fyxndl Hiiiret^itg Jihr^tg THE GIFT OF y^^V:r^7GTai, (Quoted from St John Thackeray's " Greek Anthology.") Of. also the 10th book of Plato's Laws, where he discusses at length the uses of theology to the statesmen and the dangers of heresy. Inter alia, he denounces citizens who practise religious rites in their own houses. 152 RELIGION AND MORALITY Florence or Italy. Yet Machiavelli defends in- dividual as opposed to political morality. Here is Luther's testimony of the effect of his own doctrines on individual morality in Germany: "No sooner did our Gospel arise and get a hearing than there followed a frightful confusion . . . every man at his free pleasure would be and do what he listed in the way of pleasure and license, so that all law, rule and order were utterly overthrown; this is, alas, all too true. For Hcentiousness in all ranks ... is now much greater than formerly, when the people, and above all, the rabble, was generally held in fear and restraint; whereas now it lives like an unbridled horse, and does whatever it would without apprehension " ; * and Luther's own views of the disadvantages of monogamy and of male and female chastity generally would, I imagine, much scandalise the modern Lutheran. The net results of the secularisation of poUtics were, as I have tried to show, (1) that the State came to content itself with the profession of undenomi- national Christianity on the assumption that with- out it civic morality could not survive, and (2) that the new Churches, after the first theocratic stage of their existence, regulated individual morality to a much smaller extent than the Catholic priest had done through such an institution as the confes- ' Quoted by Mr Wiseman from Walcli's edition of Luther's Works, V. 114. RELIGION AND MORALITY 153 sional. There were indeed survivals of the old idea, such as Roger Williams' stipulation that the magistrate should deal with secret sins and take cognizance of the complaints of servants, or the theocratic argument that the magistrate must be able to deal with religion because he can deal with morality; and both "equally relate to . . . spiritual interests." Spinoza too held strongly in his " Tractatus Theologico-politicus " that though opinion should be free, men should conform to the religion of the State, but he qualified this by the explanation that religion should be held to consist more of good works than of faith. It is, I think, worth while attempting to explain the significance of the slow process by which the sphere of individual fi-eedom is enlarged and the sphere of government differentiated. The great basis of aU civilization is the calculability of the average citizen, for until he becomes calculable, such a thing as public security cannot be said to exist. It cannot be adequately maintained even by a regime of martial law, for that does not ensure the safety of traders or travellers over a large area. Con- sequently every man goes about armed to the teeth, and recourse may be had at any moment to sheer force, as in early Californian communities. Such a condition of society necessitates a tribal jurisdiction. The recognition of a distinction between Church and State modifies the necessity for this. The 154 RELIGION AND MORALITY State works upon the fear inspired by the self- defensive weapons of society, and the Church employs the fear of the supernatural. This double machinery is reinforced by the natural kindliness and social instincts of mankind, without which the State would be a mechanism instead of an organism, and the Church merely the preserve of a powerful priesthood. But while the State has appealed primarily to the instinct of self-preserva- tion, the Church has also done much to keep alive the altruistic sense, and even occasionally served the cause of free speech, as in the case of Sir Thomas More and Henry VIII. Thus it has also often lain with the Church— especially in medieval Europe — to develop the spontaneous morality of the individual, which is only made possible but not directly fostered by the State. But the Church was enabled to do this only in so far as the teiTors of her ultra-terrestrial jurisdiction paled before the powers of the priest to nullify such penalties by the elaborate machinery at his disposal. It was only in the nineteenth century, however, that men began openly to surmise that they might rely enough on each other's sense of mutual benefit to dispense with imposing conditions of creed on citizenship. For the nineteenth century witnessed two great changes of opinion — (1) the utilitarian conception of politics, and (2) the decline of the belief in hell. (1) The utilitarian conception of the State, RELIGION AND MORALITY 155 whether ultimately true or false, has at least im- pressed men's minds with the conviction that social science advances very much in the same way as the other sciences, and that its inferences can be progressively applied to the art of living in political society, as, for example, the inferences of physical science can be appUed to improving the art of locomotion. This theory tends to support the con- jecture that moral progress has generally lagged far behind the sciences and arts, largely because the urgent necessity of a moral code that shall be properly observed has been of such importance that men have feared to subject moral