestation
of malevolent feeling, as I would call the episode of the lady
and the disgraced officer such a manifestation. And now we
come to our moral problem : How are these manifestations ol
feeling to be viewed from the standpoint of ethical science ?

We are agreed, I hope, that, as feeling is evolved out of the
unconscious, so moral feeling is evolved out of the simply
conscious ; and that thus our benevolent and our malevolent
feelings alike are fitly to be subjected to the checks of reason,
the test of results, just as the processes of nature and the
tendencies of the lower animals are held to be fitly subjected
to our control. Instinct, first-thought, is only valid, ethically
speaking, when it has been endorsed by correlative instincts,
by second and third thoughts ; and it is in the nature of moral
evolution that the further or qualifying instincts tend to be
developed successively and continuously. The perpetual
difficulty of practical ethics is this — that while morality clearly
rests equally on primary self-regarding instinct and on
secondary sympathetic instinct, both instincts alike are capable
of leading to evil. The very sense of right rises in physical

254

instinct, as we can see in the habits of animals; and this is the
scientific justification of the term "natural right," which
covers all social arrangements that can be permanently
harmonised with the first biological instinct and its social
correlative, and marks off as invalid and deserving of abolition
all other so-called rights set up by the legislation of either the
majority or the minority. Now, it is in the nature of a
relatively high or developed moral enthusiasm, just as of a
relatively low or primary egoism, to outleap the check of the
secondary instinct of sympathy, or of the further sympathy
which checks the first. Indignation, in the nature of the case,
excludes sympathy with its object ; which is another way of
saying that indignation is at all times morally dangerous. In
the case we are specially considering, of the conscientious lady
burning to humiliate the vicious officer, the indignation springs
first from sympathy with the endangered girl ; but there is
clearly no scintilla of sympathy with the wrongdoer. And yet
the wrongdoer should be taken into account. Either he is to
remain a member of society or he is not. In the latter case
we must either shut him up for ever or put him to death ; and
the propriety of either of these courses, if it is anyone's instinct
to take either, is determined by its social results. But probably
not even the indignant lady in the height of her wrath
thought of putting the sinner to death, or in perpetual custody.
Now, if neither of these courses is to be taken, if he is to
remain a member of society, our action towards him is clearly
non-moral if we put him outside all sympathy. To leave a
man free and yet treat him as a noxious lower animal is to
cancel morality in his case ; to tell him that you in no way
recognise any human claims of his to good-will, which amounts
to saying that he need now recognise no claims of yours —
that is to say, as between you and him there is no morality.
And if this situation can rightly arise over a grave offence,
short of penal treatment, it may rightly arise over a small one
which we chance to resent warmly.

Instead of putting the matter thus abstractly, let us, for
clearness sake, put it concretely. What are the practical
effects of publicly and grossly humiliating a wrongdoer ? Is
he made better or worse ? No open-minded inquirer will deny
that there is a great probability of his being made worse, of
his being driven, for one thing, into a state of permanent and
abiding hatred towards all who have humiliated him, and of a
lurther determination to be merely more furtive and not more
scrupulous in his actions. If you disgrace him to the extent of

255

driving him out of all decent society, you virtually tell him
to join the " lapsed mass," so called, and conform wholly to
its standards. In the particular case under notice, all this
might have happened, and worse. Supposing the vicious
young officer had been, as some vicious young officers are,
physically powerful and courageous, and had furiously resisted
his assailants, there might have been bloodshed and murder,
the real guilt of which would lie at the door of that moral
strategist, the indignant lady. I will not suggest that there
might very easily have arisen a painful mistake in identiti-
cation, for that argument would apply equally to all cases of
punitive action, physical or other, in which a culprit was to be
publicly exposed. I will assume that the possibility of mistake
was excluded ; and will suppose finally the case of the officer
being cashiered. To go out of the army is, in most cases, a
good thing ; to be drummed out of it is to be invited in the name
of society to turn cardsharper or loafer, or to get away into a
totally new society, for which, in the terms of the case, you
are no less unfit than you are for that from which you are
expelled.

Now, that is exactly the penal method of the Middle Ages
in minor cases. In our own day we at times meet survivals of
it in the resort of provincial magistrates to the device of
telling a suspicious person to leave the town and go to some
other town. They are simply throwing their refuse into their
neighbours' garden, a proceeding which, on the part of an
individual citizen, leads to his being fined and menaced ; but
which, on the part of a magistrate getting rid of a bad citizen,
has its unscrupulousness veiled for the eye of his fellow-
citizens by their limitation of their ethics to their own muni-
cipal boundary. But let us not single out the primitive pro-
vincial magistrate for our censure. Broadly speaking, we all
live morally from hand to mouth. Just as the cleanliest of us
continue to allow our sewage to pollute the river and the sea-
beach, so do the most scrupulously moral among us as a rule
merely elbow immorality away from us and on to some one
else's ground. The lying or thieving apprentice or servant who
plagues and plunders us we get rid of ; " some one else can
try her; " and when we rise to the height of refusing her a
" character " we feel we have touched the very summits of
virtue, since we do nothing to deceive our neighbour, that is,
our servant-employing neighbour. We have only left our
other neighbour, the offender, to take to prostitution, if she
likes, for a living.

256

At times, indeed, such a policy of expulsion may be in a
manner forced upon an individual placed in a position of
responsible administration. Thus Dr. Arnold of Rugby was
noted for the promptitude in which he expelled from his school
those whom he counted unpromising boys : and he made his
policy a matter of principle. " Till a man learn," he declared,
" that the first, second, and third duty of a schoolmaster is to
get rid of unpromising subjects, a great public school will
never be what it might be, and what it ought to be."* In
this course he had, it seems, a theory of final utility, some-
times retaining boys guilty of grave offences, and expelling
others whose offences were comparatively venial, being
" decided by the ultimate result on the whole character of the
individual, or on the general state of the school." Rugby
being a public boarding-school, it might be contended that
boys thus expelled were not necessarily made Ishmaelites, but,
whether good or bad, might get their schooling otherwise.
Arnold described one boy as "just one of those characters
which cannot bear a public school, and may be saved and
turned to great good by the humanities of private tuition."
But it is obvious that in a public system of education, power
of expulsion of this kind from public schools entails a public
responsibility of providing other schools where troublesome
subjects may be dealt with : whereas Arnold evidently thought
much more of the task of keeping his own school right from his
own point of view, than of the chances left open to the boys he
expelled ; and many people are seen to acquiesce in the expulsion
of poor but naughty boys from the public day schools, without
asking whether it is right that these black sheep should be thrust
masterless into the outer darkness, and left to develop their
bad tendencies as they list. To do this is simply to facilitate
and manufacture crime, the limitation of which is one of the
foremost purposes of national education. And if in all these
cases there is grave cause for circumspection, surely there is
equal cause in cases in which good people propose to resort
to a policy of moral boycotting of certain classes of offenders.
As a means of enforcing a particular act of social submission,
boycotting may be ethically defensible in certain circum-
stances ; but as a means of permanently extracting
individuals for whom we make no social provision, it is
scientifically inconsequent and socially barbarous. It is
trying to treat the sinner as the Middle Ages treated the

* Stanley's " Life of Arnold," ch. III.

257

leper ; a sinking of the relations of human beings at the
point in question to those of gregarious animals whose first
instincts constitute their whole morality.

What has all this to do, it may be asked, with the pleasures
of Malignity? This much, that hostile feeling, as we set our
by saying, may as easily work evil when formally sanctioned by
our morality as when not so sanctioned. Somehow sanctioned
It always is : we cannot possibly be angry or resentful without
feeling we have some cause ; but we do not always pat our-
selves on the back and say our wrath is righteous and morally
ordained. Carlyle announced to himself and others that his
rage was Godlike when it was turned against a set of wretched
criminals ; but, though he always inclined more or less to
consider his wrath divinely inspired, he was not wont to
announce with equal confidence the sacredness of his fury at a
maid-of-all-work who banged the plates on the table. I am
trying to show you that all forms of wrath are equally in need
of supervision, and that formulas like Carlyle's are at bottom
either cant or self-delusion.

But now arises the further question : Are the pleasures of
malignity ever pardonable or tolerable from the point of view of
ethical science ? To some of you I may seem to be proving
too much, to be laying down principles which cannot be applied
to human life. Well, I will not ride off on the subterfuge that
ideals are at least always useful as standards to try other
people's conduct by ; I will face the difficulty of application to
practice. Our guiding principle, we have seen, is that of final
utility, or rather the general ethical test which is compounded
out of the instincts of self-preservation, of sympathy, and of
final social utility. Now, I maintain that by that general test
the episode of the public humiliation of the vicious young officer
is condemned as in itself a non-moral proceeding. It was the
worst of all practicable ways of dealing vviththe case ; just as, if
the warm-tempered lady herself had been guilty, in the heat of
moral indignation, of speaking unjustly and calumniously — as
well-meaning people sometimes will speak — of some person
whose principles she disliked, the worst possible way of dealing
with her error would have been to confront her at a public
meeting convened for moral purposes and accuse her of false-
hood and slander. And this consideration brings me, who am
a journalist and lecturer, to the question. Is any kind or degree
of public exposure, in the form of printed invective or sarcasm,
ever ethically justifiable ? Here we soon come to a practicable
stand. I may be compounding for the sins I am inclined to in

