And this last thought prepares for the statement of our view of the attitude a rational religion takes up in the solemn presence of death. "Stoicism shall not be more exigent," said Emerson of the new Church. We take no lax view of life and its responsibilities, but we refuse to magnify death into the one thing worth living for or thinking about.Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat. We do not set about digging our graves, we do not carry our coffins about with us, still less do we sleep in them—a gruesome practice which has attracted some fanatical folk. To us, death is a fact, not an effect, an incident as natural as birth, in no wise affecting the real, the spiritual, man. We therefore utterly disavow all sympathy with the groundless assumption that a magical change comes over the psychical powers of a man at that supreme moment, whereby he can do no more good, but may harden into a more hopeless reprobate. The notion that a judgment of the soul takes place, as in the hall of Osiris, of Egyptian mythology, at the instant of dissolution, whereby the destiny of the individual is sealed for ever, we repudiate in terms. Man is judged, not then, but at every moment of his life. "The moral laws vindicate themselves" without the intervention of any external tribunal. And, therefore, the eternal progress of the man in us is maintained uninterruptedly across the gloomy chasm of death, under other circumstances, no doubt, but still it is the same ceaseless approach towards the Infinite Ideal, the same untiring journey along "the everlasting way". All are in that "way," we may be sure, even those whom we foolishly deem hopelessly reprobate. Something can be made of those failures of men, for
After last returns the first, though a wide compassround be fetched;What began best can't end worst, nor what God onceblest prove accurst.
But such men, the Neros, Caligulas, the Wainwrights and Palmers of all ages and nations, are but a fractional, an infinitesimal, element in the great human family.Sanabiles fecit nationes super terram. "He hath made earth's peoples to be healed;" they shall redeemthemselvesone day. The moment of awakening comes sooner or later to all; there is an unextinguished capacity for good under the sores and scars of the most dissolute life, and we may believe that awakening comes when the spirit enters new-born, as it were, into a world where the illusions of the flesh, the deceptions of the sense, obtain no more.
There are no final, irredeemable failures. The Divine in man must emerge one day; its glory pierce through the gloom of his sin and shame, and transfigure him anew after the beautiful and pathetic image of the holy Christ in the legend,[1] whose closing days on earth, they say, were illumined by one supreme wonder—his face calm and blissful, glowing radiant like the glory of a setting sun, his very raiment turned white like the driven snow. A beauteous imagery! But there was no external transfiguration. It was but a type of the radiant purity within; a witness to the "beauty of holiness". It was an emblem of what all may be in some far-off day, when the lowliest amongst us learns to follow the Christs, the blessed company of all elect souls, in the way which begins and ends in the eternal righteousness.
[1] In the same way the Buddha was "transfigured". See Doane'sBible Myths.
An idealism such as that which substantially identifies religion with morality, is suitably occupied, as occasion offers, in the discussion of those questions of public interest which have an immediate bearing on the well-being of communities. In this respect it departs markedly from the attitude taken up by those Churches, which afford little or no guidance on such matters, probably because it is felt by priests and prelates that their functions are rather of an ultra-mundane character, and that their most important duty is to prepare humanity for the enjoyment of another life after this unsatisfactory stage has passed. Hence the sharp line of distinction they draw between the Church and the world, the one the kingdom of saints, the other "lying" hopelessly "in wickedness". Hence, again, their distinction of "holy days" and secular days, Sunday being devoted to religious exercises, while the remaining six days are presumably to be occupied in wholly secular enterprise. The distinction affects our very attire. Religious rites being of a totally different character from the duties we accomplish during the week, there is nothing for it but to don "our blacks," to quote the language of a current popular play, and enact subsequently the ceremonial described as the church parade. It is the same feeling which causes the average Englishman to lapse into a sort of funereal solemnity at the very mention of the word religion, or of anything allied to it. The divorce of religion from ordinary life could not be more plainly indicated than by such phenomena as we have noticed.
It is, of course, one of the main objects of our movement to show the falsity of this distinction between the Church and the world, between religion and morality. We submit that it is not the institution of the founder of Christianity, but of his later followers. The Church of Christ meant the assemblage of menas men, as citizens. The entry thereto was not by the magical washing away of an imaginary birth-sin, but through the natural and beautiful sacrament of human birth. The world is the Church, and the Church is the world, and the "living stones" out of which "the kingdom of heaven" is built here on earth are precisely the stones out of which the civil commonwealth arises. There is nothing secular, nothing profane, but from first to last the life of every man, from the miraculous moment of his conception to the closing of his eyes in bodily death, and beyond death, through the perfecting of him by an ever-increasing approximation to the standard of all moral perfection, everything is religious, sacred, divine. The Church is nothing but an ethical society, co-extensive with the race, and it is for the realisation of this ideal that the ethical movement is working, to show men that religion is morality, is life.
This preamble, then, may serve as a justification for introducing here such a subject as war. The Christian Churches, with one single exception, that of the Quakers, vouchsafe no guidance whatsoever on the moral aspects of this question. On the contrary, they rather suggest that it is a highly moral proceeding, for their ministers pray to their Deity for the success of their country's arms, and sing theirTe Deumsover the mangled corpses of the vanquished. An archbishop in Spain offered to guarantee the harmlessness of every American bullet, and unctuous prayers were reported in the newspapers of last spring as emanating from Transatlantic pulpits. Indeed, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine what the supreme court of their heaven must be, the perplexities of patron saints and angels, and ultimately of their Deity himself, in face of the immoral mingling of bloodshed and religion which went on during the recent Spanish-American war. But the Churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, see none of the impiety which is so revolting to moral men and women, who to their lasting advantage have emancipated themselves from ecclesiastical guidance. On the contrary, the public in America which looks for moral inspiration to clergymen, is fed upon this sort of doggerel:—
Strike for the Anglo-Saxon!Strike for the newer day!O strike for heart and strike for brain,And sweep thebeastaway.
And let no feeble pityYour sacred arms restrain;This is God's mighty momentTo make an end of Spain!
It is our purpose to endeavour to make an end of the immoral inspiration behind this profane piffle by speaking out our mind on the subject of war as viewed from the standpoint of ethics.
By war we understand the appeal tomightto decide a question ofrightbetween two or more civilised peoples, and of war thus defined I say that it is the great surviving infamy[1] of our unmoral past, the persistence in us of animal instincts, of the ape and tiger which should long since have died out. That man, in the childhood of the world, should have decided questions of justice by an appeal to brute force is only what we should expect. The laws of life, which are laws of development, necessarily presuppose the imperfect before the perfect, the animal as a preparation for the human. As Immanuel Kant puts it in a sentence which flashes the light over the whole panorama of existence, "thecosmicevolution of Nature is continued in thehistoricdevelopment of humanity and completed in themoralperfection of the individual". This is the synthesis of the greatest of the masters of modern philosophy. The non-moral cosmos makes way for a process of moral human development, which is consummated in the perfection of each individual man. Here is theAlphaandOmegaof all existence.
