Part 16

So far well. But there is another view which, if we honestly take, we shall find it impossible to acquit the Aristotelian morals of a very serious defect. This defect is the want of the religious element. In saying this I do not mean to assert that God--or rather the gods--are not mentioned from beginning to end of his famous book; they are alluded to in several places, but merely in the form of a passing remark, as a pedestrian with a long day’s journey before him may pick up a primrose from a moist bank, or a fragrant orchis from a dry brae, and fling it away. Now, there is nothing more nobly characteristic of Christianity than this, that piety is identical {186} with morality; that faith and works--not ritual, or ceremonial, or externally imposed works at all, of course, but genuine works of moral fervour and moral firmness--are one; stand to one another, at least, as the root does to the flower, or the fruit of a wholesome plant, of which not the root but the fruit is the valuable part. That this is the only true and philosophical relation of the two great moral potencies no thinker will deny. Or, to take another simile, which will suit equally well: Every arch must have its keystone; and the keystone of every solid doctrine of ethics, as of every close compacted system of speculative philosophy, is God. That there is a great defect here in the Aristotelian ethics is plain. A man might as well write a treatise on the Affections without mention of reverence, as set forth a system of morals without mention of God. As the discipline of a well-ordered family implies the recognition of the father as the great source from which the family flows--as the prime power by which it is regulated--so a treatise on human ethics implies a chapter on human piety, or rather a pervading soul of human piety, without which all other chapters want their highest inspiration. And in this view the Aristotelian author of the “_Magna Moralia_” is wrong in blaming Plato for mingling up the doctrine of Virtue with discussions on the Absolute Good--that is, God. It is important to inquire what was the cause of this defect. That the subject was not altogether ignored by our philosopher is plain from the single sentence of allusion in Book viii. 12. 5; and, indeed, that a man of such reach of intellect should by mere accident or carelessness have omitted such an important factor in all moral calculations {187} seems in the highest degree improbable; but so far is the idea of God from giving any colour to his system of Moral Philosophy, that the very occurrence of the phrase, θεραπεύειν τὸν θεόν, in the last section of the Eudemian Ethics, has been justly adduced by Grant among the many proofs of the inauthenticity of that treatise. That Aristotle was a theist is certain, both from other places of his voluminous writings, and specially from a famous passage in the _Metaphysics_ which has lately been brought forward with due prominence by the noble-minded Bunsen in his great work, _God in History_; it seems impossible, indeed, for such a profound thinker as Aristotle to be an atheist, because, as Schleiermacher well remarks, “Philosophy cannot inquire into the totality of things, without at the same time inquiring into their unity, and as the totality of things is the world, so the unity of things is God;” or, as Spinoza has it in one of his propositions--“_Quicquid est in Deo est, et nihil sine Deo neque esse neque concipi potest_.” But it is one thing to be a theist as a matter of speculative belief, and another thing to be a man of devout temper and pious practice. And herein, if I mistake not, lies the real cause of the defect in the Ethics now under consideration. For if Aristotle had been a man of any fervour of religious sentiment, he had two courses before him with regard to the Greek religion, neither of which he has followed--he might either, like his great master Plato, or Xenophanes of Colophon among the pre-Socratic thinkers, have attacked the Homeric theology, and shown how its general tendency and some of its most distinctive features were inconsistent with a pure and elevated morality, or, like Socrates, {188} Xenophon, Pindar, Æschylus, Plutarch, and many other far-sighted and large-hearted men, he might have taken Jove as the impersonated Providence of Hellenic piety, and, allowing the immoral deities quietly to drop, shown how all the highest qualities of the moral nature of man are collected and concentrated in the supreme sovereign of gods and men. In the one case, he would have shown his zeal for true religion by his zealous iconoclasm of false gods; in the other case, he might have shown a still nobler form of piety by his kindly exhibition of the soul of good in things evil. But he did neither of these things; and the conclusion plainly is that the omission arose from a defect in his mental constitution, which curtailed the reverential faculties of their fair proportions. From all which we learn a most important lesson: that the analytic work of the mere understanding, even when practised by a Titan like Aristotle, is an inadequate method of reaching the highest form of vital reality, or, to use the words of Grant, it forces even the greatest minds at times to degenerate into a sort of smallness; and, generally, that mere intellectual culture never can of itself produce a complete and healthy manhood--never can elaborate for a human soul that rich blood which then only appears when the watery element of the understanding is thoroughly permeated by the red particles of the moral and emotional nature. So true is it, to use St. Paul’s language, that “_knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth;_” and of charity there is no perfect form except that reverential recognition of the common fatherhood of God, and the common brotherhood of man, which we call religion. Let this want of the devout element, therefore, stand {189} strongly pronounced as a defect in the ethical system of Aristotle; he is less than Socrates and Plato as a moralist, principally because he is less in this. Omitting from his calculation one element of that Nature which is stronger than all philosophies and wider than all churches, he has so far failed; and the failure of such a man in such a field should teach our modern philosophers, physical, mechanical, and utilitarian, to beware of following his example.