258

the proverbial fashion, but I should say that moral or literary
exposure of certain kinds of wrong-doing, assuming it to be made
in a social spirit, is part of the inevitable strife of progress, since
there are kinds of wrong-doing which cannot well be resisted or
modified in any other way. Suppose, for instance, a bishop
makes an unscrupulous and calumnious attack on the
principles of so-called Materialists or Rationalists, as bishops
do every now and then, it is hardly conceivable that any Ma-
terialist can do any good by private remonstrance. You mav
privately moralise a vicious young officer by expostulation; but
hardly an elderly bishop. And even if you could, your private
success would not undo the public evil done, unless the bishop
were induced to retract publicly his injurious utterance ; which
act, on the part of a bishop, I take to be inconceivable. In the
interests of the right culture of the public, therefore, from the
Rationalist's point of view, the bishop ought to be attacked
and refuted ; and if sarcasm be useful as a means of bringing
the bishop's folly and injustice home to those whom he may
have swayed for evil, the use of such sarcasm — unless it can be
shown to work social evil by driving the bishop to desperation,
which is hardly likely — is in the present stage of civilisation
■ethically justifiable. In which case the operating Rationalist
is likely to enjoy one of the Pleasures of Malignity, for it is
hardl}^ in human nature not to enjoy satirising an objectionable
and bigoted bishop. Here we are publicly exposing, in a
limited and therefore on the whole a defensible manner, a
public man, who by public speech assumed public responsi-
bility, and who would probably admit in the abstract that
public criticism is a proper check on public men, whatever he
might think of any particular criticism of himself. Here there is
no driving of a private person into the glare of public disgrace, and
thenceintothe gloom of privatedegradation, which leads to lower
and lower vice and crime. We are applying moral punishment
an the one rational way, that is to say, to the substantially good
;rather than to the substantially bad — a paradox which I recom-
mend to your serious attention. We enforce on the offender
the lesson either of self-regarding prudence or of wholesome
criticism. We either deter or enlighten him for the future.
All practical ethical tests are satisfied, except perhaps that
involved in the question whether the exposure of the bishop
may not have an injurious effect on the character of the person
who exposes him. And this is a difficult question opening up
new difficulties. We have to settle whether, or how far, the
Pleasures of Malignity are subjectively demoralising.

259

Clearly there is a risk, to begin with, of growing to take a
vicious or undue pleasure in the exposure of human frailties.
Once, as an anonymous journalist, I penned a paragraph of
sarcastic criticism of a philanthropic religious lady who, pro-
fessing to speak in the name of a religion of love, chanced to
display a rather startling access of what seemed gratuitously
malevolent feeling. On this another religious and philan-
thropic lady wrote me an indignant letter, accusing me of
taking pleasure in publishing good people's errors. In that
case I suppose there was an indulgence in the Pleasures of
Malignity all round ; and it would be fatuous on my part to
contend that two good women were wholly wrong and I wholly
right. The ethical tests would be : Was' the first lady advan-
tageously and necessarily admonished ; were many ladies as
much put out as the second lady; and was my character
vitiated. I will not here attempt to answer any of these
questions: I only indicate them. But I will say in general
terms that any position is unfortunate in which man or woman
is led to indulge more in malevolent feeling, no matter against
whom, than in pity and tolerance and 'philosophic recognition
of the immanence of evil in things. Whether our bias be
naturally to such an excess of indulgence in the Pleasures of
Malignity, or whether such a bias be developed by our sur-
roundings and avocation, the evil is the same. We tend to be
multipliers rather than repressors of evil ; and multiplication
of evil of any kind whatever is ethically indefensible. This
caveat clearly applies to all who are concerned in public
controversy, to politicians, to partisan journalists, to advocates
of social purity, to religionists, to freethinkers. And, by way
of bringing home the moral, I would say that it is one of the
risks of Freethinkers in particular that whereas they find them-
selves often assailed, if they be at all outspoken, with what
they feel to be base or mean injustice and odious virulence by
religious bigots and others, they are tempted to a constant pre-
paration for asperity, a more and more frequent satisfaction in
wounding attack and rejoinder and pitiless ridicule — a too
great indulgence, in fact, in the Pleasures of Malignity, making
them less humane and therefore less" social than they might
conceivably have been. They harden themselves, perhaps,
against attack, and so escape some pain on their own account,
but they tend to multiply ill-feeling rather than good.

On the other hand, however, it seems to be implied in the
spirit of utilitarian ethics that a certain exercise of the Pleasures
of Malignity may subjectively as well as objectively coincide

26o

with social progress; since if it be necessary sometimes to in-
flict moral or literary punishment it must be beneficial to culti-
vate to a certain extent the faculty for the practice. And this
raises the question how far the public and purposive indulgence
in the Pleasures of Malignity may be subjectively beneficial.

One of the outstanding features in European ethical practice,
from the dark ages down to last century, was the apparently
universal feeling that it was a good discipline and a praiseworthy
exercise for an independent gentleman to "go to the wars,'*
wherever the wars might happen to be. Nothing could osten-
sibly be more unchristian, in one of the commoner senses of the
term ; but neither clergy nor moralists seem ever to have con-
demned it. The official theory doubtless was that war might
arise anywhere at any time, and that preparation was to be made
in every available way ; but there was also the assumption that
the discipline itself was good, as forming character ; and down
to our own day, for instance in the writings of Mr. Ruskin,
there has been abundant eulogy of the type of character evolved
by war. To these mostly rhapsodic dicta we can, of course, as
students of ethics, pay no deference. They one and all, like
Wordsworth's " Character of the Happy Warrior," magnify
the results of war in developing the pre-eminent warrior, and
make little account of the general human significance of the
fact that he is

" doomed to go in company with Pain
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train;"
and, sooth to say, the poetic picture drawn of the warrior is
usually far wide of the truth. On that point we need not stay :
the responsibility for the soldier lies with us who employ him,
and there an end. Soldiering is to be made an end of, as an
anachronism, as soon as may be : the question is, whether moral
conflict, with its bloodless but still malevolent strife, can yield
the ideal discipline held to be attained in war, while working
not only no objective bi t no subjective evil. In one aspect,
the discipline of war would seem to have a certain advantage.
The ideal warrior has been in all civilized times one who passed
rapidly from the fury of battle to the calm of courteous inter-
course. He must not exult grossly svera dead foe: that was
felt even in the Homeric age to be impious ; and Mr. Swinbourne,
calling the French Emperor " dog" after as he did before his
death, falls below the classic standard."'' The warrior must

'■' The Emperor, odious as he truly was, did not quite miss his
mark when he laid down Hugo's Chdtiments with the one word
Ignoble.

26l

bear no continuous hatred. But how often and how far has
the ideal been realized ? Let the story of our own great Civil
War suffice for answer. If the malignities of political and other
controversy be sometimes enduring and ignoble, so, assuredly
have been those of race feuds and faction hatreds which were
waged with physical weapons ; and if great commanders and
brave soldiers could be placeable and mutually respecting, so
have been and so may be the leaders and the combatants in the
wars of thought and'of social predilection. Professor Bain, in
his sketch of John Mill, gives us a short prose picture which
will compare very well, ethically speaking, with Wordsworth's
poetry : —

"There is great difficulty in arriving at the precise degree of
the fundamental or elementary emotions in almost any mind, still
more in Mill, who, by training or culture, was a highly complex
product. The remark is applicable to the tender feeling, viewed
in its ultimate form ; and even more to the other great source of
human emotion — the Malevolent or irascible feeling. Unless con-
spicuously present, or conspicuously absent, the amount of feeling
in the elementary shape can with difficulty be estimated in a
character notable for growth, and for complication of impulses. In
Mill, all the course, crude forms of angry passion were entirely
wanting. He never got into a rage. His pleasures of malevolence,
so far as existing, were of a very refined nature. Only in the
punishment of offenders against his fellow-men, did he indulge
revengeful sentiment. He could, on occasions, be very severe in
his judgments and 'denunciations ; but vulgar,* calumny, abuse,
hatred for the mere sake of hatred, were completely cruciiied in
him. He spent a large part of his life in polemics ; and his treat-
ment of opponents was a model of the ethics of controversy.
The delight in victory was with him a genial, hearty chuckle, and
no more." ■'

Here then we have, in a very different sense from the
original purport of Johnson's phrase, " a good hater;" one
who can be both stern and placable ; a vigorous foe and a
well-wishing fellow citizen ; one who seems never to have
worsened in character for all his controversies. Pleasures of
Malevolence he certainly had ; but they never came near over-
balancing his benevolent affections ; any more than the
passionate resentments of Shelle}' ever encroached on the
wide range of his intense philanthropy. And this, I take it,
must be the ideal for the age of intellectual and moral conflict,
just as the temperate warrior, formidable in fight but soon
serene in peace, was the ideal of ages in which men could not

* "J. s. Mill," p. 151.

262

see beyond the necessity of war. Certainly we cannot at
present see beyond the necessity of social antagonism; and
though an utter disappearance of all Pleasures of Malignity be
the ideal goal of moral evolution, it is quite certain that it is
biologically impossible for even an appreciable minority of
civilized men at present. It belongs theoretically to the Stage
of Equilibrium, which is yet mconceivably remote. And thus
the doctrine of non-resistance, instructive as pointing to a re-
mote ideal, must be recognised as a biological impossibility
for even an appreciable minority. Its one modern propounder,
Count Tolstoi, is biologically explicable as having come to
it in a certain physiologcial state, towards the end of a long
life well filled with the Pleasures of Malignity. There is in
him, as his countryman Stepinak has recently well pointed
out, something of the Oriental ; and it is in the Oriental that we
find, contrasted with some of the extremest phases of indul-
gences in the Pleasures of Malignity, the nearest approach
to the entire disappearance of them.

The one extreme may conceivably follow the other in the
same organism. And this suggests the need of remembering
how the two swings of the pendulum are equally normal
phases of the average moralised man. Most of the legendary
or historical figures presented to us exhibit both ; and there is
clearly nothing to be gained for ethics by the common practice
of representing the Jesus of the Gospels as innocent of the
Pleasures of Malevolence, when he plainly had them frequently
and abundantly; or by the other practice of conceiving Paul in
terms of his eloquent eulogy of love, and ignoring his only too
frequent indulgence in the opposite emotion. The result of
these false generalisations is that the plainest indulgences in
malevolent feeling in any ethical or religious connection are
no longer recognised by the religionists who commit them as
malignities at all ; and we have the spectacle of bitter and
demoralizing malevolence predominating in the minds of would-
be reformers, who tell themselves that no amount of such
passion on their part can be injurious, since, like that of the
religious exemplars, it is always directed against evil. I want
you to remember that the passion itself partakes of the nature
of evil, and is only vindicated when a clear balance of objective
and subjective good can be shown to issue.

