Bywhat sort of experience are we led to the conviction that spirit exists? On the whole, by searching, painful experience. The rose Religion grows on a thorn-bush, and we must not be afraid to have our fingers lacerated by the thorns if we would pluck the rose. For instance, a person who endures great bodily suffering with fortitude will discover that there is something in him which physical agony cannot overcome, something not of the senses, which all the assaults of the senses are powerless to affect.
Why in this world of ours there should be so much suffering no one knows. But this we know; that, evil existing, the world being such asit is, we can win from evil, if we choose, an inestimable good, namely—the conviction that there is in us a power not of the senses, the conviction that spirit exists, and exists in us.
A sceptic may say that in a world ideally conceivable we might have secured this precious conviction without the necessity of undergoing the ordeal of pain. To which the reply is: that in a world ideally conceivable what he says may be true; but in the world as it is, with which alone we are concerned, we have ample cause for gratitude that we can turn suffering to such far-reaching account, that we can distil from the bitter root this divine elixir; that by manfully bearing the pains of the senses, inexplicable though they be, we are able to gain the certainty that a power not born of the senses exists in us, operates in us. It is this effectof pain that accounts for the serenity and peace of many patient sufferers, a peace and a serenity which surround their bed of misery with a kind of halo.
The same is true of moral pain. The experience of Guilt, for instance, if it leads us to pitilessly honest self-scrutiny and self-judgment, will at the last disclose the marvellous fact that even in the most desperate cases there remains a part of our nature unspoiled by the guilt. We become aware of a power within us, to slough off the guilt as the serpent sloughs off its skin; to triumph over the evil we have done as well as over the evils we suffer. We realise that there is in us a fount of inexhaustible moral rejuvenation.
What, then, are the compensations of Sin? In the first place, a truer insight into the moral order of the universe, a more adequate realisation of the authority of those holy ordinances against which we have offended; and then the conviction that the soul can ever rise again by its own efforts. The tree may fall, but the root remains indestructible; the spring of moral endeavour may appear to be dried up, but there are hidden subterranean streams from which it can ever be fed anew.
The stages of the progress of mankind may be compared to a series of mountain ranges. First the foothills, then the higher hills, then mountain range on mountain range beyond them. As we gain the loftier eminences we see the snowy summits before us, touched by the light of the moral ideal, transforming themselves before our eyes into what appear to be the ramparts and the spires of the Golden City. We climb still higher, and the vision travels with us, lighting onthe next succeeding range. And so, on and on, as we ascend.
We live in our activities, in our influence. The success or failure of life is determined, not by our conditions, but by the effort we put forth despite our conditions. A man who, though himself poor, labours to keep alive the higher life in his fellows, to inspire them with the courage to strive for the better, and with patience to bear the evils which are for the time being unavoidable, is a spiritual hero and a nobler benefactor than many of the so-called benefactors who invade the slums.
When human nature fights in the last ditch, when it is pressed against the wall, when the clutch of circumstances is about its throat and threatens to choke it, then human nature, by way of reaction, exhibits a power which we call spiritual. This is rarelydisplayed in prosperous circumstances. It is the compensation of adversity that it elicits in manifold ways this spiritual power and makes man’s life in a spiritual sense a success.
Letthe Stoics say what they will, so long as we remain human we shall always open our breasts to those warm loves that make the sweetness of existence, if also they make its bitterest pain.
It is written that the last enemy to be vanquished is death. We should begin early in life to vanquish this enemy by obliterating every trace of the fear of death from our minds. Then can we turn to life and fill the whole horizon of our souls with it, turn with added zest to all the serious tasks which it imposes and to the pure delights which here and there it affords.
There are hours of great loneliness, when the frost of desolation penetrates into the very soul, when the burden seems too heavy to bear, and the draught of life too bitter to swallow. But the very keenness of the ordeal begets the strength to bear it, and patience and unselfish resignation will come as with the rustling of angel’s wings to dry our scalding tears.
When the light of the sun shines through a prism it is broken into beautiful colours, and when the prism is shattered, still the light remains. So does the light of life shine resplendent in the forms of our friends, and so, when their forms are broken, still their life remains; and in that life we are united with them; for the life of their life is also our life, and we are one with them by ties indissoluble.