problems to the common test of reason. Men have therefore pre- ferred to invoke the crushing weight of authority for the support of moral sanctions by associating them with the truth of general propositions that may not be attacked on their own merits. Thus, too, it would be possible to argue that the very great moral progress of the last century and a half was due to the application of rationalistic tests to contemporary standards of conduct. If morality did really depend on purely otherworldly sanctions, the religious changes of the last fifty years would by now have dissolved society at large. Whether sceptical or not, most men have come to see that the observance of public order and the respect for legality serve the best interests alike of the indi- vidual and of the community, and even the great 156 RELIGION AND MORALITY intellectual and political upheaval of the French Revolution scarcely upset this conviction for more than a decade. Such knowledge, when popular- ised, at once enlists reasonable men on the side of properly constituted authority, and also makes them very loath to risk a period of anarchy, even in order to attack a radically mischievous Government, backed by great resources. An excellent example of how this principle works is the slavery question. The Church never prevailed upon men by disappro- bation or coercion to give up slavery or serfdom, least of all in medieval times, when her influence was strongest. In our own century there were found clerical apologists for the institution in all parts of the United States. Mr Cairnes showed very lucidly in his book on the question that slave-labour roused opposition in the United States, because it was causing wide- spread waste of soils, and men began to see that it did not pay, just as men needed the existence of perjury laws to make them more unwilling to take the name of God in vain. (2) On the other hand the great bulk of educated Christians have ceased to believe in the tortures of hell, though a certain kind of priest wiU always use bogeys to attain a proper respect for their fetishes.^ ' Cf. Seidell's Table-talk on "Damnation," where he points out that an alarmist surgeon impresses a patient much more than an "honest, judicious ohirurgeon " who should recommend an "ordinary medicine." RELIGION AND MORALITY 157 Thus I have come across a recent book by a member of the Society of Jesus, which informs the reader that sinners in hell will have asbestos souls to ensure their burning for eternity. But in this country at least there seems to pre- vail a feeling in the pulpit akin to the notion of Omar Khayyam's pots : " He's a good fellow and 'twill all be well." Even in other ages the attitude of most men, except those like Bunyan and Cowper, in regard to their own prospects, seem to have been happily expressed by Charles II. 's remark, "God will not punish a man for taking a Utile pleasure by the way," 1 or Heine's last mot, " Dieu me pardonnera ; c'est son metier." Though I would not altogether deprecate the growing tendency to disbelief in eternal punishment, yet the belief in the ultimate salvation of all men has the obvious defect of ignoring some of the most tragic facts of human life. Does experience justify men in relapsing into this easy optimism, or are we not constantly being impressed with the sense of finality in aU we do and even say, of the inevitable and inexorable results of the most seemingly insigni- ficant word or act ? The doctrine of eternal punish- ment possesses, like all other religious dogmas, a symbolic value, which is not easily dispensed with ' Recorded in Bishop Burnet's "History of England." 158 RELIGION AND MORALITY till we can substitute for it some other equally convincing expression of the underlying truth. It is easy to emphasize this aspect of the change, but there is a far better side to it. We are begin- ning to see the truth of Spinoza's idea that real morality is unaffected by thought of reward and punishments present or future.^ Nor indeed is it probable that conduct has ever been influenced as much as we think by the prospect of getting a bonus beyond the grave for services rendered. It is precisely where conduct is not thus influenced that morality begins. Long ago Omar Khayyam wrote : " He in whose heart is fired the lamp of love, hath neither hope for heaven nor fear of hell." ^ And the same idea emerges in Browning's poem of " The Confessional." Indeed if such con- victions were ever certain in the sense of the con- viction in this country that Consols is a gilt-edged investment, the road to heaven would be paved with the company promoter's communion-plate, and the priest would be, as he virtually was in ancient Rome, a kind of celestial stockbroker. It is clear that if we respect acts of individual ^ Sir Leslie Stephen has summed up the problem in a, few words. "That such (i.e. external) sanctions {e.g. capital punishment) are essential to society, that they provide a shelter under which true morality may or must grow up is obvious. . . . But ultimately morality means nothing but the expression of character itself. — English Utilitarians, London, 1900, vol. iii. p. 34. ^ Justin MacCarthy's Translation. RELIGION AND MORALITY 169 moraKty more than acts of civic morality for the very reason that civic morality is regulated by State penalties, so moral