Part 18

There is one marked peculiarity about Christian Ethics, growing directly out of a religious root, and closely connected with certain theological doctrines, which, though indicated in some of the previous paragraphs, demands special mention here. We mean what Dr. Chalmers called its aggressive attitude. The idea of Duty is not necessarily aggressive; a man may perform his duty quietly, as the spheres {210} move in their orbits, without daring, or even desiring, to meddle with the movements of other members of the great social machine. Even Christian Churches in quiet and flat times, as the last century for instance, have been known to content themselves with the unobtrusive performance of a certain round of familiar pieties, undisturbed by any desire to make moral inroads into the domain of remote or even adjacent heathenism. But this is certainly not the normal or flourishing state of any Christian Church; not the natural state indeed of any sect or society, whether religious or philosophical, professing to possess a healing medicine for the cure of diseased souls. We accordingly found in the first discourse that Socrates was in his attitude, however pleasant and playful on the surface, at bottom very earnestly aggressive; it was this aggressiveness, in fact, that raised up against him the hostility of those spiteful little individuals to whom more than to popular ill-will he owed his martyr-death. He asserted, as we have seen, a divine mission, and acted as a missionary, though always in the manner of a reasoner rather than as a preacher. But the aggressive element in early Christianity was much stronger than in Socrates; as any one may see at a glance by comparing the biographical career of St. Paul with that of the Athenian philosopher. And the causes of this were more than one. In the first place, the whole Hebrew nature was more fervid, more impassioned, more prophetic than the Hellenic; and again, the autocratic character which belongs to all monotheism, imparted to the moral message of the missionaries an urgency and a lofty intolerance, which in an atmosphere compounded of polytheism in its lower {211} sphere and of logic in its upper sphere was impossible. A divine command superadded to fervid human sympathies necessarily creates a mission in the person who is the subject of them; but the divine command is much more stringent from an autocratic Jehovah than from a limited monarch like Jove, and the fervour of human sympathy is more intense in proportion as the offence of the rebels against the sovereign authority is looked upon as more heinous. We are brought back therefore again to the great doctrine of the Divine Unity, if we would make it fully evident to ourselves why St. Paul was so much more aggressive than Socrates: Socrates was only partly a missionary, and the messenger of a god whose authority was limited by an inferior but acknowledged authority in other gods; St. Paul was a missionary of the one true God, to whose authority there could be no limit, and to whose command there could be no contradiction. From this principle of divine autocracy there necessarily grew up the conception of sin, not as folly merely and imperfection, but as contumacy, rebellion, and treason; and the conviction of the exceeding sinfulness of sin and the exceeding misery of the sinner became the strongest spur to the missionary activity of the Christian preachers, and gave a true moral sublimity to an aggressive attitude, which in a mere reasoner had appeared impertinent. Nothing indeed is more remarkable than the contrast between the strong colours in which sin is painted by the writers of the New Testament and its more venial aspect in the mild regard of the philosopher. Aristotle can surrender a whole generation of young men to the dominion of πάθος and think nothing more about it. {212} They are as incapable of moral ideas, these young sensualists, as swine are of cleanliness; let them wallow in the mire for a season; we shall speak to them, when they have outgrown their animalism. But the converted Pharisee who wrote his burning epistles to the young Christian churches in magnificent Rome and luxurious Ephesus used very different language. Sin with him is a very serious offence, on account of which the curse of God lies on the whole world. Sinners, whether old or young, are by nature the children of wrath; and by the act and fact of the transgression of divine law, so utterly cast down and degraded from the proper human dignity, that they require to be born again, and baptized with a fire-baptism before they can be purified from their foulness and restored to the original rights and privileges which belonged to them, as to all men, in right of their divine fatherhood. Hence the strongly accentuated opposition between flesh and spirit (Romans vii. viii.; 1 Pet. iv. 3, 4) which no doubt Aristotle, as we have seen above, also mentions; but in the Stagirite it is only an incidental recognition; in the New Testament it is a pervading and overwhelming power, a force which possesses the atmosphere, a moral storm, which, swooping violently down from the dark-throned seat of the Supreme Regent, tears the cloak of self-righteousness from the shivering sinner, and exposes him in all his bareness. Plato also and Plotinus use very Christian language when they tell us that to be partakers of true moral beauty the soul requires a κάθαρσις or purification from its natural or acquired foulness, and that the necessity of this purification was symbolically indicated in the {213} mysteries.[213.1] Very true; but here again Plato wrote calmly for the few, Paul preached fervidly for the many. And this word _purification_, as connected with the Christian idea of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and the necessity of an ingrafting of a higher moral life by the operation of the Divine Spirit, leads me necessarily to specialize the doctrine of the Atonement as performing a peculiar function in the ethical attitude and moral efficiency of the gospel. The doctrine of the Atonement arises as the necessary consequence of the Christian conception of sin as a polluting, perverting, rebellious, and treasonable principle. An error is reasoned away, but filth must be washed away; guilt must be atoned; the offender must pray for forgiveness; and the free grace of the Sovereign must restore the traitor to the place and the protection which belong to him as a loyal subject. Put into a strictly articulate form, this doctrine of atonement, not less than its correlative the exceeding sinfulness of sin, especially when pushed to its extreme of logical consistency by the so-called federal theologians, is apt to give, and has always given, more or less just cause of offence to speculative minds; but in that broad practical aspect in which it was originally presented to the world, before men began to turn a fervid faith into a curious theology, there can be no doubt that it operated most beneficially in intensifying that hatred of sin which is the mother of all {214} holiness, and in enabling many a guilt-laden soul to start on the career of a regenerate life with a comfortable lightness and an unfettered speed, which from no other source could have flowed so readily.