And those who need the warning, remember, are not merely
public teachers and combatants but private persons ; and not
merely men but women ; for it is very certain that while
women have been historically non-combatants in civilised

?63

war, they are to the full as susceptible as men of the moral
Pleasures of Malignity. They even exhibit some developments
of malevolence from which the discipline of public strife tends
to preserve men ; and since that discipline in the case of
women is still but slightly available, there is the more need in
their case for watchfulness. Especially do they tend, by reason
of their special moral development in one or two directions, to
excess of moral malevolence in connection with those points in
conduct. Now, for individuals as for parties, there is this safe
general test, that a chronic predominance or prolonged violence
of malevolent feeling, whether it be called moral or political or
partisan or religious, means multiplication of evil ; and that
the party or the person most frequently indulging in the
Pleasures of Malignity, especially in the serious as distinct
from the humorous form, is most likely to be working harm.
Try by that test both parties and their leaders, and you will
seldom go far wrong. Ask of a politician : does he oftener
speak generously, sympathetically, humanely, constructively,
or bitterly, malignantly, harshly, destructively, and you have
at least one trustworthy test of his work, if only you do not
make the blunder of supposing that the superseding of out-
worn beliefs and institutions by better ones is finally a process
of destruction.

And, finally, as regards individual conduct, it is above all
things important to realise that what most of us who concern
ourselves about ethics have most to guard against is just
excess of malevolence towards those whom we most confi-
dently reckon evil-doers. The truth may be best put in the
form of our paradox that punishment is for the good rather
than for the bad. The man in whom moral tendencies pre-
dominate may be influenced for good by your censure or your
satire ; the man in whom immoral tendencies predominate
will not be so influenced. To adopt, then, a course of invective
and of humiliating exposure tending to make him wholly
reprobate, is only to multiply evil in the name of good,
a course plainly inexcusable in us who all admit that we
at times fall into evil ; since the principle of punishment
to the uttermost may as fitly begin at a smaller sin as at
a greater, among those who are to remain fellow-citizens, and
who do not propose to destroy or imprison each other. It is
the greater sinner who most claims our consideration, and the
more commonly reprobated an offence is, the more cause is
there for scrupulous people to beware of driving an offender
to worse courses. This is the principle that condemns

264

the greater part of our official penal machinery — condemns
it so decisively, that there are few offences against the
law which a good and circumspect citizen will not rather
seek to screen and try to deal with privately rather than hand
them over for public prosecution. Much more readily will he
allow himself to arraign publicly — not private error, which
even in private he should be quick to forgive, but the public
wrong-doing, moral or intellectual, of the well-placed and the
complacent, who are countenanced and not discountenanced
by convention in their injustice or their unscrupulousness,
because they are substantially and in intention on the side of
morality. These he is not likely to dislike with too prolonged
heat, since the sight of what is good in them can comparatively
easily recall him to the philosophic recognition of universal
frailty, which is so much commoner a frame of mind than the
philosophic recognition of the cosmic nature of evil, and than
pity for those who are the vessels of it. So will he enjoy his
Pleasures of Malignity in the form least productive of evil and
most productive of good ; and so will he cultivate in his own
person the best of those characteristics which we associate
with the word chivalry and with the word generosity. That,
we all admit, is not the ultimate ideal, but it is a tolerable
working ideal for these days of social and intellectual strife.
The Golden Age lies for ever beyond.

December 21st, 1890. John M. Robertson.

PRINTED BV

KING, SELL, AND RAILTON, LTD.,

12, GOUGH SQUARE, AND 4, BOLT COURT

FLEET STREET, E.C

No. 29.]

out!) ^ka ^tljital ^^otirfj,

FINSBURY, E.G.

Pl^INCIPIiE W^ PeiilTIOS.

A LECTURE

DELIVERED BEFORE

THE SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY,

On SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28th, 1890,

ARTHUR W. MUTTON, M.A.

PUBLISHED BY
E. W. ALLEN, AVE MARIA LANE, LONDON.

PRICE TWOPENCE.

i^Ej^iDxisrc^s.

I. From Dr. Channing's Address on " Self Culture," delivered at
Boston, U.S.A., September, 1838: — "Among the best
people . . . the opportunity of justifying themselves."

II. — From Sir G. Cornewall Lewis' " Methods of Observation
and Reasoning in Politics," vol. ii., p. 392-396 : — " The
dealings of the politician are with men . . . which
never happens in real life."

PRINCIPLE AND POLITICS.

MY subject needs at the outset some definition, because the
word " Politics " is an ambiguous one. If we speak of
Politics in the sense of the Greek philosophers, as we speak of
Ethics, Metaphysics, Esthetics, and the like, we mean a science.
Political Science, a subject which may be treated in an abstract
manner, without reference to what is actually going on in the
world around us. In this sense Politics are not much to the
taste of the average Englishman, who is seldom an idealist.
He prides himself rather on his sober common sense, and he
smiles at Utopian constitutions which exist only on paper,
while he takes pride in the thought that the British constitu-
tion is almost a product of the soil, so native is it, and so slow
has been its growth. He contrasts it with the mere mushroom
constitutions in France or elsewhere, not perhaps in regard to
details, but with an eye to its age and stability ; and few of us
would blame him on that account. At the same time it must
be confessed that the study of Political Science is being more
and more forced on us in England, because we can see that
the future has grave political changes in store for us, and so
the importance of studying fundamental political problems,
either in the abstract, or better, in the history of other States,
is daily more clearly recognized. In the past we have had
distinguished political thinkers — I need only mention the
names of Jeremy Bentham and of John Stuart Mill — and
though at the moment there is perhaps no one who commands
much popular enthusiam in this department of science, the
time is coming when we shall need some one with the genius
of a Mazzini in England.

But Politics, as Political Science, are not Politics in the
ordinary sense. When we use the term we generally mean an
art, and not, I fear, an art in the best sense. It is hardly
statecraft or the art of governing that we mean ; hardly even
the art of legislation. We delegate these things to the execu-

266

tive or to our representatives, with little thought of our
responsibility in the matter, and we content ourselves with
occasionally applauding or more frequently with criticising
and ridiculing their efforts. Politics in the popular sense are a
game or something very like it. Our system of government
by party, which is nevertheless inevitable, is, to a great extent,
responsible for this ; and questions which in their nature are
political in the scientific sense, or strictly speaking are even
ethical, are turned into party questions and are used as cards
in the game. My aim in this lecture will therefore be to recall
our minds from the levity which this idea introduces, and to
insist on the great dignity of Politics rightly considered ; and
to that end I couple with them the word Principle, which
designates the lode-star of our human life.

Obviously it is the business of an Ethical Society to insist
on this connection between Principle and Politics ; the con-
nection between Ethics and Politics is necessarily a close one
whether we regard the latter as a science or as an art.
Aristotle, in concluding his treatise on Ethics, says that if
we wish to help our children or our friends on the road to
virtue we must learn how to legislate ; and so he makes the
one treatise an introduction to the other. Plato in one and
the same dialogue, on the Republic, treats of Ethics and
Politics together; and the most systematic modern philosopher,
Auguste Comte, holds that, according to " a true filiation olF
the sciences," the science of " social physics " should be
crowned by and subordinated to the science of Ethics ; and
there is no contradiction between the two, though the order in
classification differs. We can hold with Aristotle that Ethics,
regarded merely as maxims of good conduct, need enforcing by
the back-bone of legislation, if they are to be permanent,
effectual, and transmitted, while we hold at the same time
with Comte that the outcome of scientific legislation will be
good morals ; for if it is not so, of what good, as the proverb
exclaims, are our laws ? The two interact and affect each
other ; and the State in which ethical considerations are placed
above interest when law-making or law-repealing is the
problem, that State, if such there be, is surely to be envied by
all the nations of the world.

But it will be chiefly in connection with Politics as we
commonly understand the term that I shall urge our never
losing sight of the principles of Ethics. Indeed, were I com-
petent to deal at length and in philosophical form with the
scientific aspect of Politics, I doubt there being much practical

267

utility in such a discussion. What is more likely to be of
service is an examination of some of our methods of political
procedure, which examination must of itself show how sadly
they often fall short of what is required of them when judged
by a sound moral standard ; and to follow this up with some
suggestions as to what anyone of us as an individual can do to
invigorate his politics with principle. I shall keep clear as far
as may be of current political questions, not because I have no
opinions on them myself, but because this is not the occasion
for obtruding such opinions.