acts done irrespectively of other- worldly sanctions ought to be regarded as more admirable than acts done with those motives in view, though probably such acts are rare and the average man is primarily restrained by blind teiTor of the law and only secondarily by his ideals. I think that it would be generally admitted that civic morality can stand apart fi-om the theistic belief. Even Sir James Stephen, who denied it in 1874, wrote in the Nineteenth Century for June 1884 that if religion is given up "I do not see either that life will become worthless or that morals in particular will cease to be." He only argued that the " mystical and emotional " part of morality will go, i.e. the ethics of Christianity and of deified self-sacrifice. The word self-sacrifice is unfortunately a little ambiguous. It must not be confused with mere asceticism. The higher meaning of the word I take to be the self-dedication of an individual to his own ideal even to the point of dying for it. Now to some extent the true glory of the death endured by the Founder of Christianity has been obscured by the juristic theory of the atonement and by the Oriental theory of self-mortification. But there is self-sacrifice of the purest kind in the death of a Socrates, suffered in homely fashion, merely for 160 RELIGION AND MORALITY refusing to repudiate the inner voice that guided him. And numberless examples of the same kind might be cited such as the stand of Thermopylffi. Whatever " mystical and emotional morality " there is in the world will probably live as long as human nature itself. This is not the present attitude of most thinkers who separate religion and morality. They will admit that civic morality not only appeals to self- interest, but has also become spontaneous and habitual, yet they hold that individual morality will not last beyond a generation or two of sceptics, after which time the vis inertia of Christianity will have spent itself. This is even the view of such a profound thinker as Mr Goldwin Smith. To this it might be replied that religion generally impUes the " surrender of the moral to the meta- physical," and that Christianity in particular has had to go through many strange transformations, and has been adapted to the ethics of an industrial civilisation among peoples entirely ahen to the race to whom it was in the first instance preached. In fact modern Christianity includes a bewildering number of conflicting ethical systems, whether they are to be found in Eastern, Northern, Southern or Western Europe, Asia Minor, or across the Atlantic. It might be argued that this signifies not the ethical additions made to Christianity at widely difl"erent times in widely different lands, but the universality RELIGION AND MOEALITY 161 and permanence of the Christian Church itself. Those who would so argue would seem to ignore the fact that any given generation of men usually agrees in ethical questions, however much they disagree in theological speculation. For morality is a matter of usage, and rehgion a matter of temperament. The general question at issue is more germane to my subject than at first may appear. For as the civic ideals of legislation are improved by the public opinion formed through individual morality, so individual morality is ultimately important to the welfare of the State ; and the State negatively sanctions the code of public opinion by the attitude taken up towards such matters as the unrestricted sale of alcoholic liquors, the existence of disorderly houses, etc.^ Putting aside then the belief in hell, would the decline of a belief in a personal God and a future 'In his "Anticipations," London, 1902, Mr H. G. Wells seems to think that a process of what he calls ' ' moral segrega- tion " will set in and that the State will cease to interfere in "private morals," just as a man's religious belief has ceased to be part of his social life and has become part of his individual life, pp. 135 and 136. Eeading the book as a whole, however, I conclude that Mr Wells is chiefly thinking of sexual morality, and that in his opinion the State will concern itself less and less with delicate problems of this kind. Yet even here he predicts that the State will strictly insist on the proper training of chil- dren and will kill men with indisputably transmissible diseases, who knowingly transmit them to posterity, pp. 299 and 300. Tribunals that would endeavour to try such offences would, how- ever, rather resemble those described in Mr Butler's " Erewhon." 162 RELIGION AND MORALITY life be fatal to individual morality in a few generations ? Those who have answered this question in the negative have been derided for setting up the service of man as the aim of the individual. They have been asked whether they would spare a coal-scuttle for the sake of a posterity who will have no coals, and what would their efforts count, if our planet were to be de- stroyed to-morrow by the indiscretion of a vagrant comet. Such writers might well be asked why they take the trouble to educate themselves or their children, when they might be carried off to- morrow by typhoid fever or run over by a hansom- cab. It cannot be supposed that any human education would be of much use in an existence where, as Charles Lamb lamented, knowledge would come by the "unfamiliar process of in- tuition."