Book viii

. 12. 5; and, indeed, that a man of such reach of intellect should by mere accident or carelessness have omitted such an important factor in all moral calculations {187} seems in the highest degree improbable; but so far is the idea of God from giving any colour to his system of Moral Philosophy, that the very occurrence of the phrase, θεραπεύειν τὸν θεόν, in the last section of the Eudemian Ethics, has been justly adduced by Grant among the many proofs of the inauthenticity of that treatise. That Aristotle was a theist is certain, both from other places of his voluminous writings, and specially from a famous passage in the _Metaphysics_ which has lately been brought forward with due prominence by the noble-minded Bunsen in his great work, _God in History_; it seems impossible, indeed, for such a profound thinker as Aristotle to be an atheist, because, as Schleiermacher well remarks, “Philosophy cannot inquire into the totality of things, without at the same time inquiring into their unity, and as the totality of things is the world, so the unity of things is God;” or, as Spinoza has it in one of his propositions--“_Quicquid est in Deo est, et nihil sine Deo neque esse neque concipi potest_.” But it is one thing to be a theist as a matter of speculative belief, and another thing to be a man of devout temper and pious practice. And herein, if I mistake not, lies the real cause of the defect in the Ethics now under consideration. For if Aristotle had been a man of any fervour of religious sentiment, he had two courses before him with regard to the Greek religion, neither of which he has followed--he might either, like his great master Plato, or Xenophanes of Colophon among the pre-Socratic thinkers, have attacked the Homeric theology, and shown how its general tendency and some of its most distinctive features were inconsistent with a pure and elevated morality, or, like Socrates, {188} Xenophon, Pindar, Æschylus, Plutarch, and many other far-sighted and large-hearted men, he might have taken Jove as the impersonated Providence of Hellenic piety, and, allowing the immoral deities quietly to drop, shown how all the highest qualities of the moral nature of man are collected and concentrated in the supreme sovereign of gods and men. In the one case, he would have shown his zeal for true religion by his zealous iconoclasm of false gods; in the other case, he might have shown a still nobler form of piety by his kindly exhibition of the soul of good in things evil. But he did neither of these things; and the conclusion plainly is that the omission arose from a defect in his mental constitution, which curtailed the reverential faculties of their fair proportions. From all which we learn a most important lesson: that the analytic work of the mere understanding, even when practised by a Titan like Aristotle, is an inadequate method of reaching the highest form of vital reality, or, to use the words of Grant, it forces even the greatest minds at times to degenerate into a sort of smallness; and, generally, that mere intellectual culture never can of itself produce a complete and healthy manhood--never can elaborate for a human soul that rich blood which then only appears when the watery element of the understanding is thoroughly permeated by the red particles of the moral and emotional nature. So true is it, to use St. Paul’s language, that “_knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth;_” and of charity there is no perfect form except that reverential recognition of the common fatherhood of God, and the common brotherhood of man, which we call religion. Let this want of the devout element, therefore, stand {189} strongly pronounced as a defect in the ethical system of Aristotle; he is less than Socrates and Plato as a moralist, principally because he is less in this. Omitting from his calculation one element of that Nature which is stronger than all philosophies and wider than all churches, he has so far failed; and the failure of such a man in such a field should teach our modern philosophers, physical, mechanical, and utilitarian, to beware of following his example.

CHRISTIANITY.

{190}

AN ancient Greek poet, of grave thoughts and weighty words, describing the character and functions of one of the great primeval divinities of his country, says that she is

πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μορφὴ μία, One shape of many names,

an expression which might have been varied with equal truth, as

One Power of many shapes,

and indicating that the motley polymorphous harlequinade, as it appears to us, of a polytheistic Pantheism, is at bottom reducible to a few fundamental forms; and if this be true of such a shifting kaleidoscopic exhibition as popular mythology, it holds good much more of popular morals. All moral philosophies are fundamentally the same, and cannot indeed be otherwise, being only the variously emphasized expression of the one self-existent and self-organizing Reason--the βασιλικὸς Νοῦς of Plato--which makes either a physical or a moral world possible. We shall not expect therefore to find absolutely new principles in the laws which regulate human conduct any more than in the laws of those primary vitalizing forces--Light and Heat--which {191} shape and regulate all organism, immutably and infallibly, by the inherent necessity of the great Being of sleepless underived energy of whom they are the manifestation. We shall, on the contrary, believe with an assured faith, that the principles of morals, and the primary forces of the physical universe, are as immutable and self-congruent in the essential nature of things, as the laws of measure and of magnitude traced out by the mathematician; with this advantage in favour of what has been sometimes ignorantly talked of as contingent truth, that whereas the certainty of mathematical propositions depends on the fact that they are founded on self-limiting definitions of mere thoughts, with which no disturbing condition, not even the fiat of Omnipotence, can interfere, the certainty of physical and of moral laws flows from this, that they are facts, subject to no man’s definition, and necessarily existing as normal manifestations of the great primary fact, which we call GOD. The variations therefore which undoubtedly are observed in human morals--variations peculiarly notable in the infancy and in the decline both of individuals and of races,--are not contradictions, but only partial, feeble, and inadequate expressions of immutable morality. The ebb of the tide, looked at from a local and narrow point of view, is a contradiction to the flow; but both flow and ebb are parts of the grand harmonious motion of the sleepless waters of ancient Ocean. Morals vary under varying conditions of society, as plants vary under more or less favourable conditions of growth, or landscapes under more or less happy incidences of solar light; but these variations, so far from contradicting each other, could not even exist without {192} a fundamental identity; as the element of likeness in the different members of a large family could not exist without a common parentage. And where there may not be a striking unity of expression, traceable through all the varieties of popular morality, there is always at least, as Mr. Lecky has well pointed out, a unity of tendency;[192.1] even as a plant, when it first spreads out the green lobes of its radical leaves, may present a very different appearance from the distinctive leafage of its perfect growth; but the type nothing the less is one, and the necessary law of the whole congruous growth lay in the unity of the germ. There is nothing accidental in nature; so neither in morals. All things are necessary; all things are self-consistent; all things are harmonious; all things upon a whole view of the whole are complete. The distinctive character therefore of such an ethical system as Christianity is to be sought not in the fundamental invariable absolute types of right and wrong, which are the same everywhere, but mainly in the following two things--_First_, In its method of operation and in the steam power, the strong convictions and fervid passions by which the moral machinery is set in motion; or, to adopt another simile, in the fountainheads from which the necessary water-courses of a systematic social irrigation are supplied. _Secondly_, In the particular virtues which its method of operation and its moral steam, in conjunction with the nature of the materials acted on, brings on the stage with a certain preference. For though a moral system may, or rather must, include theoretically all {193} the virtues, and is justly blamed if it exclude one, even the smallest, yet from the narrowness of finite natures, and the laws of habit, it seems practically impossible that as soon as any moral system becomes a traditional law for great masses of men, there should not be manifested a strong tendency to put certain virtues into the foreground, while others are left to find their places without favour, or even with a certain amount of discouragement. All soils are not equally favourable to all plants; and the most healthy climates, where human beings of the greatest amount of robustness and grace are produced, have never been free from peculiar diseases, springing from a source indissolubly intertwined with the conditions of their remarkable salubrity. Another influence also materially tends to give even the most large and comprehensive system of Ethics a certain apparent narrowness and one-sidedness in practice. A world-regenerating system of Ethics, such as Christianity, is not a thing, like a treatise on Logic, written in a book and laid on the shelf, and allowed quietly to work its way with whosoever may choose to take it up. It is an active, aggressive, invasive power; it is a strong medicine to knock down a strong disease; it is a charge of cavalry dashing onwards, like a storm, to break the solid squares of an opposing infantry, bristling with many spears. Such a movement is necessarily one-sided; all movement is one-sided; speculation only is catholic. We must not therefore expect Christianity, of all moral forces the most impetuous and the most imperious, to be free from this fault. It had to swoop down, so to speak, on violent wings from the spiritual side of our nature upon the sensualism of {194} the Greeks, otherwise it could not succeed; and its most distinctive features will be found to spring mainly from this necessary attitude of imperious hostility. There is no time to temper blows in the moment of battle. A great victory is never gained by moderate blows; though, when gained, a wise general will always know how to use it with moderation.

I will now proceed to attempt a sketch of Christian Ethics from the two points of view here indicated.

FIRST, Let us inquire what is the steam-power, the lever, the motive force of Christian Ethics. And here at once the most distinctive part of the Christian moral system meets us in the face; it is presented to us prominently, essentially, radically as a religion. It is not merely connected with religion, not only, like the moral philosophy of Dr. Paley, willing to stamp its precepts with a religious sanction, and to found moral obligation upon the will of the Supreme Being; much less, like the philosophy of Socrates, ready to fraternize with religion, and eager to prove with Heraclitus, the profoundest of the pre-Socratic thinkers, that all human rules of conduct are derived ultimately from the necessity of the divine nature.[194.1] It is more than all this; it is a religion; by its mere epiphany it forms a church; in its starting-point, its career, and its consummation it is “a kingdom of Heaven upon earth.” In its method of presentation, though not certainly in its contents, it is as different from its great ally Platonism {195} as Platonism is from its great enemy, the Homeric theology; for Platonism, however nearly allied to Christianity, is a philosophy and not a religion; a philosophy which did not even propose to overthrow the Polytheistic faith, whose poet-theologer it had so rudely assaulted. The moral philosophy of the Greeks, indeed, generally was either a simple wisdom of life in the form of precepts loosely strung together, as in the early Gnomic poets, or it was a wisdom of life deduced from principles of reason, as in all the Socratic and post-Socratic teaching. But the Ethics of the Gospel came down upon men like a flash from Heaven; suddenly, violently, fervidly and explosively, not with a curious apparatus of slowly penetrating arguments. There is no talk about reasons here at all; the λόγος of St. John came afterwards and meant a very different thing. “_Repent ye, and be baptized, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand!_” is the form of the Evangelical appeal, in which no argument is attempted or indeed required. Your conscience tells you that you are rebels against God; as rebels you can only live under a curse; the whole sense-besotted Greek and Roman world is evidently lying under a curse; repent and be converted; return to God and be saved; to man there can be no safety anywhere except in God, who is the source of all good, and in Christ, who gave himself a living sacrifice that we might be redeemed from all evil. This is the whole style of the greatest moral Evangel the world has ever heard; absolutely and simply an act of religion; all immorality is departure from God, all morality return to God. In the Christian Ethics God is not a secondary figure; he is not brought in merely for a sanction: he is the central sun of the {196} whole system, from whose bright fountain of perennial excellence all the little twinkling lamps of our minor moralities are lighted up. The individual virtues of a Christian man are merely the flower and the fruit of a living plant, of which the root is theology and the sap piety; nay more, the piety accompanies the flower and the fruit, and imparts to them a fragrance and a flavour, which gives them more than half their charm. A rose without smell would still be a rose; but what a world of difference to the sense and to the sentiment would the absence of that fine invisible essence imply! Christian virtue, in fact, can no more exist without piety than Socratic virtue can exist without logic. Socrates was, no doubt, a remarkably pious man; but, while the piety of Socrates was a strong shoot from his reason, the virtue of a Christian is the fair issue of his piety.

The distinct proof of what we have here stated will be found everywhere in the New Testament, but in the Acts of the Apostles specially rather than in the Gospels. For the ideal of Christian character we refer naturally to the Sermon on the Mount and to the character of our Lord as exhibited in the evangelic narrative; but for the manner in which Christianity was presented to men, for the method of operation by which in so short a time it so wonderfully overcame the stern ritualism of the Jew and the fair sensualism of the Greek, we must look to the actual facts of the great early conversions as they are presented to us in the apostolic memoirs of Luke. Let us see therefore, in the first place, what we can learn from the early chapters of that most interesting narrative. Now, the starting-point here plainly is the effusion of the Holy Ghost, an influence which, {197} whether we take it on this first occasion as miraculous, according to the traditional understanding of the Church, or as something extraordinary but in the course of nature, is a phenomenon altogether different in kind from the action of arguments upon the ratiocinative faculty of the mind, and had indeed been preceded not by inductions or deductions, or analytic dissections, or any scholastic exercitations at all, but by meetings for social prayer (i. 14)--prayer which is the great feeder of the moral nature of man when reverting to the original source of all moral life in the form of religion. It was therefore not in the philosophic way of debate and discussion, but in the religious way of inspiration that the regenerative afflatus of the first Christian Ethics came upon the Jewish and Hellenic world; and it worked, let us say, by a fervid moral contagion, not by the suasion of cool argument. And there can be no doubt, that if even in the intellectual world a wise ancient might justly say, _Nemo vir magnus sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit_, much more in the world of moral and political action it is by the infection of noble passions that men are moved to any grand issues, not by the cogency of strong arguments. Melanchthon was as good a reasoner as Martin Luther, perhaps a better, but he had not the volcanic fire of his fellow; and it was an eruption of this fire only that could prevail to shake the stout pillars of the Popedom. And it was by an influence manifestly quite akin to the impetuous energetic eloquence of the great Saxon reformer, that by the first sermon of the Apostle Peter, as we read, great masses of men were suddenly pricked in their hearts, conscience-stung as we phrase it, and in one day three thousand {198} human beings, previously indifferent or hostile, were added to the new moral community afterwards called the Christian Church. Precisely similar in modern times has been the action of the so-called religious revivals, which, from the days of the Methodists downwards, have done so much in this country to rouse from a state of moral lethargy the most neglected and the most abandoned portions of the community. Of Martin Boos, the celebrated Bavarian evangelist, we are told that his “sermon was as if he poured forth flame;”[198.1] and not less striking were the moral effects of the eloquent Whitefield when he drew the tears in white gutters down the grimy cheeks of the congregated Bristol colliers, and, what is even more significant of his power, in Savannah elicited from the prudential pockets of sage Benjamin Franklin, sitting before the preacher with a stiff determination not to contribute, first a handful of coppers, then three or four silver dollars, and then five golden pistoles![198.2] Preachings of this kind have been the subject of scoffing with light-witted persons in all ages; but they stand firm as grave attestations of the fact that the Christian method of conversion, not by logical arguments, but by moral contagion and the effusion of the Holy Ghost, has, with the masses of mankind, always proved itself the most effective. Socrates did much more perhaps as a reformer of sinners than any preacher in the guise of a philosopher ever did; but he could not have done what Whitefield did with the colliers. The arguments of Socrates convinced the few; but the fervour of Peter, the loftiness of his religious position, and {199} the felt firmness of his historical foundation converted the many.

And this brings us to the second important point in the original attitude of Christianity, and the manner in which it moved the moral world. This point is the historical foundation on which the moral appeal stood; and this historical foundation was the miraculous life, death, and resurrection of the Founder of the ethical religion. It concerns us not to inquire here, whether Christ was a real person, or, as certain Germans with their ingenious whimsicality will have it, a mere myth; as little need we ask whether the miracles were really suspensions of the laws of nature, or were mere acts of remarkable power somewhat exaggerated by the wondering narrators; much less can it be necessary for the present argument to weigh the evidence for the great crowning miracle of the resurrection. Concerning these matters, every man must either judge for himself or take the authority of nearly two thousand years of effective Christian teaching as a sufficient guarantee. But what we have to do with here is simply this: that these facts were believed, that the Apostles stood upon these facts, and that the ethical efficiency of Christianity was rooted in these facts. Take the facts away, or the assured belief in the facts, and the existence of such an ethico-religious society as the Christian Church becomes, under the circumstances, impossible. Consider what an effect the personality of Socrates had in establishing what we with no great license of language may call the Socratic Church in Athens. The various schools of philosophy, first in Athens and then in Rome, were sects of that Church. Had Socrates not lived and died {200} with visible power and effect before men, the existence of these schools, fathered by this great teacher, would have been impossible. A person is the necessary nucleus round which all social organisms form themselves. But the personality of Socrates was a much less important element in the formation of the Socratic schools than that of Christ was in the formation of the Christian Church. Socrates was only a teacher--one who, like other teachers, might in time create disciples as wise, perhaps wiser than, himself; Christ was a redeemer, whose function as such could be performed by no vicar, and transmitted to no successor: the one was a help and a guide, the other a foundation of faith and a fountain of life. Socrates taught his disciples to become independent of him, and rely on their own perfected reason; from Christ His disciples always derive nourishment, as the branches from the vine. And if the relation of Christ to His disciples, conceived only as a living Saviour walking on the earth, was so much closer than that of Socrates to his disciples, how much more intimate does the relation become, when He who lived and died to redeem humanity from sin rose from the dead as a living guarantee that all who walked in His ways, should follow up their redemption from sin by a speedy victory over that yet stronger enemy. Death![200.1] From the moment that the resurrection stood amongst the disciples as an accepted fact, the Founder of the religion was not merely a wonder-working man, a prophet and the greatest of all the prophets, but He was an altogether exceptional and miraculous Person, either {201} God in some mysterious way combined into an incorporate unity with man, or at least a Person that, compared with the common type and expression of humanity, might pass for God. The influence which the belief in the actual existence of such a human, and yet in so many regards superhuman, character as the Founder of their faith, must have exercised on the early preachers of the gospel, cannot easily be over-estimated. Plato and Plotinus often talk of the raptures with which the human soul would be thrilled if not only, as now, the shadows and types of the Beautiful, but the very absolute Beautiful itself, the αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν, stood revealed to mortal sight. But granting for the moment that the manifestation of such a vague abstraction is possible, it is quite certain that, when manifested, it could not possibly act upon men with anything like the power of a human Christ actually risen from the dead. Man, with all his range of imagination, is at bottom as much concrete as any creature, and as little capable of being moved by mere abstractions. Jesus Christ, and Him crucified; Christ risen from the dead; believe in Him--this was the short summation of that preaching of the gospel which regenerated the then world, lying as it did in all sorts of wickedness. See how emphatically the resurrection is alluded to as the main anchor in all the early preachings of the Apostles (Acts ii. 32; iii. 15; iv. 2; v. 30, etc.) And as to St. Paul, he declares again and again that if Christ be not risen, the faith of Christians is vain, and those to whom the world was indebted for its moral regeneration were justly to be accounted amongst the most miserable of men; a method of speaking which plainly implies that, in the Apostle’s {202} estimation, the firm fact of a risen Saviour was the only real assurance that Christians had of a life beyond the grave. So true is the utterance of a distinguished modern divine that “the resurrection was the central point of the apostolic teaching, nay more, the central point of history, primarily of religious history, of which it is the soul. The resurrection is the one central link between the seen and the unseen.”[202.1] Let this, therefore, stand firm as the main principle of any just exposition of the machinery by which the ethics of the gospel achieved the conquest of the world. The Church--“the peculiar people zealous for good works,” of whom St. Peter speaks--was formed out of the world not by the clear cogency of logical arguments, but by the vivid belief in miraculous facts.

But the miraculous personality of the teacher, however essential to the proclamation and reception of the teaching, was not the teaching itself. There were doctrines of an essentially theological character, and strong emotions that only religion could excite, which operated along with the unique personality of the Founder in laying a firm foundation for the ethics of the gospel. The most important of these doctrines was the doctrine of the unity of the Godhead. This is a matter with which in Christian countries we are now so familiar that not a few find it difficult to realize how prominent an element it was in the Christian creed, and how powerful must have been its action in the creation of a new school of morals in the midst of the heathen world. By the Fathers of the Church, however, in the first and second centuries, the ethical virtue of this element {203} was never overlooked; they knew only too well, from their own personal experience most of them, and all of them by what they saw written in the habits and maxims of a corrupt society, how easily Polytheism had lent itself to draw a beautiful veil over what was ugly, and to stamp the most debasing vices with consecration. Philosophers, like Xenophanes and Plato, in whose breasts these things had long ago roused a rebellious indignation, might well despair of converting to a pure morality a people who, though they might be sober on all the other days of the year, would think it necessary, as an act of piety, to appear publicly intoxicated on the feast of Dionysus. The salt of goodness, it is quite true, which kept the body of Polytheism so long from rotting, has often been overlooked, principally by the exaggeration of Christian writers, seldom remarkable for candour; and the early Fathers of the Church, engaged, as they were, in actual warfare with the many-headed foe, may well be excused if their zeal was not always accompanied by that fairness to which even error is entitled. But with the most honest purpose to do justice to the moral element of Polytheism, as we may find it exhibited most favourably perhaps in the living pictures of the Homeric poems, it cannot be denied that the obvious deduction from the Polytheistic creed was, in all cases to palliate, in some cases even to justify, vice; and that this deduction was often made we may gather from the familiar fact that the most illogical people even now suddenly become very acute reasoners, the moment it is necessary to defend their prejudices, or to protest against the amendment of their faults. In a system of faith, where every {204} instinct had its god, and every passion its patron-saint, it required either a rare training, or a remarkably healthy habit of mind to keep the low and the high in their just seats of subordination and supremacy. No doubt the more imperative moral virtues to a well-constituted Heathen mind were conceived as represented by Jove, who was the real moral governor of the world; and the supremacy of Zeus in Olympus was a sufficient assertion of the superiority which belongs to the moral law in the little republic of the soul: but as the son of Kronos in the Greek heaven was only a limited monarch, and often, as the Iliad plainly indicates, obliged to wink at the contravention of his own commands by the unruly aristocracy of the skies, so Polytheism could never invest the τὸ ἡγεμονικόν--the regulating principle of the soul--with the absolute sovereignty which to its nature rightfully belongs. Christianity, as an essentially monotheistic faith, applied a perfect remedy to this evil. The highest part of man’s nature was now the only sacred part. The flesh, so far from being glorified and worshipped, was denounced, degraded, and desecrated as a synonym for all corruption. The deification of mere sensuous pleasures, which with Polytheists had passed for orthodox, was now impossible; the moral law became supreme; and surely the sanction which this law requires can never be conceived in more imperative terms than as the distinctly enunciated command of the all-powerful, all-wise, and all-beneficent Father of the human family. No sanction, deduced from a mere reasoning process, can ever approach this in broad practical efficiency. It is the impersonated, incarnated, and enthroned Reason, to which all {205} reasonable creatures owe an instinctive and a necessary obedience.