I mentioned our system of party-government as accountable
to some extent for the degradation of our politics. There are
times when every thoughtful man must feel disgusted with
the barren results of the system, and be ready to exclaim
with Mercutio, " A plague on both your houses." The
evils incidental to it are obvious. That which has been
most prominent in recent years is the systematic obstruction
of public business, not so much with the object of preventing
particular measures from becoming law — for the excellence of
some of these may be admitted — as with the aim of rendering
the party in office ridiculous, and of forcing them to resign in
sheer despair. Then the system gives rise to various forms of
exaggeration, as often as not perilously near falsehood and
calumny. We do not merely exaggerate the evils that we pro-
pose by our legislation to remove ; we accuse the other side of
being, in great measure, the cause of those evils ; we ascribe to
their interference the failure of what we have hitherto done to
remove them ; we scoff at the remedies that our opponents
have proposed, while we endeavour to plume ourselves with
any benefits that they have really secured. Nor are we
altogether dishonest in all this. We half believe it because of
our party prepossessions ; and the corresponding injustice
which we meet with from the other side confirms us in our
belief. Clearly then, in the system of government by party
there is a tendency to dissociate Politics from Ethics ; clearly,
it is not an ennobling moral atmosphere in which men live
when such thoughts about each other are the outcome of the
contest in which they are engaged. But it is easy to make too
much of all this, and to lose sight of the fact that there is
nothing essentially immoral in the idea of political partisan-
ship. Indeed, the most esteemed writers in political science
tell us that the immorality, if such it be, is really on the other
side, and that association with a political party ought to have
an important place in the ethics of every good citizen, while

?68

the system of government by party is in a democratic age as
inevitable as government itself. Our own Burke for example
says : — " I find it impossible to conceive that anyone believes
in his own politics, or thinks them to be of any weight, who
refuses to adopt the means of having them reduced into
practice. It is the business of the speculative philosopher to
mark the proper ends of government ; it is the business of
the politician who is the philosopher in action, to find out
proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with
effect." And in another place he says : — " Party divisions,
whether on the whole operating for good or evil, are things
inseparable from good government. This is a truth which I
believe admits little dispute, having been established by the
uniform experience of all ages." He then proceeds to make a
distinction between private persons, who, he says, may keep
entirely aloof from party without blame, and those who are
legally invested with public trust, who cannot remain neutral
without sinking into insignificance and neglecting their duty ;
but the distinction is not a very intelligible one ; for every man
who has the franchise, has been so far " legally invested with
public trust," the duty laid upon him being that of selecting
his representative ; and if he remains neutral when the time
comes for him to discharge that duty, he is, in a small way
perhaps, but still as really false to his position as the man in
public life who becomes impotent by not acting with a party.
But, of course, this depends on Burke's assumption that
impotence is the necessary result of holding aloof; an
assumption that many will be ready to question. A man with
an idea, which he propagates diligently, may ultimately become
a powerful factor in political progress, though meanwhile he
may dissociate himself entirely from the great contending
parties; and it is a commonplace to speak of the influence
wielded by those who hold the balance between two nearly
equal parties. But after all, these exceptions are more
apparent than real ; for the man with the idea is only effective
when his idea has won the acceptance of the majority;
and the men who hold the balance only turn the scale when
they really do ally themselves with one side or the other. It
appears, then, that Burke is right in affirming the necessity of
party-government ; and that, whatever evils we may discern in
the practical working of the system, there is nothing in it of
which we need be ashamed ; on the contrary, to work with a
party in politics is the best proof we can give that we are
active and in earnest ; to decline so to work is evidence that

269

our interest is of the kind called platonic, and that we are
deficient both in zeal and in hope.

Burke's assertion has received manifold confirmation since
he made it a century ago in its illustration in the work-
ings of the hundreds of representative bodies, national and
municipal, which have come into existence meanwhile. Later
writers on political science have also re-affirmed his position in
even stronger terms. Professor Bluntschli points out that the
most gifted and the freest nations are just those that have the
most sharply-defined parties, and that the State's best life is
evolved through their struggles. Their interaction and mutual
criticism bring out its hidden wealth, and they form the most
potent deterrent against corruption. But he adds that these
benefits rest on the assumption that parties recognize the
truth contained in their name, that they are parts, and not
the whole. It would be fatal to both parties if one over-
whelmed and destroyed the other. No party-man ought to
desire such a consummation, but only that his own side may
have a substantial ascendency, and that only for a time. It
is also essential to the idea of a party, as subservient to the
general welfare, that it should be a free association. The
allegiance of its members must not be blind, else the old
tyranny of absolutism will creep in again under the disguise of
modern political terms. The party in power is peculiarly liable
to become thus blind in its allegiance, while the danger to the
party in opposition is that it is tempted to become captious in
its criticism, and to combat the policy of the other side simply
because it delights to expatiate in its duty of opposition. I
may refer also to another scientific and sympathethic treat-
ment of party government by a German-Swiss, Professor
Rohmer, whose work was published at Zurich in 1842. An
illustration that he gives is worth noting, because, being amus-
ing, it is easily remembered. He holds that it is natural for
men to fall into four more or less distinct parties, the radical,
the liberal, the conservative, and the absolutist. These four
he compares with four more or less distinct stages in the life of
man, and he holds that the presence and interaction of these
parties is as advantageous to the State, as is the existence of
men of different ages to the welfare of society. The radicals,
he says, are the boys and young men, impatient of restraint,
critical of all authority, and believing that everything can be
changed, and ought to be changed, for the better. The liberals
are the matured men under forty, who have zeal for progress,
so as it be not too rapid. The conservatives are the men

270

between forty and sixty, who tolerate some changes, but would
prefer things to remain as they are ; while the absolutists are
the old men who delight in authority, and think there is no
salvation but in a strong ruler's repressive hand. It is a pretty
little analogy, and I should fear to tell you how many hundred
pages the learned Professor devotes to developing it in detail.
Fortunately for its credit, he adds that the extremes often
meet, and radicalism and absolutism may be found in the very
young and the very old in a somewhat confusing manner. We
could illustrate this in England by the contrast between our
oldest and most distinguished statesman and sundry Univer-
sity debating societies, in which a majority of boyish young men
is always ready to defend the most absolutist ideas in Politics.
Such, then, is the consensus of opinion about the necessity and
the advantage of the party system ; and this opinion is prob-
ably true, without reference to the particular phases which
party may assume in this or that country, or at this or that
time. It is likely enough, indeed, that so long as human
nature remains what it is, men, according to their diverse tem-
peraments, will be divided into liberals or conservatives of an
extreme or moderate type ; but even if this broad distinction
were to disappear, and if the great political distinction were
hereafter to lie, as many think it will, between socialists and
individualists, between men who make much of the State, and
men who make much of the man, it would still be true that
government by party would continue under other names.
There will never be realised those dreams of political reformers
who have anticipated the advent of a time when party spirit
shall be laid aside, and all good men will have rallied round
one standard, and we shall rejoice in a government of " all
the talents." It never turns out so. Somehow one party
has never the monopoly of wisdom ; and it is useless not to
recognize this inevitable fact. There is a dualism throughout
nature, and we find this dualism also in the temperaments of
men ; and its outcome is to render relatively eternal those
political divisions which it is our business not so much to
deplore as to render serviceable. It is temperament and interest,
rather than logic or knowledge, which we now see dividing
men into the socialist or individualist parties, the division
between which will, I anticipate, be the most clearly defined
in the future. Strong men, conscious of their strength and
accustomed to push their way successfully in the world, are
less sensible of the need of that comradeship which the weak,
the diffident, and the unfortunate recognize as necessary for

271

their present salvation. " Every man shall bear his own
burden " is a text to the taste of the former ; " bear ye one
another's burdens " is a more favourite text with the latter ;
and so men naturally adopt the individualist or the socialist
platform ; though, it must be added, no such division on
a priori grounds can ever be quite accurate, for sympath}^ and
unselfishness may often bring over to the socialist ranks, strong
and successful men.

It appears, then, that political partisanship is not wholly
responsible for the degradation of our politics, and that we
must look for other causes elsewhere. Doubtless we are right
in attributing something to that want of seriousness often observ-
able in the conduct of politicians, which is admitted in the
common metaphor of a game. There is nothing necessarily con-
temptuous in this comparison, for a game is often conducted with
more fairness than a fight. Sir George Cornewall Lewis,
in the passage which I have read, shows ingeniously in
detail that politics are more like a game of whist than a game
of chess, though the latter is the more usual comparison. The
politician is dependent not merely on his own skill, but on the
" hand " which is dealt out to him by circumstances which he
cannot control, and he is dependent also on the skill and luck
of those who represent his partner in the game. The metaphor
is not, I think, essentially a degrading one. If only politics were
always conducted with the gravity and conscientious fairness
with which men play at whist or at cricket, there would be
nothing to complain of. Better this, certainly, than the analogy
of a right, with the understanding that " all's fair in war." The
real evil is when the likeness is carried so far that the serious-
ness of the issues at stake is not recognized. The upshot of a
game (I am not now speaking of gambling) is merely the loss or
gain of prestige by either side, and no graver result follows.
Whereas to regard a political struggle, say over the hours or
other conditions of labour, as a contest in which only the pres-
tige of the Liberal or Conservative party is at stake, is fatally
to mistake the position. Yet what do we actually see ? When
a critical party-division is impending ; and the whips have been
busy in hunting up their last man for it ; when the leaders on
either side are making eloquent and memorable speeches,
which, in spite of their earnestness and eloquence, it is perfectly
well understood will not influence a single vote ; at such a time no
one in the Houses of Parliament remembers — we may admit
that the circumstances make it difficult to remember — the toil-
ing men and women, or the half-clad and half-starved children.

