MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM.

“Be of good cheer, brother!” said John Bradford to his fellow-martyr while the fagots were kindling: “we shall have a brave supper in heaven with the Lord to-night!” “Be of good cheer, everybody!” cry an army of modern confessors, seated in library chairs: “there is no heaven and no Lord, and when we die there will be an end of us all,in saecula saeculorum; but the generations who come after us will be greatly edified by our beautiful books and our instructive example.”

Perhaps the moral vitality of our age is in no way better exemplified than by the fact that certain doubts, which seem to strike mortal blows at the head and heart of human virtue, yet leave it breathing, and even pulsating with aspirations after some yet loftier excellence than saints and heroes have hitherto attained. To look back to the “infidels” with whom Massillon and Jeremy Taylor had to do, and compare them with the Agnostics of ourtime, is indeed more encouraging than to compare the “faithful” of past centuries with those of the present age. While the old Atheist sheltered his vice behind a rampart of unbelief where no appeals could reach him, the new Agnostic honestly maintains that his opinions are the very best foundations of virtue. No one can for a moment say of him that he chooses darkness rather than lightbecausehis deeds are evil. If it be (as we think) darkness which he has chosen, there can be no question that his deeds are good, and that his conceptions of duty are truly elevated and far-reaching, and enforced by every argument which he has left himself at liberty to use. Renouncing faith in God and in the life hereafter,—that is to say, inGoodness InfiniteandGoodness Immortalized,—he retains the most fervent faith in goodness as developed in human life,—that is to say, ingoodness finitein degree and in duration. If we are to accept his own statement of the case, the Agnostic has completely turned the front of the theological battle. It is now the pagans who have seized and hold aloft the sacred labarum of duty and self-sacrifice, andin hoc signoare destined to victory.

The claim is one of the gravest which can be put forth between man and man. It was not easy—it was, alas! often beyond our strength—to combatour doubts or those of others, while yet we fought against them as a sailor fights against enemies cutting his anchor cable on a stormy night. We stand amazed and disarmed by the strange intelligence that, when these doubts have done their work, and cast us adrift altogether from allegiance to God and hope of another life,then, when all seems lost, we shall suddenly discover that we have touched the Fortunate Isles of virtue and peace. Only the thorough sceptic, we are assured, can be the perfect saint. Nobody can disinterestedly serve his brother on earth till he is entirely persuaded he has no Father in heaven. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (of course it is always assumed that itisa tree of genuine knowledge on which Atheism grows) is to be desired, not only because it will make us “wise,” but because it will make usgood. Who will hesitate any more to pluck and eat?

To the consideration of this now common pretension of Agnosticism to be the trueFriend of Virtue, in the room of the old delusion of religion, the following pages will be devoted. For the purposes of our particular argument and to avoid entangling ourselves with too many collateral questions, I shall treat it here as theAssumption of the Moral Superiority of Atheism over Theism. Is that assumption justifiable? I, for one, am entirelyready to admit that,ifthere be anything in the faith in God and immortality which detracts from the highest conceivable perfection of human virtue,—if, in short, Atheism have a better morality to teach than Theism,—then the case of Theism must be abandoned. The religion which isnotthe holiest conceivable by the man who holds it is condemnedipso facto.

For the present, I may assume that no important difference of opinion exists as to the practical rules of morality. It is the propermotivesto a virtuous and self-sacrificing life which Agnostics claim to place on higher ground than that which has been hitherto given to them. They propose to tell us to “do justice and love mercy” both in a better and more disinterested way than while we added to those unquestionable duties the mistaken attempt to walk humbly with our God. The question lies in a nutshell,—Can they do it? Is there anything in the true Theistic faith detracting from the disinterestedness of virtue, or calculated to rob it of a single ray of purity and glory? This must be our first contention, since religion now stands on its defence as a basis of morality. When it is settled, it may perhaps appear that religion may justly again assume the offensive, and challenge Atheism to prove its capacity for serving equallyefficiently as a support for the virtue of humanity; and, if it appear that to such a challenge no satisfactory reply can be given, then it will be manifest that, in their expressions of satisfaction and joy at the anticipated downfall of religion, Atheists display disregard of the moral interests of their race.

Let the lists be cleared in the first place. I shall not be expected to defend all the base and demoralizing things which, in the misused name of Christianity, have been inculcated concerning “Other-worldliness,”—the doing good for the sake of getting to heaven, and avoiding evil from fear of hell. Since the day, recorded by Joinville, when the mysterious old woman carried her waterpot and torch beforeSt.Louis, and told him she intended to put out the fires of hell and burn up heaven, so that men might learn to love God for his own sake, and not from fear or hope,—since that distant time, there have not been wanting righteous souls who have girned and spurned at the vile lessons current in the Churches, and asked with Kingsley,—

“Is selfishness,—for time, a sin,—stretched out into eternity,Celestial prudence?”

