MORALITY AS A RELIGION

That minimising or denial of moral evil with which we dealt in the preceding pages, is common to, and follows as the corollary from, all systems in which the personality and transcendence of God are either explicitly denied or virtually ignored. Monism, that is to say, whether of the idealistic or the materialistic variety, whether pantheist or atheist in complexion finds its ethical counterpart in Determinism.

There are, however, in our pathetically restless age a number probably a growing number of serious men and women who attack the problem from the opposite end. Weary of speculation, and leaning on the whole to the side of negation rather than affirmation in matters of theology, they say that one thing at any rate is left, a certainty of which no one can deprive them, an ideal sufficient to inspire mankind the supreme worthiness of the good life. While the creeds of the Churches divide their respective adherents from each other, here, they tell us, is a basis upon which all can unite, and which therefore {172] should assuredly prove adequate and attractive; nay, since religion is valued for the kind of life it produces since the tree is judged neither by its name, nor age, nor foliage, but simply and solely by its fruit shall we not say that morality itself is the true and only religion, that residuum of valid and vital truth which remains when all the errors of supernaturalism have been purged and filtered away? Certainly there are those in our own day who, while definitely rejecting the sanctions and authority of religion in its commonly accepted meaning, are fully convinced that to live an unselfish life is a duty incumbent on man, and who honestly endeavour to practise what they believe. That being so, is not faith shown to be practically superfluous, and the autonomy and sufficiency of ethics a demonstrated fact?

Such, in short, is the contention of the Ethical Movement, so ably and often eloquently represented by leaders like Felix Adler, W. M. Salter, Washington Sullivan, Stanton Coit, and others; all these teachers with one accord deprecate and dismiss theological doctrines as at best not proven, at worst a hindrance, and commend instead morality as the all-embracing, all-sufficing and all-saving religion. To quote Mr. Salter, who certainly speaks with authority for his side:

A religion that will teach us how to live, that will hold up clear and high the laws of life and win us to obedience {173] to them this is the religion the world needs, and it is the only true religion; all others, all that seek to make something else sacred, that make men put their trust in “God” or Christ or the Virgin or the Bible or the Church or its sacraments and rites, are a diverting of man from the real issue; they are the blind leading of the blind; they are a delusion and a snare.{1]

Mr. Salter is, indeed, willing to show “charity” for the belief “that the authority of the right is in some way connected with God”; but it is the charity that may be extended to an exploded superstition on account of certain beneficent associations that cling to it. “If by the term ‘God,’” he says,{2] “was meant simply the reason and nature of things, it might perhaps be freely used; but the word means something else to most persons” and therefore the honest ethicist will not employ it. For this sensible and candid course we cannot but feel thankful; Mr. Salter at any rate knows well enough that there is all the difference between “the reason and nature of things” between a mere “totality of being” and a personal God.

We cannot disguise from ourselves that the present juncture is in many respects singularly favourable to the ethical movement; to not a few who have lost their earlier faith and feel the need of something to take its place, Ethicism will seem to meet that want, and they will accordingly give a wistful, grateful {174] hearing to what Mr. Salter and his colleagues have to preach. Probably, indeed, it will be people of a higher than the average intellectual and moral calibre who will seek to fill the void left by Agnosticism by embracing “morality as a religion”; and more particularly is this likely to happen when this cult has for its apostles, men of high character and gracious personality. It is for that very reason that we are bound to examine this plea carefully, and to ask ourselves whether it is really possible, as we are assured, “by purely natural and human means to help men to love, know, and do the right.” {3] The issue is no less than a momentous one; for if religion, as generally understood, is a mere graceful superfluity when it is not “a delusion and a snare,” very vast changes are bound to follow the recognition of such a fact. Dr. Coit may be a little premature in making his voluminous arrangements for the adaptation of the Established Church and the Book of Common Prayer to the uses of ethical religion; but if ethicists can convince us of the validity of their claims, then we must look forward to the fruitful service of man taking the place of the fruitless service of God.