They say that it is a blessed relief in times of grief to shed tears. But a more blessed relief than to shedtears is to wipe away the tears from others’ eyes.
In hours of great sorrow we turn in vain to Nature for an inspiring thought. We question the sleepless stars; they are cold and distant. The winds blow, the rivers run their course, the seasons change; they are careless of man. Only in the human world do we find an answering echo to our needs.
The body is incapable of supporting for longer than a few brief years the weight of the life that dwells within it. The vehicle cannot sustain the content. The instrument falls short of the demands upon it, and crumbles into ruins. But in its ruin it sets off, in tragic contrast, the grandeur of the power which, for a time, employed it for its uses, a power greater than itself, greater than any instrument, whose glory rises abovethe ruins and gilds them with unearthly splendour in departing.
We are soldiers fighting a good fight. The call that awakens us out of despair in times of affliction is the trumpet-call of duty, summoning us back to the battle.
The experience of progress in the past, the hope of progress toward perfection in the future, is the redeeming feature of life; it is the one and only solace that never fails.
It is the nature of the noble and the good and the wise that they impart to us of their nobility and their goodness and their wisdom while they live, making it natural for us to breathe the air they breathe and giving us confidence in our own untested powers. And the same influence in more ethereal fashion they continue to exert after they are gone.
The condition of all progress isexperience. We go wrong a thousand times before we find the right path. We struggle, and grope, and hurt ourselves until we learn the use of things, and this is true of things spiritual as well as of material things. Pain is unavoidable, but it acquires a new and higher meaning when we perceive that it is the price humanity must pay for an invaluable good.
The consolations of the moral ideal are vigorous. They do not encourage idle sentiment. They recommend to the sufferer action. Our loss, indeed, will always remain loss, and no preaching or teaching can ever make it otherwise. But the question is whether it shall weaken and embitter, or strengthen and purify us, and lead us to raise to the dead we mourn a monument in our lives that shall be better than any pillared chapel or storied marble tomb.
The criterion of all right relations whatsoever is that we are helped by them. And so, too, the criterion of right relations to the dead is that we are helped, not weakened and disabled, by them. Does the remembrance of our departed beloved ones have this effect upon us? Does it make us better and purer men and women than we should otherwise have been, stronger if not happier? Do they come to us as gentle monitors in silent hours of thought? Does their approving smile stimulate us to greater bravery for the right, to more earnest self-conquest? Does the pressure of their invisible hands guide us in the better way? If so, then truly blessed is their memory. Then will the pain which is associated with the thought of them gradually be diminished; the wild regrets, the unappeasable longings which, at times, assertthemselves gradually be pacified. Then will the bitter sense of the loss we have sustained be overborne by the consciousness of the treasure of their influence which still remains to us, and which can never be taken from us.
Activity is our great resource. To be active is to live. The glow that comes with activity supplies the heat that supports our mental and moral energies. Activity is the antidote to the depressions that lower our vitality, whether they come from physical or psychical causes.
Those whom we love are not given to us merely for our joy or our happiness. Their truest ministry consists in being to us revealers of the divine. They quicken in us the seed of better thoughts, help us to estimate rightly the things that are worth trying for and the things that are notworth trying for; help us to become more equal to the standard of our own best insight, and grow into our truer selves. And this influence abides when they are gone.
Let us learn from the lips of death the lessons of life. Let us live truly while we live, live for what is true and good and lasting. And let the memory of our dead help us to do this. For they are not wholly separated from us, if we remain loyal to them. In spirit they are with us. And we may think of them as silent, invisible, but real presences in our households.
In a storm at sea when the peril is extreme, the captain lashes himself to the mast in order that he may bring the vessel safely through the raging seas. So, in times of great affliction, we should lash ourselves to the mast of the ship of life, by the cord of duty.
The bitter, yet merciful, lesson which death teaches us is to distinguish the gold from the tinsel, the true values from the worthless chaff.
The terrible events of life are great eye-openers. They force us to learn that which it is wholesome for us to know, but which habitually we try to ignore—namely, that really we have no claim on a long life; that we are each of us liable to be called off at any moment, and that the main point is not how long we live, but with what meaning we fill the short allotted span—for short it is at best.