CHRISTIANITY.

{190}

AN ancient Greek poet, of grave thoughts and weighty words, describing the character and functions of one of the great primeval divinities of his country, says that she is

πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μορφὴ μία, One shape of many names,

an expression which might have been varied with equal truth, as

One Power of many shapes,

and indicating that the motley polymorphous harlequinade, as it appears to us, of a polytheistic Pantheism, is at bottom reducible to a few fundamental forms; and if this be true of such a shifting kaleidoscopic exhibition as popular mythology, it holds good much more of popular morals. All moral philosophies are fundamentally the same, and cannot indeed be otherwise, being only the variously emphasized expression of the one self-existent and self-organizing Reason--the βασιλικὸς Νοῦς of Plato--which makes either a physical or a moral world possible. We shall not expect therefore to find absolutely new principles in the laws which regulate human conduct any more than in the laws of those primary vitalizing forces--Light and Heat--which {191} shape and regulate all organism, immutably and infallibly, by the inherent necessity of the great Being of sleepless underived energy of whom they are the manifestation. We shall, on the contrary, believe with an assured faith, that the principles of morals, and the primary forces of the physical universe, are as immutable and self-congruent in the essential nature of things, as the laws of measure and of magnitude traced out by the mathematician; with this advantage in favour of what has been sometimes ignorantly talked of as contingent truth, that whereas the certainty of mathematical propositions depends on the fact that they are founded on self-limiting definitions of mere thoughts, with which no disturbing condition, not even the fiat of Omnipotence, can interfere, the certainty of physical and of moral laws flows from this, that they are facts, subject to no man’s definition, and necessarily existing as normal manifestations of the great primary fact, which we call GOD. The variations therefore which undoubtedly are observed in human morals--variations peculiarly notable in the infancy and in the decline both of individuals and of races,--are not contradictions, but only partial, feeble, and inadequate expressions of immutable morality. The ebb of the tide, looked at from a local and narrow point of view, is a contradiction to the flow; but both flow and ebb are parts of the grand harmonious motion of the sleepless waters of ancient Ocean. Morals vary under varying conditions of society, as plants vary under more or less favourable conditions of growth, or landscapes under more or less happy incidences of solar light; but these variations, so far from contradicting each other, could not even exist without {192} a fundamental identity; as the element of likeness in the different members of a large family could not exist without a common parentage. And where there may not be a striking unity of expression, traceable through all the varieties of popular morality, there is always at least, as Mr. Lecky has well pointed out, a unity of tendency;[192.1] even as a plant, when it first spreads out the green lobes of its radical leaves, may present a very different appearance from the distinctive leafage of its perfect growth; but the type nothing the less is one, and the necessary law of the whole congruous growth lay in the unity of the germ. There is nothing accidental in nature; so neither in morals. All things are necessary; all things are self-consistent; all things are harmonious; all things upon a whole view of the whole are complete. The distinctive character therefore of such an ethical system as Christianity is to be sought not in the fundamental invariable absolute types of right and wrong, which are the same everywhere, but mainly in the following two things--_First_, In its method of operation and in the steam power, the strong convictions and fervid passions by which the moral machinery is set in motion; or, to adopt another simile, in the fountainheads from which the necessary water-courses of a systematic social irrigation are supplied. _Secondly_, In the particular virtues which its method of operation and its moral steam, in conjunction with the nature of the materials acted on, brings on the stage with a certain preference. For though a moral system may, or rather must, include theoretically all {193} the virtues, and is justly blamed if it exclude one, even the smallest, yet from the narrowness of finite natures, and the laws of habit, it seems practically impossible that as soon as any moral system becomes a traditional law for great masses of men, there should not be manifested a strong tendency to put certain virtues into the foreground, while others are left to find their places without favour, or even with a certain amount of discouragement. All soils are not equally favourable to all plants; and the most healthy climates, where human beings of the greatest amount of robustness and grace are produced, have never been free from peculiar diseases, springing from a source indissolubly intertwined with the conditions of their remarkable salubrity. Another influence also materially tends to give even the most large and comprehensive system of Ethics a certain apparent narrowness and one-sidedness in practice. A world-regenerating system of Ethics, such as Christianity, is not a thing, like a treatise on Logic, written in a book and laid on the shelf, and allowed quietly to work its way with whosoever may choose to take it up. It is an active, aggressive, invasive power; it is a strong medicine to knock down a strong disease; it is a charge of cavalry dashing onwards, like a storm, to break the solid squares of an opposing infantry, bristling with many spears. Such a movement is necessarily one-sided; all movement is one-sided; speculation only is catholic. We must not therefore expect Christianity, of all moral forces the most impetuous and the most imperious, to be free from this fault. It had to swoop down, so to speak, on violent wings from the spiritual side of our nature upon the sensualism of {194} the Greeks, otherwise it could not succeed; and its most distinctive features will be found to spring mainly from this necessary attitude of imperious hostility. There is no time to temper blows in the moment of battle. A great victory is never gained by moderate blows; though, when gained, a wise general will always know how to use it with moderation.

