Morality as a Religion Part 3

[1] _Philosophical Cla.s.sics_, p. 85.

V.

THE ETHICAL DOCTRINE OF COMPENSATION.

I suppose there is no teaching more frequently insisted upon in the Old and in the New Testament as the truth of a judgment, now, or in the future, upon the misdeeds or sins of men. Let criticism prune and cut as it will, while it exhibits the deplorably low standard of morality once prevalent among the Hebrew peoples, and therefore prevalent among their G.o.ds, their Elohim, Adonai and Jahveh, one thing, at least, is undeniable--that that which is recognised as immoral is reprobated and forthwith visited with condign punishment. Doubtless, acts which to us are wholly reprehensible are discussed without attaching any stigma to them, and are even permitted, and sometimes suggested, by Jahveh himself, as in the story of Judith and Holofernes. Such ethical insensibility is wholly natural, viewing the state of development at which the Hebrew people had arrived, and should cause no wonderment in those who are familiar with the Deity of Christian Mediaevalism, and the methods and practices he was supposed to favour. But what should be carefully noted is, that nothing is adjudged immoral but is forthwith sternly reprobated and condemned to a fitting retribution.

"The way of transgressors is hard" was a conviction with the race. In the same way, the ethical note rings out in the New Testament, that right and wrong are eternally dissevered, sheep ever separated from goats; that virtue must be rewarded and vice be condemned and punished.

Now, this teaching of the judgment to come, the bare announcement of which by Paul filled Felix, the Roman governor, with such dire consternation, is the subject of which we propose to set forth the philosophical and ethical explanation. In the Bible we have the mythical setting much as we have the mythical version of the agony of spirit undergone by Christ before he definitely committed himself to his prophetical work. It is for us to-day to disentangle the substantive truth from the maze of legend with which an imperfectly developed age has surrounded it and discover the true _raison d'etre_ of that doctrine which "the Bible Christian" confesses under the aspect of the "Last Judgment".

Now, I take it that no educated man believes in the drama, or rather, the panorama, of the "last judgment"; the vision of Jesus sitting in the clouds, with every human being that ever was or shall be gathered before his throne to hear definite sentence p.r.o.nounced upon them. The _mise-en-scene_ demands of course the presence of bodies, and I suppose it is needless to point out the dogma of the resurrection of the body, insisted upon by all the Christian Churches, is a blank impossibility.

We may acquire other bodies in that unknown state, should we stand in need of such appurtenances--a fact which we may wholly disbelieve--but of one thing we may rest a.s.sured, that these identical bodies in which we die can by no possibility conceivable to us be brought back.

I once read a highly imaginative article in a religious magazine which attempted to solve the unsolvable by suggesting that after men's bodies had been buried in sufficient numbers, the whole soil of our planet would consist of nothing but the substance of the bodies of the dead, and that when that momentous epoch arrived, the Almighty would give the order for the sounding of the final trump, and the whole solid globe would be forthwith trans.m.u.ted, or rather re-trans.m.u.ted, into human bodies--in what condition it was not stated--for the countless myriads of "souls" ready to take possession of them. Probably, this pious romance was woven in the days before cremation, and as the next century will not be very old before we shall be compelled to resort to that method of disposal of the dead, at all events in our larger cities, it becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend how men of the future, to say nothing of the past, are going to be provided with their own bodies so as to put in an appearance at the great a.s.size.

We may rightly wonder how men and women of the nineteenth century can still believe in the Churches and Chapels which teach such deplorable absurdities as the revelation of G.o.d, and how it happens that when religion appears upon the scene of their daily life, their common sense can so totally desert them. One need say nothing of the inadequacy of the judgment p.r.o.nounced, the summary cla.s.sification of the myriads of humanity as white sheep or black goats, or the character of the rewards and punishments allotted. The one redeeming point in the narrative is that whatever judgment is p.r.o.nounced is decided, not on doctrinal grounds, about which no two of Christ's followers can be got to agree, but on ethical grounds, on character manifesting itself in public spirit and care for the unfortunate--the bruised reeds and smoking flax--of our communities. It would seem impossible to maintain after this final scene that creeds and faiths have any decisive influence on our status here or hereafter.