272

whose welfare and happinesF, perhaps their very existence, may
depend on the vote that is to be taken. We must resolutely re-
pudiate the analogy of a game when it is carried so far as this.
But perhaps a graver cause of the degradation of politics
is to be found in the unreality of our present system of
representation. We are in a transition stage, and the influence
of feudalism is still with us. I need not detain you with any
description of that feudal system, which in its day was a social
factor of immense importance and advantage. We see its
outcome for good in the ideas of loyalty, chivalry, and honour
which it fostered, and without which all social order would be
in danger of collapse. It was an absolute aristocracy. The
feudal lord was in a sense the representative, but he was also
the actual ruler of his men, and they recognized in him as a
matter of course a just claim on their allegiance, his cause
being their cause beyond dispute. And in point of fact these
feudal lords were, of course with exceptions, the men best
qualified to rule in their day ; and when they generally ceased
to be such the system itself inevitably disappeared. But it
remains with us as an influence and a tradition, and it
undoubtedly hampers our system of representation. In an
ideal representative government the legislative body would be
the nation in miniature. The Parliament House would
contain all classes in reduced number, but in the same pro-
portion as they exist in the countr}^ — this being on the assump-
tion, which no one now denies out loud, that all men have equal
rights. Doubtless such an ideal will never be realised in
practice ; but consider how very far we are from it yet. There
is a difference indeed between the existing state of things and
the times before the first Reform Act ; but it is not clear that
the changes are altogether for the better. Before 1832 the feudal
tradition had things all its own way, and that not only in its
stronghold, the House of Lords, which at that time possessed real
power. That does not profess to be representative; it contains a
whole class and not representatives of one. Other countries have,
as you know, a representative House of Nobles, the nobles
including all those who with us would be merely styled '* of
gentle birth " ; but there is no desire in this country for such an
Upper House, which would presumably be more tenacious of
life and so more dangerous than our House of Lords, which,
as including every man born to or decorated with the figment of
a title, instinctively shrinks into insignificance when breathed
on by the spirit of democracy. But at the date I refer to the
feudal tradition so overshadowed the House of Commons also

273

that even there hardly any real representation could be found.
A man of aristocratic birth, with sufficient means, would simply
buy his seat, and often enough he would never even take the
trouble to visit his constituents, his election following as a
matter of course when he had sent a cheque for the stipulated
amount to the representatives of his party in the borough
that had been assigned to him. It was the feudal idea which
marked him out as belonging to the *' governing class," and
there was nothing more to be said. And, absurd as it was
to call such men " representatives," the system did not work
so very badly. It was before the days of the great industrial
movement, which has populated England with a great middle
class, and with millions of shrewd and well-educated working
men. Roughly speaking, there existed then only the gentry
and the agricultural population, and it was inevitable that
from among the former the seats in Parliament should be
filled. The men selected were often enough cultured, thought-
ful, fair-minded, and able ; doubtless they were the men of
the time best qualified to legislate and rule. Anyhow, under
that system we obtained (to name no others) the two Pitts,
Burke, Fox, Canning, Melbourne and Palmerston.

But the influence of feudalism is at work amongst us still
in a somewhat different way. It having become recognized in
practice that a "representative" need not be such in the
natural sense of the term — need not be one from among those
whom he is supposed to represent, nor, indeed, be in any sense
like them — but is a man in high social position, it has followed
that, in the existing reign of wealth (as compared with the
reign of " birth " which preceded it), men, who are ambitious
of social distinction, covet a seat in Parliament as the easiest
way of securing that distinction ; and though money does not
secure a seat quite as simply and straightforwardly as it did,
it is still the one indispensable qualification, and such it must
remain until men are free to choose from among themselves a
representative whom they have long known, and have recog-
nized as able and trustworthy, all concern in regard to his election
expenses and his maintenance while in Parliament being taken
from them and placed on the public purse. There are reasons
for distrusting the regime of the new plutocracy more than that
of the old aristocracy. Among the latter you would often find
men of liberal and superior education, generous in their aspira-
tions and enthusiastic for social progress, men who had
employed their leisure in studying modern problems, either
in this or in other countries, and who coveted, not the social

274

distinction which was theirs ah'eady, but the honour which
attaches to steady and successful statesmanship. But what do
you find among the former ? I say " among," for, of course,
there are many admirable exceptions. What has been the
training for a political career of the prosperous broker or
brewer, who runs down to some country constituency where he is.
entirely unknown, and asks to be returned to Parliament as their
representative ? Presumably, his education had been mainly con-
fined to book-keeping, and he was taken early from school, so that
no time might be lost in his being grounded in the one
necessary truth, based on lago's maxim : " Put money in thy
purse," in its modern equivalent, " Increase your capital." And
after some thirty or forty years of successful application to this
one selfish idea, a man is thought to be well-fitted to " repre-
sent" a constituency composed, we will say, mainly of agricul-
tural labourers. Certainly, if statesmanship consisted wholly
in political economy, in the drawing of budgets and the driving
of bargains in the interests of the country, there would be a
good deal to be said for such a previous training ; but political
economy has in these later days developed into the wider field
of social economy. We have found that questions of prices
and of supply and demand involve further questions of a more
delicate kind. Justice and liberty are often really at stake in
a discussion which may be narrowed by hard-headed and hard-
hearted men to a question of pure economics ; and if we can-
not have the people most nearly concerned in such a discussion
represented directly by a due proportion of their own number,
surely it is better they should be represented indirectly by
sympathetic men who are eligible by birth, character, and
education, rather than by men whose only qualification is the
weight of the balance at their bankers. Among these pluto-
crats are men whose sole occupation is gambling, mainly in the
purchase and sale of shares. The addition of M.P. to their
names they value as an excellent qualification for becoming
directors of public companies and the like ; and such men
would not scruple to use their public position for the further-
ance of their private ends in that kind of gambling to which I
have referred. This evil is not an imaginary one, for it has
existed for some time in the United States, where plutocracy
is even a greater danger than with us, since it has no aristocracy
to counter-balance it, and we know how terribly it has
degraded politics there.

There is another point in connection with the choice of
representatives on which something must be said; I mean what

275

is commonly spoken of as the "moral" character of public
men. The epithet is an unfortunate one, because, as popularly
used, it narrows the true idea of the sphere of morals, and
gives undue prominence to the one department of conduct, an
important one undoubted^, in the matter of sexual relations.
A man whose life is pure in this respect may yet be altogether
immoral in other departments actually more fatal to his
serviceableness to the State. I have referred to the vice of
gambling, so unhappily prevalent, a vice which begins with a
hardly blameworthy amusement, but which grows into a
masterful passion, and eventually is transferred from a man's
amusement to his business. This is immorality of a dangerous
kind. There are other incapacitating faults which may be
found in men whose domestic life is not open to reproach.
Weakness of character is such ; so also is untrustworthiness,
whether it take the form of craftiness or of an unscrupulous
repudiation of engagements entered into with a party or with
single persons. So, again, is a callous insensibility to the rights
of others on the one hand, or an ill-regulated hysterical zesd
on the other, which flames up on the perusal of some
sensational newspaper paragraph, and would set the world
in a blaze before any attempt is made to verify the facts. All
these are grave immoralities in men who would take part in
public life, and they may occasion far more widespread
mischief and misery than that one vice w^iich monopolises in
common phraseology the epithet " immoral "; and we should also
bear in mind that strong and capable men, who form the stuff
of which statesmen are made, are presumably under the
influence of passions strong in proportion to the rest of their
nature. You must take the man as a whole, and not allow
your very natural disgust at his private vice to cause you to
forget his rare fitness for the public service, if that has been
long and clearly proved. But further than this I cannot go.
We who take Ethics to be the most important factor in human
life should insist on "integrity" which is literally "whole-
ness;" and on that principle we must reject a man who is
proved by his conduct to be weak in self-control, whatever his
strength may be in other fields. We cannot trust a man who
cannot control himself ; and this decision is confirmed, and
the truth latent in the word " integrity " is vindicated, when
undisputed evidence shows that self-gratification has been
accompanied by trickiness and falseness to a friend, and when
later proofs are given that, when once a man's wholeness of
character has been corrupted, the process of going to pieces is

276

a rapid one, and treachery and meanness, before unsuspected,
are shamelessly laid before the public eye. The case to which
I refer is of course familiar just now to everyone; and it will
long be memorable and significant as illustrating the import-
ance of the connection between Ethics and Politics.

I read before my lecture a passage from Dr. Channing, in
which he urges the importance of the duty laid upon thought-
ful and religious people to take an active part in the politics of
their country. It is necessary to address the same exhortation
to members of an Ethical Society, who may, as a rule, be
assumed to be reflective persons who have withdrawn in some-
thing like despair from the theological discussions of the day,
and so are, perhaps, in danger of being tempted to withdraw,
also in despair, from political discussions and struggles ; while
in reality they are the very people who ought to be doing their
utmost to reinforce politics with a new backbone of ethical
principle. It is undeniable that in various ways the procedure
in practical politics is in danger of becoming distasteful to men
of a philosophic, or a scientific turn of mind. Burke says the
politician is " the philosopher in action," and action is just the
thing which the philosopher most detests. He delights in
the quiet retirement of his study, and he dreads the roughness
of the contest in the street. But what has philosophy done
for the welfare of mankind, beyond stimulating and guiding
thought, if its conclusions have not first been sanctioned by
the majority of the ballot-box and the Parliamentary vote ? It
may be true, in a certain sense, that the philosopher who
descends into the street will lose his life ; but if so, he loses it
in accordance with the Gospel paradox so as to save it. His
doctrine fructifies because he has sacrificed himself for it.
This was Goethe's idea in his projected play of Mahomet, whom
he would never allow to have been an impostor. The play
was to illustrate the melancholy fact, so often observed in the
lives of men of genius, that the attempt to realise a great idea
brings the thinker into contact with a lower world, by which
he himself suffers injury and deterioration, and eventually
disappears from the scene ; but meanwhile his ideas attract
attention, and in the end prevail. The play itself was
never written, to the world's eternal loss ; but we have the
plan of it ; and the great truth it presents is one that should
encourage the philosopher to be prepared for the sacrifice
involved in his quitting his study to take part in the great con-
test for the establishment of the right.