Beyond a doubt, one of the heaviest charges against the popular creed is that, while its ministers have raged against the smallest theological error, andconvulsed the world by their ridiculous disputes concerning mysteries altogether beyond the reach of human comprehension, they have complacently endured and even fostered moral heresies which withered up the very roots of virtue. The whole tone of ordinary Romish exhortation,faire son salut, is often base beyond expression; and the teaching of the Church of England in the last century was no better. Here are some specimens of it. Rutherford says (Nature and Obligations of Virtue, 1744), “Every man’s happiness is the ultimate end which reason teaches him to pursue, and the constant and uniform practice of virtue becomes our dutywhenrevelation has informed us that God will make us finally happy in a life after this.” Paley is no better. He says:[1]“Virtue is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God andfor the sake of everlasting happiness. According to which definition, the good of mankind is the subject, the will of God the rule, andeverlasting happiness the motive of virtue.” Waterland, the great champion of Trinitarianism, went even further. He says that “being just and grateful without future prospects has as much of moral virtue in itas folly or indiscretion has.” These are the kind of doctrines which have been placidly admitted among the recognized teachings of the great Christian Churches.Nor have some of the philosophers proved a whit more conscious of the simple notion of duty. Bentham, for example,[2]plainly lays it down that for a man to give up a larger pleasure of his own for a smaller one of his neighbor’s is an act not of virtue, but offolly.

Certainly, if the new Agnostics had no types of religion or morality save these thoroughly debased ones wherewith to compare their system, they might well claim to be the evangelists of a purer gospel. Better, assuredly better, would it be to believe in no God than to pay homage to the all-adorable Author of Good for the sake of the payment we expect him to give us. Better, assuredly better, to expect no life beyond the grave than to poison every act of courage, justice, or beneficence by the vile notion of being rewarded for it in heaven; or to refrain from treachery and cruelty and lies, merely, like a beaten hound, from dread of the bloody scourge of hell.

But it would be an insult to the well-informed and widely-read advocates of Agnosticism, if we were to assume for a moment that they were ignorant that this base alloy of religion has been almost universally repudiated by the higher class of English divines of the present day, of every shade of Orthodoxy; while, outside of the Churches, thereis not a religious man who does not regard them with unmitigated disgust. The question really is, not whether religionmaybe made to corrupt morality with bribes and threats, but whether it properly does so; whether a religious manought, in accordance with his theology, to be less disinterested than an Atheist. To reply to this question, it seems only necessary to recall what a Theist believes about God and immortality as concerned with his own virtue.

A Theist believes, then, that the goodness and justice, which the Agnostic recognizes and loves so well in their human manifestations, have existence beyond humanity, and are carried to ideal perfection in a Being who is, in some sense, the Soul and Ruler of the universe.

Thisbelief, at all events (whether legitimately held or only a dream), cannot, I presume, so far as it goes, be charged with detracting from the purity of virtue. Goodness cannot be esteemed less good, or justice less just, because there exists One who is supremely good and just.

Further, as regards himself, the Theist believes that this supremely good and just Being so constituted his nature and the world around him as that the law of goodness and justice should beknownto him as the sacred rule, whereby he isinwardly bound to determine his actions and sentiments. In other words, he believes that he has acquired his moral sense of God, and not from any undesigned, fortuitous order of things which may have impressed it as an hereditary idea on his brain.

I am at a loss to guess howthisstep further can be supposed to be hostile to the disinterestedness of virtue. It is easy to see how the opposite theory of the origin of conscience, as exhibited inMr.Darwin’sDescent of Man,—whereby the authority of the human intuition, “Thou shalt do no murder,” is traced to the same origin as the bees’ intuition of the duty of killing their brothers, the drones (namely, the hereditary transmission of ideas found conducive to the welfare of the tribe),—should dethrone Conscience from her assumed supremacy, and place her among the crowd of other hereditary notions, neither more nor less deserving of honor. And, on the other hand, the attribution of our moral ideas, directly or indirectly, to the teaching of a Being immeasurably above us,—a theory which represents conscience as a ray shot downward from a sun, instead of a marsh-fire illumined under special conditions of social existence, and liable to blaze up, die down, or flit hither and thither as they may determine,—must inevitably elevate and sanctify the laws of morals to our apprehension. In truth,it is obvious that, had the first hypothesis (of the hereditary transmission of useful ideas) been heard of in the days of our ancestors, the “mystic extension” (asMr.Mill calls it) of utility into morality could never have been accomplished, and repentance and remorse would have been unknown experiences. But all this refers to the practicalauthorityof moral laws. It is with thedisinterestednessof the man who obeys them that we are at present concerned; and this disinterestedness is not, that I perceive, influenced one way or the other by the theory he may hold of how he comes by his knowledge of them.