^ Moreover it must be clear to most students of human history that the individual can no more avoid the service of man in the next generation than he can avoid being the product of all the generations that have gone before. The life of the individual merges in an immense link of causation.^ The physical law of " conservation of energy" equally applies to human achievement and to the history of the race on its ethical side, as ' Essay on New Year's Eve. ^ This idea has been exhaustively worked out by Mr Kidd in his " Principles of Western Civilisation," RELIGION AND MORALITY 163 preachers on the influence of the individual have often pointed out. There is a parable recorded in Carlyle's notebook of a hen who struck laying eggs for her owner, whereupon the owner wrung her neck and bought eggs from the nearest dairy. The service of man is therefore necessary in the sense that its neglect by the individual destroys the individual's best chance of the highest happiness. Even the criminal genius like Ctesar Borgia or Napoleon I., who must have obtained much intel- lectual happiness in sweeping away the ordinary barriers of conduct, might have gained a more lasting and a less precarious happiness in working inside these barriers. These considerations are obvious enough, and it is hardly necessary to enter into a discussion as to whether or not the individual is merely an unreal abstraction. But even Tennyson pointed out con- vincingly enough that the individual does not matter much to anyone but himself Much the same kind of objection has been raised by writers like Mr Mallock, who maintain that life is not worth living without some kind of theistic belief. But the question is nearly always stated wrongly, i.e. on the assumption that we have had any conscious experience of any existence other than our present life. These writers do not confine themselves to the data of the problem or put the 164 RELIGION AND MORALITY proper question, i.e. is it worth while living under the conditions we find ready made for us ? Most men, whatever opinions they may have entertained, have thought fit to answer this question in the affirmative. The eloquent utterances of writers like Mr John Morley on the possibility of such a morality have often been described as cold and above the level of the ordinary man. In such a passage at the end of his magnificent chapter on Rousseau's " Vicaire Savoyard" he defines religion as "our feeling about the highest forces that govern human destiny."^ Now I think that the whole history of religion shows that this definition essentially touches the feeling that most really religious men have had in the bottom of their hearts ; I exclude, of course, the hair-splitting of theologians, the self- seeking desire of priests for a temporal and spiritual tyranny over laymen and the politician's unscrup- ulous adherence to formulce which he thinks expedient. The greatest religious teachers of mankind, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus Christ, St Francis of Assisi, George Fox, and in our own time men like Howard, Wilberforce and Tolstoi have all chiefly emphasised the ethical side of religion. Such religious conceptions as the Fatherhood of God have been most valuable in propagating such 1 "EousBeau " (John Morley), London, 1896, p. 278. RELIGION AND MORALITY 165 ethical ideas as the brotherhood of man. Jesus Christ expounded the connection between these two aspirations as pointedly as any religious teacher has ever done.^ Men like Luther, who upheld Faith against Works, were primarily protesting against the per- version of the previous idea, which culminated in the system of Indulgences. Moreover, theological disputations have often been the only vent which restless intellects could find in ages when there was far less variety of food for speculation than there has been in the last two or three centuries. This side of the question has, however, been ad- mirably and exhaustively treated in Sir John Seeley's " Natural Religion." Professor Clifibrd analysed religion into three elements — a belief, a ceremonial cult and a body of precepts to guide human conduct. The essential part of religion has, I believe, been the last, and religions have survived ordy so far as they were capable of being adapted to a progressive morality. The first part has satisfied those intellectual needs which now find a partial satisfaction in scientific research and hypotheses, and the second has ministered to those eternal emotions and aspira- tions of mankind in regard to fife and love and death which now tend to find expression in all forms of secular art — especially music. I am not ' Matthew vii, 22-23, and xxv. 40-45. 