So again politics are often distasteful to a man of scientific

277

turn, who is similaii}' tempted to hold himself aloof. There is
a necessary inexactness about political methods that cannot
fail to be distressing to such a man. It is not easy for him to
realise that expedienc}^, approximation, change, may be and
indeed are quite legitimate as principles of action when the
nature of the subject-matter with which the politician has to
deal is taken into consideration. Sir G. Cornewall Lewis is
much to the purpose here: — "The practical politician must
bear in mind that the questions which he has to solve rarely
present an absolutely right and an absolutely wrong course ;.
he is seldom in the position of Hercules, in the celebrated
apologue, choosing between the two roads, one of which leads
to virtue and the other to vice. He is usually called upon to
choose, not between black and white, but between two inter-
mediate shades of colour, one somewhat darker than the other.
He has to select between alternative courses, each of which
has certain advantages and disadvantages. He has to enumer-
ate and weigh these for each, to compare the several results
together, and to strike the balance in favour of one." Indeed
he must sometimes be content to follow out a polic}^ which by
no means satisfies him, but which is, on the whole, in the
direction of what he hopes to see accomplished. On occasions
he will have to come forward and, with the best face he can,
explain that he must now advocate what before he had con-
demned ; and he must run the risk of being denounced as a
turncoat and a man of no principle. Yet, in point of fact, to
change one's policy at the right moment is a most important
principle in politics. We are dealing with a subject-matter
which itself undergoes change ; and when, in the lapse of time,
circumstances have become quite other than what they were,
to hold to the same policy under the changed circumstances
would be foolish. I should be glad if I could reconcile my scien-
tific friend to this view of the case ; and I will ask him to
compare politics with medicine. As a science, each is inexact ; as
an art, each requires the consideration of the special case. And
it is familiar to everyone that in medicine a course of treatment
has to be entirely abandoned and another substituted for it,
when experience has shown that what had seemed to promise
well is in reality futile and perhaps even harmful. I do not wish
to speak disrespectfully of the physician's art, but I must say
that the politician's has nothing to fear in comparison with it.
Take for example the practice of bleeding, all but universal a
century ago, and even yet common enough in other countries.
So typical was it of that art, that the instrument employed

278

gave the title to the leading medical journal of the day. But
now the practice has been almost entirely abandoned, as being
hurtful rather than beneficial ; and an absurd pretext was set
up to defend its disuse, on the ground that diseases which were
formerly due to an excess of vitality are now due to a deficiency.
Well, in politics there has been a similar change. Progressive
statesmen no longer think it well to debilitate a nation by
penal laws or other degrading forms of coercion. They recom-
mend instead measures calculated to develop the nation's
mental and moral strength by education and the responsibilities
of self-government. And in making this change there has been,
I think, an honest confession of previous error. I claim
therefore that the man of science, who looks approvingly on
the art of healing persons, should look approvingly also on
the art of healing nations.

It has been my aim in what I have said to do something to
deliver Politics from reproach, and in so doing to urge you to
take, as opportunity offers, an active part in them. All social
progress is dependent on political action ; and it is a grave
national misfortune when the very men who hold that Politics
should be ruled by Ethics, keep aloof from practical politics in
indifference or despair. It is useless to^ quarrel with such
politics as mere machinery, when it is clear that without the
machinery nothing is actually done. Only a steady union of
strong and high-principled men, subordinating private to public
ends, can succeed in giving realization to progressive social
ideas.

On all hands it is admitted that we are entering upon a period
when great and fundamental changes affecting social as well as
political order will not only be discussed as they have been
for some time in newspapers and magazines, as desirable or
undesirable in the abstract, but will be debated on the floor of
Parliament as practical questions pressing for solution. And
these questions will be largely concerned with that modern
tendency towards social interference, which sometimes seems
so hard to reconcile with the time-honoured belief in the
sacredness of human liberty. I do not see why we need have
any craven fears for the future, since we can recognize a steady
growth and a moral advance in the past. But assuredly this
progress can only be continued by the maintenance of the
supremacy of Ethics. Other sanctions are passing away; this
remains, and, as inherent in man's nature, will always remain.
But it will remain as little more than a tendency without
much practical power, unless those who accept it as their

279

principle go on to put it fearlessly into practice. It is no
small responsibility to form a unit in the constitution of a great
nation whose business it is, in the strong and bold but not
merely boastful phrase of Milton, " to teach the nations how
to live." Let us prove ourselves by our political action not
unworthy of so great an inheritance.

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LESSONS.

I. — From a " Babylonian Saints' Calendar."
"The seventh day a feast of Merodach and Zirpanit ; a festival : a
Sabbath. The prince of many nations the flesh of birds and cooked
fruits eats not ; the garments of his body he changes not ; white
robes he puts not on. Sacrifice he offers not. The king in his
chariot rides not. In royal fashion he legislates not. A place of
garrison the general by word of mouth appoints not. Medicine for
his sickness of body he applies not. To make a sacred spot it is
suitable. In the night in the presence of Merodach and Istar the
king his offering makes. Sacrifice he offers, raising his hand to the
high places of the God he worships."

[The above, translated by Professor Sayce, is probably the earliest
mention of the Sabbath. The same formula is repeated for the 14th,
2ist, and 28th day, but instead of Merodach and Zirpanit the deities
are, for the 14th, IBeltis and Nergal ; for the 21st, the Moon and Sun ;
for the 28th Hea and Nergal. The Assyrians called the seventh
day the Sabatu, or Sabbath ; the syllabaries explaining Sabatu as the
" Completion " of the week, and as a "day of rest for the heart " (See
a useful article on " The Sabbath Day," in " The National Reformer,"
September nth, 1892). It is probable that this idea of " completion "
was afterwards extended to the creation of the world by Jewish
adapters.]

II. — From Tacitus.
" Many authors agree that when once an infectious distemper
had arisen in Egypt, and made men's bodies impure, Bocchoris, their
king, went to the oracle of Ammon, and begged he would grant them
some relief against this evil ; and that he was enjoined to purge his
nation of them and to banish this kind of men into other countries
as hateful to the gods. That when he had sought for and gotten
them all together, they were left in a vast desert : that hereupon the
rest devoted themselves to weeping and inactivity ; but one of those
exiles, Moses by name, advised them to look for no assistance from
any of the gods, or from any of mankind, since they had been
abandoned by both, but bade them believe in him as a celestial leader
by whose help they had already gotten clear of their present miseries.
They agreed to it, and though they were unacquainted with everv- .
thing, they began their journey at random. But nothing tired them
so much as the want of water ; and now to a great extent they laid
themselves down on the ground as just ready to perish, when a herd
of wild asses came from feeding, and went to a rock overshadowed
by a grove of trees. Moses followed them, as conjecturing that there
was some grassy soil, and so he opened large sources of water for
them. That was a relief to them ; and when they had journeved
continually six entire days, on the seventh day they drove out the
inhabitants, and obtained those lands wherein their city and temple
were dedicated .... It is generally supposed that they rest
on the seventh day because that day gave them rest from their

282

labours. Besides which they are idle on every seventh year, being
pleased with a lazy life."

From Isaiah I,

" Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord."
" To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me ?
saith the Lord. I am full of the burnt offerings of rams ; and I
delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats.
When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your
hand, to tread my courts? Bring no more vain oblations : incense
is an abomination unto me ; the new moons and Sabbaths, the calling
of assemblies, I cannot away with ; it is iniquity, even the solemn
meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth ;
they are a trouble unto me ; I am weary to bear them. And when
ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you ; 3'ea,
when ye make many prayers I will not hear : your hands are full of
blood. Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil of your doings
from before mine 6363 ; cease to do evil ; learn to do well ; seek
justice, relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless, plead for
the widow."

" Zion shall be redeemed with justice, and her converts with
righteousness."

From Spinoza.

" Reason is my enjoyment, and the aim I have in this life is joy
and serenity."

" It is superstition that sets up sadness as good, and all that
tends to joy as evil. God would show himself envious if he took
pleasure in my impotence and in the ills I suffer. Rather, in pro-
portion to the greatness of our joy do we attain to a greater per-
fection, and participate more fully in the divine nature.

"Joy therefore can never be evil, so long as it be regulated by the
law of our true utility. A virtuous life is not a sad and sombre one,
a life of privations and austerity. How should the Divinity take
pleasure in the spectacle of my weakness, or impute to me as
meritorious, tears, sobs, terrors — signs all of an impotent soul ?

" Yes, it is the part of a wise man to use the things of this life,
and enjoy them as much as possible ; to recruit himself by a
temperate and appetizing diet ; to charm his senses with the
perfume and the brilliant verdure of plants ; to adorn his ver}- attire ;
to enjoy music, games, spectacles, and every diversion that one can
bestow on himself without detriment to character.

" We are incessantly spoken to of repentance, humbleness,
death ; but repentance is not a virtue, but the consequence of a
weakness ; nor is self-abasement one, since it springs in man from
an idea of his inferiority. As to the thought of death, it is the
daughter of fear, and it is in feeble souls that it sets up its home.
The thing of all others about which a free man least thinks, is death.
Wisdom lies in the contemplation, not of death, but of life."

CIVILIZING THE SABBATH.

I NEED hardly argue in this place that our Sabbath is
uncivilized : there is a consensus among liberal thinkers
that the notion that one part of time is holier than another is
akin to such superstitions as unlucky Friday and seeing a new
moon over the left shoulder. Nor need I here argue that the
Sabbath ought to be civilized ; that is, humanized. Whatever
our theories, we all know that the Sabbath is " not a theor}- but
a condition " ; a discussion of its continuance were, at present,
somewhat like debating whether bicycles should take the place
of horses. The inquiry of interest to us is, why the Sabbath is
so much less bred to social uses than the horse, or other
agencies of practical life. We cannot improve a thing unless
we understand it. A gardener can turn a wild brier into a
thornless rose, but only by understanding the brier's nature,
and the laws of its development.

The "holy" Sabbath, as distinguished from the secular
Sunday, has come to us from a time and region of which there
are other survivals, but of only curious interest, because they
injure nobody. Many close their eyes in prayer, some think
because their ancestors prayed to a tropical sun, of blinding
brightness ; the}- clasp or lift their hands, because that was a
sign of surrender by which one captured in war saved his life ;
they kneel because that is the attitude of decapitation, and
indicated admission that one's life was forfeit. These con-
jectural explanations are of only antiquarian interest, because
no power exists to force us through that pantomime of barbarians
crouching before their conquerors or despots. They show,
however, how long, amid civilized government, may linger the
conception of an unlimited monarch}- in the heavens, and relics
of a celestial reign of Terror.