Now, warfare, or the invocation of might to settle right, was as natural an accompaniment of earlier conditions as theft or cannibalism. But is it not obvious that with the disappearance of other unmoral ideals of the past, we have a right to expect, and to demand, that the last and crowning infamy of wholesale and systematised manslaughter, called war, should cease also? The humanity which has got rid of slavery in all civilised countries, which has now through England's instrumentality succeeded in destroying its last strongholds on the Upper Nile, will also ultimately get rid of war. The manhood of the race, which in this country has long since put down the immorality of duelling as a means of settling private differences, will indubitably assert itself elsewhere to the final overthrow of warfare as a means of deciding public disputes. The great reform is in the air. It is everywhere except in the pulpits of Christendom and the "yellow press"—the jingo journalism of the world. We all experienced the growing sense of the unsuitability of war to our modern ideals during the earlier months of this year while matters were reaching the acute stage between Spain and the United States. The best Press in this country reflected the common sentiment, that the whole proceeding is savage, barbarous, inhuman, and therefore utterly unworthy of rational men. I believe it is this growing horror of legalised carnage which prevented the late President of the United States' ill-judged message leading to any rupture between our two countries. It was felt that Englishmen and Americans deliberately setting about the destruction of each other's property and taking one another's lives would amount to a scandal positively unthinkable—a fratricidal horror to be prevented at all and any costs. I am not sure that the same opinion was so universal on the other side, though undoubtedly it existed amongst the best men of the country.
America has at present two difficulties to contend with. First, she is ayoungnation, and young people are fond of trying experiments. And, next, they are burdened, perhaps I should say cursed, with the most violent, anti-cosmopolitan Press anywhere existent. A set of fire-eaters appear to control the New York section, of it, and in the judgment of many sober-minded Americans, with some of whom I have myself spoken, the late war was wholly due to their ceaseless, incessant clamour, and that, given a few months' patience, the Cuban people might have by plebiscite been able to settle their own destiny. The starving peasants concentrated in the towns were the alleged object of the hurry. Long months passed before any succour reached them. If they were veritably starving, surely every man of them must have died long before an American army of liberation could have been effectually landed for their relief. The sympathies of this country were not with Spain, for it is by her misrule, her acknowledged misgovernment of her colonists, that all the mischief has been brought about. One regrets to have to say it, but Spain has been strangled in the coils of her own superstition, and progress for her ceased to be when she elected to live by the light of ideals and principles which are henceforth impossible. It is the frantic endeavour of France and Italy to escape Spain's doom which explains their incessant strife between Church and State. The enlightened Frenchman or Italian has a horror of sacerdotalism as the beginning of the end, always and everywhere, and as the only religion in those countries is sacerdotal, they are, alas, in their national capacity, bereft of any religious guidance or inspiration. We are, therefore, unable to see anything in Spain's present position, but the working of the inevitable law of Compensation, which is sovereign over States as over individuals, though there are many of us who believe that the avowed humanitarian objects of the American Government might have been attained by peaceful methods, had not the country been goaded into a fever of restlessness and impatience by that deplorable phenomenon of democratic institutions known as the "yellow press".
At all events, the feeling universal in this country in the early spring of this year, showed how far and fast we are travelling along the road which will lead us to the final abandonment of warfare as unworthy of rational men. Doubtless we are in advance of other nations in this respect. But that is only what history leads us to expect. We were the first to free slaves, abandon duelling, reform prisons and criminal law, and erect humanitarianism into a veritable religion. And have we not taught representative institutions to the world? We are evidently destined, I believe, to lead the way towards the final surrender of war. We keep no standing army. We shall never again enter on a war of conquest or aggression. Our naval armaments and such military power as we possess are notoriously created and maintained for defensive purposes only. Brigandage and pillage we have most certainly been guilty of in past times, but such a policy could not now survive the day it was mooted. We are in the last trenches, preparatory to finally abandoning the field.
But here it will be urged that there are circumstances which render war absolutely inevitable, such for instance as an unjust aggression upon the territory we own, or even live upon; an attack on the national honour, or a reckless disregard of rights sanctioned by treaty or international usage. Were arbitration in such cases even admissible, we may conceive the would-be aggressor unwilling to have recourse to it, or possibly to abide by its award. What is a government to do then?
Now, arguments and pleas such as these are valid enough against a proposal of universal disarmament to be compulsorily carried out in six months or a year's time, but they in no wise, I submit, constitute an inseparable bar to the realisation of "that sweet dream," as Immanuel Kant called it, of a "perpetual peace". The ideal is none the less real because it cannot be at once put into practice; and had we to wait another whole century, it would still be the duty of our movement to stand by Kant and boldly set up the grand conception of an universal peace as the goal for which all that is best among men is inevitably making. Still, I trust that in our enthusiasm for ethic and for the ideal of its master, we have not lost our heads and betaken ourselves to Utopian impracticabilities. No ethical man could think of fixing a limit within which a national disarmament must take place, and the swords of the world beaten into ploughshares, any more than he could name the date at which the millennium is to be introduced. But this implies no insuperable, or rather, no serious, obstacle to our belief that the ideal of universal arbitration, through the medium of a congress of all nations, must in the future, near or distant, be realised, because it is an ideal which is alone worthy of rational men. And, moreover, the essential rationality of the ideal gives us a right to demand that it should be recognised by all public men, by our legislators who represent us, the Press which aims at reflecting the life and thought of the age, the professors and masters who have the care of our youth, and above all by fathers and mothers to whom tender children are confided, and those men who assume the responsibility of speaking to their generation in the sacred name of religion.
I say the ideal gives us the right to demand its recognition by men in such positions of responsibility, and implies a corresponding obligation on their part, no less than on our own, to labour seriously for its speedy realisation. We are, every one of us, agreed that war is essentially a cruel, barbarous, horribly vindictive and degrading method of serving the interests of the sublimest thing known to man, namely, justice. Wanton warfare, merely for the sake of fighting or killing, or openly avowed oppression, can scarcely be acknowledged now even by the most cynical of statesmen. The public conscience is become too sensitive for that, so that some question of justice, or the semblance of it, must be invoked in order to justify its unspeakable barbarities. But what an outrage, the deliberate destruction of hundreds of thousands of innocent men—men who in their simplicity or ignorance are positively unable to even dimly comprehend why they are being lashed into a blind fury and goaded to the madness of steeping their hands in each other's blood—what barbarity, what savagery to invoke as the minister, as the vindicator of justice! Let us keep our eyes steadily fixed on this central, essential wickedness of the whole business, that it dares to offer its polluted services in the interests of justice and thereby to profane the holiest thing we know.
Remembering this, therefore, let us ask ourselves what help we get in our endeavours to effect its overthrow from the recognised ministers of religion. Why, it is notorious that what has long been clear to philosophers like Immanuel Kant, and philanthropists among humble laymen, has not yet dawned upon the imagination or touched the consciences of bishops or priests. Popes, themselves, have created military orders, "knights and commanders of Christ and the Cross," whose profession it was to destroy life in the name of the most merciful, pitiful man known to us Western people. Popes have led military expeditions, conducted campaigns and crossed swords with the most daring, though the impetuous fisherman, founder of their line, was bidden by Christ to put up his sword into its scabbard, "for all they that take up the sword shall perish by it". Can any man point to one single condemnation of war as immoral, irrational, opposed to the law of their Deity or of Christ, in all the collection of councils, bulls and canonical legislation? And can any man quote to us the charge of an archbishop or bishop in the Anglican Communion or the Greek Communion wherein he has raised his voice against the barbaric survival of war and condemned it in the name of his Saviour Jesus, who spoke of the meek, the mourners, the merciful, the pure in heart, the hungerers and thirsters after righteousness, or, as we say, the ethical enthusiasts, as his followers?
