III.—MORAL MAXIMS.[Contents]CHAPTER XI.JUSTICE.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.Moral philosophers have long conjectured the distinction between natural and conventional duties; and only the full recognition of that distinction can reconcile the conflicting views on the natural basis of ethics. On the other hand, the defenders of the theory of “Intuitive Morality” claim the existence of an innate moral conscience, common to all nations and all stages of social development, while, on the other hand, we hear it as confidently asserted that the standards of virtue are mere standards of expedience, and vary with circumstances as fashions vary with seasons and climates. There is no doubt, for instance, that religious bigotry has begot a sort of factitious conscience, shrinking from the mere idea of devoting the seventh day of the week to physical recreations, while the devotees of the joy-loving gods of paganism thought it a solemn duty to celebrate their holidays with festive revels. Marriage between persons of adventitious relationship (such as widows and their surviving brothers-in-law) is prohibited by the statutes of one creed, and not only sanctioned, but distinctly enjoined, by those of[138]another. Speculative dogmas that would deeply shock the followers of Abd el Wahab are tolerated in Constantinople and venerated in Rome.But such contrasts diminish, and at last disappear, as we turn our attention from conventional to essential duties. A Mussulman bigot, who would slay his son for drinking wine in honor of a supplementary god, would agree with the worshipers of that god that theft is a crime and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March; The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians, Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic. Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice. The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice, has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength, and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts” naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social intercourse. Those contracts need not always be[139]specified by written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech. Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the primitive German woodlands. The natives of San Salvador received their Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and scrupulously abstained from purloining, or even[140]touching, any article of their ship-stores; and a similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba and San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable to conceive the idea that their guests could repay good with evil. “Fair play” is the motto of boyish sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than on the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary sense of justice manifests itself even among social animals. A baboon who wantonly attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an immediate retreat under penalty of being attacked by all the winged neighbors and relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of gratuitous cruelty. They may resign themselves to a system of consistent severity, but refuse to submit to evident injustice.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a tyrant,” says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is the rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive from heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen beaks, but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And it is not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the[141]justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.” History has more than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The reputation of incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage (Ibn Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed to decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a synonyme of an “honorable,”i.e., honest, reputation. The commercial integrity of Hebrew merchants has overcome race-jealousies and religious prejudices, and in America the worship of wealth does not prevent an upright judge from ranking high above a wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power. It biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and Burgundy. A just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union, surpasses the value of common interests, which a slight change of circumstances is apt to turn into conflicting interests and disagreement. Strict adherence to the principles of political equity has preserved small states in the midst of powerful neighbors, whose greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to incur the odium of wanton aggression. Belgium,[142]Holland, and Denmark have thus preserved their national independence in Europe, as Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty and simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has proved a match for the cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly pillage their neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils, and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again and again been obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised “heathen.”The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs of commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best policy,” even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a wealthy knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes may miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed that “every nation makes its[143]gods the embodiments of its own ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend. The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma, nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an “unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny, but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the cruel murder of a[144]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants, only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such infamies to their creator.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the[145]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty “sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; theFaust-Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent) ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates, and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no place in that code of revealed ethics.Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution.[146]There, too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were mangled by the fangs of those beasts.The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of his conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let scholars starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with chains. His successors who lavished the treasures of their vast empire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in penury. The sovereign protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates refused to relieve the last distress of John Kepler. The moralists who thought it a grievance that the church should be denied the right of tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of the men whose labor had made those lands blossom like the gardens of paradise, and who were exiled by thousands for the crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the trinitary gods of the New Testament.[Contents]E.—REFORM.The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an antinatural creed is still glaringly evident[147]in the prevailing notions of natural justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern Crœsus who deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a Christian to contribute an ample subvention to the support of an orthodox seminary, has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated income by reducing the wages of a hundred starving factory children and taking every sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of helpless tenants and dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who doom their poor neighbors to an earthly Gehenna and premature death by depriving them of every chance for healthful recreation, lavish their luxuries and their endearments on the caged cutthroat who edifies his jailer by renouncing the vanities of this worldly sphere and ranting about the bliss of the New Jerusalem. The bank cashier who would never be pardoned for kicking the hind-parts of a mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin of such secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few hundred widows and orphans.Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men. Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible for his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of Secularism should insist on a truth not[148]unknown to the moralists of antiquity, that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a virtue, and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness by failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud and endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.