Now the first remark we have to make is that as a matter of fact and of history a high morality has never made its appearance apart {175] from religion. Such as they are, our moral code and moral standards at their best are the product of the Christian faith; the ethical movement has neither evolved a morality of its own, nor has it anything better to put in the place of that which we owe to Christianity. Such suggestions of alleged defects in the ethics of the Gospel as are brought forward by Mr. Salter e.g., that Jesus lacked “a scientific sense of cause and effect”; that He failed to inculcate “intellectual scrupulousness and honesty”; that we cannot go to Him for “political conceptions” and “industrial ethics,” and so forth strike one as palpably trivial, irrelevant, and made to order;{4] and leaving these not very imposing criticisms on one side, it is simply a fact that the highest laws of life were declared by Jesus Christ, and have never been superseded. And since ethicists have nothing better to propose in the domain of conduct than what we find in the Gospel since the “higher law,” as formulated by Mr. Salter, reduces itself to altruism versus living for self there is nothing harsh in saying that the ethical movement proposes merely to take over Christian morality minus its Christian setting. If a simile may be allowed, we should say that this new firm has no goods of its own manufacture; it intends to trade with the stock, and hopes to take over the goodwill, of the old. {176] Whether that is a feasible modus operandi is another question, at which we shall glance presently; for the moment we would simply insist upon the fact that hitherto at any rate the ultimate sanction of morality has always been the religious sanction. The Churches, in basing morality on religion, can at any rate point to some actual achievements in the past; on the other hand those who maintain that morality is independent of religious belief, and that human conduct will actually rise to a higher level when this truth is recognised, must pardon us if we tell them that they are merely issuing promissory notes which may or may not be honoured when they fall due. A certain extremely important thing has been done we will not say perfectly, but nevertheless done in a certain way and by certain means for a very long time; anyone who assures us that he will accomplish the same important thing for us without the means which we have hitherto deemed indispensable, can hardly be surprised if we reply that while we do not doubt his entire good faith, we cannot possibly content ourselves with his bare promises in so vital a matter.

But when we say this, we shall at once be met with the rejoinder that it is manifestly unfair to argue as if Ethicism were all promise and no performance. Are there not plenty of kindly, conscientious, well-conducted agnostics who might serve as models to some of {177] their Church-going neighbours? And have we not already referred to some of the ethical teachers themselves as men of high character and gracious personality? All this may be very readily admitted; but all this has not an atom of bearing upon the matter in hand. The question really is not whether certain avowed agnostics are not as good men as certain professing Christians; but whether the moral excellences of the good agnostic are the product, the fruit, of agnosticism, in the same sense in which the virtues of the Christian are the product of Christianity. The answer to that question must be unhesitatingly in the negative. There is no disputing the historical fact that the force which has been most potent in building up our Western civilisation is none other than Christianity; the ethics which have shaped and guided right conduct through all these centuries are Christian ethics. Think as we will about dogma, few will feel competent to contest Lecky’s verdict, when the historian of Rationalism and of European Morals declares that Christianity “has been the main source of moral development in Europe”; we know what this religion has done, because its actual record is open to inspection. To quote Lecky again, “Christianity has produced more heroic actions and formed more upright men than any other creed.” Now Agnosticism has not created its own moral system; agnostic morality at its {178] highest has so far grown in Christian soil, and to say that the flower will continue to grow in quite a different soil is to make a very bold and very hazardous prophecy. In the West we have never had anything like an agnostic civilisation, which would allow us to test the effects of non-belief upon conduct on a large scale; in the East, it is true, Japan offers us something like an agnostic civilisation, but those who are best acquainted with that nation are least inclined to exalt her performances in the domain of ethics. Japanese commercial morality is notoriously low; while Japan’s dealings with Korea have called forth the unmeasured denunciations of European eyewitnesses. The material advances and military exploits of this virtually agnostic nation must not blind us to other and less admirable features; it would, indeed, seem that this highly-gifted race, while frantically eager to “gain the whole world,” has not yet discovered its own soul, and the familiar question, “What shall it profit?” inevitably suggests itself.