Why, religion, in the hands of bishops and priests, has allowed a trail of blood to be drawn across the path of the ages. I say nothing of religious persecution and the millions who have gone to torture and to doom for erroneous beliefs. I confine myself entirely, to field warfare. During a period of 674 years, from 1141-1815, it is an historical fact that this country and France were at war for no less than 266 years, or considerably more than one-third, and we must remember that up to the Reformation both countries were under the direct guidance, one might almost say the exclusive inspiration, of the Catholic Christianity of the day. But where does history record the act of any religious leaders of those times denouncing war as contrary to the gospel of Christ and of reason alike? We are able to quote numbers of despised heretics who had grasped the truth and emphatically condemned the brutal institution. Thus Erasmus: "They who defend war must defend the dispositions which lead to war, and these dispositions are absolutely forbidden by the gospel". Wickliffe, "the morning star of the Reformation in England," thought it "utterly unlawful," according to Priestley; and as Southey writes in hisHistory of Brazil: "There is but one community of Christians in the world, and that unhappily of all communities one of the smallest, enlightened enough to understand the prohibition of war by the Divine Master in its plain literal and undeniable sense and conscientious enough to obey it, subduing the very instinct of nature to obedience".
These facts are noteworthy because they show that had the official churches—the Roman, Greek and Anglican—been true to their charge and commission from their founder; had they been unworldly enough to defy the world and denounce its barbarous practices, we might have been far nearer Kant's "sweet dream" of universal peace. But the churches,as churches, have done very little for the cause of the "Prince of peace," and now the world itself has outgrown their moral standard and looks to them for guidance and inspiration no more. By the light of reason alone, by the inspiration we gather from thegrands espritsof the race, above all by the teaching of Immanuel Kant in his beautiful treatise on "Perpetual Peace," we intend to do what in us lies to put down this surviving, crowning infamy of war, the very thought of which brutalises the mind, outrages its humanitarian instincts, and degrades the ideals whereby we desire to live.
But, surely, it will be urged, we cannot refuse to acknowledge undoubted benefits, both public and individual, which war has conferred in the past. It has welded nomad peoples into nations, bred courage, devotion, loyalty, unselfishness, self-sacrifice even to death in the hearts of those who have nobly borne their part therein. Is not the soldier hero, the military chieftain, the idol of all mankind?
Doubtless he is, and unquestionably through the instrumentality of war great services have been rendered to the communities of peoples in the past and noble individual traits of character created. It is an axiom with us that the universe is so wondrously ordered that out of the worst things a soul of good may and does emerge, and so goodly is creation that its very evils become a source wherefrom good may arise.
What was good shall be good with for evil so much good more.
Thus, for example, the young lieutenant ordered to sink a hulk across the bay of Santiago, and his handful of companions have, by exposing themselves to imminent risk of an awful death, deeply stirred the feelings of their fellow-countrymen and filled us all with a sense of admiration at the heroism which can contemn danger and death in the execution of duty or the quest of glory. But we must ask whether humanity is in need of such exhibitions of bravery, whether there are not other fields of danger which offer tasks equally arduous and difficult of accomplishment? We are not insensible to the claims of military or naval heroism, but I confess I see much more to admire in Father Damien voluntarily surrendering himself to the slow and loathsome martyrdom of Molokai, more in the self-devotion of our "white slaves," as they must, alas! be called, who toil all the day and a deal of the night in a heavy, noisome, almost disease-laden atmosphere in the disgracefully crowded slums of our great cities, and all to earn a few pence wherewith to buy just enough bread to keep body and soul together in themselves and their children. Think of the matchbox-makers, who turn out a gross for a few halfpence, out of which they must supply some of their own materials. Think of the seamstresses, the shirt-makers and tailors' assistants in the veritable dens of East London, who by slaving for fifteen hours out of twenty-four can earn eighteenpence a day, out of which four or five shillings must be paid weekly for rent. Think of these mean, squalid surroundings in which a life of positively ceaseless toil must be lived, the patience and long-suffering with which it is endured, the silent martyrdom of monotonous, unrelieved existence prolonged over long years. Think of it, I say, and compare it with the intoxication of the battle-field, the cavalry charge, the roar of cannon and musketry, the rapid movements and counter-movements, the exultation which the sight of numberless men produces, grim, deadly determination on their faces, the thought of glory, the hope of renown, the dash of a few minutes, the stroke perhaps of a few seconds, the wild burst of untamed, savage human nature temporarily released from the restraint of reason! What cannot, what shall not man under such circumstances accomplish? Yes, we are not insensible to deeds of immortal daring, of courage, that must live for ever; nor to the memory of Leonidas and his Spartans, of the deathless glories of Thermopylae, of the unbroken chain of chivalric deeds from the days of ancient Greece to "the thin red line" that broke the fiercest charge, and the handful of Englishmen that shot away their last cartridge and then stood to die with their country's anthem on their lips—we are not insensible to all this, but we say the day for it is past and gone, and the heroism of the battle-field must be consecrated anew to the service of peace and the poor. The millions on millions we are spending on those majestic engines of destruction, those ships of ours that bastion the brine for England, what could they not do for the moralisation of the poor and outcast at our very doors in this city! Why, in three years that inferno of the East End, that foul, reeking, pestilential nest of tenements, unfit for even animal habitation, could be swept clean away and human homes erected which, to put it on the lowest grounds, would positively pay a dividend on the capital outlay, as has been convincingly proved over and over again.
"How long, O Lord, how long," we exclaim with the prophet of old, shall men be consumed with this ignoble fever, this war-madness which degrades the combatants far more than it exalts them, which senselessly destroys valuable property, scatters ruin broadcast, paralyses industry, robs the poor of all the bread of life, fills the land with mourning and desolation, with widows and orphans?—war, which we learnt from wild beasts, our ancestors, which cannot therefore determine a question of justice, which makes the wrong triumph as often as the right, which degrades all that touch it by isolating them for months, for years perhaps, from civilised life, which demoralises the victors, embitters the vanquished, and, by creating strife, perpetuates the possibilities of renewed strife—war, which at this moment keeps Europe in the condition of an armed camp, millions of men leading comparatively idle lives, with long hours on their hands which they cannot fill, with the inevitable results, the nauseating record of filth, disease and abominations too utterly loathsome even to think about—war, which is the curse of the poor and unfortunate, consuming the energies of men and the material means whereby their unhappy lot might be alleviated—war, the hard, cruel, relentless, inexorable monster of unregenerate man's creation—we, since no pope, bishop or priest will do it—we execrate it in the name of all we hold holiest, in the name of reason, morality and religion, and we pledge ourselves so to act, privately and politically, as to promote such measures—a federation of all English-speaking nations of the earth, if that will serve the purpose, or any other method equally or more serviceable—as will finally exorcise this last of the besetting demons of humanity, and fulfil thereby the "sweet dream" of our master and inspirer, Immanuel Kant.
Ring out the old, ring in the new;* * * * *Ring out the false, ring in the true;Ring out old shapes of foul disease;Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;Ring out the thousand wars of old;Ring in the thousand years of peace.
[1] Since these words were written theDaily Chronicleof 10th September, 1898, quotes them as having been used by a distinguished living English general.