III.—MORAL MAXIMS.[Contents]CHAPTER XI.JUSTICE.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.Moral philosophers have long conjectured the distinction between natural and conventional duties; and only the full recognition of that distinction can reconcile the conflicting views on the natural basis of ethics. On the other hand, the defenders of the theory of “Intuitive Morality” claim the existence of an innate moral conscience, common to all nations and all stages of social development, while, on the other hand, we hear it as confidently asserted that the standards of virtue are mere standards of expedience, and vary with circumstances as fashions vary with seasons and climates. There is no doubt, for instance, that religious bigotry has begot a sort of factitious conscience, shrinking from the mere idea of devoting the seventh day of the week to physical recreations, while the devotees of the joy-loving gods of paganism thought it a solemn duty to celebrate their holidays with festive revels. Marriage between persons of adventitious relationship (such as widows and their surviving brothers-in-law) is prohibited by the statutes of one creed, and not only sanctioned, but distinctly enjoined, by those of[138]another. Speculative dogmas that would deeply shock the followers of Abd el Wahab are tolerated in Constantinople and venerated in Rome.But such contrasts diminish, and at last disappear, as we turn our attention from conventional to essential duties. A Mussulman bigot, who would slay his son for drinking wine in honor of a supplementary god, would agree with the worshipers of that god that theft is a crime and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March; The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians, Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic. Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice. The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice, has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength, and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts” naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social intercourse. Those contracts need not always be[139]specified by written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech. Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the primitive German woodlands. The natives of San Salvador received their Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and scrupulously abstained from purloining, or even[140]touching, any article of their ship-stores; and a similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba and San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable to conceive the idea that their guests could repay good with evil. “Fair play” is the motto of boyish sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than on the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary sense of justice manifests itself even among social animals. A baboon who wantonly attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an immediate retreat under penalty of being attacked by all the winged neighbors and relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of gratuitous cruelty. They may resign themselves to a system of consistent severity, but refuse to submit to evident injustice.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a tyrant,” says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is the rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive from heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen beaks, but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And it is not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the[141]justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.” History has more than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The reputation of incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage (Ibn Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed to decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a synonyme of an “honorable,”i.e., honest, reputation. The commercial integrity of Hebrew merchants has overcome race-jealousies and religious prejudices, and in America the worship of wealth does not prevent an upright judge from ranking high above a wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power. It biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and Burgundy. A just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union, surpasses the value of common interests, which a slight change of circumstances is apt to turn into conflicting interests and disagreement. Strict adherence to the principles of political equity has preserved small states in the midst of powerful neighbors, whose greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to incur the odium of wanton aggression. Belgium,[142]Holland, and Denmark have thus preserved their national independence in Europe, as Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty and simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has proved a match for the cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly pillage their neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils, and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again and again been obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised “heathen.”The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs of commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best policy,” even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a wealthy knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes may miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed that “every nation makes its[143]gods the embodiments of its own ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend. The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma, nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an “unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny, but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the cruel murder of a[144]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants, only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such infamies to their creator.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the[145]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty “sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; theFaust-Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent) ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates, and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no place in that code of revealed ethics.Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution.[146]There, too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were mangled by the fangs of those beasts.The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of his conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let scholars starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with chains. His successors who lavished the treasures of their vast empire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in penury. The sovereign protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates refused to relieve the last distress of John Kepler. The moralists who thought it a grievance that the church should be denied the right of tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of the men whose labor had made those lands blossom like the gardens of paradise, and who were exiled by thousands for the crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the trinitary gods of the New Testament.[Contents]E.—REFORM.The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an antinatural creed is still glaringly evident[147]in the prevailing notions of natural justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern Crœsus who deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a Christian to contribute an ample subvention to the support of an orthodox seminary, has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated income by reducing the wages of a hundred starving factory children and taking every sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of helpless tenants and dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who doom their poor neighbors to an earthly Gehenna and premature death by depriving them of every chance for healthful recreation, lavish their luxuries and their endearments on the caged cutthroat who edifies his jailer by renouncing the vanities of this worldly sphere and ranting about the bliss of the New Jerusalem. The bank cashier who would never be pardoned for kicking the hind-parts of a mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin of such secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few hundred widows and orphans.Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men. Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible for his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of Secularism should insist on a truth not[148]unknown to the moralists of antiquity, that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a virtue, and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness by failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud and endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.