But there is another corollary to a monotheistic creed, which, in estimating the influence of Christian faith on Christian Ethics, is by no means to be overlooked. If there is only one God, the father of the whole human race, then there is only one family; all men are brethren; nationality ceases; philanthropy, or love of men in the widest sense of the word, becomes natural; mere patriotism has now only a relative value; Leonidas is no longer the model hero; the Jew is no longer of the one chosen people; and the Greek, full of wisdom, and full of conceit, must condescend to call the ignorant barbarian his brother. This breaking down of the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile, between every nation and its neighbour, removed two of the greatest obstructions which have ever stood in the way of a generous morality, in the shape of what Lord Bacon would have called idols of the place and of the race; these idols could be worshipped no longer; and no shibboleth of separation could be mumbled to consecrate the unreasonable prejudices which every nation is so apt to entertain against its neighbour. No doubt towards the propagation of these catholic and cosmopolitan principles, ancient philosophy also, and specially Stoicism, contributed its share;[205.1] the consolidation of the Roman empire and the policy of the Roman emperors worked in the same direction; {206} but the monotheistic creed of the Christian Church, proclaimed with such dignity and moral courage by St. Paul in his discourse on the Hill of Mars, supplied the only effective leverage. Compared with what the preaching of St. Paul did for the grand idea, of humanity and fraternity, all that modern science, modern political theories, modern commerce, and modern philosophies have achieved or may yet achieve, can only be counted as a very small supplement.

The immortality of the soul, the second coming of Christ, and the final judgment of the world, form together a group of doctrines, the relation of which to moral practice is too deeply felt to require much discussion in this place. Perhaps, however, everybody does not sufficiently consider how peculiarly Christian these doctrines are, and how the belief in them, and the moral issues of such belief, must necessarily stand and fall with the faith in some such historical religion as has hitherto formed the framework of the Churches of Christendom. For however these doctrines might be dimly conceived and vaguely believed by the people who wrote D. M. upon their tombstones, and however solemnly imagined and grandly depicted they were in the eloquent discourses of the great philosopher of Idealism, there are few mistakes greater than to accept these dim conceptions and grand imaginings as a proof that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, as a point of Polytheistic faith, performed the same function in moulding the morality of the ancient Greeks and Romans that it does at the present day among modern Christian peoples. A single quotation--one of the most trite--from Homer {207} will suffice to show how utterly unfounded such an idea is. In the Cimmerian visit to the unseen world, the wandering king of Ithaca is made to encounter the hot thane of Thessaly, pacing with a stately fierceness through the Elysian fields, like a king among the shades. On being complimented to this effect by his visitor, the son of Peleus replies--

“Name me not death with praiseful words, noble Ulysses; I Would sooner be a bonded serf, the labourer’s tool to ply To a small cottar on the heath with wealth exceeding small, Than be the Lord of all the Shades in Pluto’s gloomy hall.”

A people who could think and speak thus of the state of souls after departure from the body, could not derive much practical advantage from belief in immortality. That belief indeed was held so loosely by the mass of the Greek people that it may rather be described as a dim imagination than as a definite conviction. People were rather unwilling to believe that their beloved human friends had vanished into the realm of nothingness, than convinced that they had gone to where on any account it would be at all desirable to go. To a few select heroes no doubt, men like Menelaus, of divine extraction, and divine affinity, a really enviable abode after death in the cloudless and stormless islands of the blest was by popular tradition assigned; a few perpetrators also of enormous crimes, red-hand murderers, open blasphemers, and traitors who sold their country for gold were consigned for ever to the ensanguined scourge of the Furies in those flaring regions which the genius of Virgil and Dante has so vividly portrayed; but if the belief in these exceptional cases inspired some to acts of unwonted heroism and {208} deterred others from deeds of abhorred foulness, the very good and the very bad in the world are too few in number to admit of the idea that the motives which either stir them to acts of exceptive virtue or deter them from acts of abnormal crime should have any influence in determining the conduct of the great masses. And as for the philosophers, it was Socrates only and Plato who in their teaching gave any special emphasis to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; and no man who has read the most familiar accounts of the defence which the former delivered to the jury at his trial, or of his last moments as reported by Plato in the _Phædo_, can have carried off the impression that the great father of moral philosophy taught that doctrine with any dogmatic decision or certainty. We must say therefore, with Dr. Paley, who, though incapable of sounding great depths, had a very clear head, and was a very sensible man, that it was the gospel, and the gospel alone, which “brought life and immortality to light,” and with it introduced whatever real power in elevating or strengthening the moral nature of man such a doctrine, when held as a habitual conviction, must exercise over the masses of men. What Socrates contemplated calmly as a probable contingency, St Paul and the early Christians gloried in as a grand culmination and a triumphant result. And the effective influence of this firm faith on society has been to give an infinitely greater dignity to human life, to increase infinitely the moral worth of the individual, and to add a support of wonderful efficacy to those states and stages of toilsome existence which stand so much in need of such hopeful consolation. That it has always acted, and {209} must always act, as a strong aid to virtuous conduct can scarcely be denied, though they of course are poor philosophers and ignoble men who think that virtue could not possibly exist in the world without the belief in immortality. There are many motives that force the masses of men to be virtuous, according to the respectable righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, altogether independent of any prospect of rewards and punishments in a future state; and as for men of a more than commonly delicate moral sensibility--persons to whom a life in baseness and foulness would under any conditions be intolerable--it is not to be imagined that they would be more virtuous from the prospect of an eternity of bliss, than they are from the fear of a short season of shame. These men will always live nobly, for the same reason that whatever they do they must do well. If they play cricket, they will play a good game; if they ride, they will ride well; and if they boat, they will boat well; and, for the same reason, if they live, they will live well--not because they expect a reward, but because they have no pleasure in living badly. To them vice is always rottenness, putrescence, and loathsomeness; and no man will consciously condemn himself to these who knows what soundness means.

There is one marked peculiarity about Christian Ethics, growing directly out of a religious root, and closely connected with certain theological doctrines, which, though indicated in some of the previous paragraphs, demands special mention here. We mean what Dr. Chalmers called its aggressive attitude. The idea of Duty is not necessarily aggressive; a man may perform his duty quietly, as the spheres {210} move in their orbits, without daring, or even desiring, to meddle with the movements of other members of the great social machine. Even Christian Churches in quiet and flat times, as the last century for instance, have been known to content themselves with the unobtrusive performance of a certain round of familiar pieties, undisturbed by any desire to make moral inroads into the domain of remote or even adjacent heathenism. But this is certainly not the normal or flourishing state of any Christian Church; not the natural state indeed of any sect or society, whether religious or philosophical, professing to possess a healing medicine for the cure of diseased souls. We accordingly found in the first discourse that Socrates was in his attitude, however pleasant and playful on the surface, at bottom very earnestly aggressive; it was this aggressiveness, in fact, that raised up against him the hostility of those spiteful little individuals to whom more than to popular ill-will he owed his martyr-death. He asserted, as we have seen, a divine mission, and acted as a missionary, though always in the manner of a reasoner rather than as a preacher. But the aggressive element in early Christianity was much stronger than in Socrates; as any one may see at a glance by comparing the biographical career of St. Paul with that of the Athenian philosopher. And the causes of this were more than one. In the first place, the whole Hebrew nature was more fervid, more impassioned, more prophetic than the Hellenic; and again, the autocratic character which belongs to all monotheism, imparted to the moral message of the missionaries an urgency and a lofty intolerance, which in an atmosphere compounded of polytheism in its lower {211} sphere and of logic in its upper sphere was impossible. A divine command superadded to fervid human sympathies necessarily creates a mission in the person who is the subject of them; but the divine command is much more stringent from an autocratic Jehovah than from a limited monarch like Jove, and the fervour of human sympathy is more intense in proportion as the offence of the rebels against the sovereign authority is looked upon as more heinous. We are brought back therefore again to the great doctrine of the Divine Unity, if we would make it fully evident to ourselves why St. Paul was so much more aggressive than Socrates: Socrates was only partly a missionary, and the messenger of a god whose authority was limited by an inferior but acknowledged authority in other gods; St. Paul was a missionary of the one true God, to whose authority there could be no limit, and to whose command there could be no contradiction. From this principle of divine autocracy there necessarily grew up the conception of sin, not as folly merely and imperfection, but as contumacy, rebellion, and treason; and the conviction of the exceeding sinfulness of sin and the exceeding misery of the sinner became the strongest spur to the missionary activity of the Christian preachers, and gave a true moral sublimity to an aggressive attitude, which in a mere reasoner had appeared impertinent. Nothing indeed is more remarkable than the contrast between the strong colours in which sin is painted by the writers of the New Testament and its more venial aspect in the mild regard of the philosopher. Aristotle can surrender a whole generation of young men to the dominion of πάθος and think nothing more about it. {212} They are as incapable of moral ideas, these young sensualists, as swine are of cleanliness; let them wallow in the mire for a season; we shall speak to them, when they have outgrown their animalism. But the converted Pharisee who wrote his burning epistles to the young Christian churches in magnificent Rome and luxurious Ephesus used very different language. Sin with him is a very serious offence, on account of which the curse of God lies on the whole world. Sinners, whether old or young, are by nature the children of wrath; and by the act and fact of the transgression of divine law, so utterly cast down and degraded from the proper human dignity, that they require to be born again, and baptized with a fire-baptism before they can be purified from their foulness and restored to the original rights and privileges which belonged to them, as to all men, in right of their divine fatherhood. Hence the strongly accentuated opposition between flesh and spirit (Romans vii. viii.; 1 Pet. iv. 3, 4) which no doubt Aristotle, as we have seen above, also mentions; but in the Stagirite it is only an incidental recognition; in the New Testament it is a pervading and overwhelming power, a force which possesses the atmosphere, a moral storm, which, swooping violently down from the dark-throned seat of the Supreme Regent, tears the cloak of self-righteousness from the shivering sinner, and exposes him in all his bareness. Plato also and Plotinus use very Christian language when they tell us that to be partakers of true moral beauty the soul requires a κάθαρσις or purification from its natural or acquired foulness, and that the necessity of this purification was symbolically indicated in the {213} mysteries.[213.1] Very true; but here again Plato wrote calmly for the few, Paul preached fervidly for the many. And this word _purification_, as connected with the Christian idea of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and the necessity of an ingrafting of a higher moral life by the operation of the Divine Spirit, leads me necessarily to specialize the doctrine of the Atonement as performing a peculiar function in the ethical attitude and moral efficiency of the gospel. The doctrine of the Atonement arises as the necessary consequence of the Christian conception of sin as a polluting, perverting, rebellious, and treasonable principle. An error is reasoned away, but filth must be washed away; guilt must be atoned; the offender must pray for forgiveness; and the free grace of the Sovereign must restore the traitor to the place and the protection which belong to him as a loyal subject. Put into a strictly articulate form, this doctrine of atonement, not less than its correlative the exceeding sinfulness of sin, especially when pushed to its extreme of logical consistency by the so-called federal theologians, is apt to give, and has always given, more or less just cause of offence to speculative minds; but in that broad practical aspect in which it was originally presented to the world, before men began to turn a fervid faith into a curious theology, there can be no doubt that it operated most beneficially in intensifying that hatred of sin which is the mother of all {214} holiness, and in enabling many a guilt-laden soul to start on the career of a regenerate life with a comfortable lightness and an unfettered speed, which from no other source could have flowed so readily.

The plan of this discourse leads us in the next place to consider the individual virtues to which, by their radical connexion with religion and a theological creed, Christian Ethics have shown a preference. But before attempting this it is obvious to remark how, by the atmosphere of piety in which they grow, and the theological soil in which they are rooted, the Christian virtues, as a whole and individually, are elevated to a much higher platform than belongs to any system of mere moral philosophy; and from this point of view we can understand how the divines of the school called Evangelical have been led to look down with such contempt as they generally do on every form of Christian preaching in which a round of mere moral duties is held up as in itself capable of performing the functions of a truly Christian life. The Evangelicals, narrow and bigoted as they too often are, especially in points of artificial and traditional orthodoxy, which they are unable to separate from the essence of the gospel, were quite right in this matter. It is not the mere duties performed, but the motives from which, and the inspiration by which, they are performed, that make the moral life of a truly Christian man so excellent. It is not merely that he is morally correct in all his intercourse with his fellow-men; not merely that he is richly furnished perhaps with all those born amiabilities which an acute Scotch speculator has designated as but the painted masks of virtue;[214.1] {215} the world may shower its plaudits on such cheap forms of native goodness as loudly as it pleases; Christian morality, by virtue of its lofty religious inspiration, aims at something more; the mere righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees it looks upon as an attainment utterly unworthy of a high moral ambition, as a vulgar something, the contentment with which would indicate an entire absence of that pure moral ideal, with the acknowledgment of which a religious morality--a system of ethics founded on the worship of the one true God--must necessarily start. Whatever morality the world may possess, as absolutely indispensable for the common movements of the social machine, Christianity, of course, accepts, but makes no account of in its characteristic appeals. It is rather the low maxims, the false authorities, and the spurious virtues, mixed up with the vulgar morality of the many, that it most mercilessly exposes and protests against. “_Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed in the renewing of your minds_.” “_But you are an elect people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation_.” Such is the lofty tone which it assumes, and from the days of St. Paul to Xavier and Howard has justified the assumption amply by its deeds. It aspires not merely to be moral; it would be the poetry of morality in a world where prose is the common currency. It intends to hold up to the whole human family a divine ideal of social heroism, which may some day be universally admired but which never can be universally enacted.

Let us now look at the beautiful portraiture of the Christian man in the detail of his most characteristic virtues.

And first, as the starting-point here, we must {216} observe that the Christian is pre-eminently equipped with that self-denial and self-control, and what we generally call strength of character, which are the necessary postulates of all moral excellence. A man who will take the world easily will never take it grandly; χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά· _omnia præclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt:_ all excellent things are difficult; the Christian recognises the difficulty, but delights in it as the stout old Roman did in the foes which added fuel to his victories, or as the strong modern engineer does in mountains, that he may show the triumph of his art in boring through them or winding round them. Modern sensualists and preachers of the low doctrine that pleasure is the only good have delighted to fling discredit on this grand Christian virtue of self-denial, as if anything great ever was performed without it. The man of genius denies himself in a thousand ways that he may work out a perfect body for the imaginary ideals which possess him; the great soldier denies himself through leagues of hardship that he may repel the rude invader and preserve the honour of his country unstained; and the man of virtue must deny himself also, if virtue is a thing which a creature of high enterprise and lofty purpose may reasonably have to do with. To lie in the lap of pleasure may be the highest enjoyment of which a feeble character is capable; the alternation betwixt sensuous languor and sensuous excitement may be the only grateful change of which a predominantly sensuous nature can be made to partake; but a strong man must have something difficult to do; and the strong Christian man has to “work out his salvation with fear and trembling;” to mortify the body, lest being overindulged {217} it should learn to be the master instead of the servant of the soul; and “laying aside every weighty and the sin which more easily besets him,” learn to “run with patience the race which is set before him.” What race? The race of realizing as much goodness as possible in his own personal life lend in the life of that society of which he is a part, by the twofold process of nursing virtues and weeding out vices: an ideal which never can be reached by those who commence life, after the Epicurean fashion, with a low calculation of pleasures and pains, but by those only who we inspired by the vision of what Plato preached as divine ideas, and Paul as divine commands. The recognition of a divine ideal in some shape or other is the first step to the prosecution of a divine life; and this alone can supply the inspiration which makes difficulty easy, educes pleasure from pain, and converts the most severe acts of self-denial into the materials of an elevating warfare, and the occasion of a glorious triumph.

Very closely connected with the stern self-denial and the manly strength of character so conspicuous in the first Christians was their moral courage. It requires very little knowledge of the world and experience of life to be made aware, in the case of those who are capable of being made aware of these things, that the general habitude of the world is not moral courage, but moral cowardice. The majority of men, like the majority of dogs I presume, are not physical cowards; the dog is naturally a fighting animal, and so is man. But that the majority of men are moral cowards is certain. No consideration is so powerful with schoolboys as that of being laughed at for any singularity in dress or appearance; the slavery of {218} fashion among grown-up persons is founded partly on the same dread; and the fear of standing in a minority restrains many a man in public life from giving voice to a salutary truth, and planting a gag on the barking mouth of popular error. I have myself been present at meetings of corporate bodies, where I gave my suffrage, confident that I was right in acting consistently on a plain principle of common honesty; and after the vote was taken I was told confidentially by some of those who had voted against my views, that they had a strong conviction I was in the right, only they could not venture to vote with me in the face of such an overwhelming majority! This is the moral courage of the world. ‘Have any of the Scribes and Pharisees believed in him? If so, we will speak out; if not, we keep silence.’ This tendency to follow authority is in many persons, no doubt, the necessary consequence of their own ignorance; ignorance is always afraid, and it knows by a sure instinct that its only safety lies in being led by superior knowledge. This no one can blame. But when a man acts against his own conviction in giving his vote as a member of a corporate body, or in a political assembly, to shield himself from the indignation or to gain the favour of an unreasonable multitude,--when, as in pure democracy, the question of right and wrong never comes before a man at all, but the one rule of political life simply is to submit to what such and such a local majority may choose to dictate,--this is sheer cowardice and simple slavery, from which a man of honourable and independent mind, not tainted with the baseness of democratic life, must shrink with abhorrence. And so in fact we do find that in democratic countries, where all {219} things are controlled by political cliques, who dictate the local policy, to which the puppet called a Member of Parliament, or a Deputy, is expected to swear, men of independent spirit, manly courage, and large intelligence are found systematically to shrink from the arena. How different from this demoralizing miasma is the atmosphere which we breathe in the New Testament! There a single manly individual stands forward, and in the name of God solemnly calls upon men to renounce the dearly-cherished errors, and to trample under foot the warmly-worshipped idols of a whole people. “_If it be lawful in the sight of God to hearken unto men rather than unto God, judge ye!_” This is what Peter said, speaking the truth boldly, in the face of roaring multitudes, frowning dignitaries, and lines of bristling lances. A religion in which such rare manhood was as common as cowardice is common in general society, if it was not crushed in the bud, as Protestantism was in Bohemia, could not but grow up to a mighty tree in the end. The stoical death of the gladiators in the Colosseum was wont to draw admiration, and sometimes even to extort pity, from the spectators; but their death was compulsory, and the stoicism of their last moments only a theatrical grace to fall decently before an applauding multitude. The Christian, on the other hand, whether as a fearless preacher or as an unflinching martyr, made a voluntary protest, and chose a self-imposed torture. If he was not a fool or a madman, he was a hero; and the heroism he displayed was of such a high order, that being repeated only for a generation or two, it caused the combined force of popular prejudice and traditional authority in the heathen world to blush itself into a {220} not unwilling subjection. So much of lofty courage and of genuine manhood did subtle Greece and powerful Rome learn from the moral missionaries of poor and despised Palestine!

Let us now cast a glance on that most characteristic and most widely bruited of all the Christian virtues, viz., LOVE; which under the name of Charity (not Ἔρως, the old satellite of Venus, but ἀγάπη), St. Paul in a famous chapter eulogizes as at once the crown and the epitome of all virtues most peculiarly Christian. We read also that “Love is the fulfilling of the law;” and a watchword so deliberately chosen and so emphatically sounded must always be pregnant with significance as to the moral character and efficiency of the religion to which it belongs. Now the plain significance which this blazon bears on the face of it is this, that if Love be the blossom of all virtue, the root of all vice is the opposite of Love, viz., Selfishness. And whosoever has looked into the moral world with any faculty of generalizing, will not fail to have observed that every form of vice is only a diverse manifestation of that untempered, voracious, and altogether monstrous egotism, which, in order to purchase for itself a slight advantage or a momentary titillation, would not scruple to plunge a whole universe into disorder and ruin; while, on the other hand, the virtuous man lives as much by sympathy with the desires of others as by the gratification of his own, and is ready at any moment to dash the bowl of blessedness from his lips, if he must purchase it by the consignment to misery of a singly human soul. And if we look at the lower organism of society, we shall find, that as in the republic of science knowledge prospers exactly in proportion as {221} the pure love of truth prevails, so in communities of human beings, the measure of the amount of that brotherly love which man feels to man, taken in its intensity and in its diffusion, furnishes an exact test of the amount of moral excellence and consequent happiness--as distinguished from mere material prosperity--which is found in any place. The greatest difficulties, indeed, which society has to encounter, spring fundamentally from a deficiency of brotherly love,--from every grade of carelessness, indifference, and coldness, down to niggardliness, shabbiness, and the wretched mania of hoarding jealously what he who hoards is afraid to use. Poor-laws, for instance, which are generally looked upon as a necessary evil, exist only because those social associations to which the administration of charity naturally belongs, viz., in a Christian country the Christian churches, are not powerful or zealous enough adequately to do their duty in relieving human misery; that is to say, because Love, which is professedly the soul of those associations, is either not intense enough where it exists, or not sufficiently diffused, to provide the necessary aid; and thus people are driven to supply the want of voluntary love in the community by the exaction of compulsory rates, which may, indeed, save a few individuals from starvation, but which certainly produce the double evil of weakening the healthy habit of self-support through all classes of the community, and of stopping the fountain-heads of that natural flow of brotherly aid, which is a virtue only so long as it is voluntary. Now to this selfishness, which may without exaggeration be termed the endemic taint of all human associations, Christianity has applied the antidote of Love, in the {222} triple form of love to Christ, love to the brethren, and love to the human race;--love to Christ as the incarnate type of unselfish benevolence and noble self-sacrifice; love to the brethren as fellow-soldiers in the same glorious human campaign; love to all men, as sheep of one common fold, which the further they have strayed the more diligently they are to be sought for. How much more intensely and extensively than in any other association this Love has operated in the Christian churches, from the days of Dorcas and her weeping widows down to Florence Nightingale and her Crimean campaign, need not be told; nine-tenths of the most active benevolence of the day in this country are Christian in their origin and in their character; and even those persons the favourite watchwords of whose social ethics are borrowed not from Christ but from Epicurus, will be found to have added a strange grace to the philosophy which they profess by a light borrowed from the religion which they disown. And if we inquire what are the causes of this superior prominence given to active benevolence in the Christian scheme of ethics, we shall find, as in other instances, that the peculiar character of the ethical fruit depends on the root of religion by which the plant is nourished, and the theological soil in which it was planted. For surely it requires very little thought to perceive that the root of all that surpassing love of the human brotherhood lies in the well-known opening words of the most catholic of prayers--“_Our_ FATHER _which art in Heaven;_” the aspect also of sin as a contumacy and a rebellion, and a guilt drawing down a curse, necessarily led to a more aggressive philanthropy, with the view {223} of achieving deliverance from that curse; but, above all, the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and the terrible consequences necessarily involved in the idea of an eternal banishment from the sunshine of the Divine presence, has created an amount of social benevolence and missionary zeal which under any less potent stimulus would have been impossible. The miseries of the more neglected and outcast part of humanity present an entirely different aspect to the calm Epicurean and to the zealous Christian. To the Christian the soul of the meanest savage and of the most degraded criminal is still an immortal soul. As when a conflagration bursts out in a high turret, where a little child is sleeping within the near enswathment of the flames, some adventurous fireman boldly climbs the ladder, and rushing through the suffocating smoke, snatches the little innocent from the embrace of destruction; so the Christian apostle flings himself into the eager host of idolatrous worshippers, and rejoices with exceeding joy when he saves if it were but one poor soul from the jaws of the destroying Siva to whom he was sold. But, as men’s actions are the offspring of their convictions, the Epicurean will find no spur strong enough to shake him out of his easy-chair at such a spectacle of human degradation. Let the poor sinner be worshipping Siva on the banks of the Ganges, or committing slow suicide by what, in the language of the Celtic islands, is strangely called the water of life,[223.1] your easy sensuous philosopher needs not vex himself about the matter. _Poor idiot! poor sot! poor devil! with his little feeble flame of smoky light which he calls life, let him flicker on another moment, or let him be_ {224} _snuffed out, it matters not; another bubble has burst on the surface of the waters, and the mighty ocean of cosmic vitality flows on as full and as free and as fathomless as before!_

In the estimation of Christian love one of the most interesting points is its strongly pronounced contrast with what has been called Platonic love. As for that which is commonly called love in novels and in life, though capable of affording a very exquisite bliss in its little season, it is a matter with which mere puberty and the bloom of physical life has so much to do, that except in the way of regulation (which is anything but an easy matter), it does not come under the category of morals at all; only this general remark may be made with regard to it, that in all well-conditioned human beings it springs originally from a certain affinity of souls shining through the body, as much as from the mere attractions of physical beauty; and in so far as this is the case, the purely physical instinct is elevated into the sphere of genuine Platonic love. Now, what is Platonic love? As described by the great philosopher of Idealism in the _Phædrus_, its root lies plainly in the rapturous admiration of excellence, and its consummation in the metamorphosis of the admirer into the perfect likeness of that which he admires; whereas Christian love, most characteristically so called, has its root in an infinite depth of divine tenderness, and for its fruit broad streams of human pity and grand deeds of human kindness. Platonic love is more contemplative and artistic; Christian love more practical and more fruitful; the one is the luxury of an intellectual imagination, the other the appetite of a moral enthusiasm.