There is probably no department of morality in which a metaphysic of ethic is more conspicuously needed than in that which concerns marriage. The insurrection of woman against the disabilities to which her sex was in the past unjustly subjected, due perhaps more to custom and tradition than to the statute law of the land, has developed in more recent times into a serious attack on the central institution of civilised life, on that fundamental fact of Nature on which posterity and society repose. We have had an outbreak in literature culminating in the giddy glory of the "hill-top novel," with its heroine "who did," and in America what is tautologically described as the "Free-Love Society" was founded to propagate the truth of what Rousseau euphemistically describes asmariage après la nature. For all that, however, one seems to hear less of the "hill-top" species, and possibly—with the problem play, without which no theatre was complete a couple of years ago—it may be fading into the mist of the past. It is with communities, we may take it, as with individuals. There are moments when, as it has been said, "every one is an atheist, from archbishops downwards," when a sense of the purposelessness and futility of perpetual combat seizes the most ardent. These are the dark hours when attacks are planned and delivered against the most sacred institutions, when people are not at their best, but are restless, rebellious and impatient of restraint; for nations like individuals can go mad. Then it is that the wide-awake novelist and playwright see their opportunity, and the temporary success of the sex-play or the breezy romance is the reflection of the thoughts—none of the best—that are for the moment flitting through men's feverish minds. But we soon return to saner moments; our moral sense resumes its normal sway, and sex-plays and romances fade away into oblivion.
Now, it need not be said that the contention on behalf of the rights of woman is heartily espoused by a movement which bases itself on the conception of reason and justice as the root facts of existence. There was no justice in the "subjection of woman," and we hold that those opportunities of learning which a cultured age opens up to man should likewise be at the disposal of his sister; that that freedom, which is the birthright of the man, to expand the energies, mental and moral, of his being to their fullest extent and in whatever calling, should also be acknowledged to be the right of woman. The constitutional agitation for the recognition of her rights has met with notable success, and it has the fullest support of the ethical Church; but we believe that that agitation has been pushed too far by a very small and insignificant minority, and made to cover an attack on the institution of matrimony, which her wisest friends see could only end in the ultimate downfall of woman herself. Such an agitation, such an attack, must encounter the most resolute opposition from a body which derives all its idealism and inspiration from a life motived, not by the sense, but by reason. Its leaders in America have pronounced decisively against any tampering with the natural sacrament of marriage, and where they detect tendencies—as unfortunately they do in many of the States of their Union—to further loosen its bonds, they, with all the influence at their command, endeavour to strengthen them.
Let me now proceed to justify this attitude of the ethical communion.
We do not base our action on considerations of authority such as move the Churches of Christendom. It is not because Jesus assisted at a wedding breakfast and performed an alleged wonder; not because the Apostle Paul calls marriage "a great mystery in Christ and the Church," but because both Jesus and Paul and the Churches express a truth of nature itself, that the union of man and woman is not, and cannot be, the herding of animals; that the bestowal of the body cannot but be the outward symbol of an invisible bond which is the very soul and life of the contract. We thus go behind all Churches and apostles and ascend to the very roots of Nature herself, and discern in the golden glory wherewith she surrounds the ideal marriage the significance of her intentions in its regard—that it is her true and real Sacrament, that her sons and daughters are themselves its ministers, for they alone are kindled with the heavenly fire; that not the Church, not the priest nor ritual celebrates it, but these twain made one by that same
Love which moves the earth and heavens and all the stars.
That man has so regarded marriage as a sacred and sacramental fact is authenticated by history in an abundantly available form. No doubt, ages must have passed before he emerged from his animalesque condition and abandoned polygynous and polygamous manners, the marriage by capture and purchase, which were the stages which mark the historical evolution of the contract. But ultimately these barbaric stages passed away, and we discover in the Teutonic ancestors of Britain that monogamy which was Nature's ideal from the first. Just as man was potential in the primordial slime, so was the marriage of Robert Browning a possibility in the earliest union of scarce-emancipated man and woman. What the institutioncouldbecome, what ithasbecome, shows what was the intent of Nature from the beginning. In the nobler days of Rome, under the republic and early empire, the same lofty conception animated her best sons. It was the decay of reverence for the sacred bond, the era when a woman's years were told by the number of her divorces, which called forth the solemn warnings of her moralist poets and philosophers, and ultimately brought about the emasculation of the nation's manhood and the downfall of the empire. We have not the remotest doubt but that a similar contempt in modern Europe for Nature's ordinance would involve us in the same catastrophe. A low estimate of marriage means contempt of woman; the contempt of woman means her degradation from her position at the side of man as his counsellor and his friend to that of his plaything, the instrument of his pleasure; that again means the enthronement of licence and licentiousness; that, the softening of the brain power of the manhood of the race, leading to degeneracy, imbecility, and ultimate extinction. We need no ecclesiastical organisation to tell us these things, nor threaten us with direst penalties here or hereafter. These are the penalties of nature's own aboriginal enactment. As it was in the beginning, so it is now, and so it shall be unto all time. No wonder St. Paul called marriage "a great mystery"!
Now, though it be true that Nature's ideal is that which we call monogamy, it may be perfectly true that we have not yet reached that level of morality which makes that condition universally practicable. That wisest of teachers, Jesus of Nazara, expressly recognised this distinction when he told the Jews of his own day that their lack of ethical enthusiasm, "their hardness of heart," as he accurately expressed it, the emptiness of their souls of everything save narrow nationalism and religious formalism—an emptiness by no means peculiar to them—was the sole reason which justified a departure from Nature's great ideal. "In the beginning it was not so," he declared, but "Moses gave ye permission to write out a bill of divorce". That one exception may be necessary still, but, let it be understood, it is not the ideal, and every one knows it, faithful and faithless alike, they whose honour is intact and they whose souls are smirched. It is an instinct in the human heart—no one can deny it—that love is for evermore. Shakespeare is right, "Marriage is a world-without-end bargain," for love is felt to be eternal. The old Roman digest interprets nature with philosophic accuracy when it describes marriage as "Conjunctio maris et feminae et consortium omnis vitae, divini et humani juris communicatio". "The union of man and woman and the companionship of all life, the sharing of right, human and divine." That is the majestic conception of matrimony as it took shape in the brain of those Roman masters of jurisprudence to whom we owe the law which is the nerve of civilisation. They learnt it from that ethical religion which we, too, reverently follow, from that morality which they foundin things, in themselves, in Nature's plain teaching that the union of man and his wife was a sacramental fact and therefore indelible.
Are we asked for further evidence of this position? We see it as a law of our rational being, which refuses to believe that Nature makes no other provision for us than she does for the animals; that their instinctive and impulsive association should be the norm of man's intercourse with woman. Nay, we see Nature herself as she advances to the higher stages of animal existence anticipating, in a sense, that ideal which was only to be fully realised in man. The lion, the king of beasts, as he is called, tends towards that ideal, and the elephant is believed to be even more strictly monogamous. The loves of birds, of doves and pigeons, are too well known to need more than a passing mention, and the grief they experience on the death of their partner not unfrequently ends in a broken heart. But how much better is man than many animals, and what is merely instinctive in them shall not he consciously obey as his acknowledged law of life?