[Contents]CHAPTER XI.JUSTICE.[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.Moral philosophers have long conjectured the distinction between natural and conventional duties; and only the full recognition of that distinction can reconcile the conflicting views on the natural basis of ethics. On the other hand, the defenders of the theory of “Intuitive Morality” claim the existence of an innate moral conscience, common to all nations and all stages of social development, while, on the other hand, we hear it as confidently asserted that the standards of virtue are mere standards of expedience, and vary with circumstances as fashions vary with seasons and climates. There is no doubt, for instance, that religious bigotry has begot a sort of factitious conscience, shrinking from the mere idea of devoting the seventh day of the week to physical recreations, while the devotees of the joy-loving gods of paganism thought it a solemn duty to celebrate their holidays with festive revels. Marriage between persons of adventitious relationship (such as widows and their surviving brothers-in-law) is prohibited by the statutes of one creed, and not only sanctioned, but distinctly enjoined, by those of[138]another. Speculative dogmas that would deeply shock the followers of Abd el Wahab are tolerated in Constantinople and venerated in Rome.But such contrasts diminish, and at last disappear, as we turn our attention from conventional to essential duties. A Mussulman bigot, who would slay his son for drinking wine in honor of a supplementary god, would agree with the worshipers of that god that theft is a crime and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March; The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians, Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic. Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice. The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice, has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength, and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts” naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social intercourse. Those contracts need not always be[139]specified by written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech. Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the primitive German woodlands. The natives of San Salvador received their Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and scrupulously abstained from purloining, or even[140]touching, any article of their ship-stores; and a similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba and San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable to conceive the idea that their guests could repay good with evil. “Fair play” is the motto of boyish sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than on the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary sense of justice manifests itself even among social animals. A baboon who wantonly attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an immediate retreat under penalty of being attacked by all the winged neighbors and relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of gratuitous cruelty. They may resign themselves to a system of consistent severity, but refuse to submit to evident injustice.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a tyrant,” says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is the rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive from heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen beaks, but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And it is not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the[141]justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.” History has more than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The reputation of incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage (Ibn Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed to decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a synonyme of an “honorable,”i.e., honest, reputation. The commercial integrity of Hebrew merchants has overcome race-jealousies and religious prejudices, and in America the worship of wealth does not prevent an upright judge from ranking high above a wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power. It biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and Burgundy. A just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union, surpasses the value of common interests, which a slight change of circumstances is apt to turn into conflicting interests and disagreement. Strict adherence to the principles of political equity has preserved small states in the midst of powerful neighbors, whose greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to incur the odium of wanton aggression. Belgium,[142]Holland, and Denmark have thus preserved their national independence in Europe, as Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty and simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has proved a match for the cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly pillage their neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils, and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again and again been obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised “heathen.”The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs of commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best policy,” even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a wealthy knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes may miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed that “every nation makes its[143]gods the embodiments of its own ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend. The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma, nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an “unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny, but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the cruel murder of a[144]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants, only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such infamies to their creator.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the[145]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty “sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; theFaust-Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent) ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates, and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no place in that code of revealed ethics.Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution.[146]There, too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were mangled by the fangs of those beasts.The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of his conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let scholars starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with chains. His successors who lavished the treasures of their vast empire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in penury. The sovereign protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates refused to relieve the last distress of John Kepler. The moralists who thought it a grievance that the church should be denied the right of tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of the men whose labor had made those lands blossom like the gardens of paradise, and who were exiled by thousands for the crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the trinitary gods of the New Testament.[Contents]E.—REFORM.The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an antinatural creed is still glaringly evident[147]in the prevailing notions of natural justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern Crœsus who deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a Christian to contribute an ample subvention to the support of an orthodox seminary, has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated income by reducing the wages of a hundred starving factory children and taking every sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of helpless tenants and dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who doom their poor neighbors to an earthly Gehenna and premature death by depriving them of every chance for healthful recreation, lavish their luxuries and their endearments on the caged cutthroat who edifies his jailer by renouncing the vanities of this worldly sphere and ranting about the bliss of the New Jerusalem. The bank cashier who would never be pardoned for kicking the hind-parts of a mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin of such secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few hundred widows and orphans.Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men. Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible for his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of Secularism should insist on a truth not[148]unknown to the moralists of antiquity, that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a virtue, and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness by failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud and endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.