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It would be doing injustice to Christian love, however, to suppose that it has nothing at all in common with intellectual admiration, and that its only spring of movement is pity. “Visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction,” though in our present imperfect state the most characteristic, is not absolutely the most essential, feature in its exercise. If it were so, indeed, the Christian would never be comfortable except in the midst of misery; as a nurse can ply her vocation only at the bed of the sick or the wounded. But in fact his infinite tenderness for the lost sinner is produced and heightened by his experience of joy from communion with saints; and the contemplation and imitation of the image of moral perfection in the person of the great Captain of his salvation sustains him in his unwearied and often apparently hopeless endeavours to gather in recruits to serve under that so glorious captainship. We shall therefore justly say that without a Platonic love, that is, a fine spiritual passion for the character and person of Christ, the performance of the thousand and one works of social charity and mercy for which the Christian is so famous would be impossible. But we may say further, that the picture of Charity given in that wonderful chapter of St. Paul is very far from confining the sphere of Christian human-heartedness to that field of healing and of comforting in which so many charitable institutions in all Christian countries are the watch-towers. His picture evidently exhibits the ideal of a human being, not merely in the habit of lifting the fallen, healing the sick, and ministering, as the good Samaritan did, to those who may have fallen into the hand of robbers--these are extraordinary {226} occurrences, which will excite even the most sluggish to extraordinary demonstrations of human sympathy,--but the apostle of the Gentiles will have it that in our daily intercourse with our fellow-men we learn to live their lives sympathetically as intimately and as completely as we live our own; that we study on all occasions to identify ourselves with their position and feelings and interests, and then only pass a judgment on their conduct. “_Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things_.” What a problem is here, what a lesson of humanity, of catholicity, and of something far more human than that mere toleration, which the nations of Christendom have taken now nearly two thousand years to learn, since the first preaching of the gospel, and are scarcely learning even now! How much of our daily judgments, spoken and printed, seems leavened in any degree by the genuine humanity and manifest justice of this divine ideal? “Speaking the truth in love” is the acknowledged law of Christian intercourse; speaking lies in hatred were often a more appropriate text for certain large sections of British practice. We ought to pass judgment against our brother on our knees, fearful to offend; we do it rather, not seldom with pride and insolence and impertinence, mounted on the triumphal car of our own conceit, riding rough-shod over the real or imagined faults of our brother. So far does the ideal of Christian love, in the preaching of the {227} Christian apostle, transcend its reality in the lives of men who, if not Christians, at least breathe a Christian atmosphere, and ought to have received some benefit from the inhalation!

FORGIVENESS OF INJURIES is one of the special fruits of Christian charity, which has never been denied its due meed of acknowledgment, though not unaccompanied sometimes with the sarcastic observation that the pious zeal of Christian men has generally been more apt to flame into hatred than their love to blossom into forgiveness. No man has yet been able to say of Christians generally, as one may often have remarked justly of Quaker ladies, that they have too much milk in their blood; nor do British and French and German wars seem to have abated very much in intensity for the want of a Christian text saying--_Thou shalt love thy friends and hate thine enemies!_ Perhaps, also, some scholar may be able to string together from the pages of rare old Plutarch a longer chain of pretty specimens of lofty forgiveness of enemies than can readily be picked from modern Christian biographies. In the life of Pericles, by that mellow old Bœotian, I remember to have read that on one occasion this great statesman had to endure for a whole day in the agora a succession of impertinent and irritating attacks from one of those waspish little creatures who love to infest the presence of goodness; and he endured it with such untroubled composure that, without taking the slightest notice of his assailant, he executed quietly some incidental matters of business, whose urgency demanded immediate attention. In the evening the orator returned to his house, still pursued by the gibes and scurrilities of his spiteful {228} little adversary. But the great man remained unmoved; and as he entered his own gate, quietly said to the janitor--_Take a lamp and show that gentleman back to his home!_ A similar but more serious instance of large-minded forgiveness of enemies is recorded by the same author in his life of Dion, the noble Syracusan who about the middle of the fourth century before Christ made a brilliant dash upon Sicily, similar to that which in the middle of the last century Prince Charles Edward Stuart made upon Great Britain, with this difference, that while the one succeeded gloriously in his well-calculated enterprise, the other with his mock-sublime rashness ludicrously failed. This Dion, after having planted himself on the seat of power abandoned by the worthless usurper, found the cause of constitutional order, of which he was the champion, suddenly endangered by the intrigues of an ambitious demagogue called Heracleides; but his plots were timeously discovered, and political wisdom sealed to call upon the representative of public order to prevent the recurrence of such dangerous dissensions by the death of the conspirator. But the generosity of the disciple of Plato prevailed over the severity that would have guided a common politician. Dion forgave the offender; only, however, as it soon appeared, that the fox chased out of the hole might begin to burrow in another. In this case the Syracusan Platonist behaved like a modern Quaker--nobly as concerned the sentiment of the man, foolishly considering his position as a statesman; but while no sensible man might improve of such conduct in a ruler, every man feels that the heathen here performed an act of which, so far as motive is concerned, {229} the most accomplished Christian might be proud. Let the Greeks and Romans therefore have their praise in this matter; let “seekers after God” in heathen times be put forward prominently as ensamples to those who in Christian times rejoice to think that they have found Him;[229.1] nor let sympathy be refused to noble deeds because performed from somewhat different motives. The great heathen forgave his enemies because he was too high-minded to allow himself to be discomposed by petty assailants, and because a great indignation seems wasted upon a paltry offence; the true Christian forgives his enemies because he loves them too fervidly to have any room for hatred, and because his sidling pity overwhelms his wrath. There is no sin in the magnanimous pride of the heathen; there is more humanity in the quick sympathy of the Christian. Anyhow, Christianity may claim this peculiar merit, that it has set up that type of conduct as a general law for every man, which among the ancients was admired as the exceptive virtue of the few; and Voltaire certainly revealed one source of his uncompromising hostility to the Christian faith, and showed himself as far below the ideal of heathen as of Christian magnanimity, when he acted so that one of his most illustrious disciples could say of him that “he never forgives, and never thinks any enemy beneath his notice.”[229.2]

One of the most interesting of the contrasts generally drawn between Christian and heathen ethics, is that which concerns the very difficult virtue of SELF-ESTIMATE. “Let every man,” says St. Paul, {230} “strive not to think of himself beyond what he ought to think, but soberly, according as God has divided to every man the measure of faith.” And accordingly we find that in the lives of eminent Christians, as well as in formal treatises on Christian ethics, humility has always had a prominent place assigned to it in the roll of the virtues. But here again we must beware of running into a vulgar extreme, by imagining that the Greeks and Romans knew nothing of this virtue, and that they systematically fostered pride and self-importance. It is no doubt true, as every schoolboy knows, that the word ταπεινός, which in classical Greek signifies _mean_ and _paltry_, in New Testament Greek is used to designate that sort of person who thinks of himself modestly, or, as St. Paul in the verse quoted says, “soberly;” but the mere change in the shade of colour belonging to certain words when passing from Attic into Alexandrian Greek, proves nothing in such a case; and if the matter is to be settled by words, the phrase σωφρονεῖν used by St. Paul, taking the place of the ταπεινοφροσύνη of other passages, is the very word by which the Greek moralists constantly express that golden mean between a high and a low estimate of self, which Aristotle their spokesman lauds as the habitual tone of the perfectly virtuous man. So far indeed was the Hellenic mind from recognising no sin in pride, that it looked upon self-exaltation and ramping self-assertion in every form as not only a great sin, but the mother of all sins. This sin they designated by the significant term ὕβρις--a word which etymologically signifies _beyond the mark_, and which, if it had not already existed, might well have been coined by {231} Aristotle, had he been given, like Bentham, to the pedantry of making a language for himself.

“Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines Quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum.”

Pride, indeed, is not only the sin by which Lucifer falls in Christian angelography, but it peoples Tartarus also in heathen legends; and the boastful Salmoneus, whose insane ambition aspires to mimic the thunder of Jove, is always the first to be blasted by the bolt. Wherein then shall we say lies the difference--for a difference there certainly is--between the humility of the Christian and the σωφροσύνη of the Greek? The common root of the virtue in both is plain; it is the contrast between mortal and immortal, which belongs equally to Polytheism and to Monotheism; pride was not made for man; let him worship one God or many gods, he is a poor weak creature at the best, and only the more called upon to practise a sober-minded humility because his winged schemes so often end in creeping deeds. The luxuriant pride of our young leafage grows up so frequently into a shrivelled blossom and a hollow fruit. Yet there is a difference. In Monotheism there is an impassable gulf betwixt God and man which exists not in Polytheism. There are steps which lead up with not a few gradations from Pericles to Zeus; the son of a Theban Semele may be raised into a god, and the son of a god, like Hercules, may indulge grandly in many of the stout carnalities of a mortal man. Here therefore lies the primary ground of the more profound humility of the Christian. But there is another, which in practice has proved even more potent,--the intense {232} feeling of the Christian already noted with regard to the exceeding sinfulness of sin. Every Christian looks upon sin habitually as a healthy man looks upon the plague; in some popular catechisms it is even laid down that “every sin, even the smallest, deserves God’s wrath and curse both in this world and in that which is to come;” nay, more: certain theologians, deemed by some peculiarly orthodox, have taught that the whole world lies under a curse on account of the guilt of the great progenitor of the human race, in violating a special divine command, a guilt incurred some six thousand years ago, and transmitted in due course of generation to his hapless progeny. These dogmas, of course, are only strong caricatures of the great fact that every deed, whether good or evil, by the eternal constitution of things, necessarily transmits its influence from the earliest to the latest times; families and races therefore may lie for generations under a curse; the Greek tragedy acknowledges this in the strongest terms; but, as in the other cases that we have been considering, Christianity here not only intensifies a moral sentiment familiar to the heathen world, but it extends immensely the surface over which it is diffused. Æschylus and Sophocles could represent a heavy curse hanging for ages over the royal houses of Pelops and Labdacus as the consequence of monstrous sins committed by the founders of their families; but Christianity makes no selection in this matter, and flings the blackness of a moral blight in the most unqualified phrase over the whole race of Adam. So far as we are sinners we are all under a curse, all children of wrath; and no man is supposed to be so virtuous as that he cannot {233} honestly join in the humble response of the Litany, _Lord have mercy on us, miserable offenders!_ These words repeated constantly in the weekly or daily service of a whole Church should alone be sufficient to prove how much more the virtue of humility is stamped, so to speak, into the Christian soul, than it was into the Hellenic. One cannot imagine either Socrates or Pericles using any such strong language. And I must confess, when coming out into the fresh air from the long Morning Service of the Anglican Church, I have often wondered how far the humble prostration of soul expressed in the refrain of the Litany had been cordially repeated by the great majority of the worshippers. The English, as is well known, are a peculiarly proud and often somewhat insolent people; and for myself, I honestly confess that I have always experienced in reference to my own feelings not a little exaggeration in the expressions of soul-prostration employed whether in the spoken Presbyterian or in the printed Episcopalian formularies. I do not see why Christian worshippers should so constantly avoid the language of a reasonable virtuous self-satisfaction used by King David in not a few places, and by Nehemiah. But however this be, and allowing that many Christians habitually employ phrases in their church service which are plainly at variance with the whole tone and temper of their lives, it is after all true that Christianity, if it errs here, errs on the safe side, and errs only as the medical men do, by using a very drastic drug to combat a very violent disease. For it is only too obvious that self-importance in various forms, not rarely under the decent mask of modesty and diffidence, {234} is the dominant vice of the human character. Young men are apt to glory in their strength, young women in their beauty, fathers are proud of their offspring, scholars of their learning, metaphysicians of their subtleties, and poets of the iridescent and evanescent bubbles of a luxurious fancy and an unpruned imagination. Men of science too are apt to be proud of their knowledge,--whether a knowledge of what is high or what is low matters not; it is the knowledge which puffs them up, not the thing known, which indeed, if well weighed, were oftener the motive to humiliation than to exaltation. We are therefore much in need of getting as much humility from the gospel as it is naturally calculated to inspire; and it may be observed that the public pulse is always ready to beat in unison with the sacred text whenever a man of great original genius stands forward, signally marked with the peculiarly Christian type of humility. Such a man was Michael Faraday, the subtle investigator of those secret laws which regulate the molecular action of particles of matter among themselves.

“Yet living face to face with these great laws, Great truths, great mysteries, all who saw him near, Knew him how childlike, simple, free from flaws Of temper, full of love that casts out fear.

Untired in charity, of cheer serene, Careless or gold or breath of praise to earn; Childhood or manhood’s ear content to win, And still as glad to teach as meek to learn.”[234.1]

Here we have the general type of a chaste and {235} beautiful Christian humility in the shape of a living man. To this no one objects. It is the dogmas and the doctrinal paradoxes of the professional theologians that are so apt to fret us; to which, accordingly, here as in other cases, in judging of Christian ethics, we shall be wise in not attributing too much importance.

But it were a very great mistake to imagine that in reference to the estimate of personal worth Christianity exercises only a repressing, and as some may picture it, a depressing, influence. On the contrary, there is no religion that has done so much in creating and fostering the feeling of personal worth and dignity. How is this? Plainly because, while the Christian doctrine prostrates every man in a humble equality before God, that very equality makes every man conscious of an equal personality as compared with any other man. All men are sinners; if that be a difficult doctrine to swallow there is one closely connected with it, which is more comfortable: all men are brethren; and if brethren, equal--a wise father has no favouritism. This is another consequence of that monotheistic fatherhood of which we have already spoken; it not only abolished nationalities, it created personalities. In the preaching of the gospel each individual is appealed to as a person with separate responsibilities; he has sinned individually, he repents individually, he is redeemed individually. In this affair of Christian salvation there is nothing done by proxy. Priests are not known in the Church. The people only are the priesthood;[235.1] each individual in the congregation has the value and the dignity of a {236} priest. From this equality of personal dignity before God two remarkable phenomena have flowed, both specially characteristic of modern society--the abolition of slavery and the rivalry of religious sects. Slavery, of course, must appear an intolerable anomaly to a man who believes that all men are brethren and all sons of God; to call a man brother and to sell him as a chattel is a lie too gross to be tolerated even by a world accustomed to cheat itself with the authority of all sorts of mere names. And as to the rivalry of multifarious sects and churches, which some people bewail as the one great gangrene of Christendom, it is really somewhat shallow not to see that in the moral as in the physical world diversity of form only proves the richness and the variety of the vital manifestation. The external unity after which some religious persons sigh existed naturally under heathenism, where the individual conscience was merged in the State; exists now also in Popish countries, where the same conscience is merged in the Priesthood; but in the Christianity of the early Church, founded as it was on a direct appeal to the conscience of the individual sinner, such a purely external and mechanical idea could find no place. The right to exist at all as a Church established the right to dissent from other Churches, by asserting its own convictions when such assertion seemed necessary. This assertion, indeed, might often be made foolishly, forwardly--then it was a sin, the sin of schism; but the right to dissent was inherent, it was part of the indefeasible birthright of spiritual liberty wherewith Christ had made his people free. In this sense, to talk of humility were to establish slavery; while, on the other hand, to send {237} out branching suckers, which anon take independent root, is merely to prove the rich vitality of the stem. Christianity has thus become the great mother of moral individualism; and the many sects, which are so apt to annoy us with their petty jealousies, are, when more closely viewed, merely a true index to the intensity of our spiritual life.

On the relation of Christian Ethics to civil AUTHORITY, on the one hand, and to the sacred right of LIBERTY on the other, much has been written, but most frequently by partisans too interested to be capable of an impartial judgment. The wisdom of the original preachers of the Gospel was in nothing more manifest than in the care with which they avoided mixing themselves up in any way with the social and political questions of the hour; while at the same time they did not omit to enunciate principles and to exhibit conduct opposed equally to the servility which despotism demands and the licence in which democracy delights. It would be easy to marshal forth an array of texts by which the doctors of divine right on the one hand, and the preachers of the sacred right of insurrection on the other, have endeavoured to enlist the Saviour of mankind as a recruit in the internecine wars which they have waged. But however Churchman and Puritan might expound and denounce, the serene face of the Son of Mary looked always strange through the smoke and sulphur of such struggles; his name was invoked on both sides with most vehement protestation; but it was difficult all the while for the impartial spectator to perceive that he was part of the battle; he seemed always to belong to both sides, or to neither. But sensible men of all parties {238} have at length become convinced that to attempt to stamp the name of Christ as the special patron of our little partisan cliques and warfares is as absurd as to expect that the sun should come down from heaven and confine his illumination to our private parlours. As for purely secular parties, it is quite certain that both the extremes which divide the political world are equally remote from the spirit of moderation and toleration which is the very atmosphere that Christian charity breathes. Absolute despotism, or the unlimited authority of one man over his fellows, is a condition of things which, as Aristotle remarks, could only be natural and legitimate in cases where the one absolute ruler happened to be both the strongest and the best man in the community; but to acknowledge as absolute rulers those who have no authority for their rule but their own imperious will, and are always more likely to be the worst than the best members of the society to which they belong, is manifestly as directly opposed to the sense of righteousness in the Christian code of morals as to the dictate of reason in the Greek. On the other hand, the right of the mere numerical majority to rule, which is the characteristic principle of pure democracy, never can be admitted by a religion which teaches that the majority are bad, and that we ought not to follow a multitude to do evil. The equality which belongs to all Christians is not so much an equal right to rule as an equal duty to obey; an equal right only to participate in those privileges and obligations which belong to an independent human being, not a mere chattel, as a member of a moral society called the Church, and of a legal society called the State. The Christian {239} rejoices indeed in his liberty; but it is not in the liberty to do what he pleases, much less in the liberty of a majority to outbawl and to overbear a minority by the mere power of numbers. He is free from the pollution of sin, from the slavery of the senses, from the forms of a cumbrous ritualism, and the exactions of a lordly priesthood; but he is not free, and never dreams of being free, from the homage which vice ought always to pay to virtue, from the natural subordination that ignorance owes to intelligence, and from the sacred authority of law. Here Christ and Socrates agree. “_Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s_.” “_Let every soul be subject to the higher powers_.” If laws are bad or impolitic, the guilt of their viciousness lies at the door of those who made them, or who gave themselves no concern to have them altered. But so long as they are laws let them be obeyed. The first duty of the Christian is obedience to all existing laws, respect for all established authorities, and a reverence generally for those gradations of dignity and excellence into which the fair proportions of the social architecture have been piled. Generally speaking he is not an eager politician; the inspiration of large human love which possesses his breast tenders him incapable of entering warmly into those party struggles in Church and State with which large human love has seldom much to do. He can neither despise the lowly majority of his fellow-men to please the oligarch, nor trample upon the intelligent minority to please the democrat. He has no great appetite for power; he does not covet office; he will not intrigue for place; he will not grasp the sceptre of civic rule with a forward hand, {240} but wield it when it naturally falls to him with firmness as respects others, and with a holy jealousy as respects himself; and he will rejoice with trembling then chiefly when the victorious car of his party friends is riding over the prostrate army of his foes. Ambition is with him the love of usefulness, not the love of power; he comprehends the spirit which dictated the answer of a pious English clergyman when he refused the cure of a parish which was offered him, for the singular reason that “the emoluments were too large and the duty was too small;”[240.1] and he fears the dangers which may flow from the abuse of authority more than he desires the pleasures which are connected with its use.