But now we reach the point where, it is to be presumed, the Atheist finds ground for his claim to superior disinterestedness. The Theist believes not only that goodness and justice are attributes of God, and that God has taught him to be good and just, but that God further holds what the old Schoolmen called theJustitia Rectoriaof the universe,—that he so ordains things as that, sooner or later, good will surely befall the good, and evil the evil. So much as this is included in the simplest elements of Theism. In its fuller development, Theism teaches more: namely, that God takes the interest of a Father in the moral welfare of his children; that he has created every human soul (and doubtless thousandsof races of other intelligent beings) for the express purpose that each should attain, through the teaching and trials of existence, to virtue, and so enter into the supreme bliss of sympathy and communion with himself. Theism thus understood teaches that God is perpetually training each soul for that sublime end, inspiring it with light, answering its prayers for spiritual aid, punishing it for its errors, hedging up its way with thorns to prevent its wanderings, and finally certainly conducting it, through this life and perhaps many lives to come, to the holiness and blessedness for which it was made.

The position of a Theist differs therefore essentially from that of an Atheist as regards the practice of virtue, inasmuch as the Atheist thinks he has no superhuman spectator or sympathizer; that the thoughts and feelings which awaken his conscience and move his heart do not originate in any mind out of his own; that the woes of his life bear with them no moral meaning of retribution or expiation; and finally that, whether he be a hero or a coward, a saint or a sinner, it will be all one, so far as himself is concerned, when the hour of his death has sounded. His actions may and will have important consequences to other men, but as regards his own destiny they can have no consequences at all; for the grave will receive everything that remains ofhim. The virtues he may have acquired with unutterable struggles will die away into nothingness, like the sound of a broken harp-string. He will neither rejoin his dead friends nor come into any fresh consciousness of God. Neither dead friends nor God have any existence; and a little sooner or later, as he may chance to be a more or less important person, he will be altogether forgotten, and no being in the universe will ever more remember that he oncewas.

Now, I think it would be idle to deny that it must befar harderto be virtuous under the shadow of this Atheism than in the sunshine of Theism. The tax and strain upon the moral nature of a man who holds the views just indicated of the emptiness of the universe of any One absolutely good and just, of the low and haphazard origin of conscience, and of the utter loneliness and unaided state wherewith man pursues his weary course from the cradle to the inevitable, eternal grave, must be simply enormous. All honor, sincere and hearty honor, and full recognition of their noble disinterestedness, be to those Atheists who, under such strain, yet struggle successfully and incessantly to do good and not evil all their days, and to die bravely and calmly, letting go their grasp of life and joy and love, and sinking without a groan under the waters which are to coverthem for evermore. There is something in the self-sustained, Promethean courage of such a man which commands our admiration; and we can well imagine him looking round on his suffering fellows pitifully, as on his orphaned and disinherited brothers and sisters, with infinite compassion, deeming them destined like himself to perish with all their aspirations and capacities disappointed and unfulfilled. For such a man to devote himself to the labors of practical benevolence and the relief of the woe which surrounds him, whence he usually draws his strongest arguments for his desolate creed, would seem to be the fittest, if not the only fit pursuit; and, when we behold him engaged in it (as in instances I could readily name), our whole hearts recognize his virtue as absolutely beautiful and disinterested. But because the Atheist’s virtue, when he is virtuous, is without alloy, is there any just reason to hold that it ismorepure than that of the Theist? His task is, as I have readily admitted, theharderof the two;sohard indeed is it that there seem the gravest reasons for fearing that, if a few noble spirits perform it, the mass of tried and tempted men who can scarcely lift themselves from their selfishness even with the two wings of Faith and Hope will lie prone in the very mire of vice when those wings are broken. But, because theAtheist’s duty is harder to do, is it consequently better done? Is the music which he draws from that one string of philanthropy sweeter than the full chord of all the religious and social affections together?