The wine of pleasure which once we quaffed so passionately, where is it now? The cup is empty and only the lees remain, and they are as wormwood to the taste. The flowers which we wove into chaplets at our feasts to wreathe ourselves withal, they are withered and noxious. But the gooddeeds we have done, the nobler traits of character we have developed—these are imperishable.
As in every battle, so in the great battle of Humanity, the fallen and wounded, too, have a share in the victory; by their sufferings they have helped, and the greenest wreaths belong to them.
We conceive of ourselves as somehow identical in being with those who are to come after us; for it is in the nature of spirit that its separate members, dispersed though they be in space and time, are still, in essence, one. So that we may say concerning those who come after us, and who will reap the benefit of our labours, that we ourselves shall attain to increasing perfection in them.
All of us have felt after some great bereavement the beneficent influence of mere work. Even themechanical part of our daily tasks affords us some relief. The knowledge that something must be done prevents us from brooding over our griefs, and forces us back into the active currents of life.
The resources of the intellect, too, stand us in good stead in times of trouble. The pursuit of knowledge is directed toward large impersonal ends: into the calm and silent realm of thought the feelings can gain no entrance. There, after the first spasms of emotion have subsided, we may find at least a temporary relief—there for hours we drink in a welcome oblivion. But mere plodding toil and mere intellectual preoccupation do not suffice, the discharge of the moral duties in the light of the moral perfection to which they point alone can really sustain and console us.
In alleviating the misery ofothers our own misery will be alleviated; in healing there is cure.
When we endure some heavy affliction we are apt to say, “Oh, there is no suffering like my suffering. There is no one who bears such a load as mine.” This is a mistake—the guilty suffer more than the afflicted. Better a thousand times death than shame. There are depths below depths, abysses below abysses.
Poverty, Sickness, Sorrow, and the experience of Sin are the great instrumentalities for moralising our natures. They are dark gateways through which we pass into a temple of light—into the innermost sanctuary of a truer life. Yes, for the guilty also there is consolation and redemption. “Come ye that are heavy laden unto me, no matter how heavily laden with sin,” says every religion, “and I will give you rest.” For those whohave transgressed the moral law realise more fully than others do the sublime majesty of the power which they have affronted. And in a sense greater than words can convey, those who have had the profoundest experience of guilt are more capable than others of a divine transfiguration of their natures.
We are not free to stand aside in idle woe, but should make for the departed a memorial in our lives and complete their half-completed tasks. The widowed wife shall be both mother and father to her children; the afflicted husband both father and mother to his children.
Faith in the sublime ideal of humanity is the saving faith that will work miracles to-day, as of old at Cana, that will change the waters of earth’s grief and misery into the wondrous wine of life and joy.
Death and the dead should be associated with what is brightest and purest in Nature, with glorious sunsets, with the dawn of summer mornings, with the fragrance of Spring.
Theright for the right’s sake is the motto which every one should take for his own life. With that as a standard of value we can descend into our hearts, appraise ourselves, and determine in how far we already are moral beings, in how far not yet.
The supremacy of the moral end of life above all other ends, the sufficiency of man for the pursuit of that end, the increase of moral truth to be expected from loyalty in this pursuit—these are the three tenets, if we may call them so, of an ethical creed.
The question what to believe is perhaps the most momentous that any one can put to himself. Ourbeliefs are not to be classed among the luxuries, but among the necessaries of existence. They become particularly important in times of trouble. They are like the life-boats carried by ocean ships. As long as the sea is smooth and there is every appearance of a prosperous voyage, the passengers seldom take note of the boats or inquire into their sea-worthiness. But when the storm breaks and danger approaches, then the capacity of the boats and their soundness become matters of the first importance.
Ethical religion affirms the continuity of progress toward moral perfection. It affirms that the spiritual development of the human race cannot be prematurely cut off, either gradually or suddenly; that every stone of offence against which we stumble is a stepping-stone to some greater good; that, at the end of days, if we chooseto put it so, all the rays of progress will be summed and centred in a transcendent focus.