But though now seen to be no more than a variant upon the apocalyptic tradition and literature which represented that Jesus was to return speedily to earth and rule among his saints for a thousand years--a delusion which apparently possessed even the trained intellect of Paul, and subsequently led to the pseudo-Peter explaining that his fellow-Christians must not be in too great a hurry, because "a thousand years are as one day and one day as a thousand years in the sight of the Lord"--it has done an incalculable amount of harm in the past. It has shut men's eyes to the awful fact of retribution, administered here and now, and prevented their realising any punishment other than the savage, barbarous and wholly vindictive punishment of torturing eternally by fire. It shuts men's minds to the operation of moral laws, to the fact that judgment is executed instantaneously upon the commission of wrong. It has, and it does, to the serious detriment of moral development, lead man to put off until late in life, sometimes to the very hour of death itself, restorative work which should have been undertaken immediately on the recognition or conviction of misdeeds.

The notion that he is not to be called up for judgment until he is rendered incapable by death of doing any further mischief, has been a moral obstacle in the path of man, and therefore of the race, wholly beyond the power of calculation. Foolish priests once thought that by the invention of the dogma of h.e.l.l they could terrorise men into morality, and so they preached their Divinity, the magnified copy of a fiend, who would have cheerfully created humanity out of nothing and d.a.m.ned them everlastingly, had not he himself, in the shape of his son, who is one in being with him, decided to appear upon earth and atone to himself for the mischief, which presumably he could have very well foreseen, perpetrated by man.

And what has been the effect of such teaching on humanity? It is impossible to doubt that it has led to results deplorably, indescribably wicked. Whence, for instance, arose the horrors of the mediaeval inquisition, the insensate tortures inflicted upon men like Huss and Bruno solely for theological errors, if not from belief in this demon-deity whom the Church worshipped? If their practices were but a shadow of the horrors he was supposed to be everlastingly inflicting on mankind, who could raise a protest against them? Shall man be juster than his G.o.d? This perverse Christian morality is responsible for the worst cruelties which have tormented the human race since the days of ecclesiastical domination. If the Deity is inhuman, why should man be otherwise? Therefore, inhuman tortures will be inflicted on prisoners. The rack and thumb-screw will be used to extract secrets. Men will be immured alive within narrow walls and allowed to perish by inches. The Austrian prisons in the northern Italian provinces will be so constructed that the miserable victim can neither sit nor lie down nor see the light of day. Floggings and scourgings will be universal, _lettres de cachet_ an inst.i.tution. Why not? Where the G.o.d has no sense of justice, why should man? Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of victims will perish at the stake and in the flames in atrocious agony because they are wizards or witches or have had dealings with imaginary devils. Why not? The G.o.d does worse than all this. He keeps his victims alive for the sole purpose of glutting his ire and satiating his insatiable vengeance. Nay, things are so ordered that the very happiness of the elect is enhanced, not only by the knowledge, but by the sight, of the appalling, unavailing anguish of the lost, and we have seen such a philosopher as Aquinas representing the Deity as conducting the "elect" in troops and droves to the heavenly sh.o.r.es and giving them "a glimpse of h.e.l.l" by way of stimulating their enjoyment of the celestial beat.i.tude. Why not? I ask again. My only wonderment is how we ever got rid of it. Picture the world under the universal dominion of this foul superst.i.tion. It reigns on the thrones of kings, in the cabinets of statesmen, it is preached in the pulpits, taught in the schools, it is the earliest lesson that trembles on the lips of innocent children. The most ingenious, subtly contrived, widespread and all-pervading influence is especially created to propagate it everywhere in the shape of the Christian Church--a Divine inst.i.tution, possessed of the keys of life and death, of heaven and h.e.l.l--the sole representative of the Deity on earth. How, we ask, in wondering grat.i.tude, did the world ever escape the tyranny of such superst.i.tion? This fact alone--this deliverance--is enough to make one believe that there is a "Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," that the course of human events is never wholly retrograde.

And, now, what is the truth about the "judgment to come"? What is the ethical equivalent of "h.e.l.l fire"? In the first place, we refuse to believe in a "last judgment" because we know that judgment is not only p.r.o.nounced but executed instantaneously, automatically, I would say, on the commission of wrong. There is no need to wait for the day of judgment or even for the hour of death. If a man has done wrong he sits condemned that self-same moment. _Illo nocens se d.a.m.nat quo peccat die_. There is no need of G.o.d, angel or devil, to announce the fact or deliver judgment; the man has p.r.o.nounced his own sentence, executed judgment on himself. This is, in essence, the ethical doctrine of compensation, that this universe is so woven, that the nature of things is such that "things are what they are, that the consequences of things will be what they will be," that we can no more hope to avert them by crying out for help to man, saint or G.o.d, than we can hope to hurl back the waves that dash upon the strand at flood tide. Our view is that moral laws are as irresistible as physical, and admit of no more dispensation than the everlasting order of Nature.