166 RELIGION AND MORALITY committing myself to the statement that theistic religion will necessarily decline. The unfortunate forecasts of the great Roman writers in the early days of Christianity should be a permanent warning against any venture to prophesy on such a subject. The curve may be too large for us to infer anything from the past or present. For aught I know, General Booth may be remembered when Queen Victoria has become a solar myth. I only believe that in the last few centuries men have come gradually to the implicit conviction that, so far as ultimate things are concerned, we see through a glass very darkly, and that should this tendency continue, ethical and political progress need not suffer by it. There are two very strong objections against my opinion that require an answer. In the first place, evolutionary inferences have led thinkers like Huxley into such inconsistent statements as that in his Romanes lecture on " Evolution and Ethics," where he remarked that we, who are the product of the cosmic process, i.e. the struggle for existence, must now turn round and modify it ; but how is a product in process of production to modify its producer? The professor did not assume that the cosmic process in the case of humanity suddenly ceased to operate like the deistic divinity of eighteenth-century thinkers who starts the universe and then leaves it to itself like a man RELIGION AND MORALITY 167 throwing a stone over a precipice.^ On the other hand, it has led thinkers like Nietzsche into hysteri- cal aspirations for the return of a " tooth and claw " existence in order to produce an Uebermsnsch. It has, however, been wisely demonstrated that morality consists not in opposing nor in abolishing but in humanising the struggle for existence.^ By allowing the degenerate to die out,^ and by bettering the lives of the coming generation, it is possible to achieve humanely what the Nietzsche school would snatch at brutally. The difference is like that between the abohtion of monarchy in France and the achievement of the Reform Bill in England. In the second place, it is beyond doubt that for those to whom religious teaching has ever been at all real, the shock of its loss must involve a moral risk of a temporary kind ; just as the decline of medieval religion caused a temporary outbreak from moral restraints in sixteenth-century Germany. Benjamin Franklin, whose naturally prosaic mind was probably too much influenced from the first by ^ This may perhaps be too antithetical a criticism, but to put it more in Professor Huxley's own language, he forgot that the action of environment on the individual is necessarily accompanied by a reaction of the individual on his environment. ^ Vide CorUemporary Review, August 1893. ^ It may be urged that hospitals tend to preserve artificially the physically degenerate. This is a necessary element in humanising the struggle for existence ; but it only delays and does not prevent the natural death of physical degeneracy. Hospitals are also an invaluable aid to medical research. 168 RELIGION AND MORALITY the theological notion of future rewards and punish- ment, frankly confesses that scepticism in his case produced such an effect.^ In spite of the spontaneous habit which indi- vidual morality becomes with good training, there must come crises when all seems dark and the former beacons no longer give visible guidance. A labour of love appears to have been turned into a labour of respectability. The sense of a divine presence, which gives a standard for the ideal self, has to be replaced by the inspiring memories of our heroes, our friends and of the social group to which we choose or happen to belong. The ideal self remains as vital for all practical purposes, but for the moment a habitual prop is lacking. Such cases are not so frequent as may be thought, for real religious feeling is, on the whole, peculiar to the more sensitive types of human nature. But they have to be taken into account.^ Yet I cannot see why such an ^ See his autobiography. It is rather a case of "parturiunt mmites," for he seems only to refer to soroe indiscretions in Paris. ^ An instructive confession is contained in the following ex- tract of a letter written in 1860 by the late Professor Huxley to Charles Kingsley (quoted in his autobiography) : — "Kicked into the world, a boy without guide or training or with worse than none, I confess to my shame that few men have di'unk deeper of all kinds of sin than I. Happily, my course was arrested in time— before I had earned absolute destruction — and for long years I have been slowly and painfully climbing, with many a fall, towards better things. And when I look back, what do I find to have been the agents of my redemption ? The hope of immortality or of future reward ? I can honestly say RELIGION AND MORALITY 169 eclipse need be more permanent in the individual than it is in the whole. Few would deny that nothing is heard of the moral depravity of those who have had a purely secular upbringing. Such an environment sometimes seems to leave the imagination like that of a child who has never been allowed to read fairy stories. But the temptations of life do not seem to affect them more than others. As Voltaire long ago wrote, the Jews were respectable enough without belief in personal immortality, and as he might have added, have left a legacy of the sublimest ethical aspiration to mankind. If the fabric of theistic behef is to die out that for these fourteen years such a consideration has not entered my head. No, I can tell you exactly what has been at work. ' Sartor Resartus ' led me to know that a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology. Secondly, science and her methods gave me a resting place independent of authority and tradition. Thirdly, love opened up to me a view of the sanctity of human nature, and impressed me with a deep sense of responsibility. " — "Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley," London, 1900, p. 