CHAPTER XI.JUSTICE.
[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.Moral philosophers have long conjectured the distinction between natural and conventional duties; and only the full recognition of that distinction can reconcile the conflicting views on the natural basis of ethics. On the other hand, the defenders of the theory of “Intuitive Morality” claim the existence of an innate moral conscience, common to all nations and all stages of social development, while, on the other hand, we hear it as confidently asserted that the standards of virtue are mere standards of expedience, and vary with circumstances as fashions vary with seasons and climates. There is no doubt, for instance, that religious bigotry has begot a sort of factitious conscience, shrinking from the mere idea of devoting the seventh day of the week to physical recreations, while the devotees of the joy-loving gods of paganism thought it a solemn duty to celebrate their holidays with festive revels. Marriage between persons of adventitious relationship (such as widows and their surviving brothers-in-law) is prohibited by the statutes of one creed, and not only sanctioned, but distinctly enjoined, by those of[138]another. Speculative dogmas that would deeply shock the followers of Abd el Wahab are tolerated in Constantinople and venerated in Rome.But such contrasts diminish, and at last disappear, as we turn our attention from conventional to essential duties. A Mussulman bigot, who would slay his son for drinking wine in honor of a supplementary god, would agree with the worshipers of that god that theft is a crime and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March; The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians, Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic. Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice. The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice, has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength, and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts” naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social intercourse. Those contracts need not always be[139]specified by written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech. Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the primitive German woodlands. The natives of San Salvador received their Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and scrupulously abstained from purloining, or even[140]touching, any article of their ship-stores; and a similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba and San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable to conceive the idea that their guests could repay good with evil. “Fair play” is the motto of boyish sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than on the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary sense of justice manifests itself even among social animals. A baboon who wantonly attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an immediate retreat under penalty of being attacked by all the winged neighbors and relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of gratuitous cruelty. They may resign themselves to a system of consistent severity, but refuse to submit to evident injustice.[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a tyrant,” says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is the rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive from heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen beaks, but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And it is not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the[141]justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.” History has more than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The reputation of incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage (Ibn Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed to decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a synonyme of an “honorable,”i.e., honest, reputation. The commercial integrity of Hebrew merchants has overcome race-jealousies and religious prejudices, and in America the worship of wealth does not prevent an upright judge from ranking high above a wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power. It biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and Burgundy. A just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union, surpasses the value of common interests, which a slight change of circumstances is apt to turn into conflicting interests and disagreement. Strict adherence to the principles of political equity has preserved small states in the midst of powerful neighbors, whose greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to incur the odium of wanton aggression. Belgium,[142]Holland, and Denmark have thus preserved their national independence in Europe, as Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty and simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has proved a match for the cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly pillage their neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils, and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again and again been obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised “heathen.”The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs of commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best policy,” even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a wealthy knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes may miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed that “every nation makes its[143]gods the embodiments of its own ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend. The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma, nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an “unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny, but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the cruel murder of a[144]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants, only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such infamies to their creator.[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the[145]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty “sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; theFaust-Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent) ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates, and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no place in that code of revealed ethics.Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution.[146]There, too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were mangled by the fangs of those beasts.The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of his conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let scholars starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with chains. His successors who lavished the treasures of their vast empire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in penury. The sovereign protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates refused to relieve the last distress of John Kepler. The moralists who thought it a grievance that the church should be denied the right of tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of the men whose labor had made those lands blossom like the gardens of paradise, and who were exiled by thousands for the crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the trinitary gods of the New Testament.[Contents]E.