We may see the truth also in Nature's ordinance, that man's offspring must be educated in order to reach maturity; that training of a serious character is indispensably necessary to the development of the powers latent in them. But how is such training possible, except through the unceasing watchfulness of the parents'? People here and there darken counsel with the suggestion that the State should assume such responsibilities. Was there ever such a suggestion? As a matter of mere finance, we are told by the Vice-President of the Council, that the assumption of the quite partial responsibility for the education of the children now taught in the elementary schools of the denominational bodies of the country, would mean an addition of some millions yearly to the rates. The education rate is high enough in all conscience, but where the "hill-top" theory would land us one can scarcely conjecture. So urgent is this consideration of the claim which offspring has upon parent, so imperative the need that children should be fittingly instructed so as to be worthy citizens of a great community, that we find writers like Karl Pearson, in hisEthic of Free Thought,[1] consistently excepting from the operation of the free-love gospel those unions which have resulted in the procreation of children. Mr. Pearson being of the school of those who deride marriage as "the tomb of love," "the source of the stupidity and ugliness of the human race," his admissions as to the necessity of maintaining some element of permanence in the contract, if only for the sake of children, is well worthy of our attention. It shows how grounded in nature is that conception of the marriage tie which the Roman digest has put before us.
We may see the truth, once again, in the acknowledged instability of the passional element in human nature—particularly in man. It is nothing short of amazing to see this very instability urged as a reason why the marriage tie should be still further weakened, as though man should deliberately subject himself to the vagaries of sense, instead of the guidance of reason. We hear much to-day about the "return to nature," and, soundly interpreted, that gospel sounds like a breath of pure mountain air after the stifling atmosphere of modern convention and unreality. Would to heaven, I say from my heart, that we were more natural, that a greater frankness and directness marked our intercourse with one another, that the shams and pretences of so much of our social life were made away with, that our lives were more open and free! The grand old Stoic maxim had it thus:Live in accordance with nature. Yes, but with what nature? No thinker, from Socrates to Kant, from Buddha to Hegel, ever had a doubt but that man's nature was twofold, and that the law of reason must be supreme in him. Let an animal live for sense; it is its nature; but for man another law is ordained, which bids him think last of enjoyment, and to partake only of that in obedience to the law of the mind. The modern evangel of the apotheosis of the unstable we understand to convey the teaching, "Live in accordance with sense, or the feeling of the moment". Be like thedame du mondewhom Mrs. Ward has so accurately drawn inMadame de Netteville, who did not hold herself responsible to our petty codes, and judged that feeling was guidance enough for her. That may be all very well for Madame de Netteville, but how does such teaching look in the light of Kant's solemn injunction: "Act so that thy conduct may become a law unto all men"? Could any one seriously propose to erect feeling into a supreme criterion whereby to judge of the conduct of life?
And, to show that the line of argument here adopted is no mere false asceticism surviving from an undisciplined and pre-scientific age, as the solemn verbiage of so much second-rate talking expresses it to-day, we may quote some words of David Hume, Huxley's "prince of agnostics," from theEssay on Polygamy and Divorce. The least emotional of philosophers—a hard-headed Scotsman—he makes short work of the sentimentality which is invoked now-a-days against the natural law of marriage:—
"We need not be afraid of drawing the marriage knot . . . the closest possible. The unity between the persons, where it is solid and sincere, will rather gain by it; and where it is wavering and uncertain that is the best method for fixing it. How many frivolous quarrels and disgusts are there, which people of common prudence endeavour to forget, when they lie under the necessity of passing their lives together; but which would soon be inflamed into the most deadly hatred, were they pursued to the utmost under the prospect of an easy separation! We must consider that nothing is more dangerous than to unite two persons so closely in all their interests and concerns, as man and wife, without rendering the union entire and total. The least possibility of a separate interest must be the source of endless quarrels and suspicions. The wife, not secure of her establishment, will still be driving some separate end or project; and the husband's selfishness, being accompanied by no power, may be still more dangerous." Thus our conception of marriage as a nature sacrament, a permanent contract in Nature's original intention, is abundantly confirmed by the sceptical philosopher of the eighteenth century. Whatever man may make of the contract, there stands the fact that that Nature meant it to be enduring which whispered into the lover's heart that "love should be for evermore".
It is a far cry from the abstractions of philosophy to the realisms of French fiction, but we could not better conclude this portion of our subject than by citing one single sentence from Balzac, in the judgment of many the first romancer of this century, and one of the greatest masters of the social sciences. "Nothing," he declares, "more conclusively proves the necessity of indissoluble marriage than the instability of passion."
But here our difficulties begin. Though it may be abundantly clear that Nature's ideal is Hume's and Balzac's, is it not a fact that this "high has proved too high, this heroic for earth too hard"? Is it not true that there are murmurs and mutterings of revolt both amongst men and women against a burden too grievous to be borne? Does not the fiction of the day represent a tendency to allow an increased laxity in the interpretation of the matrimonial contract? And where there is smoke there is fire. What novelists write other people are thinking. Has the time come to reconsider our position with regard to marriage and the permanent obligations hitherto associated with it?
We answer decisively, No. It is not the institution which is at fault, but the individuals who embrace it. We spoke of marriage as Nature's great sacrament, and so it is. And as with "the Lord's Supper" the unworthy participant is said to "eat and drink only condemnation to himself," so is it with they who draw near to Nature's banquet and attempt, unprepared, to partake of the deepest joys of life. Their profanity smites them with a curse. We hold up our hands in no Pharisaic spirit of holy horror, but we ask the men and women of this generation and of those classes from which these mutterings and threatenings of revolt mainly emanate—we ask them, whether marriage, as they understand the term, can be other than a bloodless martyrdom? If that individual who gave her name to a novel two or three seasons ago, if the young woman known asDodobe a type—and it was noted by the critics of the time that such was the character of the fashionable youngmondaineof the day, greedy for nothing but excitement and sensuous existence, incapable of serious thought, rebellious against, I will not say the restraints, but even theconvenancesof civilised life, with no pretension to anything remotely resembling character or moral earnestness, a wild, gay, frittering, helpless creature, whom it were blasphemy to think of in the same day with noble womanhood as we all have known it—ifthat, I say, is the type of the youngmondaineof the hour, then I have no doubt they will give the novelists and playwrights plenty of employment in describing their self-imposed torments, the insufferable bondage to which they are subjected. But does any one propose to alter the moral law for them? If mothers in modern Babylon are ready to labour day and night in attempting to catch as husbands for their daughters men in whom one and one only qualification is asked, namely, that of wealth, then their perdition be upon their own heads and on those of the luckless pair who are literally speaking "crucified on a cross of gold". If girls continue to be brought up with the preposterous notion that marriage is the one profession open to them, and that therefore they are by no means to risk the loss of an "engagement," no matter who the employer may be, and that the wealthier he is the more suitable he is to be adjudged, then let us abandon all attempts at reaching our ideal. But let us at the same time prepare for the overthrow of the home and the family; for the destruction of "pure religion breathing household laws," and of the stately, dignified, domestic life, which has been the glory of every land where Nature's true ideal has been worthily upheld.