Let us now, in the last place, inquire how the Christian law of right conduct has approved itself in the history of society since the first institution of the Church. And we seem certainly justified in starting here with the expectation that, moved by such a fervid steam-power, strengthened with such lofty sanctions, and displaying a scheme of virtues at once so manly and so gentle--virtues not preached merely in sermons or discussed in ethical treatises, but set forth in the living epistles of two such opposite and yet both eminently Christian types of character as St. Paul and St. John--so accoutred surely, and clad with the perfect panoply that belongs to a great moral warfare (Eph. vi. 13), Christianity could not but go forth conquering and to conquer, especially when the living faith in extraordinary, and miraculous demonstrations everywhere accompanied its march; and if it has in any considerable degree failed to fulfil its bright promise in regenerating the {241} face of the moral worlds this, in those who accepted the religion, must have proceeded mainly from one of three causes: either because the ideal was too high for them, as we are accustomed to observe that certain nations are not socially far advanced enough for free constitutions, and thrive best under despotism; or from, the neglect of a regulative force which might check the natural tendency to excess, extravagance and one-sidedness, to which all human movements are liable; or again, from the disturbance of the proper healthy action of the regenerative virtue of the doctrine by the admixture of certain foreign, incompatible, and corrupting elements. Of the first cause of failure nothing need be said; it is with high morality as with high art, it is and it always must be above the average reach of the great mass of men; and it may be that in morals, as in art, some nations have tacitly agreed to let the high standard drop, and content themselves with attaining a manifestly inferior but more generally attainable ideal. But however such compromises and refuges of despair may be the necessary wisdom of politicians and of lawyers, who have to deal practically with the selfish element in the masses of mankind, in the theory of morals, as of art, they can certainly find no place. The Church and the Academy must always set up the highest ideal; if they fail to do so it is only because the inspiration which created them was originally feeble, or has waxed faint; and if the members of the Church or the scholars of the Academy fail to realize in their lives and in their works the perfect pattern which has been set before them, it is the defect of the learner, not the fault of the teacher. No one thinks of elevating the character of art by lowering {242} the standard. And so if Christianity is too good for mankind it must just remain too good, till in the slow process of the ages men shall become more worthy of it. But the two other causes of failure require to be looked into more seriously. To the danger of excess Christian morality is peculiarly liable, just because its steam-power is so very strong and its action so efficacious. I read but the other day in a newspaper of a girl, studious, as girls are apt to be, of personal beauty, who, having picked up somewhere a fact well known to horse-dealers, that arsenic has a specific beneficial action on the skin, set to work of her own motion to mingle her daily potations with an infusion of the potent metal, and did this so assiduously that in a very short time, instead of improving her complexion, she had well-nigh removed herself for ever from the society of the living. Now this is exactly what has happened with Christian Ethics. Men have taken too much of a certain virtue, say Reverence--which is the virtue most closely bound up with religion--and have changed it into stupidity. That which was meant to elevate human beings out of their finite littleness has been used to depress them below the level of their meanest selves. And not only have Christians by the excessive culture of favourite virtues turned them into caricature, but they have assumed that because they have learned to be Christians they should forget to be men. There are certain human instincts, either purely physical, or closely connected with our animal existence, so strong that the first preachers of the evangelic ethics seem to have thought they might be safely left to take care of themselves; but these same instincts certain high-pressure Christians {243} who came afterwards, with more zeal than sense, thought it their duty studiously to repress, or even violently to extirpate. The result has been that we have seen Christianity set at work systematically to maim that humanity which it was intended to heal. As to the third cause of failure, the admixture with foreign elements, it is of the same nature as the water which dilutes the milk and the sand which debases the sugar in the adulterated traffic of low traders. That such adulteration should exist to a large extent in Christianity was unavoidable, so soon as the profession of a religion so high above the measure of vulgar ethics became respectable. When everybody was born and baptized and bribed into Christianity, the morality which each Christian of this external type professed must have been something as cheap as the blood from which he was procreated, the water with which he was washed, and the work by which he gained his livelihood.

The first, and in its epiphany one of the earliest and most wide-spread excesses of Christian morality, was ASCETICISM. The temptation to this lies very near, in the practice of the Christian life, and is suggested in the strongest manner by its very language. If sin is the flesh, and some of its most shameless and rampant exhibitions are characteristically designated the lusts of the flesh, it would seem that the simplest way to get the mastery of such lusts is to keep the body under, as St. Paul has it,--to frown upon cakes and ale, and perhaps even to extirpate certain passions, as you would pull up dock by the long tape root, to make more room for the grass. Nor was this altogether an unreasonable procedure. It might be very admissible, in certain cases, to {244} become a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake; “for the present need” he who abstained from marriage might save himself from much incumbrance and from some misery. The error lay in setting up that as a general ideal which was valuable only as a device for special occasions, and possible only in a rational way to persons of a peculiar temperament. Our Saviour showed himself publicly at marriage-feasts as well as retired into the mountains; he was found eating and drinking, and even changing water into wine. St. Paul also never denied that a glass of wine was a good thing; but Christians afterwards very soon began to act as if the stern Baptist of the wilderness, and not the social Jesus of the waysides, had been the pattern set up for their imitation. This degeneration, no doubt, was the fruit of the anti-sensuous impulse which it had been necessary to give them; and they saw daily in the streets of Rome and of Corinth unseemly spectacles enow, of which the lesson seemed to be: it is better to abstain than to be poisoned. Add to this that Plato and his Alexandrian successors had thrown the whole force of their ethics of reason on the spiritual side, and spoken of the body often in terms of greater contempt than the Christian apostles had ever done of the flesh. Of Plotinus, his biographer Porphyry tells that “he lived like a man who was ashamed of being in the body at all;” and Clemens of Alexandria, one of the most intelligent of the Fathers, though not going to the extreme of these Platonic devotees, speaks of a good dinner in a style calculated to lead by a violent plunge on the other side into an artificial appetite for dry pease and hard crusts. “We must not,” he says, “have any care of external things, but be {245} anxious rather to purify the eye of the soul and to chasten the flesh. Other animals live that they may eat; man eats that he may live; for neither is eating his business nor pleasure his good. Therefore those are strongly to be condemned who seek after Sicilian lampreys, Mæandrian eels, Pelorian mussels, oysters from Abydos, sprats from Lipara, Attic flounders, Mantinean turnips, Ascræan beetroot, thrushes from Daphne, and Chalcedonian raisins.”[245.1] Of course the sensible old Father meant this partly as a protest against the monstrous gastronomic luxury of the Romans, of which we read in Suetonius and other Latin writers of that age; but it seems no less true that he was carried away in these matters by an ideal of extravagant anti-sensualism, which had then strongly taken possession of the Christian Church, and was indeed a rank native growth of the East, specially of Syria and Egypt, as Church history largely testifies. Nay, even in modern times, and in Western Europe, where the cold climate partly excuses, partly necessitates, high feeding, we find young persons, in the first start of a religious life, not unfrequently led into a course of ascetic practice, as prejudicial to their bodies as the excessive bookwork of the colleges is to the mind. Young Whitefield, we are told, suffered not a little from exercises of this kind; and the prolonged formal fastings prescribed as God-pleasing by recent Ritualistic clergymen in this country, have on more than one occasion enfeebled for a whole lifetime the bodily functions of their virgin devotees. This is sad enough; but it is not the worst. Such absurdities make Christianity ridiculous, and force revolted nature into the {246} school of a benign Bentham or an easy Hume, where one may at all events be moral and reasonable. When we read in the biography of some modern Anglo-Catholic saint that he feared nothing so much as the soft seduction of a slice of buttered toast, and the golden deliciousness of a glass of Madeira, we begin to sigh for Aristotle; it were better to have no religion at all as an inspiring soul of morality, than a religion which lends importance to such puerilities. But if these things have been done by certain pseudo-Christians, and are paraded even now, there was one belief, very common in the early ages of the Church, which tended not a little to intensify the tendencies which lead to them. At all times it is possible for the expectation of a future life to encroach on the enjoyment of the present; and the growth of the asceticism of the first centuries was beyond doubt powerfully aided by the overwhelming influence of a newly promulgated and greedily accepted immortality, and yet more perhaps, by the belief in the speedy second coming of Christ. The renunciation of the world, and the more characteristic worldly enjoyments, becomes of course much more easy when the machinery of the world is shortly expected to stop. And thus the weakness of human nature concurred with a number of accidental causes to make the ascetic caricature of Christian ethics one of the most wide-spread diseases, and an altogether astounding phenomenon in the moral history of man. The ascetic oddities of Diogenes and a few Greek cynics were nothing to it. The multitude of strange, and ridiculous, and even disgusting forms which it assumed, will be found amply detailed in the second volume of Mr. Lecky’s excellent _History_ {247} _of European Morals_, and need not be enlarged on here.

One of the strangest fancies that was ever begotten by the translation of sense into nonsense is the idea of the Society of Friends, that Christianity forbids war, and that self-defence is a sin. Unquestionably Christianity forbids the spirit of hatred and the desire of revenge; for the religion of Christ is a religion of motives, of purity of heart, and of humanity of purpose, and could not but forbid every spring of action that had in it the least tincture of selfishness; but hostility between diverse interests is a fact which Christianity could not deny, and common sense would not attempt to explain away. What Christianity denounced was the spirit from which wars generally arise--“_From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not even from your lusts that war in your members?_” And so far as this is the case, if these lusts were regulated by Christian principle--that is, if love and sympathy took the place of selfishness and jealousy, the wars that spring from their feverish ferment and fury would not take place. But this is a quite different thing from the natural right of self-defence; there are wars where the aggression is all on one side, and where to yield to the assault would be to offer a bribe to brigandage; there are wars also of pure stupidity, where both parties don’t know what they are about, and where it is not a pure heart but a disciplined intellect that is necessary to prevent the fray. But whatever be the cause, wherever there is a fermenting bed of conflicting interests of divergent opinions and of antagonist passions, even amongst good men wars are unavoidable; unless, indeed, such a court of impartial {248} arbiters could be appointed, as it has hitherto proved beyond the reach of human wit to realize; and what Christian Ethics in this case requires is, that, contests of right being unavoidable, after every attempt at peaceful adjustment has failed, men should go to war with a certain mutual self-respect, and with a generous chivalry such as the knights of the middle ages systematically fostered, carrying on hostilities like men, and not like tigers. In this sense it has been proved perfectly possible to love our enemies without betraying our rights, and will become more and more practicable in the degree that international recognition becomes more common, and a large Christian philanthropy more diffused. But the idea that Christian love should become so intense as absolutely to annihilate the instinct of self-preservation, and to train every creature to love every other creature a great deal better than itself, is pure maundering, and will then only be tolerated among men when a decadent humanity shall have entirely divorced piety from reason, and Buddhism instead of Christianity shall have become the religion of the most advanced pioneers of civilisation.

But the most general excess which runs, so to speak, in the blood of Christian ethics, arises from the overflow of zeal without knowledge, at one time boiling over in floods of the most savage intolerance, at another ossified into the rigid features of the most unrelenting bigotry. This is an evil which springs naturally from the connexion of morality with religion; and it is an evil of so enormous a magnitude that it seems in some sort to supply an excuse for those inadequate ethical systems of recent growth which take no cognisance of the reverential and devout {249} instincts of human nature, and, after the model of Aristotle, would build up an architecture of Ethics without piety. And if religious zeal generally is prone to run into intolerance, it is specially so in the case of monotheism. For monotheism is naturally intolerant; it will bear no assessor on the supreme throne; if true, it is exclusively true. And this is indeed no more than what it is entitled to; but it should be intolerant only of polytheism as a system, not uncharitable to polytheists as men; whereas it has become almost a proverb that the zeal of Christian theologians stands divorced not only from charity, but from truth; of all disputants men of the clerical profession are the most unfair, so much so, that among churchmen as a class candour is scarcely a mentionable virtue. A candid evangelist is generally a black sheep to his brethren; assuredly he will not be found prominent in Church debates, or forward as a leader of Church parties. But neither must we bear too hard upon the clergy in this matter. It is human nature, in fact, more than clerical inoculation that is to blame; and we shall find if we look round with an impartial eye, that humanitarian democrats, anti-church Radicals, scientific crotchet-mongers, mathematical formulists, and conceited young poets, are equally intolerant in their own way; only religion, like love, by the very intensity of its excellence, raises the natural intolerance of human nature to its highest power; it is so pleasant to stamp the name of God upon our passions and ride triumphantly over the world in the character of armed apostles of the most sacred truth. Hence religious wars, which, as all the world knows, have generally proved the most bitter and sanguinary; hence conquests, robberies, {250} and oppressions in the name of the God of Christians; which for systematic cruelty, treachery, and all manner of baseness, have not been surpassed in the annals of Spartan helotage or Venetian espionage; hence assumptions of infallibility which make reason blush, and consecrations of absurdity which petrify common sense. And when this flaming zeal, in more quiet times, has settled down, it does not therefore always cease to exist, but stiffens into bigotry, and, united with that self-importance which is so natural to man, produces an exclusiveness and a Pharisaism of which all Christian Churches, in seeming rivalry of the Jews, whom they revile, have presented a very sharp and well-marked adumbration. If the religious Hindu will not eat from a Christian’s platter, the religious Episcopalian will not dine in the same room or stand on the same platform with the religious Dissenter. The hissing fervour which originally forbade the approach of two adverse churches has now been changed into a dead wall or

## partition, which keeps those who ought to know, and love, and

co-operate with one another, habitually as far apart as Greeks and Turks; so that it has become the most difficult of all social operations to unite two Christian churches, separated perhaps by some notion more political than religious, in the prosecution of some common object which they both confess to be supremely desirable.

That which makes the ebullition and overflow of religious zeal so fatal in its effects, is not merely the excess of the zeal itself, which like all excess is bad, but the tendency of all religions to subordinate the moral element which they contain to the religious: to make religion a separate business instead of an ethical instrument; to hang it as an amulet round {251} the neck, not to breathe it as an atmosphere of social health, to nurse it as a sacred fire in the heart, and to feel it as a power which purifies every passion, ennobles every motive, and braces the nerve to the robustness of all manly achievement. If there is one characteristic of Christianity more prominent than another, it is certainly this, that it is essentially an ethical religion; other religions favour certain virtues, or give a certain sanction to all virtues, but Christianity is morality; the moral regeneration is the religion. There are religions which profess to possess a power by which its priests can bring down rain, banish the pestilence, make the devil speak truth, and charm a murderer into heaven. Christianity knows nothing of these tricks. Its ministers supply no passports by which knaves and sluggards, when they escape from the body, may pass the celestial police without question. The Christian religion is not a special training which pious persons are to go through in order to prepare themselves for a future world; it calls upon every man with a loud voice to do the work of God in this world, here where alone work is possible for us; and not until our assigned task has been bravely done here, can there be any question of what promotion may await us there. Had the gospel been intended according to the vulgar prejudice now under consideration, as a religion having an existence apart from the details of everyday morality, John the Baptist certainly would never have been sent as its precursor, nor the Sermon on the Mount been given forth as its manifesto. Neither again does the famous doctrine of St. Paul, that men are saved by faith not by works, in any wise contradict the essentially ethical character {252} of the faith which he preached. The works which in the Epistle to the Romans he so unconditionally denounces, are works either of self-conceit or of sacerdotal imposition, by which persons uninspired by a lofty moral ideal seek to recommend themselves to God. From such a germ no moral good can possibly grow; for as in the realm of speculation the oppressive sense of ignorance is the commencement of true knowledge, so in the practical world, the honest confession of sin is the commencement of sanctification. But how little Christian faith can have any significance apart from works, the same Apostle shows largely in the 11th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the only part of the New Testament by the way in which a formal definition of faith is given, and a chapter at the same time from whose copious historical illustrations, it is plain to any child that faith is merely a religious synonym for what we in secular language call moral heroism, a heroism peculiarly marked as Christian only by the distinct recognition on the part of the actor that the moral law which he obeys is the accredited will of the Moral Governor whom he serves. Clear as this is, however, there has always been manifested in the Christian church a tendency to separate faith from works, a tendency which, like other aberrations, has sometimes had the hardihood to stilt itself up into the dignity of a dogma, and in this attitude has been known in these latter times under the name of Antinomianism. Of a leaning towards this monstrous doctrine, the Calvinistic churches have been specially accused; and there can be no doubt, that in Scotland and other countries where a Calvinistic creed is professed, notions of this kind will always {253} find an open soil in souls of a certain nature, notions too that will often be practically acted upon even where they are not theoretically professed; but it is historically certain, that of all Christian teachers the great Genevan reformer himself was the least chargeable with any absurdity of this kind. On the contrary, he found himself involved in a serious war with the city to which he ministered, just because he insisted that his religion should be practical, and his faith if it meant anything, should mean good works; and he carried his point too in the end in spite of those who stoutly protested that the stern limitations of gospel law marked out by the preacher, should have nothing practically to do with the broad licence that might be convenient for the libertine and the publican. And indeed, it would be the greatest reform that could be made in the Christian church at the present moment, if our popular preachers were to give us fewer sermons, and when they did preach, take care, like St. Paul in his Epistles, to have some distinct practical point to speak to. For the difficulty of Christian as of all ethics, lies not in the general rules, but in the special application of the rules; and vague condemnations of sin however severe, and commendations of holiness however fervid, will have little effect if people are not to be made to understand distinctly what those phrases so awfully sounded forth on Sunday are meant to signify on Monday. The dignity of the pulpit, I suspect, like the dignity of history, has often made it dull; certain it is, that whether from a false sense of dignity, or from a religious zeal without ethical depth, or from ignorance of those affairs to which ethical maxims must be applied, or {254} from fear to offend those whose support is thought necessary, the ministrations of the Christian pulpit lose not a little of their efficiency from dealing more in the generalities of sin and holiness, than in special vices and virtues, and from yielding to the easy temptation of expatiating on scholastic subtleties or ecclesiastical crotchets, instead of unravelling the perplexities of social practice, or unmasking the disguises of individual character. Many things are left to be handled lightly by the novel-writer, which with much more effect might have been handled seriously in the pulpit; and in fact, I have found not a few excellent sermons in novels, which I should have sought for in vain in our pulpits; but the misfortune is, that people read novels mainly to be amused, and will see the living portrait of their own follies painted in the firmest lines, and with the most glowing colours, without making the slightest attempt to amend their faults. But of this enough. One thing is certain, that no amount of faith, no amount of preaching, and no amount of prayer, can be taken as a true measure of the genuine Christianity of any country, unless the faith professed shall be found to be permeating every form of social life, and elevating every trait of individual character. To any one who wishes to see what real Christianity can do for a district in the person of a truly evangelic and wise man, I recommend the perusal of the life of the Rev. John Frederick Oberlin, who, in the latter half of the last century, was, during the course of a long life, pastor of the mountain district of the Ban de la Roche in Alsace. This remarkable man was not content with the common ministerial routine of preaching and praying; he saw that in the circumstances {255} in which he was placed, nothing was to be done by mere talk; so with pick-axe in hand he set himself to make roads; he became the forester of his parishioners, and planted trees; their schoolmaster, and built them schools; their architect, and reformed their cottages; their deacon, and taught them trades; their professor, and lectured to them on science; their physician, and taught them to live according to the laws of health. Thus the faith which he professed turned a neglected parish in a few years into a perfect museum of all good works, of which a religion of the purest love was the soul; and the unobtrusive Christian worker, who of this wilderness made a garden, was perhaps the greatest man in France at a time when the thunders of Napoleon were shaking the world from west to east, while his own fame had scarcely travelled beyond the bleatings of the sheep of his own parish. So little has the noisy applause of the world to do with some of the highest forms of Christian virtue.[255.1]