—REFORM.The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an antinatural creed is still glaringly evident[147]in the prevailing notions of natural justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern Crœsus who deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a Christian to contribute an ample subvention to the support of an orthodox seminary, has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated income by reducing the wages of a hundred starving factory children and taking every sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of helpless tenants and dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who doom their poor neighbors to an earthly Gehenna and premature death by depriving them of every chance for healthful recreation, lavish their luxuries and their endearments on the caged cutthroat who edifies his jailer by renouncing the vanities of this worldly sphere and ranting about the bliss of the New Jerusalem. The bank cashier who would never be pardoned for kicking the hind-parts of a mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin of such secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few hundred widows and orphans.Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men. Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible for his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of Secularism should insist on a truth not[148]unknown to the moralists of antiquity, that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a virtue, and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness by failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud and endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.
[Contents]A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.Moral philosophers have long conjectured the distinction between natural and conventional duties; and only the full recognition of that distinction can reconcile the conflicting views on the natural basis of ethics. On the other hand, the defenders of the theory of “Intuitive Morality” claim the existence of an innate moral conscience, common to all nations and all stages of social development, while, on the other hand, we hear it as confidently asserted that the standards of virtue are mere standards of expedience, and vary with circumstances as fashions vary with seasons and climates. There is no doubt, for instance, that religious bigotry has begot a sort of factitious conscience, shrinking from the mere idea of devoting the seventh day of the week to physical recreations, while the devotees of the joy-loving gods of paganism thought it a solemn duty to celebrate their holidays with festive revels. Marriage between persons of adventitious relationship (such as widows and their surviving brothers-in-law) is prohibited by the statutes of one creed, and not only sanctioned, but distinctly enjoined, by those of[138]another. Speculative dogmas that would deeply shock the followers of Abd el Wahab are tolerated in Constantinople and venerated in Rome.But such contrasts diminish, and at last disappear, as we turn our attention from conventional to essential duties. A Mussulman bigot, who would slay his son for drinking wine in honor of a supplementary god, would agree with the worshipers of that god that theft is a crime and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March; The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians, Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic. Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice. The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice, has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength, and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts” naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social intercourse. Those contracts need not always be[139]specified by written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech. Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the primitive German woodlands. The natives of San Salvador received their Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and scrupulously abstained from purloining, or even[140]touching, any article of their ship-stores; and a similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba and San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable to conceive the idea that their guests could repay good with evil. “Fair play” is the motto of boyish sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than on the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary sense of justice manifests itself even among social animals. A baboon who wantonly attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an immediate retreat under penalty of being attacked by all the winged neighbors and relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of gratuitous cruelty. They may resign themselves to a system of consistent severity, but refuse to submit to evident injustice.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Moral philosophers have long conjectured the distinction between natural and conventional duties; and only the full recognition of that distinction can reconcile the conflicting views on the natural basis of ethics. On the other hand, the defenders of the theory of “Intuitive Morality” claim the existence of an innate moral conscience, common to all nations and all stages of social development, while, on the other hand, we hear it as confidently asserted that the standards of virtue are mere standards of expedience, and vary with circumstances as fashions vary with seasons and climates. There is no doubt, for instance, that religious bigotry has begot a sort of factitious conscience, shrinking from the mere idea of devoting the seventh day of the week to physical recreations, while the devotees of the joy-loving gods of paganism thought it a solemn duty to celebrate their holidays with festive revels. Marriage between persons of adventitious relationship (such as widows and their surviving brothers-in-law) is prohibited by the statutes of one creed, and not only sanctioned, but distinctly enjoined, by those of[138]another. Speculative dogmas that would deeply shock the followers of Abd el Wahab are tolerated in Constantinople and venerated in Rome.But such contrasts diminish, and at last disappear, as we turn our attention from conventional to essential duties. A Mussulman bigot, who would slay his son for drinking wine in honor of a supplementary god, would agree with the worshipers of that god that theft is a crime and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March; The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians, Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic. Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice. The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice, has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength, and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts” naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social intercourse. Those contracts need not always be[139]specified by written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech. Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the primitive German woodlands. The natives of San Salvador received their Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and scrupulously abstained from purloining, or even[140]touching, any article of their ship-stores; and a similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba and San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable to conceive the idea that their guests could repay good with evil. “Fair play” is the motto of boyish sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than on the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary sense of justice manifests itself even among social animals. A baboon who wantonly attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an immediate retreat under penalty of being attacked by all the winged neighbors and relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of gratuitous cruelty. They may resign themselves to a system of consistent severity, but refuse to submit to evident injustice.