If boys are brought up at school, or taught by the social atmosphere they breathe on first entering into early manhood, to conceive of marriage as in no wise nobler or loftier in essence than any of thosemariages après la nature, those ephemeral associations, terminable at will; that the only difference between them is, that the one is legal and permanent, the other voluntary and dissoluble, then so long will the scandals of divorce and the revolt against marriage continue to be heard. What one complains of is the utter lack of reverence in the view which is taken of this most solemn of all acts. There is no idealism in the contract. The thoughtless youth who has grown up in what one may call the "wild oats" theory is, we suggest, utterly incapable of appreciating the absolutely inestimable blessings which wedded love might have brought him. How can he? He has "wasted his substance, living riotously," and the most precious of all the treasures he has squandered is that of his idealism.His wife can scarcely be to him what she might have been had he come to her as he expected her to come to him. "The golden gates are closed," "a glory has passed from the earth". This is pain enough to make hearts weep, but it is the operation of that inflexible law of Compensation, that not all the tears of sorrow, not all the absolutions and sacrificial atonements of Churches, can undo that past, can make that young man to be as in the days of his youth, before the experimental "knowledge of good and evil" touched him.
Our remedy is, therefore, not to destroy the institution of Nature, but to reform the candidates who undertake to embrace it. An ethical religion would reprobate the sacrilegious bargains in which bodies are exchanged for gold, and refuse to accord them the honorific title of marriage, which is first and foremost a union of souls. Time and again have we seen that the springs of all things are in the invisible world, from the breath of a flower to the energy that pulsates in the great bosom of the ocean, or governs the movements of the uttermost star. It is so here. Not the transference of bodies, of titles, of wealth or station, are the sacrament. They are merely the accessories, the outward form, the symbol of something higher and Diviner far, of the invisible love, which is everywhere, yet manifests itself in especial manner in these two souls, speaking even in their very countenances of an emotion supreme and irresistible. An ethical religion, wholly based upon and identified with morality, would refuse to sanction any marriage but that we have described, a union based upon a supreme affection between two who had worthily prepared themselves for its consummation, and believed in the permanence of their tie.
With regard to the modern maiden—theDodosand their kindred swains—it would be infinitely preferable that they did not degrade the sanctity of a natural sacrament by profanely prostituting it to their temporal and social convenience. Far better that they betook themselves to "the marriage after the truth of nature" than to the great human institution of which Milton sang:—
Hail, wedded love, mysterious law,True source of human offspring!
They do but defile it by their patronage, and having manifestly spoiled themselves by their reckless lives for the entertainment of any emotion deeper than mere sensuousness, they are bound at length to bring a noble institution into contempt, and drag it down in their own fall. You do not believe, we would say to them, in the eternity of soul and love, and therefore the nature sacrament is not for you. But having presented yourselves at its sacred table, and partaken of its rites, do not, if only for motives of mere decency, betake yourselves to the denunciation of that of which, indeed, you were never worthy.
Week by week, at the services of the ethical Church, we see numbers of young men who doubtless aspire one day to share in the benediction which a true marriage alone can bring them. Their presence is welcome as a testimony to the virility and inspiration of the ethic creed which is strong enough to prevail over other inducements which would take them far afield. It shows that spirit overcomes the flesh, and that the culture of the mind is not postponed to the relaxation and enjoyment of the body.
What the ethical religion says to all such as they is this: Live so as to be worthy of that which you one day hope to receive at Nature's hands—a pure, good and true wife. Somewhere, in some corner of this earth, unknown to you, unknown to her, she is being made ready for the hour of your espousals. You will know her when you see her. Wait until you do. Remember the requisite preparation of the body, and now forget not the preparation of the mind.
Marriage is based on friendship, that true kinsman of love, which made a poet call his friend "O thou half of my own soul!" [2] Your wife must be your friend. True love, the love of which true marriages are made, is friendship transfigured—the halo, the glory, of a supreme emotion coming to crown that which is most enduring on this earth. Just as we say that our religion is morality, is duty, only etherealised by viewing it as the expressed mind and will of the Soul of all souls, the World-intelligence, so do we think of marriage as based on a union of souls by friendship, inspired by a deep mutual respect, not for what the partners have, but for what they are, and finally made glorious in the light of an unfading love. Live, we would counsel you, so as to be worthy one day of the reverence of a woman's pure and untried soul.
And our message to womanhood is not dissimilar. Live, we would say, so that you be worthy of the respect, of the homage of all men. Your nature is such that virtue in you has a double charm, wherefore you are visibly marked out as the treasury wherein the ideal is enshrined and handed down through all the generations of men.
A nation is, ethically speaking, worth just what its women are worth, and we must therefore rejoice, and greatly rejoice, to know that the contention which is being increasingly put forth by women, that the men who demand their sisters' hands should themselves be arrayed in suitable wedding garment, is convincing evidence of a strong ethical enthusiasm which is beginning to pervade the sex, and a determination to ennoble more and more that one great sacramental ordinance of Nature, marriage.
All things transitoryBut as symbols are sent;Earth's insufficiency grows to event;The indescribable,Here it is done,The ever-womanly leadeth usUpward and on.—GOETHE.
[1] Pp. 431-443.
[2] "Dimidium animae meae" (Horace).
The appearance within the last hundred years of different philosophical attempts to produce a synthesis which should combine at once a system of thought for the guidance of the mind, and a source of enthusiasm for the inspiration of the heart, is significant of many things, but chiefly of two. In the first place it is evidence that the present has outgrown the past; that the religion of medievalism is inadequate to modern needs; that
Still the new transcends the old,In signs and tokens manifold.
And, next, it would appear to indicate the serious disposition of the new Age. If we find the thinkers of humanity uniformly tending towards a given direction, we may be sure there is an undefined, perhaps unconscious, though none the less real, desire on the part of the age to be led thither. Thus, at the close of the last century, Immanuel Kant, while undermining the ground on which the faith of old rested, attempted that new presentation of religion, as essential and sovereign morality, with which we are so familiar. And, within half a century of the foundation of the new Church, we meet with another bold and comprehensive effort to revivify religion, which had grown cold in the heart of his country, by showing that its chief expression is to be found in that "love of the brotherhood" whereby Jesus Christ declared his own truest followers would ever be known. "We tire of thinking and even of acting," this foremost of the thinkers of his age declared, but "we never tire of loving". I need not say that these are the words of Auguste Comte, one of the two men in this nineteenth century who had learning enough to grasp the universal knowable, and genius enough to express it in a clearly defined philosophic system. His fellow and compeer, of course, is our own Herbert Spencer.
Now, no one will be able to even dimly appreciate the significance of the work of Immanuel Kant and Auguste Comte unless he realises that the inspiration which moved them both was that which we call religion. As the rivers flow into the sea, so the streams of knowledge converge at a point which marks the limits of the finite, the boundaries of the Infinite. There never was a system of thought yet which did not culminate in the sublimity of religion. From the first system of all, the immortal Aristotle's, down to Kant's, Comte's and Spencer's in our own times, the issue is always the same: philosophy leads the way to the Boundless; it lifts the veils of the Eternal. And therefore Kant and Comte, each in his own way, while setting forth their exposition of intellectual truth, endeavoured to provide a stimulus to move the heart of man to put its plain teachings into execution.
Though at first sight there appears to be nothing but irreconcilable opposition between the critical and positivist systems, there is, nevertheless, a fundamental unity which Comte was quick enough to detect, for he pronounced Kant "the most positive of all metaphysicians". What led him to this conviction was the fact that the German philosopher had, like himself, based his whole idealism on the sure ground of morality which cannot be overthrown. As Spinoza was called by Novalis "a God-intoxicated man," so Comte was described by Mill as "morality-intoxicated," for in the purity and elevation of his ethical conceptions he comes nearest of all to the austere standard set up by Kant and Emerson.