Let us revert to the points of difference between the two creeds as above enumerated. Is a man necessarilyself-interestedin doing the will of a Being whom helovesand hopes by serving to approach and resemble? Of course, if he is looking for payment,—for health, wealth, happiness on earth or celestial glory,—for any adventitious reward outside of the fact of becoming better and nearer to God,—then, indeed, his service is self-interested. He is a mercenary in the army of martyrs. In strict ethics, his conduct, however exactly legal, is not virtuous; for virtue can only be absolutely without side-looks to contingent profit, present or future. I presume that, when Agnostics boast of the superior disinterestedness of the virtue they inculcate over that of religious men, they think (and cannot divest themselves of the early acquired habit of thinking) of religion as of this kind of labor-and-wages system,—hard duty below, high glory above,—with perhaps the additional complication of certain scholastic doctrines of imputed righteousness. But it is time this confusion shouldcease. Love of goodnessimpersonated in Godis not a less disinterested, though naturally a more fervent, sentiment than love of goodness in the abstract. The Theist, in his attempt to obey by good deeds the will of the Being he loves, acts as simply as the Atheist, who loves the good deed, thinking that no being higher in the scale of existence than himself has any appreciation of the difference between good and evil. The Theist, indeed, adds to his love of goodnessper sea love of goodness impersonated in God, who desires good actions to be done,[3]and possibly also a hope that, by doing good now, he may be given the power to do it again and again for ever; but it is all the same charmed circle ofdoing good for goodness’ sake, out of which he never emerges into any such motive as doing good for the sake of honor, prosperity, or heavenly bliss in a golden city. The sole thing which the Theist asks of God as the reward of obedience is the power to obey better in future, the privilege of obeying forever. The payment of his virtue is to be virtuousnow and throughout eternity. Whether it be in this life or another, there is no difference; no new principle comes into play; no bribe unsought for here is hoped for there. He says to God: “It is a joy to serve Thee, but infinitely greater is the joy to serve Thee with the assurance that the term of my service will never expire. Precious is the privilege of calling Thee Father. How glad then am I that I shall be a child at Thy feet forever! Lord, I seek no heaven hereafter. I covet no abode of bliss, no outward reward above. To be with Thee is my heaven and my salvation and the only reward I seek. As I abide in Thee now, may I continue to live in Thee, O Father; and to grow in wisdom and love and purity and joy in Thee, time without end.”[4]

Surely, it is altogether absurd to speak of this religion as involving any, even the very slightest shade of interestedness or detraction from the highest conceivable type of human virtue. If it deserve such a condemnation, then must likewise stand condemned the most pure and exalted human love which friend has ever felt for friend,—for this also, by its very nature, seeks to serve for love’s sake, to arrive at perfect harmony, to dwell with the beloved in unbroken and everlasting union.

Turn we now to the other side of the subject. Theism has been, I hope, vindicated from thecharge of interestedness. What shall we say to the general ethical aspect of Agnosticism, which assumes to be the nobler system? Admitting the blameless conduct and the high aspirations of some of its professors, what value shall we attach to their claim to be the heralds of a higher morality?

If I may, without offence, condense their lessons in a very obvious parallel, they amount to this “symbol”: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he cease to believe either in one God or in three; and that he be fully assured that those who have done good and those who have done evil shall alike go into everlasting nothingness.” This creed piously accepted, he will advance to perfection and outrun in two ways any excellence which has been hitherto attained.

1st. While recognizing that, so far as he himself is concerned, death means the annihilation of consciousness, he will act throughout his life with a deep and conscientious concern for the consequences of his actions to those who come after him or, asMr.Frederick Harrison expresses it, to his own posthumous activity.

2d. By welcoming the conclusions of Atheism, and especially the doctrine of the annihilation of consciousness at death, not as a sorrowful truth, but as the latest and brightest gospel of goodtidings; and proclaiming, on all suitable occasions, that they afford a better stand-point and outlook for humanity than any faith or hope which has been hitherto entertained.

The first of these doctrines was set forth, a few years ago, in two eloquent and affecting papers, byMr.Frederick Harrison, in theNineteenth Century. How much sympathy I feel with a great deal which is said in these papers,[5]how sincerely I respectMr.Harrison’s noble conception of the aim of life, even where I most completely misdoubt the validity of the method he proposes for attaining it, there is scarcely need to say. It is precisely because such Positivists as he andMr.Morley and the late George Eliot, and such Agnostics as many I could name, assume such really high ground in their teaching, and appeal (though, as I think, in a fallacious way) to our very noblest sympathies and aspirations, that I feel urged to raise my feeblevoice and call in question their guidance. There, in truth, stand, as they point to them, the snowy summits of purity and goodness. But by what path would they guide us to ascend them? Even if their own strong souls may climb those arid crags, can they be in any possible sense a better way than that by which millions of believers in God and immortality have gone up on high?