Moral philosophers have long conjectured the distinction between natural and conventional duties; and only the full recognition of that distinction can reconcile the conflicting views on the natural basis of ethics. On the other hand, the defenders of the theory of “Intuitive Morality” claim the existence of an innate moral conscience, common to all nations and all stages of social development, while, on the other hand, we hear it as confidently asserted that the standards of virtue are mere standards of expedience, and vary with circumstances as fashions vary with seasons and climates. There is no doubt, for instance, that religious bigotry has begot a sort of factitious conscience, shrinking from the mere idea of devoting the seventh day of the week to physical recreations, while the devotees of the joy-loving gods of paganism thought it a solemn duty to celebrate their holidays with festive revels. Marriage between persons of adventitious relationship (such as widows and their surviving brothers-in-law) is prohibited by the statutes of one creed, and not only sanctioned, but distinctly enjoined, by those of[138]another. Speculative dogmas that would deeply shock the followers of Abd el Wahab are tolerated in Constantinople and venerated in Rome.
But such contrasts diminish, and at last disappear, as we turn our attention from conventional to essential duties. A Mussulman bigot, who would slay his son for drinking wine in honor of a supplementary god, would agree with the worshipers of that god that theft is a crime and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March; The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians, Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic. Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice. The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice, has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength, and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts” naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social intercourse. Those contracts need not always be[139]specified by written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech. Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the primitive German woodlands. The natives of San Salvador received their Spanish invaders with respectful hospitality, and scrupulously abstained from purloining, or even[140]touching, any article of their ship-stores; and a similar reception welcomed their arrival in Cuba and San Domingo, the natives being apparently unable to conceive the idea that their guests could repay good with evil. “Fair play” is the motto of boyish sports in the kraals of Kaffir-land, not less than on the recess-ground of Eton College. A rudimentary sense of justice manifests itself even among social animals. A baboon who wantonly attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is liable to get mobbed by the whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to beat an immediate retreat under penalty of being attacked by all the winged neighbors and relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure the most inhuman methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of gratuitous cruelty. They may resign themselves to a system of consistent severity, but refuse to submit to evident injustice.
[Contents]B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a tyrant,” says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is the rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive from heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen beaks, but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And it is not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the[141]justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.” History has more than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The reputation of incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage (Ibn Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed to decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a synonyme of an “honorable,”i.e., honest, reputation. The commercial integrity of Hebrew merchants has overcome race-jealousies and religious prejudices, and in America the worship of wealth does not prevent an upright judge from ranking high above a wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power. It biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and Burgundy. A just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union, surpasses the value of common interests, which a slight change of circumstances is apt to turn into conflicting interests and disagreement. Strict adherence to the principles of political equity has preserved small states in the midst of powerful neighbors, whose greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to incur the odium of wanton aggression. Belgium,[142]Holland, and Denmark have thus preserved their national independence in Europe, as Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty and simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has proved a match for the cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly pillage their neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils, and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again and again been obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised “heathen.”The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs of commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best policy,” even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a wealthy knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes may miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a tyrant,” says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is the rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive from heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen beaks, but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And it is not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the[141]justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.” History has more than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The reputation of incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage (Ibn Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed to decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a synonyme of an “honorable,”i.e., honest, reputation. The commercial integrity of Hebrew merchants has overcome race-jealousies and religious prejudices, and in America the worship of wealth does not prevent an upright judge from ranking high above a wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power. It biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and Burgundy. A just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union, surpasses the value of common interests, which a slight change of circumstances is apt to turn into conflicting interests and disagreement. Strict adherence to the principles of political equity has preserved small states in the midst of powerful neighbors, whose greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to incur the odium of wanton aggression. Belgium,[142]Holland, and Denmark have thus preserved their national independence in Europe, as Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty and simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has proved a match for the cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly pillage their neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils, and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again and again been obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised “heathen.”The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs of commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best policy,” even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a wealthy knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes may miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.
Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a tyrant,” says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is the rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive from heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen beaks, but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And it is not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the[141]justest of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.” History has more than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The reputation of incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and even private citizens, the arbiters of nations.
King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage (Ibn Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed to decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a synonyme of an “honorable,”i.e., honest, reputation. The commercial integrity of Hebrew merchants has overcome race-jealousies and religious prejudices, and in America the worship of wealth does not prevent an upright judge from ranking high above a wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.
The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power. It biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King Cyrus, and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and Burgundy. A just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union, surpasses the value of common interests, which a slight change of circumstances is apt to turn into conflicting interests and disagreement. Strict adherence to the principles of political equity has preserved small states in the midst of powerful neighbors, whose greed of conquest is restrained by their hesitation to incur the odium of wanton aggression. Belgium,[142]Holland, and Denmark have thus preserved their national independence in Europe, as Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central Africa the honesty and simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has proved a match for the cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly pillage their neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division of their spoils, and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have again and again been obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised “heathen.”
The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs of commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best policy,” even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a wealthy knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes may miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.
[Contents]C.—PERVERSION.Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed that “every nation makes its[143]gods the embodiments of its own ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend. The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma, nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an “unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny, but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the cruel murder of a[144]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants, only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such infamies to their creator.
C.—PERVERSION.
Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed that “every nation makes its[143]gods the embodiments of its own ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend. The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma, nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an “unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny, but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the cruel murder of a[144]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants, only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such infamies to their creator.
Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has condensed in the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of man,” was recognized already by the ancient historian who observed that “every nation makes its[143]gods the embodiments of its own ideals,” though, happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is better than the object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the moral standards of the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly prejudiced by the lewd propensities of their Olympians, and it is equally certain that the extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can be partly explained, as well as condoned, by the moral characteristics of their dogma-God. According to the accepted doctrine of the Middle Ages, the administrative principles of that God seemed to imply a degree of moral perversity which even the poetic license of a saner age would have hesitated to ascribe to a fiend. The same deity whom the creed of the Galilean church makes the omniscient creator of all the physical and moral instincts of human nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish with endless torture nearly every free gratification of those instincts, and demand a voluntary renunciation of a world which his own bounty had filled with every blessing, and adorned with every charm of loveliness. The God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a moderate share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the Christian dogma, nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as an “unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny, but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the cruel murder of a[144]god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments and rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of predestination distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by their own merits, but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous act of divine favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an eternity of woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of immersion, the guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the eleventh hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even children, nay, newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no doubt,” the Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants, only a few spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a doctrine which the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so atrocious, and at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it would be simply impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity.” Yet for more than twelve hundred years Christians were in danger of being burnt at the stake for refusing to attribute such infamies to their creator.