In those who kneel, these ceremonies of ancient abjectness
have as little conscious connection with their origin as a dog's
circuit on a rug, before he lies down, has with that of his wild
progenitors, who so made their bed in the prairie grass ; }'et
under that unconsciousness a great deal of the primitive devotee

284

may survive. The Sabbatarian despotism is a barometer that
reports how much of this ancient terrorism of an unconsti-
tutional deity Hngers in air too pure for a slave to breathe —
except one day in the week. For it is slavery when the people
are locked out of their own houses — their communal museum,
art-gallery, theatre, library — and forced to beg for a little beauty
at the doors of charitable collections and studios. So it is to-
day ; to-morrow a like oppression of freedom, in a political or
social matter, might cause a revolution.

Superstition is not the sole cause of the injustice, as we shall
presently see, but it is superstition that renders it possible — and
it is an English superstition. The nations of the Continent
are as superstitious as England, but such Sabbath laws are^
unknown except here, and where the English race has carried'
them. Moreover, our curious local Sabbatarianism is compara-
tively modern ; in the Sixteenth Century England had a fairly
merry Sunday. There were stage-plays and dances. How and
why a gloomy Sabbath grew in this one island has not yet been
explained. The Jews and their Bible are usually credited with
it ; but Continental nations have the same Bible ; they find in
it no command to close places of amusement on the Sabbath.
And the Jews themselves do not prohibit amusements, but only
work on their Sabbath (Saturday) of which our Sunday is the
sombre ghost.

Properly to understand this matter we must go beyond the
Bible, through which flow Persian streams of faith. _ In
America there is a point where the Missouri and the Mississippi
rivers join, and flow in one channel to the Gulf of Mexico.
But they run together a long way before their waters mingle :
side by side, in the same channel, their different colours are
distinguished ; and when at length they are really mixed, the
river is of a colour different from either of its great tributaries.
Something like this was the union of the Persian and the
Semitic streams of religion. At an early period there was an
impression that these different religions might be distinguished
as that of the Old Testament and that of the New. Thus we
find a great English divine. Archbishop Tillotson, writing as
follows : —

" The difference between the style of the Old and New
Testaments is so very remarkable, that one of the greatest
sects in the primitive "times, did, upon this very ground, found
their heresy of two Gods, the one evil, fierce, and cruel, whom
they called the God of the Old Testament ; the other good,
kind, and merciful, whom they called the God of the New
Testament ; so great a difference is there between the repre-

285

sentations that are given of God in the books of the Jewish and
Christian ReHj:^ion, as to give, at least, some colour and
pretence to an imagination of two Gods,"

While Archbishop Tillotson's candour is admirable, criticism
in his time had not been applied to the two Testaments equally.
There are two different Lords in the New, as there are two
different Gods in the Old, Testament. There is a humane
Jesus loving his enemies, and there is a ferocious Christ con-
signing them to Hell ; just as there is a Jehovah who spares
Nineveh, and a Jehovah who massacres the Midianites, a God
of Wrath, and a God who pitieth men as a father his children.
The two contrarious deities are distinguishable from each
other both in the New and Old Testaments, though in both
is apparent the monotheistic effort to combine them into one
and the same deity. This is done by the device of supposing a
powerful prince of darkness, who is made responsible for some
of the worst evils of the world, especially for moral evils. This,
however, could only be done by supposing this dark and evil
being to be equal in his realm, and in immortality, to the good
power, otherwise the good power would destroy him, and end
his horrible works.

This dualism, or struggle between good and evil deities, is
traceable to ancient Persia. The religion that shaped Europe
was not Jewish but Persian. The Bible is only one of the
\arious channels through which there passed into every part of
Europe the belief in two great antagonistic personalities. In
Russia and other Slavic countries they are to this day frankly
recognized as both gods, — Byelibog and Tchornibog, god of
light and god of darkness. (" Bog " meaning god, and the
origin of our word " Bogey.") In some regions they are God
and Satan, in others God and Devil. In this country, where
science has compelled Theology to admit the unity of nature,
the prince of darkness has been repudiated, and in his place
we are told of a disciplinary providence who, in his great mercy,
dashes ships against rocks, crushes human beings in railway
collisions, spreads cancer, cholera, and other agonies, all of
course in loving kindness and tender mercy. Nevertheless with
that Theology on our lips we have a host of physicians and
charities trying to resist and undo these peculiar providences,
all the same as if they were inflicted by a Devil. Virtually and
really our religion to-day is the same as that of the Persian
Zoroaster, recognizing good and evil as essentially and eternally
opposed, the one to be enthroned as our Christ, the other to be
chained up like an Antichrist.

Without going into the historical development of this

286

Zoroastrian Religion, it may be stated that in its symbolism
were combined the Solar and the Lunar mythologies. There
are regions where the Sun is mainly benehcent, subduing the
short winter, clothing the earth with blossoms ; there are regions
where the Sun deals sunstrokes, burns up vegetation, dries up
fountains, causes deserts. The moonlight is here friendlier ; in
the cool night, and beneath the starry host, man finds protection.
It was the Lunar races — Assyrian, Egyptian, Hebrew — which
formed the month (or moon) of twenty-eight days, and its
seven-day quarters, each completed by a Sabbath, or rest-day.
This under a burning sun was grateful enough. As the majority
were slaves, their day of rest could only be defended from
exacting masters by some kind of superstition. What the
earlier superstitions were we know not. We know only those
that sanctioned the Sabbath among the Jews, and equally the
seventh year, which it is not convenient for our Sabbatarians
to notice. But, long before, the Sabbath was an institution in
Babylon, as we saw in our first lesson.

Now the Lunar- worshippers had over the Sun-worshippers one
advantage : night-watching and star-gazing made those Assyrians
great astrologers. In their observations astronomy was dawn-
ing, though the earth was neglected. The Solar people knew
more about the world revealed by day, its people, its fliowers,,
and birds ; but the Lunar devotees knew more about the worlds
revealed by night, its galaxies and omens.

Gradually the lunar month and the seven-day division of
time crept up among the more northern races. But for many
centuries it was only an imported science. They did not
import the religion corresponding to it, and they adopted no
day of rest. Yet the lunar mythology did influence the solar
mythology. Their moon god was made a prince of darkness,
and an evil influence ascribed to the moon. His day of rest,
the Sabbath — the seventh day — was accounted evil, and it still
bears, as Saturday, the name of the sinister god Saturn, who
devoured his own children. In the Gentile world it would have
been impossible for even Constantine to decree any holiness to
the seventh day, — Saturn's day. He consecrated the day of
the Sun — Sunday — as a day of rest from toil, and a day of
sunshine, of gladness, of recreation.

The Sabbath god and the Sunday god became thus re-
specti\ely the potentate of Darkness and the potentate of
Sunshine. The assemblages of Jews on their Sabbath was
regarded as a kind of devil-worship. Jehovah was associated
with plagues, and his name suppressed. So was the name of
the Sabbath, still rarely heard on the Continent. Christ was

287

the Sun, the Light of the World, associated with all the brighter
deities — such as Apollo, Helios, and Baldur the Beautiful.

Some of our theologians claim the early and rapid spread of
Christianity in Europe as proof of its divine origin. Nothing,
they say, but supernatural assistance could have caused such
wide acceptance of the Gospel. But they forget that it was
then a Gospel, or God's-spell, of glad tidings. It would indeed
have looked like a miracle had the poor serfs and sufferers
welcomed a gloomy god, and a gloomy Sabbath, and for them
abandoned their tender household deities — Bertha, Fre}-a, and
their beautiful Baldur and Phoebus. Not so did Christianity
come, but as a release from dungeons of fear ; and not the least
of its glad tidings was its opening of the prison-house of toil on
one day in the week, that the serfs might make merry. There
was great opposition bythelandlords,the gentry; theydidnot like
this loss of one day's labour on their estates. But the Church
insisted: on the Sun's day the human heart leaped for joy. The
very churches were used for theatres and festivities. These were
then also the art-galleries and concert rooms. In fact, in that
early spread of Christianity, Ormuzd triumphed over Ahriman
for one day in the week, — all the bright gods triumphed over
the gloomy gods, — and it is so now, every Sunday, throughout
Europe, with exception of this one nation.

What was the cause of this exception ? Did this climate
render people doubtful about the Sun, while certain of the
cloud and fog? Charles Kingsley said: " It is the hard grey
climate that has made hard grey Englishmen." Was it that
which made their hard grey Puritanism ? It is difficult to see
how Puritanism could so easily have taken root here, and
spread like the thistle, had tjiere not been some predisposition
in the mental soil. Christianit}' came to Great Britain with
release and joy : it became what was once called " Merry
England " ; but there are traces of a gloomy and terrible
religion here before that — what we call " Druidism," a dark
lunar superstition, believed to include human sacrifices.
Whether the dismal elements of that pagan Puritanism
lingered here or not, certain it is that when the Reformation
came, substituting the Bible for the Pope, some gloomy
tendency in this country seized on what was gloomiest in the
Book, took the side of Jehovah against Jesus, — who, had he
here plucked his corn on the Sabbath, would have been haled
before a magistrate. On the Continent Luther had protested
against all this, saying, " Go to the Jews with your Moses ! "
Calvin was free from Sabbatarianism, and it is said that when
a number of ministers from this region called on him one

288

Sunday they found him playing at bowls. Milton, who
liked the political protest of Puritanism, abhorred its hard
Pharisaism. Milton reminded the English people that the
two things used by the Good Samaritan on the sufferer, oil
and wine, were things that did not grow in England, and that
we needed to import into our customs and religion just those
products of southern sunshine, — more oil and wine, more
sweetness, kindliness and mirth. These would soothe and
heal Humanity. But Puritanism would not heed its one great
teacher. The poor toiler, fallen and wounded, is still visited
by the Sabbath Samaritan, who takes him to a chapel or drives
him to a gin-shop. For oil and wine, for beauty and recreation,
the poor man must get what he can from alcohol and orthodoxy.