Nor do the points of resemblance stop here. In the course of this chapter it will become ever more evident that there is no irreconcilable opposition between the ethical religion of Kant and the Religion of Humanity of Comte, nay, that there appears to be a well-grounded hope that the Church of the Future, which we salute from afar, and towards the building of which we are each contributing our share, will in the main embrace as its essential features the teaching of these two great men. For that Church will aspire to guide men in their private and in their public capacities, in their individual and in their social life. The ethic of Kant, the categorical imperative of duty, will be the inspiration of the individual; thePolitique Positiveof Comte will govern him in his social and political relations, while in the supreme concern of worship, I venture to foretell a widening of the Comtist ideal so as to admit of such conceptions as underlie the philosophical belief of Mr. Spencer, that the world and man are but "the fugitive product of a Power without beginning or end," whose essence is ineffable. Thus the agnosticism of to-day will contribute to the reverence of the future, while I firmly believe that the religion of Humanity will come to be so interpreted as not to wholly exclude belief in an Existence anterior to man and to all things, from whom he and all he knows aboriginally sprang, unto whom he and all things ultimately return. Nothing shall be lost of these words of life which have fallen from Wisdom's lips; they are treasured now in many hearts, and some day, near or distant, they will be one and all incorporated in some diviner gospel than any which has yet been heard, and preached in some church, vast enough, catholic enough, for the inspiration of the race.Reposita est haec spes in sinu meo.
In the meantime, we must attempt something of a succinct statement of the ethical, social and religious system with which the name of Auguste Comte is associated.
It is clear that he was early impelled to a study of the principles on which society rests by the disorganisation into which his country had fallen, after the upheaval of the Revolution and the disasters of the Napoleonic era which succeeded it. It may even be the truth that his bold and subversive teaching in religious matters was due to a profound conviction that the virtue of the old ideals had been completely exhausted, and that if society was to be regenerated, it must be by a radical reformation of the theoretic conceptions on which it had been held to repose. Certainly there was a vast deal in the contemporary history of France to confirm Comte in his belief that Catholicism had spent its force. At a period of crisis in a nation's history, thinking men naturally look about them for some strong influence, for some commanding ideal which can serve as a rallying point in times of social dispersion, and help to keep the severing elements of the body politic together. But what had religion done for France in the hour of her trial? So little, that the country had to wade through blood in order to reach a measure of political emancipation which England had long enjoyed. In fact, it was the corruption of religion in the person of its official representatives, its intellectual degradation in the eyes of the thinkers, which helped to provoke the catastrophe. What wonder, then, that a mind so penetrating and alert as Comte's early arrived at the conclusion that theancien régimein religion, no less than in politics, must be abolished if progress was to be possible among men?
Comte, then, was essentially a social philosopher. His work, indeed, is encyclopaedic—not one whit less so than Spencer's—but the aim he persistently kept in view was the service of man by the reconstruction, through philosophy and religion, of the foundations on which civilisation rests. It is impossible not to be impressed by the grandeur of his conception, and the consuming energy with which he addressed himself to its realisation. He seems to recall to us Browning's Paracelsus, whose "vast longings" urged him forward to some surpassing achievement, to some heroic attempt
To save mankind,To make some unexampled sacrificeIn their behalf, to wring some wonderous goodFrom heaven or earth for them.
When a young man of only twenty-four years, he had already published his first work, entitledA Plan of Scientific Works necessary to reorganise Society, thus striking the keynote of his career. We can feel nothing but the strongest admiration for the man who from the first determines to subordinate knowledge, life and love, to the service of the human race. It was Comte's incessant teaching that the sciences were to be cultivated, not as ends in themselves, but as means whereby to further human welfare. He would have the astronomer and physiologist pursue their tasks, not merely for the sake of acquiring knowledge, for the gratification of the curiosity to know, but for the betterment of man's lot. And for the same reason he insisted on the pre-eminence of the sympathetic affections over the intellect. The reason, he declared, must ever be the servant,though not the slave, of the emotions. Altruism, or the service of others (a word of his own coining), must be made to prevail over egoism or selfishness. There could not be a nobler conception of human duty.
What was the source of the miseries which had driven the people of France to rebellion but the selfishness of absolute monarchs, of dissolute nobles who ground their dependants to the dust of destitution, and of a corrupt hierarchy of clergymen contemptuous of the people, hypocritical in their conduct, and slaves of the crown? An astounding revelation that elementary religion should be preached again in France by a layman who had turned his back in disappointment on all that priests and the past represented!
And what is the source of the degradation of our own cities but this same curse of selfishness which is ready to march to opulence and luxury over the bodies of the starved and poisoned toilers of our towns and factories, and thinks it can justify its barbarity by an off-hand reference to Political Economy and its irrefragable laws? "Supply and demand"—sacrosanct enactments of man's brains—how shall they prevail over the clear dictates of the conscience that thunder in our ears that it is murderous to grind the life out of the poor in the name of an economical fetish? Is not the man more than the meat, and the body more than the raiment? How shall not man, then, be better than many economical laws? If the laws outrage our sense of justice, then are they false laws, because false to reason, and they must be abolished. The unrestricted domination of the competition theory which urges men to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, and pay the very lowest wages that poor outcasts are forced in their destitution to accept—is that to be the permanent condition of large masses of toilers in the towns of the richest country in the world? Is the matchbox-maker to go on for ever turning out a gross for 2 1/4d., providing her own paste and string? Are wretched women to toil from morning till night folding sheets—sheets of cheap bibles at 10s. a week and pay lodging and keep a family out of it? Are men and women to be decimated by consumption in the poisoned atmosphere of some of our factories? No commonwealth can exist on such a basis, and if economical laws are invoked in its support, those laws are an infamy. No wonder Carlyle fiercely denounced it all as "a wretched, unsympathetic, scraggy atheism and egoism".
Well, Auguste Comte had witnessed all this and possibly worse than this in Prance. He knew the institutions of his country and of his age, and he came to the deliberate conclusion that if any progress was to be made, if this degrading egoism was to be put down, this callous insensibility on the part of employers towards the labourers, whose slow martyrdom produces the wealth they enjoy, the whole scheme of social philosophy would have to be reconsidered and a new foundation provided whereon to build the commonwealth. "You want altruism in place of egoism; sympathy instead of selfishness," he preached. "How are you going to obtain it? For eighteen centuries now you have been walking in one beaten path, following one and the same light, listening to the same spiritual guides. What have they taught you? Whither have they led you? To the impasse which you have now reached. Has not the time come to begin anew; to reconstruct, to reorganise society? And this time it must besans dieu, sans roi, par le culte systématique de l'Humanité."
Such is the remedy proposed by Auguste Comte for the malady of the modern world; this is his revolutionary scheme for the establishment of society on such a basis as would conduce to progress. It involves, as may be seen, the disavowal of the belief in God and king; the substitution of a republic for a monarchy, and of humanity for God. Comte conceived religion as the concentration of the three great altruistic affections, namely, ofreverencetowards that which is above us; oflovetowards that which helps and sustains us, andbenevolencetowards that which needs our co-operation. Religion being in his judgment a supreme concern of life, though always subordinated to the larger interest of social welfare, he was anxious to provide the new commonwealth with an idealism which should set before man a Being able to evoke these three great emotions. Formerly man had bestowed them on God; Comte thought he had found a more excellent way in suggesting that they might far more appropriately and profitably be exercised on mankind. The service of God, therefore, being changed into the service of man, he contended that the course of things would set steadily in a higher direction, because all the immense energy and enthusiasm which the worship of God had been able to provoke in the past would be available in the cause of suffering, down-trodden and persecuted humanity. He wished to dam the stream of devotion flowing towards the churches and God, and divert it into channels that had far greater need of it—the unsatisfied and unprovided needs of all mankind.
