Part 17

And this brings us to the second important point in the original attitude of Christianity, and the manner in which it moved the moral world. This point is the historical foundation on which the moral appeal stood; and this historical foundation was the miraculous life, death, and resurrection of the Founder of the ethical religion. It concerns us not to inquire here, whether Christ was a real person, or, as certain Germans with their ingenious whimsicality will have it, a mere myth; as little need we ask whether the miracles were really suspensions of the laws of nature, or were mere acts of remarkable power somewhat exaggerated by the wondering narrators; much less can it be necessary for the present argument to weigh the evidence for the great crowning miracle of the resurrection. Concerning these matters, every man must either judge for himself or take the authority of nearly two thousand years of effective Christian teaching as a sufficient guarantee. But what we have to do with here is simply this: that these facts were believed, that the Apostles stood upon these facts, and that the ethical efficiency of Christianity was rooted in these facts. Take the facts away, or the assured belief in the facts, and the existence of such an ethico-religious society as the Christian Church becomes, under the circumstances, impossible. Consider what an effect the personality of Socrates had in establishing what we with no great license of language may call the Socratic Church in Athens. The various schools of philosophy, first in Athens and then in Rome, were sects of that Church. Had Socrates not lived and died {200} with visible power and effect before men, the existence of these schools, fathered by this great teacher, would have been impossible. A person is the necessary nucleus round which all social organisms form themselves. But the personality of Socrates was a much less important element in the formation of the Socratic schools than that of Christ was in the formation of the Christian Church. Socrates was only a teacher--one who, like other teachers, might in time create disciples as wise, perhaps wiser than, himself; Christ was a redeemer, whose function as such could be performed by no vicar, and transmitted to no successor: the one was a help and a guide, the other a foundation of faith and a fountain of life. Socrates taught his disciples to become independent of him, and rely on their own perfected reason; from Christ His disciples always derive nourishment, as the branches from the vine. And if the relation of Christ to His disciples, conceived only as a living Saviour walking on the earth, was so much closer than that of Socrates to his disciples, how much more intimate does the relation become, when He who lived and died to redeem humanity from sin rose from the dead as a living guarantee that all who walked in His ways, should follow up their redemption from sin by a speedy victory over that yet stronger enemy. Death![200.1] From the moment that the resurrection stood amongst the disciples as an accepted fact, the Founder of the religion was not merely a wonder-working man, a prophet and the greatest of all the prophets, but He was an altogether exceptional and miraculous Person, either {201} God in some mysterious way combined into an incorporate unity with man, or at least a Person that, compared with the common type and expression of humanity, might pass for God. The influence which the belief in the actual existence of such a human, and yet in so many regards superhuman, character as the Founder of their faith, must have exercised on the early preachers of the gospel, cannot easily be over-estimated. Plato and Plotinus often talk of the raptures with which the human soul would be thrilled if not only, as now, the shadows and types of the Beautiful, but the very absolute Beautiful itself, the αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν, stood revealed to mortal sight. But granting for the moment that the manifestation of such a vague abstraction is possible, it is quite certain that, when manifested, it could not possibly act upon men with anything like the power of a human Christ actually risen from the dead. Man, with all his range of imagination, is at bottom as much concrete as any creature, and as little capable of being moved by mere abstractions. Jesus Christ, and Him crucified; Christ risen from the dead; believe in Him--this was the short summation of that preaching of the gospel which regenerated the then world, lying as it did in all sorts of wickedness. See how emphatically the resurrection is alluded to as the main anchor in all the early preachings of the Apostles (Acts ii. 32; iii. 15; iv. 2; v. 30, etc.) And as to St. Paul, he declares again and again that if Christ be not risen, the faith of Christians is vain, and those to whom the world was indebted for its moral regeneration were justly to be accounted amongst the most miserable of men; a method of speaking which plainly implies that, in the Apostle’s {202} estimation, the firm fact of a risen Saviour was the only real assurance that Christians had of a life beyond the grave. So true is the utterance of a distinguished modern divine that “the resurrection was the central point of the apostolic teaching, nay more, the central point of history, primarily of religious history, of which it is the soul. The resurrection is the one central link between the seen and the unseen.”[202.1] Let this, therefore, stand firm as the main principle of any just exposition of the machinery by which the ethics of the gospel achieved the conquest of the world. The Church--“the peculiar people zealous for good works,” of whom St. Peter speaks--was formed out of the world not by the clear cogency of logical arguments, but by the vivid belief in miraculous facts.