But not only has Agnosticism so far not grown its own morality; there is yet another consideration which leads us to listen with a certain measure of scepticism to the assurances of those who say that right conduct will survive though religion be surrendered. It has perhaps not been generally observed that just as the virtuous agnostic is generally the child of Christian parents, so by a seeming irony he is {179] often found to be the father of Christian children: there is hardly a genuine case on record where “free-thought,” Agnosticism, Rationalism, has descended from parents to children to the third or fourth generation without a break, and the practical non-existence of such cases proves something of real and great importance. It has been said that pure-bred Londoners die out in three generations at most, unless new blood from the country is brought in to replenish their failing vital power. If unbelief shows the same incapacity to propagate itself by natural descent if the descendants of unbelievers show a marked tendency to “revert to type,” i.e., to religion such a fact suggests only one adequate explanation, viz., the instinct of self-preservation, a return to the soil which made the growth of the flower possible. The virtues of the agnostic may be not unfairly compared to cut flowers, which may continue to shed their perfume for awhile, but are bound to fade before long. Our agnostic ethicists, being themselves the products of a Christian civilisation, may commend, approve and practise they may wear the Christian virtues; that those virtues will bear transplanting into an agnostic soil and flourish in an agnostic climate is a highly dubious proposition. We can only say that available experience seems to be against it. The Christian morality implies the Christian religion which has created it; as for the {180] high-minded, altruistic individual agnostic, he must simply be pronounced a credit to Christianity.

We say “the high-minded individual agnostic,” because candour compels us to go on to state that generally speaking those who have thrown religion to the winds hardly strike one as standing on a particularly high ethical level. One can only go by facts; and the facts are that the frequenters of the betting-ring, the dram-shop, the light-minded, pleasure-seeking throng that flutters from amusement to amusement without any interest in life’s serious duties these are hardly drawn from the Church-going strata of society. Religion says “no” to this whole mode of life; and unbelief is most frequently, and in its most typical forms, found where the restraints of religion have proved too irksome to be tolerated. Before arguing in the abstract that morality is independent of religion, and will be advanced by its abandonment, it would perhaps be better to observe the average, concrete case of the man who has cut himself adrift from religious beliefs and influences; then it will be time to decide whether we should like to see the experiment tried on a national scale. It is easy to theorise in vacuo; in practice we are well aware that without the sanctions and the guardianship of religion morality tends to sink to the level where the accepted motto is the hedonist’s “Let us eat and drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die.”

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But at this point another objection will be raised; “surely,” it is said, “we do not seriously maintain that men are kind to their families, honest in their every-day transactions, truthful in speech, and so forth, merely because they believe that to do so is to act in accordance with Divine injunction, and that if this belief were suddenly destroyed we should be reduced to moral chaos.” But this argument, so frequently met with in this connection, misapprehends the real issue. We do not dispute that the elements of moral conduct begin to be inculcated wherever there is any social life at all. Where there is any living together, complete selfishness is impossible; there must come into being a rough law of give-and-take, a recognition of mutual rights to be respected, a certain loyalty from the individual towards the tribe, which in turn befriends and defends each of its members. Quite a number of rudimentary virtues are thus developed by the force of public opinion, which cannot tolerate flagrantly anti-social acts from one member of the community towards the rest; murder, violence, theft, false witness these and the like offences are suppressed with a strong hand, without the need of a special supernatural revelation to decree “Thou shalt not.” To be brief, there is no doubt that this social pressure is powerful enough to insist upon behaviour which will regulate most of the ordinary relationships of life in a fairly {182] satisfactory manner i.e., relationships between equals or members of the same community. The latter is a highly important qualification; where purely natural sanctions obtain, equal rights might be enjoyed by all bona fide members of the tribe, but the same rights would not necessarily extend to an alien. And even within the community governed by such sanctions the weaker, and especially the weakest, did not rank as equals; among the most highly civilised nations of antiquity, the Greeks and Romans, infanticide and exposure flourished indeed, as Lecky points out,{5] by the ideal legislations of Plato and Aristotle, and by the actual legislations of Lycurgus and Solon, infanticide was positively enjoined. Nothing can be more significant than to find in the Self-Tormentor of Terence the very character who expresses the noble sentiment, “I am a man, and deem nothing that is human alien from me,” giving instructions that if the child that is to be born to him should be a girl, it is to be put to death. The public opinion of an enlightened and cultured paganism countenanced such deeds without reproach; it was Christianity, or rather He who said, “Suffer the little children to come unto Me,” that put a stop to these barbarities.

The point which we wish to establish is this: that while “evolutional ethics” and natural {183] sanctions will carry us a certain way, they will certainly not carry us all the way; indeed, the moment we come to the higher reaches of character, these sanctions are seen to be quite inadequate. Why, e.g., should the conviction be born in man, and become a governing conviction, that he must under no circumstances commit a certain act, though to do so would be easy and advantageous, and detection not to be feared? Why should the moral consciousness of the higher races accept the principle which places self-sacrifice above self-seeking? There is only one explanation for this paradoxical phenomenon: it is that, as men rise in the moral scale, there dawns on them the sense of a law that is not of this world, an Ought-to-be, which speaks with a strange authority, and will not be denied; and when this authority is properly interpreted, it reveals a Righteous and Sovereign Will to which we owe unconditional obedience.