Is it urged that religion apart from a belief in God is an impossibility? Doubtless such is the conviction of great numbers of people, and, it must be confessed, such usage of the word is not consonant with prevalent custom. Still the emotion which Comte experienced for Humanity was such as no other word would adequately express. As Mr. Mill remarks in his chapters on the Positivist System (p. 133)—
It has been said that whoever believes in the infinite nature of duty, even if he believe in nothing else, is religious. Comte believes in what is meant by the infinite nature of duty, but he refers the obligations of duty, as well as all sentiments of devotion, to a concrete object, at once ideal and real; the human race, conceived as a continuous whole, including the past, the present and the future. . . . Candid persons of all creeds may be willing to admit that if a person has an ideal object, his attachment and sense of duty towards which are able to control and discipline all his other sentiments and propensities, and prescribe to him a rule of life, that person has a religion. . . . The power which may be acquired over the mind by the idea of the general interest of the human race, both as a source of emotion and as a motive to conduct, many have perceived; but we know not if any one before Comte realised so fully as he has done all the majesty of which that idea is susceptible. It ascends into the unknown recesses of the past, embraces the manifold present, and descends into the indefinite and unforeseeable future. Forming a collective existence without assignable beginning or end, it appeals to that feeling of the infinite which is deeply rooted in human nature, and which seems necessary to the imposingness of all our highest conceptions.
However, we must now endeavour to briefly trace the steps whereby Comte arrived at what certainly must be acknowledged a most startling conclusion.
A study of universal history, of which he must be acknowledged an absolute master, had convinced him that all human institutions, be they beliefs, forms of society or government, scientific conceptions, or modes of thought in general, have passed through three distinct stages. These three stages he called the theological, metaphysical and positive. In the first stage history shows that man explained the origin of everything by explicit reference to wills like his own, though, of course, invisible; and ultimately, by an appeal to one supreme Will. Thus, a thunderstorm, the rise and setting of the sun, the ebb and flow of tides, the succession of seasons and crops are all explained by the agency of unseen wills, powers, or divinities. As time advances, progress is so far made that all minor deities are merged in the belief in one supreme Being who created the universe and is ever responsible for its continuance in existence.
But man at length awakens to the need of a more proximate explanation of phenomena, and, by such experiment as he is capable of, endeavours to ascertain, through their intrinsic properties or their outward manifestations, the cause or causes of their being. He leaves the skies and comes to earth, and seeks to read the secret of things by examining the things in themselves. This, Comte denominates the "metaphysical" stage, mainly, because the solutions given were bound up with abstractions of physical realities. Thus, if you asked Aristotle why a vegetable grew, he would reply that it had a "nutritive soul," or principle, which enabled it to assimilate food. If one asked why heavy bodies fall, or why flame and smoke ascend, the answer would be because everything tends to go to itsnaturalplace, implying, thereby, that there was some occult power or tendency in bodies to behave in certain definite ways. Those were the days of the time-honoured legends about Nature "abhorring a vacuum," tolerating no "breaks," and the wonders of her "curative force". These phrases about abstractions were held to be adequate explanations of any of the facts about nature or man.
At length, there came the period when men demanded a straightforward answer to plain questions, and refused to acquiesce in the reply that opium puts us to sleep because there is adormitive virtueresident in it. The powers of observation and experiment having increased, it became possible by scientific test and analysis to satisfy the desire for a more immediate knowledge, and thus to discover, for example, that water is water, not because it possesses the form ofaquosity, as the Scholastics would have said, but because it is chemically composed of oxygen and hydrogen. This last stage Comte called the "positive," and hence we perceive what he means when he calls his entire system by that name. It marks his conviction that those methods which are so successful in the discovery of truth in scientific matters should be applied to the solution of the problems of sociology and religion. In other words, "positive" and scientific are practically synonymous terms, the system pledging its followers to hold nothing which is not its own evidence, to abandon all attempts to know anything which is not phenomenal, that is, an object of sense-experience, and consequently to disavow metaphysics as practically equivalent to the unreal. Thus, for Comte, sociology, of which he may truthfully be described as the founder, is as much a science as chemistry or astronomy. It deals with its subject-matter, man, in precisely the same way as the astronomer with the stars. And the same is also true of religion.
Such is the famousLaw of the three States, which has always been treated by friend and foe as the key to the Comtean philosophy. It only concerns us now to describe the use he made of it in abolishing the belief in God, and thus attempting to revolutionise the conception of religion.
Closely associated with his Law of the three States is another which he calls theLaw of the Wills and Causes. In fact, there is practically no difference between that law and the first or theological stage through which human knowledge goes. It may be enunciated thus: Whenever the human mind is in ignorance of the proximate causes of a given phenomenon, it tends to ascribe it to the agency of superior and invisible powers. Hence, ignorance of nature, which modern science has largely remedied, led men to ascribe to "the act of God" innumerable events, even the appearance of Halley's comet, which we now unhesitatingly refer to subordinate agencies. Why, then, urged Comte, should we continue to believe in even one supreme Cause, when we may hope, with the advance of science, to give an explanation of every natural occurrence or fact? Convinced on social grounds that belief in the Deity had been of no service to mankind, he sought for philosophical reasons to justify his surrendering the tenet, and thus formulated the famous law which has just been enunciated. If that law is valid and universal in its application, we should have to surrender all hope of Comte's co-operation with what we hold to be rational religion. But it is because I am so convinced that it is that very law, so finely framed and stated by Comte, which makes it impossible to dispense with belief in a supra-mundane Power, that I adhere to the ideal which I sketched in the beginning, that Kant and Comte will be found to be, after Christ, the master builders of the second temple which is to be the religious home of the ages to come.
For what does his famous law amount to? To nothing beyond this, that we are warranted in believing that no single fact, no individual phenomenon, of nature exists, but will be one day explained by the all-conquering advance of physical science. But surely his most enthusiastic adherent will admit that when every phenomenon has been singly explained, only half the work, and that by far the less significant part, has been done. If the human mind is eager, and legitimately eager, to explore the scene of nature's manifestations, much more will it be necessary to attempt some solution of the vaster fact of their concatenation, of their miraculous combination into that whole which we call the universe. It is not so much the isolated phenomena which strike the mind with such overpowering bewilderment, as the manifest fact that in their infinite diversity and innumerable varieties, they are all subordinated to one vast end—the constitution and the good of the whole. Explain every sun that lines the eternal path into the Infinities, where no telescope can penetrate—what is that to the mind that knows that the numberless series is bound together by laws which they as unhesitatingly obey as an animal when it walks? Hence, by the very terms of his own law, Comte is compelled to restore to the human mind its belief in a Power other than the world, for if our only justification for discarding that belief is that science will explain one day theindividualphenomena of the universe, it is plain that man's science can never hope to explain the origin of the worlds themselves and the infinite complexities of their mutual relations. And if science cannot hope to do that, the mind of man must, under penalty of going to disruption, assent to the belief that there is a World-Power who is responsible for the conscious production of the universe, and therefore of ourselves.