I will now proceed to attempt a sketch of Christian Ethics from the two points of view here indicated.

FIRST, Let us inquire what is the steam-power, the lever, the motive force of Christian Ethics. And here at once the most distinctive part of the Christian moral system meets us in the face; it is presented to us prominently, essentially, radically as a religion. It is not merely connected with religion, not only, like the moral philosophy of Dr. Paley, willing to stamp its precepts with a religious sanction, and to found moral obligation upon the will of the Supreme Being; much less, like the philosophy of Socrates, ready to fraternize with religion, and eager to prove with Heraclitus, the profoundest of the pre-Socratic thinkers, that all human rules of conduct are derived ultimately from the necessity of the divine nature.[194.1] It is more than all this; it is a religion; by its mere epiphany it forms a church; in its starting-point, its career, and its consummation it is “a kingdom of Heaven upon earth.” In its method of presentation, though not certainly in its contents, it is as different from its great ally Platonism {195} as Platonism is from its great enemy, the Homeric theology; for Platonism, however nearly allied to Christianity, is a philosophy and not a religion; a philosophy which did not even propose to overthrow the Polytheistic faith, whose poet-theologer it had so rudely assaulted. The moral philosophy of the Greeks, indeed, generally was either a simple wisdom of life in the form of precepts loosely strung together, as in the early Gnomic poets, or it was a wisdom of life deduced from principles of reason, as in all the Socratic and post-Socratic teaching. But the Ethics of the Gospel came down upon men like a flash from Heaven; suddenly, violently, fervidly and explosively, not with a curious apparatus of slowly penetrating arguments. There is no talk about reasons here at all; the λόγος of St. John came afterwards and meant a very different thing. “_Repent ye, and be baptized, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand!_” is the form of the Evangelical appeal, in which no argument is attempted or indeed required. Your conscience tells you that you are rebels against God; as rebels you can only live under a curse; the whole sense-besotted Greek and Roman world is evidently lying under a curse; repent and be converted; return to God and be saved; to man there can be no safety anywhere except in God, who is the source of all good, and in Christ, who gave himself a living sacrifice that we might be redeemed from all evil. This is the whole style of the greatest moral Evangel the world has ever heard; absolutely and simply an act of religion; all immorality is departure from God, all morality return to God. In the Christian Ethics God is not a secondary figure; he is not brought in merely for a sanction: he is the central sun of the {196} whole system, from whose bright fountain of perennial excellence all the little twinkling lamps of our minor moralities are lighted up. The individual virtues of a Christian man are merely the flower and the fruit of a living plant, of which the root is theology and the sap piety; nay more, the piety accompanies the flower and the fruit, and imparts to them a fragrance and a flavour, which gives them more than half their charm. A rose without smell would still be a rose; but what a world of difference to the sense and to the sentiment would the absence of that fine invisible essence imply! Christian virtue, in fact, can no more exist without piety than Socratic virtue can exist without logic. Socrates was, no doubt, a remarkably pious man; but, while the piety of Socrates was a strong shoot from his reason, the virtue of a Christian is the fair issue of his piety.