It remains now only shortly to indicate how Christian ethics has suffered from the admixture of adulterating elements. These are notably three: INTELLECTUALISM, RITUALISM, and SECULARISM. “There is a strange fascination,” says a living distinguished theologian, “in reasoning about mysteries.”[255.2] Every religion of course has its mysteries--for a man reverences that only which he has reason to respect, {256} while he cannot fully comprehend it; but the faculty of reverence when exercised on sacred mysteries should rather deter men from presumptuous dogmatism than invite them to its exhibition. But it has not always proved so in the Church. The unsophisticated intellect of the laity might possibly have been content without the vain attempt to define what is in its nature undefinable. It is not the business of man to define God at all; our finite work in reference to all forms of the Infinite is to acknowledge, to worship, and to obey. But the meddling intellect of professional theologians would not allow matters to rest here; they proceeded to construct certain curious formulæ of doctrinal orthodoxy, an intellectual belief in which was substituted for the living ethical faith by which the heathen world had been regenerated. Men were now taught to entertain the thoroughly unchristian idea that the acceptance by the cognitive faculty of an array of nicely-worded propositions concerning the Divine Nature and the plan of redemption was somehow or other essential to their salvation; was certainly not the least important element in Christian faith, and the non-acceptance of which was held as justly excluding the recusant from the communion of the saints. This was a sad mistake. The fiery denunciations which St. Peter (2 Pet. ii. 1) and the other apostles uttered against those who “privily bring in damnable heresies,” were launched not against intellectual heterodoxies, but against the lusts of the flesh and all sorts of sensualism; but now the hated name of heresy was transferred to the imaginary sin of not being able to believe what a conclave of foolish or presumptuous Churchmen chose to lay down, and artificial creeds {257} were forged and fulminated, and flung with stern anathemas and boastful defiance against every honest thinker who could not be brought to believe that faith must show its efficacy principally by its power of blinding reason and smothering common sense. This gigantic dogmatism of the shallow understanding making an alliance with the fervid religious zeal which has been already mentioned, led consistently to a system of the most organized social selfishness that the history of the world knows,--selfishness only the more horrible that it was dignified by the most venerable names, and consecrated by the most sacred ceremonial The office-bearers of the originally free moral community called the Church now declared themselves infallible, and lorded it insolently over the consciences of those within the Church, and over both soul and body of those without its pale. To think on any of the subjects most interesting to a thinking man was now a sin; men who had the misfortune not to think exactly according to the formulæ prescribed by the Church were prosecuted as criminals, condemned as malefactors, burnt at the stake as monsters, and refused the humanities of common burial. A compact was made with the civil power that no situation of honour, emolument, or trust should be given to any one who was not ready to swear to the established orthodoxy; and thus, as human nature is constituted, not only was thinking forbidden and absurdity enthroned, but a bribe was held out to public hypocrisy; the conscience of young persons was systematically debauched; and the love of truth and the independent searching of the Christian Scriptures in many Christian churches became utterly unknown. Such were the fruits of Intellectualism. {258} But these portentous results were not produced by the impertinence of the meddling intellect alone. Such a hideous domination over the liberties of the individual conscience could not have been achieved by one unassisted evil power. During the same period of Christian corruption the other evil influences of RITUALISM and Secularism were both equally active. Of these the first, though with a distinctively religious feature, was in essential character anti-Christian. Christianity is a religion of inward motives, Ritualism a religion of outward forms. It was not enough that the hand should shrink from offending; that the eye should cease from lustful wandering; the fountains of evil desire had to be stopped in their first wellings; the lawyer and the police might concern themselves with the completed act and its consequences; with the evil thought, which is the germ of all evil deeds, Christianity commenced and finished its purifying action. Occupied with this radical regeneration, the preachers of the Gospel never dreamt of prescribing minute regulations about attitudes, gestures and postures, crosses, crosiers, candlesticks and change of dresses, decorations with banners, flags, festoons, gilded shrines, jewelled images, and other appurtenances of flaunting ceremonial. These might be matters of decency and taste very proper to be attended to; but to have made them the subject of special prescription would have been to assign them an importance which they did not deserve; nay, would have manifestly run counter to the liberty of that religion which they taught, and confounded it with the bondage of that Judaism--a bondage of meats and drinks, new-moons and sabbaths, and other externalities--which neither {259} they nor their fathers had been able to bear. And this leads us to remark, that the oppressive puerilities of Ritualism in themselves, perhaps more ridiculous than pernicious, were, in the case of the Jews, and are indeed naturally everywhere, closely combined with another evil no less foreign to the genius of Christianity, which we may call SACERDOTALISM. The Jews and the Egyptians had a closely banded hereditary priesthood culminating in a theocracy; the Greeks and Romans had a sporadic priesthood of special sacred persons, colleges and places; of these a ritual, often cumbrous, seldom graceful, sometimes shameful, generally ridiculous, was the legitimate exponent. Christianity with the performance abolished the performers; prayers were declared to be the only incense, a holy life the only offering, and a people zealous of good works the only priesthood. But this was too good a doctrine for poor human nature to hold by, or at least for the then stage of civilisation permanently to maintain. People were only too glad to get theologians to think for them, and ceremonies to dress up their devout feelings in an imposing though it might be often a tasteless garb. These ceremonies, originally indifferent, by the sacred character belonging to the men by whom they were performed, soon became sacrosanct, and the performing priest naturally attributed a special efficacy to those rites of which he was the instrument. Whatever virtue they possessed was derived originally, no doubt, like everything else, from God, but specially and exclusively through him. He was the conducting rod, the chosen medium of bringing down the spiritual electricity from heaven to earth. Thus he became a wonder-worker more potent than the rainmakers {260} of African superstition. He had but to open his mouth and wine became blood, and bread flesh at the magic mutter of his lips. In a religion thus made essentially sacerdotal, where thaumaturgic rites received such prominence, it was impossible that the ethics of common life should be able to maintain their original place in the idea of its founder. Judaism, in fact, and Heathenism, had been smuggled back into the Church; religion was one thing, moral character another; brigands might rob and kill, and, at the same time, keep up a converse with Heaven by the kissing of crosses, the telling of beads, and the tramping of pilgrimages; the poles of right and wrong might be positively inverted, while piety remained. But a still greater triumph for the evil principle was in store. In the evangelic history of the Temptation, it is narrated that the devil, after trying other methods of seduction, carried our Lord up into an exceeding high mountain, where there was a survey of all the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof, and pointing out these the tempter said,--“_All this I will give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me_.” This argument, as we know, did not succeed with our Lord; but it succeeded only too well with those who came after Him. The marriage of worldly power and glory, to an essentially spiritual and unworldly religion, gave birth to that last and most potent adulteration which we have called SECULARISM. There is no necessity, of course, that a modern bishop should be a poor man, any more than an ancient patriarch; Christian ethics do not forbid a man to have a fat purse any more than a full stomach; but as a Christian may not live an epicure mainly for the sake of his stomach, so neither {261} may he live for the sake of his purse. And then there is a great difference between the effect of worldly prosperity in individuals and in institutions. An individual may be a man of exceptional virtue, and in the face of many temptations may become more virtuous the more he is exposed; but institutions are composed of the majority, and οἱ πολλοὶ κακοί, the majority are not heroes. It was natural, therefore, to expect, that as the Christian Church in its first epoch possessed a principal element of purity in the poverty and the social insignificance of its members, so one great occasion of its corruption would emerge as soon as the profession of the once despised faith became the high-road to wealth, the badge of social worth, and the guarantee of political power, whether, “as at Constantinople, the attempt was made to imperialize the Church, or, as at Rome, the Church waxed into the dimensions of an empire.”[261.1] But it was not at Rome or Constantinople only that the Church was thus secularized. Wherever official position in a prosperous and popular church presents an open career to persons desirous of making a respectable livelihood, there must always be a class of people, more or less numerous, who are ready to say in their hearts, though they may not dare everywhere to say it openly,--“_Put me, I pray thee, into one of the priests’ offices, that I may eat a bit of bread_.” Only the means by which this bit of bread may be obtained depends always to a great extent on the character of the patrons; and the corruption of the church office-bearers will always be greater where the appointment to valuable benefices is a mere civil right, {262} belonging to private individuals, than where it remains with its original depositaries, the congregations of the Christian people. No doubt where popular election exists in a church there will always be a danger of divisions, and a sort of ecclesiastical demagogy or mean subserviency to the passions and prejudices of the majority can scarcely be avoided; but this is a less evil than open simony, and the usurpation of apostolic functions by men who do not, like St. Paul, work with their own hands that they may preach without fear, but preach that they may feed themselves, and dress themselves, and amuse themselves, and bring up their sons to play billiards, and their daughters to dance quadrilles with the aristocracy of the land. This thorough secularisation of religion is one of the most revolting spectacles that the moral history of the world presents; and to its existence in any country, along with the other two adulterations mentioned, must be attributed its full share of guilt in creating that reaction in favour of a morality without religion, and a State divorced from Church, which is one of the favourite ideas of the democratic age in which we live. For while Intellectualism and Ritualism expose an ethical religion to attack, the one by planting faith in an attitude of hostility to reason, the other, by making its worship puerile and ridiculous, the secular corruption cuts deeper and proves suicidal to the very essence and soul of Christianity. For by this infection a religion of the most chivalrous love, the purest unselfishness, and the profoundest humility, is worked up into a monstrous combination of selfishness, pride, and hypocrisy, which tears up the very notion of public virtue by {263} the roots; and so in point of fact it came to pass that, in the lives of some of the most conspicuous of Christian pontiffs, there was exhibited to the world a march of scarlet sins, unsurpassed by the bestialities of Roman or the ferocities of Byzantine autocrats. In the holiest courts of the most holy all was rankness, loathsomeness, putrescence; only a theatric show of sanctitude was kept up scarcely with decency, to deceive those who might be deceived by the good fortune of not living too near the actors. And thus was realized the most sorrowful example of the truth of the ancient adage--_corruptio optimi pessima;_ THE CORRUPTION OF THE BEST THINGS IS THE WORST.

UTILITARIANISM.

{264}

OF recent British phenomena in the domain of ethical philosophy, what is called Utilitarianism is the most notable, certainly the most noisy. If, indeed, there is anything distinctive in the most recent tone of philosophic thought and sentiment in this country, apart from speculations springing out of pure physical science, it is this very thing, or something that claims close kindred with it. It is talked of in the streets and commented on in the closet; and numbering, as it does, amongst its advocates some of the most astute intellects of the age, it certainly deserves an attentive examination. No doubt its merits, whatever they be, are likely to fall short of its pretensions; for never was a system ushered in with a greater flourish of trumpets and a more stirring consciousness on the part of its promulgators that a new gospel was being preached which was to save the world at last from centuries of hereditary mistake. At the watchword of the system, shot from Edinburgh to Westminster more than a hundred years ago, the son of a London attorney felt “the scales fall from his eyes;” all was now clear that had hitherto been dim; a distinct test was revealed for marking out by a sharp line a domain where, previous to the arrival of the great discriminator, all {265} had been mere floating clouds, shifting mists, and aërial hallucinations; the unsubstantial idealism of Plato and the unreasonable asceticism of the New Testament were destined at length to disappear; only let schools be established for the creation of universal intelligence to assert itself by universal suffrage, and the redemption of the world from imaginary morality and superstitious sentiment would be complete. This, so far as my observation has gone, is the sort of tone under the inspiration of which the doctrine of Utility has been proclaimed to the world; and that I am not exaggerating but rather understating the self-gratulation of the school, is evident from the fact that Dr. Southwood Smith, one of Bentham’s most admiring disciples, actually believed and printed that his discovery of the principle of utility marked an era in moral philosophy as important as that achieved for physical science by Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the principle of gravitation. Nor was Dr. Smith at all singular in this tone of transcendental laudation. The dogmatism which, as we shall see, was a characteristic feature in the intellectual character of Bentham, was inherited more or less by most of his disciples; and the importance which they attribute to themselves and their own discoveries is only surpassed by the superciliousness with which they ignore whatever has been done by their predecessors. This ignoring of the past, indeed, to the best of my judgment, seems to be the radical defect, not only of the Benthamites, but of the great body of our British philosophers from Locke downwards; we do not start from a large and impartial survey of the inherited results of thought, so much as from some point of local or {266} sectional prominence; our petty systems are of the nature of a reaction rather than an architecture, and like all reactions are one-sided in their direction and extravagant in their estimate of their own importance. If scholars sometimes make their learning useless by their ignorance of the present, the men of the present are not less apt to make their intellectual position ridiculous by ignoring, misunderstanding, or misrepresenting their relation to the past;--for a large appreciation of what has been achieved by our predecessors alone can guarantee a just estimate of the true value of our own labours. All judgments are comparative; and as Primrose Hill is a mighty mountain to the boy born within the chime of the Bow Bells, so Locke and Hume and Bentham may be taken for the greatest captains of thinking by men to whom Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are unknown.

The first thing that strikes us in attempting a critical estimate of Utilitarianism is its name. Names are sometimes attached to systems accidentally, and in that case need not be curiously analysed; but when they are deliberately chosen by the propounder of a new theory, they are significant, and provoke question. “WHY UTILITY PLEASES” is the heading of one of Hume’s chapters; and the answer to it simply is, that as Utility consists in the adaptation of means to ends, and as the recognition of such adaptation is a peculiar function of reason, it cannot but be that reasonable creatures should receive pleasure from being affected in a manner so suitable to their nature. The eyes, as Plotinus says, are susceptible of pleasure from light, because an impressibility to light is of the essence of their quality and {267} the idea of their structure;[267.1] so reason is necessarily pleased with what is reasonable, and utility must please a creature whose whole energy, when he acts according to his best nature, is expended in discovering and applying means which shall be useful to secure certain ends. But the answering of this question does not advance us one step in moral philosophy; moral philosophy is a science of ends, not of means--a science of what Aristotle calls the ἀρχιτεκτονικόν, or supreme τέλος--the ultimate aim. So our new philosophy has taken as a watchword a term that means nothing by itself, any more than the terms _plus_ and _minus_ in algebra. To give the term a meaning, the further question must be put, _Useful for what?_ and then the old commonplace comes out--Useful for what all men desire, Happiness, of course; for “all men desire Happiness, that’s past doubt,” says Locke,[267.2] and Aristotle also, for that matter; but we do not consult philosophers to hear such truisms. What then comes next? The truism is put into an antithetic shape, and we are told as the grand result of the profoundest modern thought that _the greatest happiness of the greatest number_ is the ultimate principle of moral science, the pole-star of all social navigation, by attention to which alone the blinding mists of transcendental sentiment and the sharp ledges of unnatural asceticism can be avoided. But is this maxim really in any way worthy of the applause with which it has been received? May we not well ask, in the first place, _Who ever {268} doubted it?_ If happiness is desirable, and if man is naturally a social and sympathetic animal, as all the ancients took for granted, then the more that can be made to partake of it so much the better. Of this neither Aristotle nor Plato ever had any doubt. They wished every country to contain as large a population as was compatible with the conditions of health; beyond these limits, indeed, they saw a difficulty, and, to prevent the evil of overpopulation, were willing to allow certain remedies which, to modern sentiment, may appear harsh and inhuman; but they never doubted that in a well-ordered State happiness was the common right of the many, not the special privilege of the few; and Aristotle in his _Politics_ lays it down expressly as a reason why oligarchy is to be reckoned among the worst forms of government, that it assumes that power is to be used for the interest of the few, not for the good of the many. The famous Benthamite formula, therefore, can be regarded only as a very appropriate war-cry for an oppressed democracy fighting against an insolent oligarchy; to this praise it is justly entitled, and in this sphere it has no doubt been extensively useful; but as a maxim pretending to enunciate a fundamental principle of ethical philosophy it has neither novelty nor pertinence.

The Utilitarian school, therefore, judged by its name, and by its favourite shibboleth, has no distinctive character; and its chosen appellation merely shows an utter deficiency of the first principles of a scientific nomenclature. To say that morality consists in happiness, falls logically under the same category with the proposition that a cat is an animal--we {269} knew that; but what we wish to know is, by what differentiating marks a cat is distinguished from other animals, and specially from others of the feline family. Wherein does the special happiness of the creature called Man consist? Aristotle, to my thinking, answered that question with as much precision as it ever can be answered, and neither Hume nor Bentham added anything to his definition. So far as these spokesmen of modern ethics said that virtue consisted in acting according to reason, as necessarily involving the greatest happiness of the reasonable being called Man, they said what was quite true, but nothing that was new; they merely repeated the Stagirite, putting the element of εὐδαιμονία into the van, which he had wisely kept in the rear. So far as they went beyond this, they said what was neither new nor true, but only a refurbishment of the old doctrine of Epicurus, that for man, as for beast, pleasure is the only good, and there is no need of a distinctive phraseology for the happiness of creatures so essentially the same. What then is the distinctive character of Utilitarianism, if we fail to discover it in its name? for that the school, as a matter of fact, does stand on a very distinct basis, and in an attitude of very decided antagonism to other systems, is unquestioned. Between Paley, the model churchman of the eighteenth century, and Bentham, the stereotyped hater of all churchmen, churches, and creeds, there is no doubt a great gap; still there is a strong family likeness even between these two extremes of the school; and the point in which this likeness asserts itself we think may be best expressed by the phrase EXTERNALISM. From Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury {270} down to Alexander Bain of Aberdeen, the morality of the Utilitarians is a morality in which the moral virtue of the inner soul is as much as possible denied, and the moral virtue of outward institutional or other machinery as much as possible asserted. Look everywhere for the origin of right and wrong--only not in the soul. The kingdom of heaven, according to the prophets of this gospel, is not within you, but without. This, if I am not mistaken, is the keynote which gives a unity and a significance to all the variations of Utilitarianism from Bentham to Bain. Let us hear it in their own words: “What one expects to find in an ethical principle is something that points out some _external_ consideration as a means of warranting and guiding the internal sentiments of approbation and disapprobation:” so Bentham. “Conscience is moulded on _external_ authority as its type.” “Utility sets up an _outward_ standard in the room of an inward, being the substitution of a regard to _consequences_ for a mere _unreasoning sentiment_ or feeling:” so Bain. “The contest between the morality which appeals to an _external_ standard and that which grounds itself on _internal_ conviction, is the contest of progressive morality against stationary; of reason and argument against the deification of mere opinion and habit:” so Mill. The assumptions implied in these last sentences, no less than the proposition stated, are peculiarly interesting. They are redolent of all that narrowness, exclusiveness, and dogmatism, which we have already noticed as so characteristic of Bentham. It is assumed that the advocates of an innate morality hold it to be a thing that acts apart from, or contrary to reason. It is assumed that moral progress is possible only {271} under the action of an ethical system founded on the doctrine of consequences, whereas experience has proved that a morality of motives, such as Christianity contains, is as much capable of expansion and of new applications as any other morality. It is assumed that all our sentiments and feelings, that is, the whole emotional part of our nature, is to be supposed false, till its right to exist and to energize shall have been approved by reason. But what if emotions be primary sources of all moral life, which reason indeed may examine, but which it has no more authority to disown than it has power to create? What if the emotions and the sentiments, which you treat with such disrespect, really supply the steam without which your curious ratiocinative machinery were utterly worthless? But these questions anticipate part of our coming argument. Meanwhile let EXTERNALISM stand here as the only significant designation for the system of ethics which we are now to examine; and let the word UTILITY be remitted to that limbo of vagueness and confusion whence it originally came forth.

It will be most convenient to treat this subject historically, because this method will display in the clearest light the operation of that one-sided reaction out of which the Lockian philosophy, no less than the Benthamite Ethics took its rise. And here it will be manifest that we cannot altogether escape metaphysics, however odious that word may sound to the general English ear; for in our inquiry we must find or assert certain first principles which form the foundation of all reason, whether practical or speculative; and though metaphysics, like clouds, are apt to be misty, they are just as certainly the {272} fountain of all moral science, as the clouds are the fathers of the rain, which supplies the water that moves the useful machinery of the mill. We must therefore start from Mr. Locke, the acknowledged father of whatever school of British thinking deserves the name of a philosophy. No doubt before him came Hobbes; but this man stands alone, like a huge trap-rock bolt up in a flat country; and therefore we shall let him lie over for a separate treatment, if opportunity should occur; but in tracing up the main line of Utilitarian Ethics from Mill to Hartley, I found that they ended naturally and legitimately in Locke, just as a net-work of waters may often be traced to one common well-head. Now Locke is the father of what the Germans call the empirical philosophy. What does this mean? It simply means, as any one may see by a superficial glance cast on the first chapter of the “Essay on the Human Understanding,” that he commenced his philosophy by a formal declaration of war against the doctrine of INNATE IDEAS inherited by modern thinkers from the Platonists of Athens, Alexandria, and Florence; and, if all innate sources of true knowledge are denied, then there remains for morality, as for everything else, only the source of external experience, which comes to us not by nature but by acquisition; for according to the use of the English language, whatever things a man does not originally possess, he acquires. Locke, therefore, in the language of Plato and Aristotle, denied the existence of ἐπιστήμη, or science properly so called, which is founded on necessary principles of internal reason, and asserted that all knowledge is to be got by ἐμπειρία or experience, in other words, is what the {273} Germans call empirical. That Locke’s ideas on this fundamental question of all speculation were anything but clear we shall see immediately; but on the face of the matter the very noticeable thing is, that in rejecting the doctrine of innate ideas the Englishman does not go directly to Plato and Plotinus, the sources from which this doctrine had come, but he goes to war with certain floating loose notions of Herbert and other dreamy speculators of his own or the previous generation. Now, this is evidently a method of proceeding altogether unphilosophical. If a man means to refute Christianity scientifically, he does not go to the books of the Jesuits, but to the New Testament. So the refutation of the doctrine of innate ideas should have commenced with the examination of Plato, its original promulgator. But it was Locke’s destiny to fight against Plato as Bacon fought against Aristotle, without knowing his adversary. The consequence was in both cases the same; a real battle against a real adversary, and a real victory on the one side against a real defeat on the other; but not the victory and not the adversary supposed. The world, however, always willing to be deceived by names, gave the combatants credit for having done a much greater thing than they had really achieved; it was not the mock image of Æneas, but the real Æneas that Diomede had routed in the fight. And so it came to be an accepted fact in this country with large classes of persons that Locke had driven Plato out of the field, just as Bacon had quashed Aristotle. And the deception in the case of Locke has lasted longer; and that for a very obvious reason. The physical science movement {274} inaugurated by Bacon led much more naturally to a recognition of the true Aristotle than to a recovery of the genuine Plato. It suited the practical genius of John Bull to regard the severe Idealist as a transcendental dreamer; and Mr. Locke taught him to put this shallow prejudice into dignified and grave language. A thinker who does such a service to any nation is pretty sure to be overrated; and so it fared with Mr. Locke, who besides being a thinker was a sensible man, and on public affairs held liberal opinions in harmony with the progressive element of the age. Accordingly a recent juridical writer of the Utilitarian school has not scrupled to call him in the most unqualified terms, “the greatest and best of philosophers.”[274.1] With this partial verdict, however, we do not find that foreign writers agree; and the following estimate of the merits of our typical English Philosopher by a recent German writer, is unquestionably nearer the truth. “Precision and clearness, perspicacity and distinctness, are the characteristic of Locke’s writings. Acute rather than deep in thinking, he is true to the character of his nationality.”[274.2] So much for the position of our great English “empiric.” Let us now look more nicely at his doctrine, and the reasons of it.