One of our main reasons for repudiating the conception of the miraculous is that it involves a violation of eternal order and therefore of eternal reason, and if freely admitted in the physical, would doubtless be speedily introduced into the moral order, to the destruction of civilised society. We believe that this universe is "so magically woven" that it is absolutely impossible to escape the consequences of our deeds, and if the Buddhist doctrine of Karma represents that teaching, then we are among its most enthusiastic adherents, because it is absolutely true to fact.

But let us look at the matter more closely.[1]

Have we ever sufficiently reflected how that "all things are double, one against the other," in this mysteriously governed world, that everything has its counterpart? the world appears to be split into halves, which yet cleave to each other, as a man is haunted by his shadow. "An inevitable dualism bisects Nature, so that each thing is half, and suggests another thing to make it whole." Thus--spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; action, rest; yea, nay. "All things are double, one against the other."

All the woes of existence arise from our deliberate resistance to the law of oneness, to that integration which is so conspicuous in Nature.

We are incessantly seeking to take the one half and leave the other, and straightway Nemesis overtakes us. We want to enjoy the pleasures of sense without attending to the inexorable requirements of mind, and such an appalling satiety sickens our souls, that we forget ourselves in the commission of deeds unspeakably wicked; we possibly degrade ourselves in the eyes of all men by falling even into the clutches of the law, or we border on the verge of self-destruction in our unspeakable _ennui_. We would have the half, while Nature planned the whole, and we pay the last farthing. The results are naturally so appalling that it is not to be wondered that men sought to express them under the image of a fire which will not be quenched, a worm of remorse which can never die--an immense despair for which there is no relief.

Life is full of distressing ill.u.s.trations of this ethical law. A man who owns but the clothes he wears one day, is a millionaire the next, and he attempts the impossible task of bisecting life, which has been manifestly planned as a whole. He appears to succeed for a time, but one day men are startled to hear that he has owned up that he had chosen the wrong path, and has determined to quit it in suicide. A few months after, the community is compelled to witness an almost unparalleled degradation, that of a young man born in the purple, with every advantage that birth, position, education or matrimonial connections could give him, sentenced as a felon for the meanest treachery, because he would halve life which was planned a whole, and forgot the Fates, the dread Erynys, who administer the ethical law of compensation.

But it is the same in lesser as in greater things. Without hesitation, we may ascribe our minor sorrows to the one self-same source, the attempt to dissever the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright, from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair. We forget that purity of heart and the law of gravitation arise in the same eternal spring, that the world is a whole, that moral and physical are grounded in one source, and we pay the penalty. "The soul says eat; the body would feast. The soul says the man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have power over things to its own individual ends."

Now, this conduct never yet met with any success. You thrust your arm into the stream to divide the water, but it re-unites behind your hand.

You attempt to live your life on one side only, to dissever that which was made for unity, and calamity comes to crush you. Men and women marry for flesh or gold, they put half their whole into the contract, and their sacrilegious bargain smites them with a curse. It is the law of compensation, the workings of that moral gravitation which causes all things to fit into their own places, and is to us the clearest indication of the workings of the Divine in all this tumultuous life.

Wonderful discernment of the ethical prophet! We cease to see G.o.d omnipresent in all things, and our blindness ends in our destruction.

We see the sensual allurement, but not the sensual hurt; we see the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; we think we see our way to cut off that which we would have from that which we would not have.

"How secret art Thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, that bringest penal blindnesses on such as have unbridled desires,"

quotes Emerson from Augustine's confessions.

No "last judgment," then, but a first judgment, a judgment here and now, swift, sudden, irreversible upon every man and woman who dare to take their lives by halves, to forget the seamless unity wherewith the universe is woven. This is the ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in the universe and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies are the attendants on justice, and if the sun in the heavens should transgress his path, they would punish him.

This is that awful yet sublime doctrine of retribution which is the groundwork of the masterpieces of the ancient Greek tragedies, the inspiration without which the world would never have known the Agamemnon or the immortal trilogy of Sophocles. It is the doctrine which made Plato describe punishment as going about with sin, "their heads tied together," and Hegel define it as "the other half of sin,"

while Emerson shows that "crime and punishment grow out of one stem.

Punishment is a fruit which, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of pleasure which concealed it." They are linked together inexorably, as cause and effect, and no G.o.d can dispense in this law, because the law itself is G.o.d.