And here we may quote in support some significant words of Mr. Salter’s words whose full significance, we venture to think, that able and distinguished writer hardly realised when he penned them: “The whole meaning of ethics is in the sense of an invisible authority; to bow to custom, to public opinion or to law, is moral idolatry.” {6] “Whatever else I may doubt about, I cannot doubt the law of duty that there is a right and a wrong; that the {184] right obliges me, that I ought to do it. . . . The law is over all, though it were never obeyed. . . . Ethics is nothing but the response which man and man make to the higher order of things. . . . Ecstasy is the grace heaven sets upon the moment in which the soul weds itself to the perfect good.” {7] Let us see what is implied in these truly remarkable statements. The real sanctions of moral conduct are not the sanctions of expediency or force, but are derived from a higher law, an invisible authority; the finest morality is man’s free response to a higher order. But, we ask, what is this higher order, this note of command, but the expression of a higher Will? And how can there be a higher Will without a Higher Personality, a God who impresses His law upon us and makes us aspire after the ideal good? Mr. Salter explicitly denies that the moral virtues come “from below, from prudence, from the sense of decency, from longsighted selfishness; they who think so,” he declares, in a fine burst, “never breathed the climate of morality.” {8] But if not from below, they must come from above; and this “above” really must be something more than an atmospheric conception. Will Mr. Salter help us to determine its nature more clearly? He says, “The Mighty Power, hid from our gaze by the thin screen of nature and of nature’s laws . . . is {185] with our struggles after a perfect right” {9]; but if this Mighty Power, which is not so much expressed as hidden by nature’s laws which therefore transcends nature is in the highest sense moral, how can it be less than personal? It is this Power which, according to our author, gives us the vision of the ideal, this Power which sets the mark of its approval upon our surrender to its behests, this Power which manifests its character in doing justice upon individuals and nations alike, weeding out the selfish, the wanton, the luxurious, and preserving the pure and upright; may we not ask what reason there is for withholding from that Power the one adequate name of God?{10]

Let us pursue and emphasise this thought a little further. Already we have seen that teste Mr. Salter the highest ethics require our belief in a mighty, transcendent and benevolent Power; that admission means nothing less than the surrender of naturalism {186] in morals it is an acknowledgment that ultimately a true ethic involves and presupposes a metaphysic. Indeed, when Mr. Salter speaks of ethical religion, the same implication is there. Religion signifies a living and personal relationship between the worshipper and the object of his worship: we can stand in such a relationship to a living, personal God, in harmony with whose will alone we are able to find our true happiness; we cannot stand in such a relationship to an impersonal power or a universal order. Mr. Salter speaks of man “bending hushed and subdued, as he thinks of those mighty laws on which the health and safety of the race depends,” and calls that a religion; we submit that so far as such an emotion is religious, it means that behind those mighty laws there stands a mighty Lawgiver, whom we worship and seek to obey because He is good. We can keep a law, we can conform to it so as to escape hurt, but we cannot worship it except when we conceive of it as the manifestation of a good Will; neither can we derive moral stimulus from an abstract ideal. It is when the ideal speaks in us and to us as the behest of the Living God above all, when it stands before us incarnated, made actual in the Son of God that it becomes dynamic, drawing and uplifting and transforming men into the Divine likeness. We are not greatly helped by such a statement as that the bare idea of morality, {187] quite apart from faith in God, “may be the supreme passion to a man”; we have to deal with things as they are, and in actual life we well know that the most commonplace presentation of the Gospel has been more of a force in the making of character and as an inspiration to righteousness than the most refined philosophical Ethicism.