The philosophy against which Locke argues is, that there exist “certain innate principles, primary notions, κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι, characters, as it were, stamped on the mind, which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it”--(i. 2.) And the assertion of the belief in these innate ideas, he afterwards indicates to have approved itself “a {275} short and easy way for lazy people, and of no small advantage for those who affect to be masters and teachers. Nor is it a small power it gives one man over another to have the authority to be the dictator of principles, and teacher of unquestionable truth, and to make men swallow that for an innate principle which may serve his purpose who teacheth them”--(i. 4. 24.) From these words it is plain that Locke protested against the doctrine of innate ideas, in the same spirit, and with the same object, that Luther did against the doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope; his mission, he considered, was to rouse reason from its lethargy, and to teach men to think with open eyes, not blindly to believe; and, in so far as he meant this, the mission of the philosophical, as of the religious reformer, was unquestionably right. But, as above remarked, in making this protest, he was fighting against the language of Plato without knowing, or, so far as we can see, ever attempting to know the ideas of Plato. This will be more manifest from the arguments which he uses. “If there be such innate principles,” says he, “it is strange that children and idiots have no apprehension of them; children do not join general abstract speculations with their sucking bottles and rattles”--(i. 2.) “If we attentively consider young children, we shall have little reason to think that they bring many ideas into the world with them”--(i. 4. 2.) These are Mr. Locke’s words, and they certainly indicate a conception of the doctrine of innate ideas the most crass and crude that could well be conceived. Assuredly neither the Athenian, nor the Alexandrian, nor the Florentine Platonists, ever dreamt of anything so absurd. Surely Plato knew that children {276} did not march into the world with Euclid’s axioms in their mouth, nor did he believe that even a miraculous baby, like himself, came out of his mother’s womb armed cap-à-pie with all the principles of the ideal philosophy, like Pallas Athena out of the head of Jove. What Plato actually said was, that everything was what it grew to be by virtue of a divine type, which lay in the germ, and which type was the expression of an energizing thought in the Divine mind; and this type, form, or idea (εἶδος), he called innate, because it was possessed originally as part of the internal constitution of the thing, not acquired from without. Who the men were who in Locke’s day or before him, maintained the existence of ready-made, panoplied, and full-grown ideas in the minds of idiots and babies, I do not know; but, so far as the Platonists were concerned, the Englishman was fighting with a shadow. Idiots, in any case, as imperfect and abnormal specimens of their kind, have nothing to do with the argument; and as to children, the things that sleep within them cannot, in the nature of things, be known till they grow up into full leafage and burst in perfect blossom. Inborn ideas are not the less inborn because they do not exist full-grown at the moment of birth. They did exist for ever in the original self-existent Divine mind; they do exist in the derived existence of the human mind the moment it awakens into consciousness of its individualism. In either case they are not acquired; they are possessed. Plato’s doctrine, therefore, was, that the germ of all human ideas lies in the human mind, and is developed from within, not derived from anything external. In this, there cannot be the slightest doubt that he spoke wisely; {277} as little that Mr. Locke wrote most unwisely, when, in accounting for the origin of our ideas, he said, “the senses at first let in particular ideas and furnish _the empty cabinet_.” Here we fall in with one of Mr. Locke’s short similes, which have proved more effective in spreading his doctrine than his diffuse and somewhat wearisome chapter. “One of the most common forms of fallacious reasoning,” says Mr. Mill, “is that of arguing from a metaphysical expression as if it were literal.”[277.1] This is precisely the error which seems to have run away with the wits of the sensation-philosophers, when they read Mr. Locke’s chapter on the Origin of Ideas. The mind was “an empty cabinet,”--if empty, it had merely a holding or containing power, before it was filled and furnished altogether and absolutely from without. But a single word will show the inadequacy and the utter falsity of this style of talking. The senses (as Plato long ago showed in the _Theætetus_) let in no _ideas_, they let in _impressions_, which the plastic power of mind elaborates into ideas; and again, the mind is in nowise like an empty cabinet, in which the senses hang up ready-painted pictures; but the mind, in so far as it creates ideas, and not merely experiences sensations, both paints the pictures and hangs them up, and this it does by an inherent divine power and divine right, of which no mere sensation can give any account. In fact there is nothing more hopeless than an attempt to explain the genesis of ideas, connected as it is with the miraculous fact of consciousness, by any sensuous process. It were much nearer the truth to adopt the strong language of a distinguished Scotch metaphysician, and say that {278} “man becomes an I or a conscious being, not in consequence of or even on occasion of his sensations, but actually in spite of them.”[278.1] The real fact of the matter is, as any one may observe in the reasonings of young persons, that in the formation of ideas the mind is active, not passive; and this distinction is strongly expressed in the very structure of some languages, in which verbs, expressive of mere sensation, such as verbs of smelling, are followed by the case which belongs to the passive voice, whereas verbs which express both a sensation and an intellectual idea, imposed on the sensuous expression by the plastic mind, demand the case which belongs to the presence of an active and transitive force. The healthy instincts of the human race manifested in the common uses of language, are often more to be trusted in such matters than the subtleties of metaphysicians. Nature, at least, which the popular instinct follows, is always complete; speculation is apt to be one-sided. If we will have a simile that may express both sides of the wonderful fact of knowledge, we may say sensation supplies the materials, but the manufacturer of ideas is MIND.

I said above that Mr. Locke was a sensible man; and it is nothing contrary to this to admit that by the incautious use of one or two strong similes--“the empty cabinet, the sheet of blank paper, and the dark room,”--he became the originator of a school which made itself famous by the ingenious maintenance of the nonsense that judgment and sensation are the same thing. A vain Frenchman, pleased to utter glittering paradoxes in gay saloons, might say this, might even go so far as to parade the proposition {279} that if horses had only possessed human hands they would have been men, and if men had been armed with equine hoofs they would have been horses; such paradoxes were, no doubt, a logical deduction from the doctrine that sensation is the father of ideas, and that all internal faculties are the result of mere external forces; but Mr. Locke was too much of a solid and sober Englishman to allow himself to be led into sheer nonsense by the charm of mere logical consistency, and chose rather to prove his good sense by his inconsistency. After asserting in the strongest terms that the only origin of ideas is sensation, he goes on to divide ideas into ideas of sensation and ideas of reflection, which division instantly suggests the question--_What is reflection, and whence comes the reflecting power?_ And by raising this question the empirical speculator at once brings in the whole of Platonism and innate ideas by a side gate, just after they had been driven out at the grand entrance; for how can this question be answered except in the well-known words of Leibnitz--“_Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu_, NISI INTELLECTUS IPSE.” Mr. Locke’s successors, however, have shown no inclination to follow his example in this respect. They have been ambitious of the cheap popular virtue of consistency, which even thieves and murderers may achieve; and verily they have had their reward. Their master may be compared to a man who held out a poison in his right hand, and administered forthwith the antidote with his left. His followers, from Helvetius to Mill, thinking--naturally enough perhaps--that the right hand contained the right thing, instantly snapt it up and ran away with it, not choosing to encumber {280} themselves with the incongruous bounty of the left. The fruit has been that climax of nonsense in which half truths always issue when left to blossom by themselves. The one-sidedness of the philosophy taken from Locke’s right hand, which, in a popular way we may call Materialism, culminates in the Nihilism of John Stuart Mill. Under his cunning manipulation not only mind vanishes but the outward world also. “It may be safely laid down as a truth that of the outward world we know and can know nothing, except the sensations which we experience from it; ontology therefore is not possible.” So what Plato called the human mind and the New Testament the human soul, becomes only a bundle of sensations. But the fallacy involved in this phraseology is easily pointed out. Instead of saying, We know nothing but sensations, he ought to have said, Nothing but sensations, and the thoughts or ideas vulgarly called classes of things and laws of nature which we recognise in the outward world, by virtue of the thoughts and ideas that arise out of the necessary action of the thinking Unity, the Creator of thoughts and ideas within us; and an ontology therefore is possible, because we know what we are as thinking beings by the very act of thinking, and we know what the world is as the general and absolute thought, or rather the product and manifestation of absolute thought, by the recognised identity of its working and products with the working and products of our own minds. In other words, Thought, or Reason, or Mind--God the absolute thought, and man in his little world of limited thinking, is the only thing that is or can be meant by an ontology, and is known partly as direct fact, partly as indirect, but {281} assured inference from unequivocal manifestation. This is the common sense of the whole matter; and whosoever will not accept this may content himself with Nihilism and Atheism. I cannot.

So much for the strictly metaphysical part of the empirical doctrine. Let us now consider shortly its application to morals. “Moral principles,” says Mr. Locke (i. 3), “are even further removed than intellectual ones from any title to be innate. Will any one say that those who live by fraud and rapine have innate principles of truth which they allow and assent to?” This question displays in the most vivid manner the extraordinary misconception, not to say wrong-headedness, which possessed the English philosopher as to this whole matter. The nature of innate ideas implies neither universality nor inaccessibility to corruption. A man may be born with an innate sense for music, though all his fellows were as harsh as asses or as deaf as stones. If some men are colour-blind, and others purblind, and others altogether blind, these defects, inadequacies, or total eclipses of vision, do not make light intrinsically a less enjoyable thing, or the healthy eye an organ less marvellously adapted for enjoying it. As with vision so with morals. A whole population given to drunkenness does not make drunkenness a whit less beastly, nor will the general practice of fraud and rapine render the appropriation of my labour by another man’s rapacity a whit more reasonable. Again says Mr. Locke (i. 3, 4), “There cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason,” from which sentence it plainly appears, that, whereas by innate ideas Plato means the necessary expression of reason in a normally developed {282} mind, Locke understands by them some blind unaccountable impulse independent of and extrinsic to reason. The supplying of a reason for any course of action, say for speaking the truth or keeping a man’s word, does not in the least make that course of action less the product of a truthful instinct in nature, or an innate love of truth. Morality is not the less innate because it is reasonable; but inasmuch as it is an essential element in the universal or divine Reason, in virtue of this it is necessarily an inborn quality in the individual or human reason, always of course with the probability of those large exceptions and defections which the very nature of finite existence implies. But we need not detain ourselves with a chapter of such shallow misunderstandings. The immoralities and follies of men, though a thousand times as many as they are, no more affect the inborn necessity and absolute immutability of the moral law, than the false summing of a class of schoolboys affects the relations of number. Errors are as common in arithmetic as in morals; only men hire those special pleaders, their passions, to justify the moral law, while the arithmetical blunder is exposed by the master of accounts. But though Mr. Locke argues against the existence of innate ideas in morals with even more self-gratulation than in his psychological account of the formation of ideas, we are not to suppose that his ethical theory was in any respect identical with that of the modern Utilitarians. He sowed the seed for their doctrine, no doubt, but himself had his garner well stored with grain from a very different source. He was a Christian, and believed in Divine law; he was a theist and believed in God. The modern Utilitarian believes only in a bundle of {283} sensations and in an invariable sequence. By denying innate ideas of morality, Mr. Locke, as his illustrations prove, only meant to proclaim the very obvious fact, that, as all men obviously do not agree in their principles of action, it is reasonable to demand of them some reason for accepting one principle of action rather than another. No man can object to such a reasonable demand. But this does not prevent him in another place (ii. 33. 11), from talking, as no modern Utilitarian would, of “the unchangeable rule of right and wrong which the law of God hath established.” This method of speaking, common to Locke I believe with many of the most solid thinkers of his time, would lead me to class his ethical doctrine under the rubric of what might be called THEOCRATIC INSTITUTIONALISM; that is to say, he looks on morality as the result of a law laid down and sanctioned by the ultimate source of all laws, physical as well as moral. This, no doubt, seems to imply something arbitrary, which neither Plato nor Aristotle would allow to be possible in any of the fundamental manifestations of Divine reason; but notwithstanding this preference of the word νόμος, _law_, to φύσις, _nature_, had the English thinker been cross-questioned on the subject, he would probably have said that these institutions or laws which God lays on man flow necessarily from the excellence of the Divine nature; and this would have been pure Platonism. That he was sound-hearted at bottom no less than sound-headed, his book amply proves, notwithstanding the confusion of ideas in which he entangled himself by the assertion of propositions which, when logically followed out, lead directly to materialism in philosophy, atheism in theology, and sensualism in morals.

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The next significant name in the genealogical tree of modern Utilitarianism is DAVID HARTLEY. As it was the distinction of Mr. Locke to have given respectability to the vulgar British prejudice against innate ideas, so the claim of Hartley to reputation rests on his having first given prominence to the doctrine of the association of ideas, a doctrine which from its originator down to the most recent times, plays an important part in every form and phasis of speculative and practical externalism. Hartley was a Yorkshireman, born at Armley, near Leeds, in the year 1705, educated at Cambridge originally for the Church; but having a thoughtful mind and a tender conscience, he did not feel himself in a condition to subscribe the Church Articles in the offhand way which academical morality sanctioned; and accordingly betook himself to the study of medicine, an art which he afterwards practised with success, first in Newark and London, and then at Bath, where he died. These facts are of great significance, as indicating the remarkable combination in his character and works of an extremely sensitive evangelic morality, with a tendency to give physical explanations of spiritual operations, from which evangelic moralists are naturally averse. The object of his great work, _Observations on Man_, published in the year 1749, is to give a complete treatise of human nature on the inductive method of Locke and Newton; and accordingly the first volume, which contains his most peculiar views, is merely a following into detail of the doctrine of Locke, that all our knowledge proceeds from sensation, and that ideas in the brain are the product of impressions on the sensuous nerves. This one-sided notion Hartley {285} pursues into the inmost network and curious membranous wrappings of the brain, and by the action and reaction and interaction of vibrations and vibratiuncles in that region, attempts to explain the generation of thought and reasoning; and this he does through long chapters, and with not a little iteration, in language than which the most extreme materialist could desire nothing more crass. In fact, we find in Hartley the great precursor of those masters of physical science in the present day, who seem to expect some important discovery in mental science from the curious comparison of cerebral structure in the monkey and the man. A few short extracts will make this more obvious. “Simple ideas,” he says, “run into clusters and create complex ideas”--(i. 75.) Here we have that vague use of the word “idea,” which serves equally for a sensation and a thought, and which lies at the bottom of all that strange confusion of thought which runs with such unhappy persistency through all the speculations of Mr. Locke. Again, “Ideas, intellect, memory, fancy, affections, will, all these are of the same original, and differ only in degree, or some accidental circumstance; they are all deducible from the external impressions made on the senses, the vestiges, or ideas of these, and their mutual connexion by means of association taken together and operating on one another” (i. 80). And in harmony with this (i. 101), he afterwards gives a formal derivation of ideal vibratiuncles from sensory vibrations; and (103) talks of that “idea or state of mind, _i.e._ set of compound vibratiuncles, which we term the WILL;” and again (p. 212) he says, “the permanence of sensations is of the nature of an idea.” Here the great {286} mystery which puzzled the Greeks so much, the mysterious bond which unites the ἕν and the πολλά--the one and the many--is solved very decidedly, as it would appear, on the Epicurean side. It is not the one which produces the many, but the many which produce the one; the one--what I call Mind, Will--is only a modification of the many. The radical objection to all this is that every man who is not a professional metaphysician feels it to be nonsense; the popular feeling protests; Shakespeare, who represents the thoughts and the language of a high and a healthy humanity, never talks in this style; and, more than that, the profoundest thinkers from Plato down to Hegel find in the proposition that thought is manufactured out of sensations a much greater mystery than that which this theory was invented to explain. One feels conscious that sensations might go on for ever, and not produce anything that had the slightest semblance to a thought; just as rain and sunshine acting on thistle-down from summer to summer produce only thistles and not roses. It appears, indeed, that our inductive philosopher is here involving himself in the vulgar fallacy of confounding the occasion or the condition of a thing with the cause. An accidental occasion, or an indispensable condition, are equally remote from the idea of a cause. The accidental occasion, for instance, of a house being built on a certain site, is that a certain gentleman, happening to take a walk in a certain district, and being not averse to house-building, determines to have a house on that site; the indispensable condition of the house being erected is that there should be a site for it to stand on, and stone and lime for it to be built with; but the only proper efficient {287} cause of the house being a house is the mind of the architect, the plan which that mind originates, and the instructions which he gives to the contractor, and the contractor to the masons. The sensuous tendency which Hartley’s medical studies had given to his thoughts comes out strongly in another passage (i. 342), where he attempts to explain the evidence of mathematical axioms:--“We infer that 2+2=4 only from prior instances of having actually perceived this; and from the necessary coincidence of all these instances with all other possible ones.” This recalls a famous passage in J. Stuart Mill’s treatise against Sir W. Hamilton, in which he stamps with his authority the ingenious demonstration of a London barrister, to the effect that “in some possible world two and two may make five”--where, however, the more recent is grandly consistent as compared with the wavering double-sidedness of the more ancient speculator. The fact of the matter is, that Hartley, like Locke, was swayed at bottom by a sound sense and a lofty religious philosophy which crossed his mechanical theories; whereas the modern thinker, not believing in Mind, properly so called, at all, but only in a bundle of sensations and a thread of associations, like the Romanist Transubstantiation doctors, had no scruple in flinging open defiance in the face of Reason, and making a public ovation of unmitigated nonsense. Such is the natural culmination of all one-sided philosophizing. The seed of a favourite fancy grows up into a stately dogma; the dogma blossoms into a paradox; and the paradox ripens into an absurdity. The extreme nonsensicality of Mill, and the mildly modified error of Hartley with regard to {288} the nature of mathematical evidence, arise from the same cause. They are only the natural expression of the principle that thought is sensation and sensation is thought; thought the matured sensation, and sensation the nascent thought. Mill denies altogether the existence of thought as a distinct thing from sensation; therefore he is quite consistent to say that in some possible world two and two may make five; for it is as a thing thought, and not as a thing perceived, that in the science of number 2+2=4. Mill, in fact, by this paradox, with a hardihood of consistency which is almost sublime, denies the possibility of science altogether; there is no ἐπιστήμη of any kind possible any more than ontology; only ἐμπειρία is possible--an experience of something that is accidentally what it is, and may have been otherwise. This is the highest power of what the Germans call the “Lockian empiricism;” and Mr. Mill in asserting the contingency of all science, has argued, as a good logician could not but do, from that half of the truth of things which it has been the unfortunate destiny of him and his school to mistake for the whole. As for Hartley, he qualifies his one-sidedness with a condition which takes the sting from its nonsense, and, like Locke, saves himself by a very transparent inconsistency; for he talks of a “_necessary_ coincidence” of a certain number of observed equalities with all possible equalities; interpolating thus into the product of sensations the idea of necessity which belongs to a different region altogether, and by no possibility could grow out of a mere succession of sensuous impressions and nervous thrills, however often repeated. A tide-waiter may feel convinced that the tide will {289} flow to-morrow just as it has flowed to-day, and has flowed regularly ever since he began to observe its motions; but no degree of strength in this conviction comes up to the certainty which every sane man has that two and two not only always do make four, and always have made four, but in every possible world must make four. The two certainties differ not in degree only but in kind; and mathematical demonstration having to do only with thoughts, the creation of pure mind, cannot in the slightest degree be affected by any complete or incomplete realization of these thoughts in any time, past, present, or to come. When I say that all the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or that the angle at the centre of a circle is double the angle at the circumference, I prove this from certain necessary relations of lines to lines drawn under conditions of which my thought is the absolute master. The proof is only the evolution of what lies in the thing,--of what cannot be otherwise, so long as the figure remains subject to the dictatorial power of my conception.

It will be now quite evident from these specimens, that Hartley’s philosophy is just the sensuous side of Locke worked curiously into detail, with a practical rejection of the intellectual side. Indeed, he says expressly (i. 360) that “all our most complex ideas arise from sensation, and REFLECTION IS NOT A DISTINCT SOURCE, as Mr. Locke makes it.” This throwing of reflection overboard is the necessary postulate of all the absurdity that afterwards grew out from the Lockian philosophy; and James Mill accordingly[289.1] disowns the “ideas of reflection” with {290} the same fatal one-sideness, and, it may be added, with the same transparent superficiality of logic; for when a man talks of “generalizing states of consciousness,” what is this but another term for reflection? Generalizing is a species, and one of the most universally practised species, of reflection.

It was necessary to be thus particular about Hartley’s doctrine on the generation of ideas, because, as expressed in the above passages, it is one of the broadest statements of Externalism possible, and if consistently followed out, as it has been by the Mills, neither morals nor mathematics can escape from its grasp. According to this doctrine there exists no morality founded on the eternal reasons and relations of things, but all notions of right and wrong proceed from association alone, from clusters of ideas which are only modified sensations,--all affection as well as all reasoning being the mere result of association--(i. 499.) Let us now inquire a little more closely what this ASSOCIATION is, which performs such marvels in the transmutation of sensations into ideas; for surely never was a word so largely used by philosophical writers in recent times, and so villainously abused. Association is a popular term, and therein precisely lies its large capacity of doing harm, when sophistically used. Now what it means in popular language is pretty plain. When I think of London I think of beauty, splendour, magnitude, multitude, wealth, din, incalculable noise of rattling cabs above ground and of screeching railways under ground. These are my associations with London. When I think of Oxford, I think of Greek and Grammars and square caps, of {291} mitres, and lawn sleeves, High Church and Broad Church, learning and luxury, bigotry and boating, cricket, cram, and scholarly conceit. When I think of the Highlands, I think of Bens and Glens, of lochs and waterfalls, of steamboats and tourists, of salmon-fishing, grouse-shooting, deerstalking. Free Churches, untrousered legs, and Ossianic poems. There does not seem much mystery in this. Ideas must hang together somehow or other; if they did not, they would be like a swarm of mad bees in our head, and would reel about in an unmanageable chaos; if therefore they are to hang together in some way, what more natural than that those ideas which come in together should remain together, and that those which have a family likeness and affinity should arrange themselves into companies. Add to this the natural tendency of black to recall white, and of life to suggest death, and you have the whole three bonds of association among human thoughts and emotions--contiguity, similarity, and contrast--of which philosophical writers make parade. Now what is the place which belongs to this popular principle of association in a system of metaphysics or mental philosophy? To me its place appears a very secondary one; and to give it any place at all we must carefully distinguish between accidental and necessary, between ephemeral and eternal associations, the confounding of which rather seems to stand out as the prominent employment of the Sensation philosophers. There are two great classes of associations, the one principally of external and accidental, the other of internal and necessary origin; the one dominant in weak minds, the other in strong minds; the one common to us with the brutes, the {292} other altogether impossible to brutes; the one more in the manner of a loose bundle, the other in the style of a stable architecture. With people not much given to think consecutively ideas are apt to hang together by certain mere superficial points of attachment; like drifted matter on an open beach, they lie just as they come in; the most incongruous things together all in a heap. Such associations, subjected to no controlling and discriminating power, are the fruitful source of all vain opinions, prejudices, senseless conceits, and hollow reasonings. With another class of people, again, in whom a strict watch is always kept over the materials with which sense supplies the mind, we find a totally opposite sort of associations. In this case the influence of the external factor diminishes, while the internal factor comes largely into play. The mind of such persons is not merely a mirror of such things as may chance to fall upon it, it is a commander-in-chief and a dictator, which discriminates, selects, and disposes according to an innate ordering faculty, which rejoices to trace out the cognate order which everywhere lives beneath the diverse surface of external things. The former of these forms of association is always more or less arbitrary; the latter is imperatorial and absolute; the one claims kinship with mere fancy and fashion; the other is reason in the realm of imagination rejoicing in the discovery of what under various guises is only a manifestation of the eternally Reasonable. Now the fault of the Association theory as used by moralists of the Utilitarian school, is that they have left reason altogether out of the account, and fixed their eyes exclusively on those external associations {293} which form the principal furniture of the lower class of minds; nay, they have gone further than this, and systematically explained away the highest ideas, such as Beauty and Duty, into mere unsubstantial or monstrous products of some abnormal association! The applause which Alison received in Edinburgh by the publication of a treatise on Beauty, the drift of which was to resolve all our ideas of what is excellent in form or expression into mere arbitrary association; is one of the great reproaches of the Scottish philosophy. Similar ideas with regard to Duty are vented by Professor Bain.[293.1] Here, as in every other case, we see that it has been the business of the successors of Locke in this country to exaggerate his errors and to omit his truths. With regard to association Mr. Locke (iii. 33) did the wiser thing when he treated it not as the handmaid, much less as the substitute, for reason, but rather as its great enemy; and in the domain of morals, particularly, Professor Ferrier does not overstate the matter when he says in his own eloquent way that the Utilitarian philosophy presents to us “not the picture of a man, but that of a weathercock shifting helplessly in the winds of sensibility, a wretched association-machine, through which ideas pass, linked together by laws over which the machine has no control.”[293.2] And another sturdy Scotch thinker, yet alive, justly indignant at the juggle which has been played with this word, bursts out into the exclamation, “The Association psychology,--that barren bastard, between Materialism and Idealism, which, but intended as a jeer to the priest, is a disgrace to common-sense.” {294} Thus the Scottish interpreter of Hegel; but though these strong words, in the fulness of their meaning, may be applicable to his successors, Hartley certainly never intended by his curious interplay of vibrations and vibratiuncles to jeer the ministers or to damage the cause of Christianity. In this respect he was a perfect parallel to Locke. He had inherited the central idea of all true philosophy,--the idea of God,--from Christianity; and he stuck by that. And if in his first volume he seemed to derive the noblest thing internal from the basest things external, to turn the whole miraculous world of thought and feeling, as Ferrier says, into a wretched “association-machine,” it was not so bad after all; for behind the machine he believed also in the steam, and the imperial mind of Him who made the machine; so in theology he remained a sound theist, and in morals he went so far as literally to stumble on the paradoxical love of “self-annihilation,” so prominent in the transcendental ethics of Budd. Hartley was the most pious and the most pure of metaphysical writers; and while he balanced his first proposition that “sensations beget ideas” by a second, that “God is the source of all Good” (i. 114), and a third, that “Final causes are the key to all mystery” (i. 366), he might launch his book into the world with a good conscience, and the sure hope of a good result, if only people would take him as a whole. This, however, unfortunately, people had not the thought or the will to do; the fewest people, Goethe said, can comprehend a whole; so they took up his sensuous association, and left his spiritual piety to float. He fared in this like St. Paul, whose sound sense, we read, certain persons lightly dismissed, {295} who were forward to wrest his more obscure doctrines to their own destruction.