Let us takeMr.Harrison’s doctrine of the “Posthumous Activities” of the soul, and endeavor to estimate how far it is calculated to act as an efficient motive of virtue on ordinarily constituted, well-intentioned men and women. We must bear in mind that it is formally proposed as a substitute for the old belief in the immortality of the individual,—that is (according to the Theist creed), in the immortality of thevirtueof the individual. While a Theist believes that, having lighted that sacred torch, he shall be permitted to bear it onward,burning more purely and brightly forever, the Comtist thinks he must lay down his at the side of his grave, though other men may ignite their own from it, and so carry on its light from age to age.

In the first place, I must remark that, like the promise on which such stress is laid inDr.Bridge’sGeneral View of Positivism, that attached husbands and wives may be solemnly interred side by side, there is nothingnewin these anticipations. We have always known that we might be buried in the same vault with our next friend, as we have always known that our actions would continue to bear fruit after our departure. We entertained the first hope (so far as such a pitiful matter as the future position of our deaf and blind decaying dust deserves to be considered a hope), and we were aware of the responsibility,—plusthe belief that we ourselves should enjoy free converse with the spirit of our friend, and afford to smile together on our poor mouldering garments laid up side by side in the tomb,—andplusthe belief that we might ourselves be cognizant of our posthumous activities. There is nothing in the fact that both the hope and the sense of responsibility must now stand by themselves for what they are worth, to give them (so far as I can see) any fresh leverage as motives of conduct. People who did not love each other betterwhile they expected to be at liberty to spend eternity in conscious communion, as well as to be buried in the same grave, certainly will not love each other better when their future prospects are limited to the family vault. And people who have not regulated their conduct with a view to theirpost-morteminfluence while they anticipated to be living somewhere to know, or, at all events, to be obliged to think about it, are very little likely to regulate it the better when they are convinced that, if they leave the deluge behind them, they will neither know nor care one iota. As to the good man, he will, under the old creed and under the new alike (and neither more nor less, so far as I can perceive), entertain a solemn sense of a responsibility to do all the good and refrain from every evil in his power during his threescore years and ten,—notfirst, or chiefly, for the sake of consequences near or remote to himself or other people in this world or another, but because goodness, truth, courage, justice, and generosity are good in themselves, lovable in his eyes and in the eyes of God, and falsehood, impurity, cruelty, and treachery are bad and despicable, hateful to him and to his Maker. Afterward, and as a reinforcement of his choice of Scipio, he will reflect that every good act entails good consequences in widening circles of loving-kindness, honor, and honesty, andevery bad one the reverse; and he will hope in dying to reflect that the sum of the influence he leaves to work after him will be wholly on the side of truth, justice, and love. It is monstrous forMr.Harrison to say that “the difference between our (Positivist) faith and that of the orthodox is this.Welook to the permanence of the activities which give others happiness.Theylook to the permanence of the consciousness which can enjoy happiness.” Why should looking to the permanence of consciousness and happiness make a man care less for the activities “which give others happiness”? Does A care less for B’s welfare because he would like to be alive to see it, or even alive at the antipodes at the same time?

Moralists and divines of all ages have not overlooked the remoter consequences of our actions in rehearsing the motives in favor of virtue. But it is idle to attach to it, as applied to the bulk of mankind, more practical force than it possesses. In the first place, when such an observer of things as Shakspere could say that

“The evil which men do lives after them,The good is oft interred with their bones,”

it is open to us all to doubt whether some of the very noblest achievements of human virtue have leftany other mark than on the virtuous souls themselves, which (as we Theists think) enjoy even now in a higher existence their blessed inward consequences. The martyrs who perished unseen and unknown in the loathsome dungeons and amid the protracted tortures of the Inquisition in Spain, where the Reformation they would have established was absolutely extinguished and left no ray of light behind,—could these men cheer themselves under the awful strain of their agonies by a motive of such tenuity as the prospect of their “posthumous activities”?