And now let us show, from yet another point of view, as we think may be done quite simply and cogently, that it is impossible rationally to get away from the theistic position if we are in earnest about morality, viewed as the pursuit of the ideal. In order to engage in such a pursuit, we must in the first place be free agents, able to choose between conflicting motives and to follow the right. If our actions are necessitated, then to speak of our “pursuing” this or that course, choosing and rejecting, is of course a mere contradiction in terms. But if the universe, including ourselves, is simply the resultant outcome of the interaction of unconscious mechanical forces, freewill is an absolute illusion, and Determinism the only true theory; and again, if Determinism is true, we cannot choose, we cannot strive in a word, we cannot help being what we are. Hence, if morality in any intelligible sense is to exist at all, we must be free; and only a personal and transcendent God could have conferred on us the faculty of freewill.

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We pass on to one or two final considerations. One of our ethicists, who genially informs us that “theology is discredited . . . and the world is indifferent to what the Church either thinks or says,” writes as follows: “The Ethical Movement believes that the good life has an imperative claim upon us because of its supreme worth for humanity.” {11] As against this statement we have no hesitation in affirming that only religion, in the accepted sense of the term, can give us the absolute conviction of the absolute supremacy of moral claims the assurance that it were better to suffer, to hunger, to be despised and rejected of men, to die on a cross, than to violate one of these. Grant that the good life is of supreme worth for humanity; yet supposing a man is sorely tempted to obtain some immense advantage or to gratify some consuming passion, at the cost of injuring someone else suppose he can do so with safety and success why should he prefer humanity’s interests to his own? Why, indeed? We make bold to say that no one in the throes of conflict between duty and desire, at the moment of moral crisis, has ever been influenced by the worth of his action for humanity. The ultimate sanction of right conduct must be drawn from a Source beyond humanity, which enjoins the right at all costs from Him who is humanity’s Maker and Ruler.

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And the same fact is borne witness to by the experience which waits upon wilful wrong-doing, by the sense of sin. Such an emotion can never be inspired by an impersonal order with which we have come into conflict, but only by a personal Will against which we are conscious of having offended. The man who disregards the law of gravitation and falls from a ladder, experiences one kind of painful sensation; but the man who disregards the law of righteousness and falls into sin, experiences quite a different kind of painful sensation the sensation, not of self-pity, but of self-accusation and remorse, because it is God’s holiness against which he has transgressed; and that feeling finds utterance age after age in the agonised cry, “Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight.”

The truth is, those who claim to set up morality as a religion, while declaring “the personal Deity of theology illusory,” are engaged in an impossible task; and it is because of the inherent hopelessness of their enterprise that we must raise our voice in warning to any who may be tempted to put faith in their fair promises. The ethicist’s intentions are admirable; but he sets about their realisation in a manner which dooms him and them to failure. Let us have practice without theory, he says, the superstructure without the foundation, the fruit without the root, works without the {190] faith which produces works: and such being the nature of his undertaking, he fares accordingly, a spectacle of ineffectual goodness, wondering why the world declines to listen to his so reasonable gospel. But the world continues to cling to an ultra-rational Gospel because it is instinctively aware that morality rests upon ultra-rational sanctions. Ethicism may borrow from Christianity the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, but it has no explanation to give of the basis supporting that axiom why we ought to regard each human being as having certain indefeasible claims upon us, so that we may not treat him as a mere means subserving our ends. That position can never be defended on purely natural grounds; in the last analysis the brotherhood of man has a right to be accepted as true only by those who believe in the Fatherhood of God.

In conclusion, as all true morality pre-supposes religion, so it is only religion which can supply the strongest incentive and encouragement to the good life; for it is religion alone which has the promise that the Good shall and must prevail, that the stars in their courses are fighting on the side of right and truth, and that it shall be well or ill with us according as we range ourselves on that side or in opposition to it. Take away the idea of a God whose will is that righteousness shall triumph, that life shall be lord of death, and {191] love victorious over all, and we have no guarantee but that all the efforts and sacrifices of martyr and reformer may be in vain, and the hope of the world a delusion. It is only the believer who can never despair, who knows that his work will endure and enrich the world that there will be no collapse or final disarray, that the world is no blot nor blank, but means intensely and means good. It is that faith which makes endeavour and surrender worth while; that faith the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen which alone gives us a right to sing Felix Adler’s noble hymn:

And the work that we have builded,
Oft with bleeding hands and tears,
Oft in error, oft in anguish,
Will not perish with our years,
It will rise and shine transfigured
In the final reign of light;
It will pass into the splendours
Of the City of the Light.

For the assurance which breathes in these lines rests on a previous, deeper assurance: it is that which the Christian expresses in the words, “If God be for us, who is against us?”