There are two points generally discussed in ethical treatises, which belong most naturally to our present rubric; _first_, whether moral judgments are performed by a separate faculty called Conscience; _second_, whether all our emotions are not originally selfish; whether benevolence, like remorse, is not a derived and compounded rather than an original and simple element of our nature. To both these questions the Association theory of Hartley gave the start; for with him, as we have seen, everything is compounded; will, judgment, conscience, whatever acts seem most emphatically to proceed from the imperial I within, are radically only transmuted sensations, the composite result of a curiously interwoven tissue of associations. Now there are no questions in ethical science more easily answered than these. Conscience is certainly not a separate faculty; it is an exercise of judgment, that is, of discriminating reason, accompanied with an emotion. You confess to me, for instance, as your friend, that on such and such an occasion, from a regard to some petty interest, or a desire to curry favour with some influential person, you displayed a cowardly reticence, where an open profession of your sentiments would have been advantageous to the cause of humanity; and you feel ashamed of your conduct. Here is nothing but Reason applied to action; and the emotion of self-reproach in reference to an unreasonable action, which is the exact correlative of the feeling of incongruity which attaches itself to a false proposition. Man is not a mere cognitive machine; he has emotions of delight, which make him start from his seat {296} and cry out εὕρηκα! at the naked perception of a purely speculative truth, much more when he uses his reason on the most important acts that concern the well-being of himself individually, and the society of which he is a part. Let anything very good be done by his tribe, or nation, or church, if he is a complete man he instantly flames up into a noble enthusiasm, and becomes ambitious of attempting like deeds; let anything very bad be done, he fumes, in grim indignation, or blushes with shame, and is ready to reproach and to condemn, and even to trample his proper self under foot. This is the most natural thing in the world; the necessary result of applying reason to action at all; for a man cannot act without motive power, that is, without passions, which may be either noble or base. But though there is no separate faculty called Conscience, there is a peculiar sensibility of the soul in reference to moral action, when judgment is pronounced by any individual on the character of any action which he has performed. Self-condemnation, self-reproach, and, in their sharpest potency, what are called the stings of remorse, are judgments of reason accompanied by emotions, which well deserve a separate name; and just as for the classical Latin _judicium_ when speaking of the fine arts, we now use the peculiar word TASTE, so for our judgments of actions, with the peculiar emotions which accompany them, we use the word CONSCIENCE. It is not a new word; it is as old as Periander and Bias;[296.1] it has been used {297} by both heathens and Christians for more than two thousand years; and there is no reason why it should be abolished. The ignoring of its compound character by incurious people can do no harm; its analysis into practical reason and passion by the more curious can do little good. When, on the other hand, it is declared generally to be the mere product of association, a great deal of harm may be done; for from this doctrine a consistent one-sided moralist may prove that morals are the mere creatures of habit, fashion, fancy, and caprice, as readily and with precisely the same warrant that Alison proved that beauty is an accidental product of the same unreasoning elements. What we ought to say is simply this--there is an enlightened conscience, and there is an unenlightened conscience; neither of these can act independently of associations; for associations supply the bonds by which the materials of thought and feeling are bound into separate parcels; but the difference is this: in the enlightened conscience feelings and actions are bound together by associations over which cultivated Reason has exercised a control; in the unenlightened conscience, where the emotions connected with the performance of certain actions are the crude product of all sorts of random influences, it is natural that moral judgments should exhibit all sorts of inadequacy, perversity, and absurdity. To a conscience so constituted the neglect of a piece of insignificant silly ceremonial may cause more pain than the commission of a murder.

As to the sophistical refinement that all our social sympathies are fundamentally selfish, there can be no doubt that, under the influence of that passion for unity which is the inspiration of system-builders, {298} Hartley, after Hobbes, did common sense the dishonour of publicly propounding this theory. But he propounded it, after his fashion, in a very innocent way; in such a way indeed as to show that the whole question arises out of a confusion of language, or, what is worse, a studied affectation of using words in a different sense from that in which they are used by the vulgar.[298.1] To the thinker this is a matter of indifference; not so to the vulgar: they all insist in using common words in their common sense, and allow the subtle qualifications of the philosopher to drop. It is strange, however, to observe that there are even at the present day writers of pith and judgment who seem to imagine that there is something more than a mere juggle of words in this question. Mr. Barrett, in his _Physical Ethics_, an ingenious and thoughtful work, says that “the merit of Hartley was not only that he showed the ultimate selfishness of all motives, but that he saw the true subordination among the various emotions, and their natural evolution from their simple elements.” This sentence, by the simple abuse of a single word, does great injustice to Hartley. The word _selfishness_, in the classical use of the English language, is a word of a very bad odour; it is equivalent to the φιλαυτία of the Greeks, and means that excessive regard to self which leads a man to disregard and to disown the rights and feelings of other selves in the complex social machine of which he is a part. Now Hartley {299} does not use this word; he uses a word capable also of a good meaning--_self-interest_, better still if he had stumbled on Bentham’s phrase, _self-regard_. But as it is, the ingenious association-moralist (i. 458) divides self-interest into three species--

_Gross self-interest_, _Refined self-interest_, and _Rational self-interest_,

which, when analysed, turn out to be altogether different things baptized with the same name. If a rational self-interest convinces me that, when I see my neighbour fall into the sea, it is my duty to jump in after him at the risk of being drowned myself, it requires an open force put upon language to say that such an action is the result of any kind of deliberate self-regard; it seems more like the result of a social instinct, and so far from being the product of any sort of prudential calculation, it is more likely to be strangled in the first conception than brought to a brilliant birth by the consideration of self in any shape. It seems to me indeed quite unworthy of anything styling itself philosophy to deal in such manifest quibbles. I might in a similar way, for instance, classify all religions under a common name, according as they are inspired by

_Gross reverence_, _Refined reverence_, and _Rational reverence;_

but though the name is the same in all the three cases, the feeling may be very different, and the {300} product altogether opposed; for the gross reverence of vulgar superstition may be founded on fear, while the rational reverence of enlightened piety may be based on philosophic wonder and on that perfect love which casteth out fear.

Much less ingenious than Hartley as a speculator, but more distinct, perspicuous, and effective as a writer, was Dr. PALEY, a man whose position among the thinkers of the last century, though somewhat dwarfed by the contemporary magnitude of Hume and Bentham, will ever secure him an honourable place among the preachers of the Utilitarian doctrine. As an author, he commanded a wider circle of intelligent readers than any of his contemporaries who handled the same subjects; he was a Churchman too, the only clergyman, so far as I know, among the Utilitarian doctors; and the last of that school--Austin only excepted[300.1]--who did not think it a disgrace but an honour to keep on friendly terms with Christianity. The salient points of his moral philosophy are four--Utility, the doctrine of Consequences, the Will of God, and the Future life. Of the first, what remains to be said will be said more opportunely when, in the next section, we shall have to discuss Hume; the doctrine of Consequences a passing hint under Bentham will dismiss; and for the other two points a few sentences may suffice. “Virtue,” according to Paley, “is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God for the sake of everlasting happiness.” {301} This definition characterizes the man, the book, the age, the country, and the profession to which he belonged admirably. It is a definition that, taken as a matter of fact, in all likelihood expressed the feeling of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand British Christians living in these islands in the generation immediately preceding the French Revolution; still, it is a definition which contains as many errors as it contains clauses. In the first place, as to the doing good to mankind, it is a principle which lies at the basis of the doctrine of Utility, and has its origin doubtless not so much in modern anti-Christian systems as in the prominence which Christianity gives to works of charity and brotherly-kindness; than which practically of course there can be nothing better, but as part of the definition of virtue in this place it is faulty; for virtue of various kinds may be exercised where no men exist to be the objects of our benevolence, as with Adam in Paradise, and Robinson Crusoe in his desert island, and the poet Campbell’s Last Man. Then as to the Will of God, that no doubt is a power which overrules all; tides and tempests and thunderstorms must obey that, and human life of course no less; but what constitutes the Divine will, and how is it to be learned, in what way by the Christian, and in what other way by the unbeliever? Properly speaking, the will of God rather expresses the ultimate source of virtuous conduct than furnishes a practical definition of its quality. Lastly, as to the everlasting happiness, this is the greatest blunder of the three. It may no doubt be very true under the relations in which it was spoken, that “if in this life only we have hope in Christ we are of all men {302} most miserable:” that was a sentence which applied with the most vivid pointedness to St. Paul and to many others in similar circumstances; but it is very far from furnishing a warrant for the general proposition that the sure expectation of an everlasting reward is a motive necessary for the existence of virtue in this mortal life. For if this really were the case, either the virtue of Socrates was no virtue at all, or a virtue far above the standard of any Christian virtue according to Paley’s definition; for Socrates died the death of a martyr with a very doubtful faith of what might happen to him after death. But, in fact, the prospect of an external reward is no part of any virtue, either Christian or heathen,--rather in many cases would annihilate the very idea of virtue. To give away ten pounds to-day with the sure expectation of getting a thousand pounds for it to-morrow would be no act of generosity. Aristotle says that a man is bound to be virtuous by the distinctive law of his nature, whether he lives seventy years or seven hundred years; and Christianity surely ought to say no less. It is plain therefore that Dr. Paley was no great master of definitions. Nevertheless he wrote a most useful practical book; such a book as justly commended itself to the practical English mind; such a book as might have been expected from the finished manhood of a young man of whom when he went to college it had been said by his father, that “he had by far the clearest head he had ever met with.” A clear head unquestionably is a most useful quality in business and in daily life, but a quality which of itself will not make a great philosopher, or even a great man.

DAVID HUME, born at Edinburgh in the year {303} 1710, was older than Dr. Paley by more than thirty years, though we have placed Paley first, as with Locke and Hartley completing the band of decidedly Christian Externalists. But in Hume we find the father of an altogether new school, the real progenitor of that living sect of philosophers whom the popular memory traces back no further than to Bentham and James Mill. In him therefore we may reasonably expect to find in one form or another all that came afterwards, some parts of course less worked out and less consistent, but the whole more rich, various, and complete; and, as in the case of Locke and Hartley, we may probably have cause to rejoice that by a certain broad and salutary inconsistency he saved himself from a narrow and pedantic dogmatism. We shall not therefore err in calling him comparatively a great man, but only comparatively; compared with the highest style of men, great with first-rate position and constructive minds, he is not great; he is only rich, various, and subtle. Nevertheless in respect of those who followed him with kindred tendencies, his stature remains unapproached. He is, as Emerson says of Plato, “a terrible destroyer of originalities.” In the page of intellectual record he stands unquestioned as the man who shook all the easy thinkers of an easy century out of their easy seats with much observation; but there are two ways of shaking people out of their seats--first in the manner of an architect who pulls down a crazy old cabin in order that he may set quarrymen, masons, plasterers, carpenters, painters, and other artisans to work that they may erect a palatial structure in its stead; secondly, in the manner of a strong Samson, who shakes the pillars of some temple of Dagon, and buries himself {304} and all the Philistines beneath its roof. That this is too much the manner of Hume as a philosopher is obvious; only he does not actually die like Samson, but gets himself paralysed for a moment, and then recovers

## partially by virtue of that strong infection of common sense which, as

a Scotchman, he naturally had. We have called him a rich man; for unquestionably his treatise on the Principles of Morals, perhaps on the whole the best of his works, exhibits him as at once a subtle thinker, a shrewd observer, and a graceful stylist, in a combination as happy as it is rare. The man of the world is present here as well as the philosopher; and perhaps the philosopher is not fully aware how much the acceptance of his abstract speculations is due to his secular shrewdness and his gentlemanly demeanour. But with all his wealth there is a certain meagreness about Hume arising out of his ignorance and entire misprision of the past. It is difficult for a man to write well on morals with an entire disregard of Aristotle and Plato, and with a fashionable Parisian contempt for the New Testament. No doubt this was to a great extent the misfortune of the philosopher rather than his fault; yet the fact remains, and cannot but weigh heavily with all who would make a true estimate of the permanent value of his contributions to ethical philosophy. In Hume’s time, as we have seen above (p. 131), Aristotle had not yet recovered from the supposed blows inflicted on him by Bacon--“his fame,” to use Hume’s own language, “was utterly decayed;”[304.1] and as for Plato, St. Paul, and St. John, our subtle Scotch David had no organ for them, and could appreciate their excellence {305} as some kilted piper picked up from Celtic games at Braemar might be expected to appreciate the harmonies of Sebastian Bach. Greek certainly he had--the fruit of private study in his riper years--more than usually falls to the lot of Scottish philosophers; and what he had of that noble language he knew how to use more effectively and with more grace and originality than many English scholars with ten times his erudition; but in reading his Principles of Morals I find no trace of any appreciation of the work done by his great Hellenic predecessors; on the contrary, I find the strange delusion possessing both him and Bentham that they were commencing a new epoch, and doing for moral science what Newton had done for physical, and what Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, not to mention St. Paul and St John, had altogether failed to do. Hume’s own view of his relation to the ancient moralists is distinctly stated thus--“I found that the moral philosophy transmitted to us by antiquity laboured under the same inconvenience that has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypothetical and depending more on invention than experience; every one consulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue and happiness, without regarding human nature, upon which every moral conclusion must depend.”[305.1] The complacent conceit of this passage to a man who really knows the ancient moralists, {306} is only less ludicrous than the benign self-satisfaction which inspires the well-known overture to the _Deontology_ of Bentham. And the conceit becomes the more ludicrous when, in searching for this new principle which is to redeem ethics from fancifulness and transport it into certainty, we find nothing but the old Socratic formula:--

Reason + sentiment = virtue = happiness.

Nay more; he defines this sentiment to be “an internal sense or feeling which nature has made universal in the whole species.” _Risum teneatis, amici?_ Here we have the innate ideas of Plato, one part of them certainly, which Mr. Locke was supposed to have blown into smoke. And afterwards, in language even more distinctly Platonic, in the section “Why Utility Pleases,” he says, “Had nature made no original moral distinctions independently of education, distinctions founded on the original constitution of the mind, the words _honourable_ and _shameful_, _lovely_ and _odious_, _noble_ and _despicable_, had never had place in any language; nor could politicians, had they invented those terms, ever have been able to render them intelligible, or make them convey any idea to the audience.” We see therefore in these passages plainly, that Hume was by no means a thorough and consistent Externalist; he protests stoutly against Hobbes and all who declare that there is naturally no difference between men and tigers till the policeman introduced it; and he does not seem to have approached Professor Bain’s conception, that Conscience is always and everywhere modelled on the statute-book. He agrees entirely with Socrates in assigning to love and the {307} social affections--the τὰ φιλικά--as strong a sway in human society as to the selfish principle. Here his common sense and his knowledge of the world saved him signally from the perverse ingenuity of Hartley. It will be observed through all his works, indeed, that though he was fond of puzzling himself as a thinker, he had fundamentally far more faith in the common instincts and feelings of the great masses of men than in the conclusions of the metaphysicians. “Nature,” he says wisely, “will always assert her rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever;”[307.1] while with regard to individual speculators he says, “It is easy for a profound philosopher to commit a mistake in his subtle reasonings, and one mistake is the necessary parent of another, while he pushes on his consequences, and is not deterred from embracing any conclusion by its unusual appearance or its contradiction to common sense.”[307.2] And accordingly he makes no scruple of shelving the whole theory of the Ethics of Selfishness by the single sentence that it “seems to have proceeded entirely from that love of simplicity which has been the source of much false reasoning in philosophy.”[307.3] What then have we to lay hold of as distinctively Humian? Hitherto all is mere Socrates. A well-disciplined reason and a well-educated natural instinct of benevolence acting together for the public weal.--This is Utility; this is Hume; this is Socrates also, and Aristotle; for these great ancient thinkers had the εὐδαιμονία and the ὠφέλιμον in their eye and on their tongue as {308} much as any modern Utilitarian. Where then lies the differentiating element of this great progenitor of the most modern school? The difference, we must reply, is partly imaginary, arising out of the gross misconception of the character of ancient philosophy, transparent in all the writings of the Utilitarians; partly real, in so far as the ancients, while acknowledging Utility as a principle, kept Reason in the foreground, while the moderns push Utility into the van, and use Reason only as an instrument to make that point alone prominent. The modern Utilitarian accordingly looks more to the consequences of the action, the ancient Rationalist to the quality of the actor; but how this should be looked upon as a great discovery in morals, or as tending in any way to the elevation of human character or the regeneration of society, seems difficult to understand. It rather appears to me that the prominence thus given to the results of action has a tendency to turn the eye of men away from the great work of purifying the sources of action, the foulness of which is the constant cause of foul results; prudential considerations will be very apt to obtain undue preponderance; and everywhere, as Lecky observes, “the philosophy of sensation will be found to be accompanied with the morals of interest.”

The extreme meagreness of the Utilitarian doctrine as thus produced from the propositions of its great progenitor, is something so remarkable that one is naturally driven to look about for some cause that may have given artificial importance to a matter in itself so insignificant; and this cause, so far as I can discover, lies nowhere so much as in the general reaction against Christianity which distinguished the {309} age of which Voltaire in France was the great spokesman, Hume in Scotland, and Bentham in England. Reaction is the universal law of all mundane forces: and it was not to be expected that Christianity should escape it. Christian ethics being based purely, as we have seen, on a regard to the will of God, on purity of motive, and lofty self-sacrifice, even had they been left to work in all their natural integrity, would have demanded a doctrine of moral consequences to neutralize the necessary one-sidedness of their

## action. To have a good conscience was a most excellent thing, but to

have a clean shirt was also a virtue. The Divine sanction given by Christian piety to Christian morals was naturally beneficial, but it was also possible, or rather from human weakness almost certain, that the science of human ethics might lose as much as it gained from alliance with Christian theologians, who are only too apt to “bend every branch of knowledge to their own purposes, without much regard to the phenomena of nature, or to the unbiassed sentiments of the mind.”[309.1] Add to this the tawdry mummeries of ritualism, the insolence of haughty churchmen, the gross worldliness of fat beneficiaries, the morbid sanctitude of pietistical devotees, the unnatural austerities of monkish ascetics, and the grim severity of damnatory dogmatists, and we shall easily understand how a revulsion should have taken place, which would not be content till on the throne of morals it had supplanted Christ by Socrates, and Socrates by Epicurus. And this consideration opens up to us the second notable achievement of the subtle Scot in the important field of morals. Not content with {310} withdrawing virtue as much as possible from the region of personal sentiment into the wider domain of social wellbeing, he determined to strike at the root of the whole evil, as it appeared to him, by not only attacking Christianity, but by undermining that primary idea of CAUSALITY on which the idea of religion and the very conception of a God reposes. This was a daring business no doubt; but Hume was not the man to take things of that nature overseriously; he would keep himself quite easy as to results; he would not make himself miserable by any unnecessary enthusiasm even for his own philosophy;[310.1] if he did not choke the Church-doctors, he would at least give them something to chew; and at all events he might effect a permanent divorce between human ethics and that sectarian theology to which it had been so unpropitiously yoked.