But the miraculous personality of the teacher, however essential to the proclamation and reception of the teaching, was not the teaching itself. There were doctrines of an essentially theological character, and strong emotions that only religion could excite, which operated along with the unique personality of the Founder in laying a firm foundation for the ethics of the gospel. The most important of these doctrines was the doctrine of the unity of the Godhead. This is a matter with which in Christian countries we are now so familiar that not a few find it difficult to realize how prominent an element it was in the Christian creed, and how powerful must have been its action in the creation of a new school of morals in the midst of the heathen world. By the Fathers of the Church, however, in the first and second centuries, the ethical virtue of this element {203} was never overlooked; they knew only too well, from their own personal experience most of them, and all of them by what they saw written in the habits and maxims of a corrupt society, how easily Polytheism had lent itself to draw a beautiful veil over what was ugly, and to stamp the most debasing vices with consecration. Philosophers, like Xenophanes and Plato, in whose breasts these things had long ago roused a rebellious indignation, might well despair of converting to a pure morality a people who, though they might be sober on all the other days of the year, would think it necessary, as an act of piety, to appear publicly intoxicated on the feast of Dionysus. The salt of goodness, it is quite true, which kept the body of Polytheism so long from rotting, has often been overlooked, principally by the exaggeration of Christian writers, seldom remarkable for candour; and the early Fathers of the Church, engaged, as they were, in actual warfare with the many-headed foe, may well be excused if their zeal was not always accompanied by that fairness to which even error is entitled. But with the most honest purpose to do justice to the moral element of Polytheism, as we may find it exhibited most favourably perhaps in the living pictures of the Homeric poems, it cannot be denied that the obvious deduction from the Polytheistic creed was, in all cases to palliate, in some cases even to justify, vice; and that this deduction was often made we may gather from the familiar fact that the most illogical people even now suddenly become very acute reasoners, the moment it is necessary to defend their prejudices, or to protest against the amendment of their faults. In a system of faith, where every {204} instinct had its god, and every passion its patron-saint, it required either a rare training, or a remarkably healthy habit of mind to keep the low and the high in their just seats of subordination and supremacy. No doubt the more imperative moral virtues to a well-constituted Heathen mind were conceived as represented by Jove, who was the real moral governor of the world; and the supremacy of Zeus in Olympus was a sufficient assertion of the superiority which belongs to the moral law in the little republic of the soul: but as the son of Kronos in the Greek heaven was only a limited monarch, and often, as the Iliad plainly indicates, obliged to wink at the contravention of his own commands by the unruly aristocracy of the skies, so Polytheism could never invest the τὸ ἡγεμονικόν--the regulating principle of the soul--with the absolute sovereignty which to its nature rightfully belongs. Christianity, as an essentially monotheistic faith, applied a perfect remedy to this evil. The highest part of man’s nature was now the only sacred part. The flesh, so far from being glorified and worshipped, was denounced, degraded, and desecrated as a synonym for all corruption. The deification of mere sensuous pleasures, which with Polytheists had passed for orthodox, was now impossible; the moral law became supreme; and surely the sanction which this law requires can never be conceived in more imperative terms than as the distinctly enunciated command of the all-powerful, all-wise, and all-beneficent Father of the human family. No sanction, deduced from a mere reasoning process, can ever approach this in broad practical efficiency. It is the impersonated, incarnated, and enthroned Reason, to which all {205} reasonable creatures owe an instinctive and a necessary obedience.

But there is another corollary to a monotheistic creed, which, in estimating the influence of Christian faith on Christian Ethics, is by no means to be overlooked. If there is only one God, the father of the whole human race, then there is only one family; all men are brethren; nationality ceases; philanthropy, or love of men in the widest sense of the word, becomes natural; mere patriotism has now only a relative value; Leonidas is no longer the model hero; the Jew is no longer of the one chosen people; and the Greek, full of wisdom, and full of conceit, must condescend to call the ignorant barbarian his brother. This breaking down of the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile, between every nation and its neighbour, removed two of the greatest obstructions which have ever stood in the way of a generous morality, in the shape of what Lord Bacon would have called idols of the place and of the race; these idols could be worshipped no longer; and no shibboleth of separation could be mumbled to consecrate the unreasonable prejudices which every nation is so apt to entertain against its neighbour. No doubt towards the propagation of these catholic and cosmopolitan principles, ancient philosophy also, and specially Stoicism, contributed its share;[205.1] the consolidation of the Roman empire and the policy of the Roman emperors worked in the same direction; {206} but the monotheistic creed of the Christian Church, proclaimed with such dignity and moral courage by St. Paul in his discourse on the Hill of Mars, supplied the only effective leverage. Compared with what the preaching of St. Paul did for the grand idea, of humanity and fraternity, all that modern science, modern political theories, modern commerce, and modern philosophies have achieved or may yet achieve, can only be counted as a very small supplement.