Religion is concerned with the foreign relations of mankind, that is to say, with our relations to the whole of outside nature. The mission of religion is to convince us that the foreign power is friendly. The non-ethical religions have represented the eternal outside power as manifesting its friendliness by warding off unhappiness and ministering to the temporal well-being of man. Ethical religion restricts itself to affirming that the eternal power assures the fulfilment of our moral aims. The non-ethical religions have based the belief that there is a higher power on the testimony of supernatural revelations. Ethical religion bases its belief solely upon the testimony of conscience, which declares that progressought to be achieved, hence inferring that it will be.
That the moral obligation remains in force is the capital fact to which we must hold fast, no matter what may be our theories of life and the Universe. The recognition of this obligation, the hearty avowal of the supremacy of the moral end above all other ends of life, is the first article of a practical ethical creed.
There may be, and there ought to be, progress in the moral sphere. The moral truths which we have inherited from the past need to be expanded and re-stated.
In times of misfortune we require for our support something of which the truth is beyond all question, in which we can put an implicit trust, “though the heavens should fall.” A merely borrowed belief is, at such time, like a rotten plank across araging torrent. The moment we step upon it, it gives way beneath our feet.
Good deeds remain good, no matter whether we know how the world was made or not. Vile deeds are vile, no matter whether we know or do not know what, after death, will be the fate of the doer. We know, at least, what his fate is now, namely, to be wedded to the vileness.
The question for any one to decide, who hesitates between good and evil, is whether he aspires to be a full-weight man, or merely the fragment, nay, the counterfeit of a man. Only he who ceaselessly aims at moral completeness is, in the true sense, a human being.
There is a universal element in man which he can assert by so acting as if the purpose of the Universe were also his purpose. It is the function of the supreme ordeals of life todevelop in men this power, to give to their life this distinction, this height of dignity, these vast horizons.
Life has ever seemed to me a task. It has its interludes of joy. But, on the whole, it is an arduous, often a desperately arduous task. I think of the dead as of those who have finished their task, who have graduated from this exacting school, who have taken their degree—and some of them, surely, with honour.
We need to feel that no effort is ever wasted, that no honest reaching out toward the good is vain, that the great All is pressing forward toward a transcendent goal. And there is but a single way to obtain this conviction. It is not possible to enter into the nature of the Good by standing aloof from it—by merely speculating upon it. Act the Good, and you will believe in it. Throw yourselfinto the stream of the world’s good tendency and you will feel the force of the current and the direction in which it is setting. The conviction that the world is moving toward great ends of progress will come surely to him who is himself engaged in the work of progress.
By ceaseless efforts to live the good life we maintain our moral sanity. Not from without, but from within, flow the divine waters that renew the soul.
The ethical element of religion has ever been its truly vital and quickening force. It is this which lends such majesty to the speeches of the Prophets, which gives such ineffable power and sweetness to the words of Jesus. Has this ethical element become less important in our age? Has the need of accentuating it become less imperative?
To-day, in the estimation of many, science and art are taking the place of religion. But science and art alike are inadequate to build up character and to furnish binding rules of conduct.
We need also a clearer understanding of applied ethics, a better insight into the specific duties of life, a finer and a surer moral tact.
It is the business of the preacher, not only to state moral truths, but to inspire his hearers with a realising sense of their value, and to awaken in them the desire to act accordingly. He can do this only by putting his own purpose as a yeast into their hearts. The influence of the right sort of preachers cannot be spared. The human race is not yet so far advanced that it can dispense with the impulses that come from men of more than average intensity of moral energy.
Let us produce, through the efficacy of a better moral life and of a deeper moral experience, a surer faith in the ultimate victory of the good.
Let us found religion upon a basis of perfect intellectual honesty. Religion, if it is to mean anything at all, must stand for the highest truth. How then can the cause of truth be served by the sacrifice, more or less disguised, of one’s intellectual convictions?
To those who are longing for a higher life, who deeply feel the need of religious satisfactions, we suggest that there is a way in which the demands of the head and the heart may be reconciled. Religion is not necessarily allied with dogma, a new kind of faith is possible, based not upon legend and tradition, not upon the authority of any book, but upon the moral nature of man.