[Contents]D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the[145]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty “sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; theFaust-Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent) ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates, and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no place in that code of revealed ethics.Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution.[146]There, too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were mangled by the fangs of those beasts.The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of his conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let scholars starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with chains. His successors who lavished the treasures of their vast empire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in penury. The sovereign protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates refused to relieve the last distress of John Kepler. The moralists who thought it a grievance that the church should be denied the right of tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of the men whose labor had made those lands blossom like the gardens of paradise, and who were exiled by thousands for the crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the trinitary gods of the New Testament.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the[145]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty “sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; theFaust-Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent) ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates, and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no place in that code of revealed ethics.Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution.[146]There, too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were mangled by the fangs of those beasts.The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of his conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let scholars starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with chains. His successors who lavished the treasures of their vast empire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in penury. The sovereign protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates refused to relieve the last distress of John Kepler. The moralists who thought it a grievance that the church should be denied the right of tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of the men whose labor had made those lands blossom like the gardens of paradise, and who were exiled by thousands for the crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the trinitary gods of the New Testament.
Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit of passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and Freethinkers? Why should men try to be better than their God? The worshiper of a God who doomed the souls of unbaptized children and honest dissenters, naturally had no hesitation in assailing the[145]bodies of their unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded fawning sycophants with favors which they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty “sovereign of six faithful square miles” accordingly became a law to himself. A man’s might was the only measure of his right; theFaust-Recht, the “first law” of iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent) ecclesiastic courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect in the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage duties and ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates, and passive submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian citizen. Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no place in that code of revealed ethics.
Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by the outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to be, by being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.
“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution.[146]There, too, the despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests and princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were mangled by the fangs of those beasts.
The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of his conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let scholars starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with chains. His successors who lavished the treasures of their vast empire on pimps and clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in penury. The sovereign protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates refused to relieve the last distress of John Kepler. The moralists who thought it a grievance that the church should be denied the right of tithing the lands of southern Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of the men whose labor had made those lands blossom like the gardens of paradise, and who were exiled by thousands for the crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran to the trinitary gods of the New Testament.
[Contents]E.—REFORM.The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an antinatural creed is still glaringly evident[147]in the prevailing notions of natural justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern Crœsus who deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a Christian to contribute an ample subvention to the support of an orthodox seminary, has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated income by reducing the wages of a hundred starving factory children and taking every sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of helpless tenants and dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who doom their poor neighbors to an earthly Gehenna and premature death by depriving them of every chance for healthful recreation, lavish their luxuries and their endearments on the caged cutthroat who edifies his jailer by renouncing the vanities of this worldly sphere and ranting about the bliss of the New Jerusalem. The bank cashier who would never be pardoned for kicking the hind-parts of a mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin of such secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few hundred widows and orphans.Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men. Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible for his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of Secularism should insist on a truth not[148]unknown to the moralists of antiquity, that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a virtue, and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness by failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud and endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.
E.—REFORM.
The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an antinatural creed is still glaringly evident[147]in the prevailing notions of natural justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern Crœsus who deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a Christian to contribute an ample subvention to the support of an orthodox seminary, has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated income by reducing the wages of a hundred starving factory children and taking every sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of helpless tenants and dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who doom their poor neighbors to an earthly Gehenna and premature death by depriving them of every chance for healthful recreation, lavish their luxuries and their endearments on the caged cutthroat who edifies his jailer by renouncing the vanities of this worldly sphere and ranting about the bliss of the New Jerusalem. The bank cashier who would never be pardoned for kicking the hind-parts of a mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin of such secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few hundred widows and orphans.Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men. Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible for his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of Secularism should insist on a truth not[148]unknown to the moralists of antiquity, that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a virtue, and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness by failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud and endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.
The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an antinatural creed is still glaringly evident[147]in the prevailing notions of natural justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern Crœsus who deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a Christian to contribute an ample subvention to the support of an orthodox seminary, has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated income by reducing the wages of a hundred starving factory children and taking every sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of helpless tenants and dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who doom their poor neighbors to an earthly Gehenna and premature death by depriving them of every chance for healthful recreation, lavish their luxuries and their endearments on the caged cutthroat who edifies his jailer by renouncing the vanities of this worldly sphere and ranting about the bliss of the New Jerusalem. The bank cashier who would never be pardoned for kicking the hind-parts of a mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin of such secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few hundred widows and orphans.
Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men. Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible for his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of Secularism should insist on a truth not[148]unknown to the moralists of antiquity, that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a virtue, and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness by failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud and endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.