The distinct proof of what we have here stated will be found everywhere in the New Testament, but in the Acts of the Apostles specially rather than in the Gospels. For the ideal of Christian character we refer naturally to the Sermon on the Mount and to the character of our Lord as exhibited in the evangelic narrative; but for the manner in which Christianity was presented to men, for the method of operation by which in so short a time it so wonderfully overcame the stern ritualism of the Jew and the fair sensualism of the Greek, we must look to the actual facts of the great early conversions as they are presented to us in the apostolic memoirs of Luke. Let us see therefore, in the first place, what we can learn from the early chapters of that most interesting narrative. Now, the starting-point here plainly is the effusion of the Holy Ghost, an influence which, {197} whether we take it on this first occasion as miraculous, according to the traditional understanding of the Church, or as something extraordinary but in the course of nature, is a phenomenon altogether different in kind from the action of arguments upon the ratiocinative faculty of the mind, and had indeed been preceded not by inductions or deductions, or analytic dissections, or any scholastic exercitations at all, but by meetings for social prayer (i. 14)--prayer which is the great feeder of the moral nature of man when reverting to the original source of all moral life in the form of religion. It was therefore not in the philosophic way of debate and discussion, but in the religious way of inspiration that the regenerative afflatus of the first Christian Ethics came upon the Jewish and Hellenic world; and it worked, let us say, by a fervid moral contagion, not by the suasion of cool argument. And there can be no doubt, that if even in the intellectual world a wise ancient might justly say, _Nemo vir magnus sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit_, much more in the world of moral and political action it is by the infection of noble passions that men are moved to any grand issues, not by the cogency of strong arguments. Melanchthon was as good a reasoner as Martin Luther, perhaps a better, but he had not the volcanic fire of his fellow; and it was an eruption of this fire only that could prevail to shake the stout pillars of the Popedom. And it was by an influence manifestly quite akin to the impetuous energetic eloquence of the great Saxon reformer, that by the first sermon of the Apostle Peter, as we read, great masses of men were suddenly pricked in their hearts, conscience-stung as we phrase it, and in one day three thousand {198} human beings, previously indifferent or hostile, were added to the new moral community afterwards called the Christian Church. Precisely similar in modern times has been the action of the so-called religious revivals, which, from the days of the Methodists downwards, have done so much in this country to rouse from a state of moral lethargy the most neglected and the most abandoned portions of the community. Of Martin Boos, the celebrated Bavarian evangelist, we are told that his “sermon was as if he poured forth flame;”[198.1] and not less striking were the moral effects of the eloquent Whitefield when he drew the tears in white gutters down the grimy cheeks of the congregated Bristol colliers, and, what is even more significant of his power, in Savannah elicited from the prudential pockets of sage Benjamin Franklin, sitting before the preacher with a stiff determination not to contribute, first a handful of coppers, then three or four silver dollars, and then five golden pistoles![198.2] Preachings of this kind have been the subject of scoffing with light-witted persons in all ages; but they stand firm as grave attestations of the fact that the Christian method of conversion, not by logical arguments, but by moral contagion and the effusion of the Holy Ghost, has, with the masses of mankind, always proved itself the most effective. Socrates did much more perhaps as a reformer of sinners than any preacher in the guise of a philosopher ever did; but he could not have done what Whitefield did with the colliers. The arguments of Socrates convinced the few; but the fervour of Peter, the loftiness of his religious position, and {199} the felt firmness of his historical foundation converted the many.