But admitting, for argument’s sake, that the motive would serve always to support the heroic order of virtues, would it likewise aid the still more important ones of every-day conduct? His own illustrations ought surely to have madeMr.Harrison pause before he assumed it. He speaks of Newton as “no longer destroying his great name by feeble theology or querulous pettiness,” of Shakspere as “the boon companion and retired playwright of Stratford,” of Dante as the “querulous refugee from Florence,” and of Milton as “the blind and stern old malignant of Bunhill Fields.” Now these are his chosen exemplars of the enormous “posthumous activity” which a man may exert, and certainly nobody now living can hope that he shall ever exerciseone-tenth as much. Buttheir“pettiness” and “querulousness” and “boon companionship” and “sternness” in their lifetimes did not hinder, or even essentially detract from, their stupendous “posthumous activity.” Why, then, should lesser people have any scruple in being petty, querulous, or stern, or indulging in pot-companionship, or any other faults of temper or habit, on account of their little posthumous activities, whatever they may hope that these may prove?

Obviously,Mr.Harrison has a misgiving as to the force which his argument can be expected to exert on ordinary mortals or for the daily purposes of life. Though he says that the truth he teaches “is not confined to the great,” and adds the beautiful remark that “in some infinitesimal degree the humblest life that ever turned a sod sends a wave—no, more than a wave, a life—through the evergrowing harmony of human society,” yet even while he alleges that a concern for such posthumous activity is “no doubt now in England the great motive of virtue and energy,” and asks, “Can we conceive a more potent stimulus to daily and hourly striving after a true life?”[6]he says in the next page that “it would be an endless inquiry to trace the means whereby this sense of posthumous participation in the life of our fellowscan be extended tothe mass, as it certainly affects already the thoughtful and refined.” Honestly, he admits that it is “impossible it should become universal and capable of overcoming selfishness” “without an education, a new social opinion without a religion; I mean an organized religion, not a vague metaphysic.” “Make it,” he cries, with almost the enthusiasm of a discoverer, “at once the basis of philosophy, the standard of right and wrong, and the centre of a religion,” and then it may perhaps be achieved.

But, in sober truth, what “education” or “organized religion” (i.e., of course, Comtism) can possibly transform this remote anticipation of the results of our actions after we are dead into a practical lever for daily duty for the great bulk of mankind? It is the specialty of all vice to be selfishly indifferent to the injurious consequences of our actions, even to their immediate and visible consequences, to those nearest to us. Is it not almost ludicrous to think of exhorting the drunkard who sees his wife and children starving round him to-day, or the ill-conducted girl who is breaking her mother’s heart, or the hard task-master or landlord who is grinding the faces of the poor to fill his pocket, to refrain from their misdoings on account of the evil which they will cause fifty years hence to people unborn? Or let us try to apply the principle to that sound massof every-day English virtue which is, after all, the very air we breathe,—the daily dutifulness, the purity, the truthfulness, the loving-kindness of our homes, the beautiful patience to be witnessed beside a thousand sick-beds. Were we to ask the simple-hearted men and meek women who exemplify these virtues whether they ever think of the excellent “posthumous activities” which they will exert on their surviving acquaintances, would they not be utterly bewildered? The clergyman (or let us have the Comtist philosopher) who will go through a workhouse ward, or round the cottages of a village, and offer such a suggestion as a topic of encouragement, would, I think, effect a very small measure of reformation. Nor do I think it is necessarily a low type of mind which does not project itself much into the future, whether in this world or the next; but which is vividly affected by the idea of apresentrighteous law claiming immediate obedience, and apresentadorable God watching whether that obedience be paid, but which takes in even the idea of immortality more as adding an infinite dignity to moral things and human souls than as a direct motive to moral action. To such a person, the promise of “posthumous activities” is as remote and inoperative a principle as it is possible to propose; and he can scarcely help smilingat it, as he does at the observation of Pliny, that the “happiest of all possible anticipations is the certain expectation of an honorable and undying renown.” Posthumous activity affords a far nobler motive than posthumous fame; but they both appeal to sentiments which have little weight with the majority of minds, and no weight at all with a great number not undeserving of respect.

The truth seems to be that the leading Comtists and Agnostics of the day not only belong to an exceptional type of human nature, little touched by grosser impulses and highly sensitive to the most rarefied order of influences, but are unable to descend from such altitude, and realize what ordinary flesh-and-blood men and women are made of. AsMr.Darwin unconsciously betrayed that he had never once had occasion to repent an act of unkindness, when he theorized about repentance asbeginningby a spontaneous reversion to sympathy and good-will to the people we have injured (in bold contradiction to Tacitus’ too true maxim, “Humani generis proprium est odisse quem laeseris”), so the disciples of Comte unwittingly allow us to perceive that they really consider an exalted and far-reaching interest in the welfare of our kind as the sort of motive which is already “now in England the great motive of virtue and energy.”