Hence, there can be no such thing as "forgiveness of sin". An act once done is irreparable. Its consequences must endure to all time. Our most agonising repentance cannot undo the past, it can only avail to safeguard the future. We cannot escape the law of compensation. There is no magnified man in the skies, swayed by human pa.s.sions, ready, at the call and entreaty of prayer, to obstruct the operation of natural laws. Theories of atonement by blood shedding, sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins, arose in the days when man believed in such a deity as that, but we know none such now, and wise are we if we recognise--oh, how well it had been if in our youth we all could have known--that the consequences of an act are absolutely inevitable, that deeds once done, words once spoken, are traced ineffaceably on the tablets of universal nature and must reverberate throughout the universe to all time!

Severe teaching, you say. Yes, one pauses here when thoughts of h.e.l.l and devils never once made man pause. The truth is, no one really believes the insensate teaching of the Churches on punishment. Even their adherents have outgrown them. Nothing is clearer from history than that fear of h.e.l.l fire never yet made man moral. It could not keep the Church of mediaevalism, its priests and its bishops, aye, and its supreme pontiffs--numbers of them--even decent living men, to say nothing of morality or virtue. It is worse than useless now;--an insult to reason and an outrage on religion. But what _will_ hold a man is the doctrine of compensation, of judgment p.r.o.nounced _by himself_ directly his iniquity is accomplished, of sentence self-executed, unpardonable and irremissible, now and for ever.

And, added to this, the conviction that his crimes are committed, not "against G.o.d," who can in no wise be personally influenced or injured by man's misdeeds, being wholly dest.i.tute of human pa.s.sions and emotions, but against his fellow man, or against his sister woman.

One knows, alas! the beginning of the end to which the lost have come.

If only youth had been taught in the opening days of life, when impressions are so vivid, that there is no such article as the creeds of the Churches falsely proclaim--"the forgiveness of sin"--that one only wrong act may, rather must, be the starting point which will one day precipitate a catastrophe, how many would have been saved from the nameless depths, of which we must be silent, how many spared the anguish of an unavailing remorse!

Must this false teaching indeed go on for ever? Will it never dawn upon our priests and ministers, our masters and mistresses in schools, that G.o.d bears none of the burden of humanity; his heart never breaks because a life is withering in despair? He takes no hurt from the weltering sorrows by which so many are overwhelmed. It is man, it is woman, who bears the agony; the crushing burden of wrong-doing falls on them. Look no more then, we urge, to a phantom deity, to an idol-G.o.d in the skies, a figment of a disordered imagination, but think on your brother man before you dare to set mischief in motion. When you apprehend the nearness of danger, think of the future, think of consequences, think only of the irremissibleness of sin, which not all the waters and baptisms, though it were of blood, through which the Churches can pa.s.s you, will ever be able to efface.

How much knavery in actual progress in this wilderness of men in London might one not hope to stop if this doctrine of compensation could be brought home? How much company-promoting, fraud, mendacity, adulteration of food, could we not render impossible, if ethical and prophetical teaching took the place of the Church catechisms and the creeds, if men could be persuaded that the success of their ventures--quite legitimate in the eyes of the civil and criminal law--can only be purchased by the tears and ruin of human beings? The dogma of endless future punishment was apparently impotent to restrain the ultra-orthodox directors of the Liberator Company, but I take it that no man who had been schooled in Emerson, could have sat at that board and thanked an Almighty G.o.d for the exceptional favours he had been mercifully pleased to bestow on their conscious frauds. The vindictiveness of a purposeless h.e.l.l has, of course, failed ignominiously as a deterrent from crime. We cannot conceive infinite Intelligence inflicting an excruciating and endless punishment simply for punishment's sake. We are superior to such methods ourselves; we refuse to a.s.sociate them with G.o.d. What we do believe in, what we are sure of, is that a man's sin must find him out, that he must reap as he sows, that the consequences of his misdeeds are eternal, that--

All on earth he has made his own Floating in air or pent in stone, Will rive the hills, the sea will swim, And like his shadow follow him.

[1] In what follows I have freely borrowed from the great "Essay on Compensation".

VI.

CONSCIENCE THE VOICE OF G.o.d AND THE VOICE OF MAN.

We have already learnt in the study of the doctrine of Compensation that the misfortunes of life are due to man's attempt to bisect the world and life, and seize greedily on one half to the partial or total neglect of the other. Life having been planned a whole, inevitable disaster overtakes the man who would behave as though it were a thing of shreds and fragments. Now this law of what we may call the Divine unity is equally valid in the purely intellectual order. That, likewise, refuses to admit schisms and divisions to break in on the solidity of its unbroken ranks. An attempt to view life and its problems exclusively from our own standpoint, is to fail to grasp truth; our shadow gets projected over the surface, and the light is partially concealed, if not wholly confused. No better ill.u.s.tration of this fact, I believe, could be afforded than that supplied by conscience, the practical dictate of reason which controls the moral life of man.