Thus in the long and wide-spread conflict between Ormuzd
and Ahriman — bright god and gloomy god, winter-god and
summer-god — the dark god here prevails. And here only, in
Europe, though this country has inoculated America with it.
There is but too much probability that the great Exhibition
building at Chicago will stand every Sunday as a monument of
what retrogression in religion has gone on in four centuries
b}' the side of progression in everything else.* Our anti-
Sabbatarians will probably have a slower work than they think
in subduing the Lunar God. For his is the last sceptre of
idolatry. The power to disregard the reason of the nation, to
lock up their treasures of science and art on the only day when
the majority could enjoy them, represents a palpable, a visible
authority surviving the overthrow of all other forms of divine
right. It is the last fortress of ancient idolatry.

But such an oppression could not survive in a free country
by mere strength of an Eastern superstition. A practical wrong
lives by slipping snakelike from one skin to another. Among
the Jews the Sabbath began by claiming that Jehovah founded
it because he rested on the seventh day, but later on it got a
new lease by claiming that on that day Jehovah led them out
of Egypt. And there seem to have been other explanations.
In England these ancient consecrations are little referred to.
The superstition now fostered among the labourers is that if the
Museum is once unlocked they may all be made to work the
whole seven days. I have said that this ignorant superstition
is fostered. There is indeed a great and increasing number

* A citizen of Philadelphia, who had much to do with the Exhibition held there
in 1876, the Centenary of Independence (to which on Sundays fashionable people
were admitted by printed invitations, while the masses were excluded) told me that
the city was then morally a kind of pandemonium on Sundays.

289

of clergymen who do not encourage it, and some who even
withstand it ; but one must be bhnd not to see that this popular
superstition is fostered by many pulpits, which could but do not
point out that the open Sunday of the Continent has never been
accompanied by enforced labour.

I remember, in early life, expressing some rationalistic senti-
ments to an eminent Unitarian minister. After listening
patientl)', he shrewdly answered : " Christianity is a stool that
stands on three legs — the ministry, the miracles, and the Sabbath
Day. Take a^^'ay the divine authority of either of those legs
and over goes Christianity." What, in London, might result,
were the Museums and Galleries open ? How many preachers
can rival in attractions the wonders of the British Museum, the
noblest institution in the world ? What would be the condition
of the conventicles, of the " Gospel Halls," if darkest England
were flooded with the splendour of Arts now hid under their
bushel of bigotry? Well, for a time, some of our chapels might
be rather thin ; but gradually their pulpits would be occupied
by men able to preach up to an enlightened people, instead of
down to benighted people. The clerical intellect would be
awakened and stimulated. The whole standard of religious
thought and sentiment would be raised. The discourse of the
scholar would be interpreted and illustrated by the beautiful
Madonnas, the sacred scenes, and lofty ideals, portrayed by the
artist and the sculptor.

Protestantism of the English type is much over-rated. In
cruelty, Catholicism was equalled by Protestantism here and in
New England. Religiously, the Reformation was no reform,
but a relapse from a highly-developed environment of beautiful
images and shrines of art, into a primitive temple of unhewn
stones ; a hard unlovely naturalism that denounced Art. " Thou
shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or likeness of
anything in heaven, earth, or sea." The revival of that biblical
barbarism set our Protestant fanatics to sweep pictures and
statues out of our Churches, breaking and burning them in the
name of the dark art-hating deity. But those beautiful forms
reflected the deity of sunshine, of love. In Catholic Churches
the people were surrounded by saints whose countenances
beamed all virtues, all tendernesses. And there are even now,
in Protestant lands, vast numbers of people who can receive
such exalted impressions only through the eye. Nor are these
only the illiterate people. The great American author, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, could never be persuaded to enter a church. Such
was his recoil from the ugly Puritanism by which his youth
was surrounded that he would never listen even to the liberal

290

sermons of Channing, Parker, and others. His religious nature
became torpid. But when, in advanced Hfe, he visited Rome
and Florence, the sacred history and legend of humanity, as
told in statues and pictures, awakened his enthusiasm, and he
bitterly lamented that Protestantism should have deprived him
and others of these sacred and sublime influences of Art. But
these elevating forms, swept from our Churches, are now in
the Art-galleries. These are our real cathedrals. There the
divine legend of humanity is told. But Puritanism seems
angry that even in galleries Moses' hatred of graven images
should be disobeyed, and virtually denies them to the working
people altogether. It is to thousands a denial of any religious
impression or spiritual culture at all. And how much brutality,
how much despair, half-drowned in drink, are caused by this
pious inhumanity ?

Of all the practical issues of our time this of Sabbatarianism
appears to me the most important. The Anglo-Assyrian Sab-
bath is the visible keystone of an invisible arch, built of stony
uncivilized dogmas and oppressions, all of which would fall with
their keystone. It is momentous because it involves the entire
free lifetime of the toiling masses. Their time for mental
culture is counted by Sundays. It is of paramount importance
because it involves religious liberty. And it is vital because it
establishes and preserves false conceptions of deity, — concep-
tions long discarded by the intelligence of the nation, —
conceptions that degrade the minds and homes of the ignorant.
Should you ask any English scholar, clerical or other, any
professor in our colleges, wdiether he believes that God created
the world in six days, rested from fatigue on the seventh, and
was so egotistical as to make idleness compulsory on that day
for everybody, such scholars would repudiate these puerile
notions of primitive man. Should you ask the scholar whether
he believes in a deity opposed to art, a deity pleased to have
the people deprived of beauty, happier when the masses are less
happy, a deity who will reward hereafter those who sacrifice
happiness here, that scholar would declare a deity pleased with
such human sacrifices to be more like a demon than a God.
Such is the voice of English culture, of civilization. And yet
beside our universities is throned this Assyrian Idol, — the
Sabbath, — whose ancient literal human sacrifices are perpetuated
by the sacrifices of human culture, refinement, and happiness.
This ancient idol is as fully portrayed as if his graven image
were preserved. He wished to keep man ignorant, lest he
should know as much as himself. Instead of bidding man eat
his fill of the Tree of Knowledge, he forbade it, and cursed the

human race because man began to gain wisdom. He was
afraid of man's progress, and overthrew his architecture at
Babel for fear man would climb up into the sky. Jealous of
man's knowledge, frightened by man's progress, he is also
jealous of man's happiness. He threatens a whole nation
because some are too happy on the day of freedom from toil.
" You take your pleasure on my holy day," he complains.

Such an arrogant, selfish deity as that could only be
established anywhere by bribe or terror. The idol has been
maintained here in the past by a popular belief that the self-
sacrifice was an investment : those who gave up pleasure on
earth were to be paid tenfold hereafter. That notion is extinct.
There is now no philosophy of a future life which supposes
anybody will be better off in the future because he has been
ignorant, or stupid, or miserable on earth, or gave up pleasures
here to get more elsewhere.

Such being the intelligence of the country, its civilized
culture and thought, it is monstrous that any usage or practical
institution should remain, founded on the uncivilized notion of
a deity opposed to the tree of knowledge, jealous of man's
towers, satisfied with man's gloom, vexed by his enjoyments.
This grim idol, the Sabbath, can give no compensation whatever
to its victims, except when they rise up from its reeking altar
and send it to the Museum, where it m.ay be studied along wdth
Moloch, Typhon, and other antiquities from the same region
of time and of the world. Then the people may go to study it
or smile at it on a Sunday that should represent all the gods of
sunshine — Ormuzd, and Krishna, and Baldur, and Apollo.

Jesus said to his disciples, " Go you and learn what this
means — I will have mercy and not sacrifice." His supposed
followers have gone on for centuries without learning what that
means; but there now appears some glimmer of the meaning
among those who with guilds and heart-charities are trying to
make the poor happier. Though, let me say, all such benefits
are of small importance — a little melting of the snow here and
there while it is still snowing — compared with the glorious
summer that would burgeon with the opening of the bounties
of Art and Science, at whose barred doors the people sit like
Lazarus, with only brutal pleasures to lick their sores.

" Go you and learn what this meaneth — I will have mercy
and not sacrifice." Should England comprehend all the
meaning of those words, it would be as if Jesus should this
day stand on the steps of the National Gallery and cry :
Henceforth let the night of Sacrifice end, and the era of
Mere}' dawn ! You have heard for three wretched puritanical

292

centuries that man owes a duty to God. I say unto you
Man owes no duty to an}' being whom his conduct cannot
benefit or affect in the least. You have heard that God desires
sacrifice, — sheep in one age, self-sacrifice in another. But
self-sacrifice is a delusion. If a man gives something to
another he does not sacrifice himself, he enriches himself.
He wants the happiness of making another happy, and gladlv
pays for it. Let this old sacrificial phraseology, however well
meant, pass away with the selfish superstition in which it
originated — giving up one pleasure on Earth to get two in
Heaven. You have heard that it is good for a man to suffer,
to be afflicted, to mourn. But I say unto you : Be happy !
The first and supreme duty of all is to be happy. You cannot
be happy while others are miserable, therefore make others
happy. You have heard that those who mourn here will be
comforted hereafter, the afflictions of time be paid with an
eternal weight of glory. For that little children have been
cowed, beaten, their healthy spirits broken, as they were once
passed through the fire to Moloch. For that even ill-health
has been fostered, pious invalidism supposed a providential
means of curing the soul. And for that the poor, the toilers,
the ignorant, have been told to be submissive to their lot to
which God had called them. But now that common knowledge
and common sense have destroyed that whole set of super-
stitions about the blessings of sorrow and the future bliss of
the miserable, religion has no object at all but to make people
happy in this world. If they miss happiness here they may
miss it for ever. The future is all uncertain. And almost the
only time in which any can minister to their mental hunger is
Sunday. Then alone does the wheel of toil on which they are
bound stand still. Then alone does the smoke of their torment
cease to ascend. It were a worthy task for English civilization,
and for the whole genius of this great nation, to gather in
convention, and contrive how they can make the people
happier ; and especially how they can make the day of the
Sun a day of resurrection for the masses — the gladdest, merriest
day, healing oil and wine for the wounds of six days' toil, a
day when museums, galleries, theatres, shall make real once
more the glad tidings of great joy.

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