The foundation of this monstrous doctrine of ATHEISM is laid by our subtle Scotch Epicurus in the following way. In his chapter entitled “Sceptical Doubts,” speaking of the origin of our ideas of _cause and effect_, he says, “When we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other, as the communication of motion by one billiard-ball to another, this knowledge arises entirely from _experience_, and is not a matter of _à priori_ reasoning.” Again: “The effect in this and in every case is totally different from the cause; the conjunction of every effect with its cause must appear arbitrary; every effect is in fact a distinct event from its cause. Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher who is rational and modest has ever pretended {311} to assign the ultimate cause of any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power which produces any single effect in the universe. The ultimate springs or principles productive of natural phenomena are totally shut up from human curiosity and inquiry.” Then in the next section he goes on to argue against the legitimacy of the common postulate of all scientific thought, that “similar sensible qualities proceed from similar secret powers.” “All that experience can do is to show us a number of uniform effects resulting from certain objects, and to teach us that those particular objects at that particular time were endowed with such powers and forces.” After this, in the chapter entitled “Sceptical Solution of Sceptical Doubts,” he lays it down that since our belief that similar effects imply similar causes does not depend on reasoning, the only, “principle on which it depends is Custom or Habit.” In fact, “All inferences from experience are the effect of CUSTOM, not of REASONING.” Cause means only “customary conjunction.” Then, towards the conclusion of the same chapter, he says, “There is a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the succession of our ideas; and though the Powers and Forces by which the former is governed be wholly unknown to us, yet our thoughts and conceptions have still, we find, gone on in the same train with the other works of nature. CUSTOM is that principle by which this correspondence has been effected.” Cognate with these chapters on Causation are some discussions that follow on the idea of power or necessary connexion, in which he maintains that this idea is not copied either from the observation of the operation of forces {312} in the external world or in the world of volition within us; that in all cases what we know is only “the frequent CONJUNCTION of objects, not their connexion;” “all events seem entirely loose and separate; and at bottom we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and these words are absolutely without any meaning;” and, philosophically expressed, “the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion,” is only “the customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant.” And so “we may define a CAUSE to be one object followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second.” Lastly, to crown this whole elaborate edifice of Scottish atheism, we have, in the chapter on “Providence and a Future State,” the following sentences:--“When we infer any particular cause from an effect, we must proportion the one to the other, and can never be allowed to ascribe to the cause any qualities but what are exactly sufficient to produce the effect. Allowing, therefore, the gods to be the Authors of the existence or order of the universe, it follows that they possess that precise degree of power, intelligence, and benevolence which appears in their workmanship; but nothing further can be proved. The supposition of further attributes is mere hypothesis.” This argument is levelled against the perfection of the Divine workmanship and attributes. He then proceeds to annihilate, as he conceives, the Socratic argument from design in the following fashion:--“If you saw a half-finished building, surrounded with heaps of brick and stone and mortar, and all the instruments of masonry, {313} you might justly infer from this effect that it was a work of design and contrivance; and in reference to works of human art this reasoning is good, because _man is a being whom we know by experience_. But the case is not the same with our reasonings from the works of Nature. The Deity is known to us only by his productions, and is a single Being in the universe not comprehended under any species or genus, from whose experienced attributes or qualities we can by analogy infer any attribute or quality in him. The method of reasoning which we legitimately use in reference to the intentions and projects of men, can never have place with regard to a Being so remote and incomprehensible, who bears much less analogy to any other being in the universe than the sun does to a wax taper, and who discovers himself only by some faint traces or outlines, beyond which we have no authority to ascribe to him any attribute or perfection.”

We have been at pains to transcribe these articulate sentences verbatim, selected from a sweep of some hundred pages of the Essays, because they really contain all that can be said in justification or palliation of that sort of positive or negative atheism which has recently been haunting the intellectual atmosphere of Europe, and poisoning the sources of social morality. Let us now see what they amount to.

In the first place, then, with regard to the general source of all our knowledge of matters of fact, it is quite certain we gain such knowledge only from experience; but this of course does not mean merely external experience of external objects. Whatever exists, the thinking I that is capable of taking cognisance {314} of objects, no less than the objects cognised, are known only by experience, could not be known otherwise. A thing must exist in order that it may be known to exist. Nothing is known by mere abstract reasoning independent of existence. If it be said that mathematics are so known, the answer is, that mathematics imply the existence of a thinker, and the existence of laws of thinking, and further, that the objects of mathematical science are thoughts, not existences, mere hypothetical conditions and arbitrary limitations of space and time. We are not therefore entitled to start with a presumption that whatever is not known by abstract reasoning falls under the category of mere accident or custom; in the wide range of what we know by experience some things may be accidental or customary, many things may be necessary; what things are absolutely necessary the Supreme Cause alone may know; but that customary conjunction is not a sufficient explanation of the order of phenomena which we admire in the outer or inner world, human reason may be quite strong enough without hesitation to assert. For, let us inquire how the idea of CAUSE arises. According to Mr. Hume it is nonsense; it is merely another word for custom; a constant custom is a cause. Now, according to the general sense of mankind in all ages, and the use of all languages,--a consent and a use to which Mr. Hume himself, as we have seen, in another place attaches the utmost importance,--while the inconstancy of a custom, by introducing the idea of whim and caprice, excludes the notion of a cause, at least of a cause which falls under the category of science, a constant custom is the very thing which naturally suggests the question, What {315} is the cause of this constancy? It is therefore something different from the constancy; and whether discoverable or not, is not to be confounded with the existence of that thing, or series of things, of which it is required as the explanation. Take an example. I see a certain person pass along the street before my window every morning at a quarter before nine o’clock, and another person following him regularly at ten minutes before nine. Here is a customary conjunction. If it happened once, or even twice, I should ask no questions, it might have been what men call accidental; but it has happened every day for six months, and I ask the cause. Am I wrong in doing so? Is there no cause? Or do I give a sufficient answer when I say it is a customary conjunction, or an invariable sequence? The invariability of the sequence, so far from offering any explanation of the cause, is the very thing that suggests it. I insist on believing that this invariability has a cause, and that it is neither an accident nor a custom. Of course it may be possible that I shall not be able to find out the cause; but that there is a cause I believe as firmly as that two and two are four. Now why am I entitled to demand a cause here, or in the case of any such conjunction? and what do I mean by it? I mean something that has an inherent and necessary virtue to produce effect; and I am entitled to make the demand, just because I am a reasonable being, and because the exercise of reason has proved to me directly that invariable sequences are not produced except by the persistent application of some calculated force of which energizing reason is the source. I know by experience that whenever this presidency of reason is abolished, the {316} world in which I move instantly becomes a chaos; and the living unity of that mind which I exercise in thinking, and which brings its own unity into the wide sphere of my thoughts, feelings, and actions, displays to me in the most direct way that the unity of plan between the different members of an invariable sequence can proceed only from that of which plan and unity can be predicated, viz., REASON. I derive my notion of cause therefore primarily from the most direct and certain of all sources, from my own existence; and if Mr. Hume objects that I do not know how my mind acts on my body, or how my limb does not follow my will in the case of palsy in the motor nerves, this ignorance does not in the least shake my conviction that a cause is something different from a custom; a piston or a paddle may be deranged, but the steamboat is moved by a cause nevertheless, and that cause is twofold,--the steam, and the mind of James Watt. These conclusions with regard to the works of man even Mr. Hume seems to regard as perfectly justifiable; for, like all puzzle-headed paradox-mongers, he is forced to forget his own distinctions, and to speak of a cause after all, as something different from a custom. We are justified, therefore, in finding in the energizing reason of man a cause, and the only sufficient cause, for the reasonable works of man. But it is different, you say, with the works of God. Different unquestionably in some respects; as the ocean, for example, is different from a drop of salt water, or the sun, as you say, from a wax taper, or a scuffle between two Irishmen at a fair from a great battle betwixt Prussia and France. Let it be so. There is an immense difference in magnitude betwixt man and God, betwixt {317} the works of man and the works of God. Still that will not make a gulf sufficiently large to prevent mutual recognition. A drop of salt water, the chemist will tell you, contains every element that makes the mighty ocean a salt ocean, and not a fresh-water lake. The smallest spark from the largest conflagration is an affair of the same oxygen gas; and petty differences in the management of the smallest borough in Great Britain are the result of the same play of vanities, jealousies, stupidities, and spites that provoke the greatest wars on the battle-field of Europe. We shall therefore not be deterred by the magnitude of the Creator’s works from recognising the excellence of their cause; we shall rather feel the more occasion to sing with the royal Hebrew psalmist, “_How excellent in all the earth, Lord, our Lord, is Thy name!_” No doubt there is another difference that separates human work from Divine. The work of God is vital work, ours is mechanical, mere puppetry, all the motive forces of which are borrowed from the exhaustless batteries of the Divine electricity. But this is only another reason for wondering with so much the more admiration, and worshipping with so much the more fervour. How healthy-minded, how noble, and how sublime, in reference to this matter, does that grand old Hebrew singer appear, with the flaming wings of his devout Muse, compared with this peeping Scotch metaphysician, keeping himself jealously free from the contagion of all intellectual enthusiasm, and discovering in this glorious universe only “some faint traces and outlines” of a self-existent Reason, enough to lead a man into puzzles but not to lift him into hymns! Truly a sorry spectacle! They will not {318} worship God, forsooth, these philosophers, because they do not know Him exactly as they know the machinery of their watches, because they do not see Him with their carnal eyes, because they cannot lay their fingers on Him. Well, let me ask them, Does any man see any man? Can any man put his finger upon me, or you, upon that which is properly called me and you? No; he sees only the man as revealed in his flesh, as manifested in his works. His soul looks through the windows of his eye; and his eye directs his hand where to strike. We believe in the man; we do not see him. If his works are full of order and beauty and purpose, we conclude that the man is reasonable; if they are mere disorder, ugliness, and haphazard, we conclude he is unreasonable. Not otherwise with our knowledge of God. “No man hath seen God at any time, nor can see.” Creation is the face of God; the sun is the eye of God. Everywhere I see Him in his works radiant with reason, instinct with soul. I know Him as a child knows his father, as the shepherd’s dog knows the shepherd, as a common soldier knows the great projector of the campaign, though he may never have seen him. I may not comprehend many of His movements (it would be a strange thing if I did), I may not understand much of that which most nearly concerns myself; but this necessary inadequacy of my finite faculty shall not prevent my acknowledgment, my loyalty, and my obedience. I know enough of God always to inspire wonder and to annihilate criticism; and this is my highest human wisdom.

So much for the poor sceptical bewilderment of the celebrated David Hume; into which den of dust {319} and cobwebs I certainly should not have strayed in this discourse, had experience not taught me that to deny God in the macrocosm necessarily leads to the denial of Mind in the microcosm, and to deny mind in man is to disown morality, or at least to stanch it in its principal well-head, and to poison the purest of its fountains. In forming a judgment of his character, however, we must not insist upon applying to him all the logical consequences of his own arguments. That his philosophy is speculative atheism is quite certain. By “emptying the idea of causation of its efficiency,” to use Professor Ferrier’s language,[319.1] “that is, of the element which constitutes its essence, he not only denied God, but he struck a blow which paralysed man’s nature in its most vital function;” he was not however consistently and thoroughly an atheist; as a Scot he had too much sense to remain in his practical moments entangled in the unsubstantial tissue of sophistry and cobwebs which he had spun for himself in speculation, and his want of piety was a defect of sentiment rather than a revolt of reason.[319.2] We must remember also charitably, that he lived in a flat age, when it was always impossible for a man to be truly great. A little moral earnestness, of which the eighteenth century had nothing to give him, would have saved him from a great part of the barren subtlety which disfigures so many pages of his otherwise sagacious, pleasant, and profitable works. When we observe that as the prophet of that age he was in everything acute rather than strong, that in his literary tastes {320} he preferred Sophocles to Shakespeare, Epicurus to Plato, Lucian to the Apostle Paul, and Leo X. to Martin Luther, we shall not be surprised to find his moral treatise tainted with the notion that Christian virtue always means asceticism, and that religion is only a more respectable name for superstition. Pity only that in the present age some persons should be forward to use his arguments who have not the excuse of his position.

We have now finished our notice of those who are entitled to be called the founders of the Utilitarian school; those who follow, as the mere inheritors of principles already largely discussed, need not detain us long. Of these by far the most distinguished unquestionably is Bentham; so distinguished indeed, as in popular estimate to be accounted, the founder of the school. But there is need of a distinction here. Those men found a school in the proper sense who teach the principles which it acknowledges; but in another sense he founds it who applies those principles to practice. In the first sense, the founders of the ethical doctrine which we are considering were Locke, Hartley, and Hume; in the other sense, Bentham. His glory lies not so much in expounding as in applying principles; he is a lawyer and a politician rather than a philosopher. Not however that he did not give himself the airs of a philosopher; this he did with observation, and was accepted by his disciples accordingly. Therein lay the mistake. It is not every man, not even every great man, who knows how to recognise the limits which nature has laid down to the exercise of his faculty. Napoleon the Great, in the pride of imperial command, overlooked the moral forces that {321} lay slumbering in the heart of the people, and was punished by a three days’ cannonade at Leipzig, the prelude to his final chastisement at Waterloo. Jeremy Bentham, because he could tabulate Acts of Parliament with the astuteness of a barrister, the purity of a philanthropist, and the comprehensiveness of a statesman, conceited himself throned on a moral eminence from which he might look down with contempt on Plato and Socrates, and all the great moral teachers of the past. In the third chapter of the first volume of _Deontology_, or _Doctrine of Duty_, we read, “While Xenophon was writing history, and Euclid giving instruction in geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence of teaching wisdom. This morality of theirs consisted in words,--this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters known to every man’s experience, and the assertion of other matters opposed to every man’s experience. And exactly in the proportion in which their notions on this subject differed from those of the mass of mankind, exactly in that proportion were they below the level of mankind.” Such an exhibition of ignorance, insolence, and impertinence as this in a man of undoubted genius, were truly inexplicable, did we not bear in mind that genius even of the very highest kind is often accompanied by a very decided one-sidedness; and more than that, there were in the circumstances of Bentham’s life not a few things that tended to raise to a maximum the dogmatism with which he was naturally endowed. He is by no means a solitary example of a great man, the sublime of whose excellence has been turned into the ridiculous for lack of a little Christian humility. {322} “Who is that young man who discourses on all subjects with such a wealth of resources?” said a distinguished guest at Worcester to Bishop Stillingfleet one day after dinner. “That is my chaplain, sir,” replied the Bishop; “Bentley is his name--Richard Bentley--a very remarkable man, a man of gigantic learning, and who might be the greatest man in Europe, had he only a little modesty.” Young Bentham had the misfortune to be a spoiled child--and not without cause, for he was by no means a common boy; his intellectual and moral endowments were both rare; this was the good gift of God; but he was brought up as a prodigy; this was the great blunder of his parents. Nor was the blunder mended when at a remarkably early age he was sent to Oxford. Public schools and colleges are often admirable institutions for teaching young men to find their level, but it was not so with Bentham; he had the misfortune to be born in a flat century, and fell among flat people. Everything that he saw in the great seat of English learning tended rather to pamper than to prune his conceit. He could write Latin verses as well as the best of them; but he rightly judged that at this time of day, in reference to the highest demands of a rational culture, this sort of exercise is at best a very pretty kind of trifling, and anything better did not grow there at that time. He seems to have got a taste of Aristotle’s Logic--that was part of the academical routine,--but he had logic enough in his own brain, and could not be expected to reap much benefit from any barren exercitations of a school-book. Logic is useful only as a flail, when it gets corn to thresh from other quarters; of itself it is utterly {323} unfruitful. Into the real gist and marrow of Aristotle and Plato it does not appear he ever entered, nor amongst the tutors of his college did any one offer a manuduction into these intellectual penetralia; it was the age of elegant grammarians and low churchmen; and when the Articles were duly subscribed and the Latin verses properly turned off, there seemed nothing more in prospect for the academical mind but port wine and chapel service, and, in pleasant summer weather, a little languid activity on the bowling-green. But this was not the sort of nutriment which could feed the fine spirit of a young Bentham, whose food was mere intellectual truth, and his drink pure human love. He had been born in a Tory family; he was bred in a Tory college; he had been kidnapped (to his life-long horror) to sign the Articles of a Tory Church; but from all this Toryism the best part of his nature had received no nourishment. The consciousness grew, and one day burst out with a flash upon him, that Toryism was selfishness: that the British people, in common with himself, were lying languid and downtrodden, and rotting beneath the selfish dominance of an oligarchy, an oligarchy perhaps the most powerful that the history of the world knew; for as he knew it, it certainly seemed fourfold,--an oligarchy of pedants, an oligarchy of priests, an oligarchy of lawyers, and an oligarchy of peers. Against all this the spirit of young Bentham, as courageous as it was pure, rebelled. He would pull it all down; though he stood alone in the world, like Plato’s just man, he would pull it all down. And so he set himself valiantly to protest against the oligarchy of pedants, founded on a blind reverence {324} for the letter of dead books; against the oligarchy of priests, founded on the real desire of power and the pretended admiration of an ascetic morality; against the oligarchy of lawyers, who strangled the rights of the present by the fictions of the past; against the oligarchy of peers, which in the government of the State preferred the interests of the favoured few to the happiness of the neglected many. And the issue was that young Bentham returned from Oxford, not to prosecute his legal studies at one of the Inns of Court, and advance himself to a position of wealth and honour by practising the curious art of giving a reasonable face to the most unreasonable of fictions, but as an armed apostle of intellectual, moral, juridical, and political democracy, and full of that sort of sacred fury which inspired the French democrats when they looked forward to a speedy millennium as the time “when the last king should be strangled with the bowels of the last priest.”

The state of feeling here sketched is the only thing that, in my opinion, can afford a satisfactory explanation of the extraordinary one-sidedness and dogmatism of Bentham’s moral philosophy. It was the creature of a reaction; and such a reaction as is apt to exhibit itself most emphatically in the case of the most highly-gifted young men, who however sometimes, as increasing years bring extension of view, contrive to work their way to some Aristotelian mean point which permits the recognition of two opposite truths. But such was not the nature of Bentham. He worshipped the great goddess Consistency, and could see and work only in a straight line. To his dicta there was no limitation, any more than to those {325} of the Pope; he held himself practically infallible. So the first thing that he determined to do was to re-establish the Epicurean doctrine that “Pleasure is the chief good;” for “Epicurus,” he expressly says, “was the only one among the ancients who had the merit of having known the true source of morality.”[325.1] After this we need inquire no further. The novelty of this sentence is too dear a price to pay for its manifest error in elevating a species into the dignity of a genus, and for its manifest danger in stamping that which is highest in human nature with a label familiarly used to mark what is lowest. The great ancients whom Bentham despised made εὐδαιμονία or happiness the genus; and this happiness, they said, one class of men sought to attain by ἡδονὴ or PLEASURE, another class by striving after the τὸ ἀγαθὸν or the GOOD. This language, founded on the healthy instincts of human nature, the apostles of Christianity sanctioned with their authority when they talked of persons being “lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God;” and to the present hour “a man of pleasure” is a phrase familiarly used in the English language to express one of the most trifling, contemptible, and useless members of society. And the reason of this use of language is obvious. Pleasure and Good, so far from being of a kindred nature, are generally directly opposite; no doubt they both produce enjoyment, but the enjoyment in the one case is often passive, in the other always active; in the one case generally shunning difficulty, in the other rather provoking it; of the former the senses are the main organ, of the latter the reason; the sensuous enjoyment man has in common with a {326} pig, the rational only as a man. It was therefore a strange service that Bentham assumed himself to have done to moral philosophy by confounding the poles of moral distinction; and his conduct can only be palliated, not justified, by the tendency of every reaction to swing itself into an extreme. Any peculiar provocation in Bentham’s time calling upon him to reinstate the gospel of the flesh in the rights of which it had been deprived by St. Paul, one does not exactly see. Whatever faults he might have discovered in the morality of the clerical exclusives, purple doctors, and minute grammarians of Oxford, asceticism certainly was not one; feastings rather than fastings were the order of the day among the Dons; there remains, therefore, only the puerile delight of using a strong phrase, to palliate this gross confusion of the received terminology of moral science which he introduced. As for any other principles of morality that Bentham might have, they were merely what every other body had always professed. It did not require Hume, or any other sceptical solver of sceptical doubts, to teach mankind that Benevolence was naturally a good thing, and that no virtues were true virtues which did not tend to the public good. It happened therefore to Bentham, as it had happened to other promulgators of new gospels,--that what was most new in his system was least true, and what was most true was least new. The doctrine that Pleasure is the chief good, and that Epicurus was a better philosopher than Aristotle, will scarcely now, we apprehend, be seriously maintained; while, on the other hand, the maxim, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” has always been the war-cry by which the most generous politicians have {327} been roused, and the load-star by which the most far-seeing statesmen have been guided. It is not, indeed, in the kingdom of ethics, strictly so called, that Bentham’s merit is to be sought; specially rather in the outlying fields of jurisprudential and legislative economy, where that doctrine of consequences justly sways, which Paley erroneously sought to make regulative in the region of personal purpose, pure motive, and noble deed; and for his services in applying his favourite maxim to various departments of political, juridical, and social reform, the world can scarcely be sufficiently grateful It is not often that so pure a philanthropist enters with victorious axe and mattock into domains bristling so rankly with all sorts of professional prejudice and professional selfishness. In this domain let him be loved as a man, reverenced as a patriarch, and even worshipped as a saint--(he was a saint in his own peculiar way unquestionably); but let him not be lifted into Christian pulpits or academic chairs to indoctrinate the ingenuous youth of this country in a curious moral arithmetic how to maximize pleasure and to minimize pain. Not by such teaching, certainly, were heroes wont to be made in Sparta, in Athens, or in Rome.

With Bentham the edifice of Utilitarianism is complete, and there is little more to say about the matter. Those who came afterwards were expositors, not founders; they employed themselves in explaining the doctrines of their master, sometimes also in explaining them away; for, while bound to maintain the honour of the sect, they were sometimes dimly conscious and more than half ashamed of the base element out of which it sprang. One {328} of their foremost spokesmen was JAMES MILL, the father of the present distinguished logician and politician, John Stuart Mill. This gentleman, who is much respected by the school to which he belongs, in the year 1829 published a work entitled _An Analysis of the Human Mind_. This treatise I have read carefully, and am constrained to say that it appears to me an extremely meagre production; somewhat as if the mind of the author had been blasted and frosted by the arid and sharp east wind in the face of which--near Montrose--he was born. From his life it would appear that he studied at the University of Edinburgh in the days of the great metaphysical school there, and that he devoted considerable attention to Plato. I have not the slightest reason to believe that the great idealist was much known even to the best thinkers in our Scottish metropolis at that time; but if Mill did study Plato thoroughly, it must have been, as Grote has done in our time, for the purpose of not understanding him. Certainly in his