Let me explain myself. I do not think there is any precept too high to be accepted by the mass of mankind: nay, I think that the higher, nobler, more self-sacrificing the lesson, the warmer response it will draw forth from the heart of humanity. But this is themoralexcellence of the precept, the loftiness of the purity, the nobleness of the generosity, the courageousness of the self-devotion, which are demanded. It is quite another thing to choose to present, as the proper motive of daily virtue, an idea requiring a trainedintellectto take it in and a vividimaginationto realize it. Every argument for virtue, for sobriety, veracity, and so on, drawn from considerations of future consequences, labors under this irremediable defect:that it appeals least to those whom it is most necessary to influence. When we go further, and place our fulcrum of moral leverage in the period after the death of the man to whom we appeal, and candidly tell him that he will neither enjoy the sight of any good he may have effected, nor suffer from the spectacle of the results of his wrong-doing, we have reached (as it seems to me) thene plus ultraof impracticability. Woe to human virtue when its advocates are driven to attach primary importance to such an argument, and dream it can be made “the centre of a religion”!

To sum up this subject. To a man of high calibre and gifts, the consideration of “posthumous activities” may act as a spur to doing great actions, but scarcely as a motive to regulate his daily life and temper. He will, perhaps, under its influence reform the prisons of Europe, and at the same time break his wife’s heart; write a great epic poem, and treat his daughters like slaves; paint splendid pictures, and remain a selfish and sordid miser; fight heroically his country’s battles, and lead a life of persistent adultery; be at once a disinterested statesman in a corrupt age, and an habitual drunkard.

As to the mass of mankind, who are endowed neither with any superior gifts to employ, nor vivid imagination to realize the results of their actions hereafter, an appeal to them to act virtuously in consideration of their posthumous activities would draw forth some such reply as this: “Our conduct can, at most, leave after our deaths only very small results on a very few people whom we shall never know. We find it hard enough to make sacrifices for those whom we do know and love, and whose happiness or misery we actually witness. It is asking too much of us that, for remote, contingent, and evanescent benefits to our survivors, we should undergo any pain or labor, or renounce any of the pleasures which in our poor short lives (so soonto end forever in darkness) may fall within our grasp.”

Thus, in its capacity of theFriend of Virtue, it seems that Atheism begins by depriving virtue of some of the strongest, if not the very strongest, motives by which it has hitherto been supported, and offers in their room, as the best substitute for them and the future “centre of religion,” a consideration of Posthumous Activities, whose force is of necessity both partial as to the virtues it inculcates, and extremely limited as to the persons over whom it can exercise any influence. Andthatforce, such as it is, appears to be in no way specially connected with the Atheistic view of human destiny, but belongs to every moral system in the world.

Finally, as if to complete the nullity of the motive of Posthumous Activities, there comes a reflection which must take erelong a prominent place in disquisitions of this kind. Comtists talk of the “immortality,” the “eternity,” of a dead man’s influence. But, if each individual human soul is destined to be extinguished at death, then there isnothingwherewith man is concerned which is immortal or eternal. Our race is destined irretrievably to perishas a race, if it perish piecemeal with every soul which drops into the grave. Miss Martineau’swild talk about “the special destination of my race” being “infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of divine moral government”[7](an assertion in itself simply absurd, since the believers in a scheme of divine government hold that whatever is noblest isby the hypothesisassuredly our destination), is rendered doubly preposterous when we bear in mind what science teaches regarding the inevitable lapse of this planet within a limited epoch into a condition of uninhabitability. The following observations are made on this subject in a littlejeu d’espritwhich I may be pardoned for quoting. It assumes to be an extract from a newspaper of the next century, and the men of that period are supposed to look back upon the doctrine of “Posthumous Activities” with very little respect:—

It is needless to repeat that the delusive exhortations of some amiable but short—sighted philosophers of the last century to “labor for the good of Humanity in future generations” (a motive which they supposed would prove a substitute for the old historic religions) have been once and for all answered by the grand discovery of astronomers that our planet cannot long remain the habitation of man (even if it escape any sidereal explosion), since the solar heat is undergoing such rapid exhaustion. When the day comes, as come it must, when the fruits of the earth perish one by one, when the dead and silent woods petrify, and all the races of animals become extinct, when the icy seasflow no longer, and the pallid sun shines dimly over the frozen world, locked, like the moon, in eternal frost and lifelessness,—what in that day, predicted so surely by science, will avail all the works and hopes and martyrdoms of man? All the stores of knowledge which we shall have accumulated will be forever lost. Our discoveries, whereby we have become the lords of creation and wielded the great forces of Nature, will be useless and forgotten. The virtues which have been perfected, the genius which has glorified, the love which has blessed the human race, will all perish along with it. Our libraries of books, our galleries of pictures, our fleets, our railroads, our vast and busy cities, will be desolate and useless forevermore. No intelligent eye will ever behold them, and no eye in the universe will know or remember that there ever existed such a being as man.Thisis whatScienceteaches us unerringly to expect, and in view of it who shall talk to us of “laboring for the sake of Humanity”? The enthusiasm which could work disinterestedly for a Progress destined inevitably to end in an eternal Glacial Period must be recognized as a dream, wherein no man in a scientific age can long indulge.[8]