220. I venture to think that this is a sufficient answer to the frequent suggestion that heresy is adopted by heretics to cloak their moral aberrations from themselves. So far as I have been able to see, the Agnostic type is more colourless and puritanical than that of the average believer. I have observed far more piety of temperament and more religious emotion among inebriates et hoc genus OTnne than among more conventional classes of humanity. I do not mean to scoff at the genuineness of religious emotions, but only to show that often the religious temperament is too rich in emotion to be as well balanced as that of the emotionally anaemic rationalist. Since writing this note I find an analogous suggestion put forward by Mr William James in his " Varieties of Religious Experience," London 1902, p. 387. 170 RELIGION AND MORALITY slowly, I see no reason for fearing the destruc- tion of moral sanctions, though no doubt certain ethical ideas would change, e.g., in regard to the criminality of suicide or the conditions of the marriage tie. Theism is now generally assumed to ^be the bed-rock of all religious speculation in all ages. It is no less possible to imagine that it may clothe, though with less opaque vestments, even greater truths. Theism must necessitate the assumption that the mind of God does not change, but the alleged revelations of the divine mind given to men differ from each other toto ccrIo. How are we to reconcile the teachings of Buddha, Confucius and Mahommed in this con- nection ? Theism certainly cannot. CHAPTER VII TWO RIVAL THEORIES OF THE STATE One of the most salient features in the struggle for toleration is the unavailing effort of its advo- cates to minimise the functions of the State and to substitute a dual for a single idealism, to assert the freedom of the individual to be guided by his own ideals or by the ideals of an associa- tion of individuals independent of the State. Thus, Milton's plea for toleration is nothing more nor less than a plea for individual liberty — in thought and speech, if not in action. The hostUity of the State to this individualism was probably the element underlying the condemna- tion of Socrates and the persecution of the Christian Church, as I have before suggested. The most enduring States have never been those in which men were really convinced that the State only existed as a corporate policeman. Men have always claimed a sanction for the State which appeals to their highest convictions, and in deeply religious ages, they have accord- ingly claimed, and probably will ever claim, for the State a religious sanction. The "good life," 172 TWO RIVAL THEORIES OF THE STATE for which Aristotle declared the State to exist, must necessarily in religious periods of history include belief in supernatural religion as an essential part of itself. For the State has a double aspect in so far as it represents the community at large, as well as the police machinery for keeping order.^ I need not refer again to the conditions of primitive society, of ancient Greece and Rome, of the Jewish and Mahommedan theocracies and of the Frankish and Byzantine Empires. There are, however, the beginnings of an attack on the exclusive authority of the State, even in Greece and in Rome. The distinction, for example, ^ For this reason I tHnk Mr Kidd's distinction between the State and society is a little artificial. He maintains that tolera- tion is based on » " conviction of responsibility in the human mind transcending the content of all interests within the limits of political consciousness." He then traces the separation of Church and State, and toleration itself to the revolt of the individual against the ephemeral sanctions of the State, e.g., he particularly praises Hobbes for having marked off the domain of positive law from the region of ethics, in which there con- tinued to be involved the larger and fundamental principles of society as a whole. And he quotes Burke's definition of society, as if it necessarily excluded the State : ' ' Society is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead and those who ai-e to be bom." Whether or not the State has always tended to represent no more than police machinery, I believe that in the future it will tend more and more to represent society as a whole and its best aspirations, and that it will embody in itself many of the functions hitherto exercised by the Churches ; though, perhaps, in a much more general and broad fashion. " Principles of Western Civilization," London 1902, p. 459. TWO RIVAL THEORIES OF THE STATE 173 that Aristotle draws between the "good citizen" and the " good man " is very significant, especially when he concludes that the two types can only completely coincide in the ideal state.^ It is also very interesting that he should think it the duty of the individual to conform to the State to which he belongs, and become a good citizen at the expense of being a good man. This would seem to condemn the sublime utterance of Antigone in the Sophoclean tragedy, when she justifies herself on the ground of a law higher than the civil law for having performed funeral rites for her brother against Creon's orders : oi) yAp 5e fioi Zei)s ^v 6 Krjpi^as rdSe 0^5' 7} ^jjvotKos Twv Karbj 6eC}V AIkij^ TolovaS' iv aydpthiroLGiv wpurev vbiwvs ov54 aOheiv rotrovrov wh^-qv to.