Theologians often say that faith must come first, and that morality must be deduced from faith. We say that morality must come first, and faith, to those whose nature fits them to entertain it, will come out of the experience of a deepened moral life as its richest, choicest fruit.
Precisely because moral culture is the aim, we cannot be content merely to lift the mass of mankind above the grosser forms of evil. We must try to advance the cause of humanity by developing in ourselves, as well as in others, a higher type of manhood and womanhood than the past has known.
To aid in the evolution of a new conscience, to inject living streams of moral force into the dry veins of materialistic communities is our aim.
We seek to come into touch with the ultimate power in things, theultimate peace in things, which yet, in any literal sense, we know well that we cannot know. We seek to become morally certain—that is, certain for moral purposes—of what is beyond the reach of demonstration. But our moral optimism must include the darkest facts that pessimism can point to, include them and transcend them.
To give to actual life the formal poise and finish of a work of art is the tendency of those who see in learning and beauty the highest end of human endeavour. It is a tendency the value of which as an element of wisdom cannot be denied; but it cannot, on the other hand, be said that it is “the religious teaching which is proper to our time.” The watchword “culture” we may indeed adopt. But there is needed the qualifying prefix “ethical” to give it a practical direction and a higher than the merely æsthetic connotation.
We should teach our children nothing which they shall ever need to unlearn; we should strive to transmit to them the best possessions, the truest thought, the noblest sentiments of the age in which we live.
The moral ferment that has worked from the beginning in human nature is active still. To-day it is manifest in the great social problems that agitate our age, demanding a higher justice, if they are to be solved, threatening social disruption if they are met in the hard spirit of selfish greed, while promising a fairer future than the world has yet seen if dealt with in wisdom and forbearance.
The frontier of the higher life is everywhere contiguous to the common life, and we can cross the border at any moment. The higher life isas real as the grosser things in which we put our trust. But our eyes must be anointed so that we may see it.
The office of the religious teacher is to be a seer, and to make others see, and thus to win them into the upward way.
They have not grasped the whole truth who see in the sympathetic side of human nature, in the tender and amiable impulses of the heart, the well-spring of our moral judgments. These gentle qualities—pity, tenderness, sympathy—are the sweet, younger sisters of Virtue; but Virtue herself is greater than they.
We should seek to free the moral life from the embarrassments and entanglements in which it has been involved by the quibbles of the schools and the mutual antagonisms of the sects; to introduce into it an element of downrightness and practical earnestness; above all, to secure to the modern world, in its struggle with manifold evil, the boon of moral unity, despite intellectual diversity.
In order to improve ethics as a science it is necessary to fix attention on the moral facts, to collect them, to bring them into view, especially the more recondite facts.
Many of us stumble, not because we lack the desire to do what is right, but because we fail to discern what the right is.
I believe in the supreme excellence of righteousness; I believe that the law of righteousness will triumph in the universe over all evil; I believe that in the attempt to fulfil the law of righteousness, however imperfect it must remain, are to be found the inspiration, the consolation, and the sanctification of human existence.
We live in order to finish an, as yet, unfinished universe, unfinished so far as the human, that is, the highest part of it, is concerned. We live in order to develop the superior qualities of man which are, as yet, for the most part latent.
The test of genuine moral culture is to be found in the attention we pay to the oft-neglected details of conduct; in the extent to which we have formed the habit of asking, What is it right to do in those little things which yet are not little?
The thought of the brevity of life is the prod that spurs us on to the achievement of our task; it is like the blast of a bugle from the walls of a fortress that warns us to make haste lest the gates be closed against us.
We are to go out as teachers among the people, discarding the limitations imposed by the theologiesof the past, and holding up the moral ideal, pure and simple, as the human ideal, as the ideal for all men, embracing all men, binding on all men—the ideal of a perfect society, of a society in which no men or class of men shall be mere hewers of wood and drawers of water for others; in which no man or woman, or class of men or class of women shall be used as tools for the lusts of others, or for the ambitions of others, or for the greed of others; in which every human life, the life of every man and woman and child, shall be esteemed a sacred utterance of the Infinite.
THE END
WATTS AND CO., PRINTERS, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.