The immortality of the soul, the second coming of Christ, and the final judgment of the world, form together a group of doctrines, the relation of which to moral practice is too deeply felt to require much discussion in this place. Perhaps, however, everybody does not sufficiently consider how peculiarly Christian these doctrines are, and how the belief in them, and the moral issues of such belief, must necessarily stand and fall with the faith in some such historical religion as has hitherto formed the framework of the Churches of Christendom. For however these doctrines might be dimly conceived and vaguely believed by the people who wrote D. M. upon their tombstones, and however solemnly imagined and grandly depicted they were in the eloquent discourses of the great philosopher of Idealism, there are few mistakes greater than to accept these dim conceptions and grand imaginings as a proof that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, as a point of Polytheistic faith, performed the same function in moulding the morality of the ancient Greeks and Romans that it does at the present day among modern Christian peoples. A single quotation--one of the most trite--from Homer {207} will suffice to show how utterly unfounded such an idea is. In the Cimmerian visit to the unseen world, the wandering king of Ithaca is made to encounter the hot thane of Thessaly, pacing with a stately fierceness through the Elysian fields, like a king among the shades. On being complimented to this effect by his visitor, the son of Peleus replies--

“Name me not death with praiseful words, noble Ulysses; I Would sooner be a bonded serf, the labourer’s tool to ply To a small cottar on the heath with wealth exceeding small, Than be the Lord of all the Shades in Pluto’s gloomy hall.”

A people who could think and speak thus of the state of souls after departure from the body, could not derive much practical advantage from belief in immortality. That belief indeed was held so loosely by the mass of the Greek people that it may rather be described as a dim imagination than as a definite conviction. People were rather unwilling to believe that their beloved human friends had vanished into the realm of nothingness, than convinced that they had gone to where on any account it would be at all desirable to go. To a few select heroes no doubt, men like Menelaus, of divine extraction, and divine affinity, a really enviable abode after death in the cloudless and stormless islands of the blest was by popular tradition assigned; a few perpetrators also of enormous crimes, red-hand murderers, open blasphemers, and traitors who sold their country for gold were consigned for ever to the ensanguined scourge of the Furies in those flaring regions which the genius of Virgil and Dante has so vividly portrayed; but if the belief in these exceptional cases inspired some to acts of unwonted heroism and {208} deterred others from deeds of abhorred foulness, the very good and the very bad in the world are too few in number to admit of the idea that the motives which either stir them to acts of exceptive virtue or deter them from acts of abnormal crime should have any influence in determining the conduct of the great masses. And as for the philosophers, it was Socrates only and Plato who in their teaching gave any special emphasis to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; and no man who has read the most familiar accounts of the defence which the former delivered to the jury at his trial, or of his last moments as reported by Plato in the _Phædo_, can have carried off the impression that the great father of moral philosophy taught that doctrine with any dogmatic decision or certainty. We must say therefore, with Dr. Paley, who, though incapable of sounding great depths, had a very clear head, and was a very sensible man, that it was the gospel, and the gospel alone, which “brought life and immortality to light,” and with it introduced whatever real power in elevating or strengthening the moral nature of man such a doctrine, when held as a habitual conviction, must exercise over the masses of men. What Socrates contemplated calmly as a probable contingency, St Paul and the early Christians gloried in as a grand culmination and a triumphant result. And the effective influence of this firm faith on society has been to give an infinitely greater dignity to human life, to increase infinitely the moral worth of the individual, and to add a support of wonderful efficacy to those states and stages of toilsome existence which stand so much in need of such hopeful consolation. That it has always acted, and {209} must always act, as a strong aid to virtuous conduct can scarcely be denied, though they of course are poor philosophers and ignoble men who think that virtue could not possibly exist in the world without the belief in immortality. There are many motives that force the masses of men to be virtuous, according to the respectable righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, altogether independent of any prospect of rewards and punishments in a future state; and as for men of a more than commonly delicate moral sensibility--persons to whom a life in baseness and foulness would under any conditions be intolerable--it is not to be imagined that they would be more virtuous from the prospect of an eternity of bliss, than they are from the fear of a short season of shame. These men will always live nobly, for the same reason that whatever they do they must do well. If they play cricket, they will play a good game; if they ride, they will ride well; and if they boat, they will boat well; and, for the same reason, if they live, they will live well--not because they expect a reward, but because they have no pleasure in living badly. To them vice is always rottenness, putrescence, and loathsomeness; and no man will consciously condemn himself to these who knows what soundness means.