The second counsel of perfection of the Agnostic teachers is, as above said, “to welcome the conclusions of Atheism, and especially the doctrine of annihilation of consciousness at death, not merely as truth, but as the latest gospel of good tidings.”

This lesson, though repeated more or less by nearly all Agnostic and Comtist writers, has been perhaps most prominently brought to the front in the Life of Harriet Martineau. I shall take her observations and example as the text for the remarksI wish to offer upon it, as I have done the papers ofMr.Frederick Harrison for those just made on the doctrine of Posthumous Activities. These are some of her utterances which touch on the matter:—

I soon found myself quite outside of my old world of thought and speculation, under a new heaven and a new earth, disembarrassed of a load of selfish cares and troubles.... Hence it followed that the conceptions of a God with any human attributes whatever, of a principle or practice of design, of an administration of the affairs of the world by the principles of human morals, must be mere visions, necessary and useful in their day, but not philosophically or permanently true.... The reality that philosophy founded upon science is the one thing needful, the source and the vital principle of all morality and all peace to individuals and good-will among men, had become the crown of my experience and the joy of my life.... My comrade (Mr.Atkinson) and I were both pioneers of truth. We both care for our kind, and we could not see them suffering as we had suffered without imparting to them our consolation and our joy. Having found, as my friend said, a spring in the desert, should we see the multitude wandering in desolation, and not show them our refreshment?...Then(in younger days) I believed in a Protector, who ordered my work and would sustain me under it; and, however I may now despise that sort of support, I had it then, and have none of that sort now. I have all that I want, ... and I would not exchange my present views, imperfect and doubtful as they are,—I had better say I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition,—if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of Orthodoxy. Nor would I for my exemption give up the blessing of the power of appeal to thoughtful minds.... When I experienced the still new joy of feeling myself to be a portion of the universe, resting on the securityof its everlasting laws, certain that its Cause was wholly out of the sphere of human attributes, and that the special destiny of my race is infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of “divine moral government,” how could it matter to me that the adherents of a decaying mythology were still clinging to their Man-God?... Under this close experience (of illness), I find death in prospect the simplest thing in the world,—a thing not to be feared or regretted or to get excited about in any way. I attribute this very much to the nature of my views of death.... Now, the release is an inexpressible comfort. I see that the dying naturally and regularly, unless disturbed, desire and sink into death as into sleep.... I feel no solicitude about a parting which will bring no pain.... Under the eternal laws of the universe I came into being, and under them I have lived a life so full that its fulness is equivalent to length: thus there is much in my life that I am glad to have enjoyed, and much that generates a mood of contentment at its close. Besides that, I never dream of wishing that anything were otherwise than as it is; and I am frankly satisfied to have done with life. I have had a noble share of it, and I desire no more. I neither wish to live longer here nor to find life again elsewhere. It seems to me simply absurd to expect it.[9]

It is no part of the purpose of this article to discuss thetruthof the doctrine that there is no God, and that death terminates human consciousness. Nor yet do I question whether a high sense of loyalty to what is understood to be truth may not make it appear to any one holding such doctrines that he is under the obligation to publish themfrankly to the world. Many a man who is an Atheist as regards God holds (what many believers in Him lack) a noble faith in TruthasTruth, a firm conviction that nothing can be better than Truth, and that, as Carlyle said, “To nothing but error can any truth be dangerous.” It is not, then, the holding of such views as those above quoted, nor yet their frank publication and defence, wherewith we are now concerned; but with thetone of exultationwith which they are announced, the disregard and contempt which are manifested for the dearest hopes, the purest aspirations, of the great mass of mankind.

Magnanimity has two phases. We may be magnanimous on our own account,—brave, calm, and self-reliant in the face of things which appall feebler souls. Of this sort of personal magnanimity, this remarkable woman has given a very fine example. Here are the words she wrote twenty years after the foregoing pages, in her last letter to her friend:

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