In days of old when man was nothing in his own or anybody else's eyes, in the ages when he thought to magnify the Deity by belittling himself, an interfering agency of the Divine was necessarily invoked on almost every conceivable occasion; "the hand of G.o.d" was seen in every occurrence. From the comparatively minor matters of bodily ailments up to the colossal disasters which nature is capable of inflicting--in all the visible interference of the supra-mundane power was discerned.

Those were naturally the days of the "Divine right of kings," when all civil power was held to have been centred in one individual by the express act of the Divinity; those were likewise the days when the conscience of man was exclusively interpreted as the articulate utterance of G.o.d. But, inasmuch as man was too ignorant and wicked to rightly interpret that supreme oracle, he was bidden to leave it in the custody of a sanctified corporation, the Church, and to keep his thoughts and his conduct in tune with the dominant ecclesiastical sentiment of the hour.

Now, from that extraordinary position a reaction was of course inevitable. Man could not go on for ever describing himself as "a worm" and an outcast, or avowing himself "a miserable sinner" and a limb of Satan; and consequently, with an awakened sense of human dignity, inspiring him, not with vainglory, but with an ever-deepening self-reverence, the ascription of all agency to supernatural power began to be seriously curtailed. "The Divine right of kings" went its way with other archaisms into the limbo of oblivion, from which the reigning monarch in Prussia would appear to be vainly endeavouring to rescue it, while man began to realise that the causes of natural and human phenomena were to be sought in nature and in man. As a consequence of this, a new theory of conscience began to take shape, which was ultimately described by one of the boldest of later English philosophical writers, the late Professor Clifford, as "the voice of man commanding us to live for the right".[1]

In these definitions of conscience, as "the voice of G.o.d" and "the voice of man," we have an instance of propositions which in logic are called _contraries_. Both, therefore, cannot be exclusively and simultaneously true, but both may be simultaneously false. Thus, "all men are white" and "no men are white" are contraries, but they are both false. And this, I submit, is the judgment to be p.r.o.nounced on these two exclusive definitions of conscience. Neither is, exclusively speaking, true, but there is a measure of truth common to both, and that measure it will be the purpose of the following remarks to determine.

But, before going any farther, we must get a clear idea of what we mean by conscience. In a general way, of course, we all know what is meant by the word: an appeal to conscience would be intelligible by every one. We understand it to be a faculty which decides on a definite course of action when alternatives of good and evil are before us. We look upon it as an instinct, magnetic in its power, incessantly prompting us towards the fulfilment of duty, and gravely reproaching us on its dereliction. We recognise it as the sweetest and most troublesome of visitants; sweetest when the peace unspeakable sinks into our souls, most troublesome when we have been guilty of a great betrayal. So delicate is that voice that nothing is easier than to stifle it; so clear is it that no one by any possibility can mistake it.

Thus, in general terms, we may describe conscience. Coming now more closely to a philosophical a.n.a.lysis of the conception, we shall find therein much enlightenment for the purposes of our present investigation. In the first place, the word is of comparatively late origin. It does not occur in the Hebrew writers of the Old Testament.

Its earliest appearance is in the Book of Wisdom, the work of a h.e.l.lenistic Jew extremely well acquainted with the trend of Greek thought in the third century B.C. It does not occur in the Gospels, except in the story of the sinful woman whom Christ refused to condemn--a history which, though profoundly in accord with the sympathetic genius of Jesus, is none the less an interpolation in the eighth chapter of the Johannine Gospel, so much so that Tischendorff excised it from his last edition of the text of the New Testament. St.

Paul certainly uses the word once in the Epistle to the Romans, and though known in the latter days before the advent of Christianity, we may a.s.sume that mainly through that religion the word was popularised throughout the world.

But what is the faculty which corresponds to the word conscience? We shall find etymology of great a.s.sistance in giving precision to our thoughts. The word is, of course, a derivative from the Latin, _conscientia_, knowledge with, or together. Now, _scientia_ is the simple knowledge of things by the reason, while _conscientia_ is the knowledge which the reason has of itself; it is the realisation of one's selfhood--the realisation of the _ichkeit des ego_, as the very expressive German phrase has it, "the selfhood of the I". In English philosophical language we commonly denominate this self-realisation consciousness, a word of precisely the same etymological origin as conscience. If, in the next place, the reason is occupied, not with the reflex action of self-contemplation, but with moral action or the discernment of right from wrong, then it is called, and is, no longer consciousness, but _conscience_. Putting it technically, consciousness is a psychological expression, while conscience is ethical.