The plan of this discourse leads us in the next place to consider the individual virtues to which, by their radical connexion with religion and a theological creed, Christian Ethics have shown a preference. But before attempting this it is obvious to remark how, by the atmosphere of piety in which they grow, and the theological soil in which they are rooted, the Christian virtues, as a whole and individually, are elevated to a much higher platform than belongs to any system of mere moral philosophy; and from this point of view we can understand how the divines of the school called Evangelical have been led to look down with such contempt as they generally do on every form of Christian preaching in which a round of mere moral duties is held up as in itself capable of performing the functions of a truly Christian life. The Evangelicals, narrow and bigoted as they too often are, especially in points of artificial and traditional orthodoxy, which they are unable to separate from the essence of the gospel, were quite right in this matter. It is not the mere duties performed, but the motives from which, and the inspiration by which, they are performed, that make the moral life of a truly Christian man so excellent. It is not merely that he is morally correct in all his intercourse with his fellow-men; not merely that he is richly furnished perhaps with all those born amiabilities which an acute Scotch speculator has designated as but the painted masks of virtue;[214.1] {215} the world may shower its plaudits on such cheap forms of native goodness as loudly as it pleases; Christian morality, by virtue of its lofty religious inspiration, aims at something more; the mere righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees it looks upon as an attainment utterly unworthy of a high moral ambition, as a vulgar something, the contentment with which would indicate an entire absence of that pure moral ideal, with the acknowledgment of which a religious morality--a system of ethics founded on the worship of the one true God--must necessarily start. Whatever morality the world may possess, as absolutely indispensable for the common movements of the social machine, Christianity, of course, accepts, but makes no account of in its characteristic appeals. It is rather the low maxims, the false authorities, and the spurious virtues, mixed up with the vulgar morality of the many, that it most mercilessly exposes and protests against. “_Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed in the renewing of your minds_.” “_But you are an elect people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation_.” Such is the lofty tone which it assumes, and from the days of St. Paul to Xavier and Howard has justified the assumption amply by its deeds. It aspires not merely to be moral; it would be the poetry of morality in a world where prose is the common currency. It intends to hold up to the whole human family a divine ideal of social heroism, which may some day be universally admired but which never can be universally enacted.

Let us now look at the beautiful portraiture of the Christian man in the detail of his most characteristic virtues.

And first, as the starting-point here, we must {216} observe that the Christian is pre-eminently equipped with that self-denial and self-control, and what we generally call strength of character, which are the necessary postulates of all moral excellence. A man who will take the world easily will never take it grandly; χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά· _omnia præclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt:_ all excellent things are difficult; the Christian recognises the difficulty, but delights in it as the stout old Roman did in the foes which added fuel to his victories, or as the strong modern engineer does in mountains, that he may show the triumph of his art in boring through them or winding round them. Modern sensualists and preachers of the low doctrine that pleasure is the only good have delighted to fling discredit on this grand Christian virtue of self-denial, as if anything great ever was performed without it. The man of genius denies himself in a thousand ways that he may work out a perfect body for the imaginary ideals which possess him; the great soldier denies himself through leagues of hardship that he may repel the rude invader and preserve the honour of his country unstained; and the man of virtue must deny himself also, if virtue is a thing which a creature of high enterprise and lofty purpose may reasonably have to do with. To lie in the lap of pleasure may be the highest enjoyment of which a feeble character is capable; the alternation betwixt sensuous languor and sensuous excitement may be the only grateful change of which a predominantly sensuous nature can be made to partake; but a strong man must have something difficult to do; and the strong Christian man has to “work out his salvation with fear and trembling;” to mortify the body, lest being overindulged {217} it should learn to be the master instead of the servant of the soul; and “laying aside every weighty and the sin which more easily besets him,” learn to “run with patience the race which is set before him.” What race? The race of realizing as much goodness as possible in his own personal life lend in the life of that society of which he is a part, by the twofold process of nursing virtues and weeding out vices: an ideal which never can be reached by those who commence life, after the Epicurean fashion, with a low calculation of pleasures and pains, but by those only who we inspired by the vision of what Plato preached as divine ideas, and Paul as divine commands. The recognition of a divine ideal in some shape or other is the first step to the prosecution of a divine life; and this alone can supply the inspiration which makes difficulty easy, educes pleasure from pain, and converts the most severe acts of self-denial into the materials of an elevating warfare, and the occasion of a glorious triumph.

Very closely connected with the stern self-denial and the manly strength of character so conspicuous in the first Christians was their moral courage. It requires very little knowledge of the world and experience of life to be made aware, in the case of those who are capable of being made aware of these things, that the general habitude of the world is not moral courage, but moral cowardice. The majority of men, like the majority of dogs I presume, are not physical cowards; the dog is naturally a fighting animal, and so is man. But that the majority of men are moral cowards is certain. No consideration is so powerful with schoolboys as that of being laughed at for any singularity in dress or appearance; the slavery of {218} fashion among grown-up persons is founded partly on the same dread; and the fear of standing in a minority restrains many a man in public life from giving voice to a salutary truth, and planting a gag on the barking mouth of popular error. I have myself been present at meetings of corporate bodies, where I gave my suffrage, confident that I was right in acting consistently on a plain principle of common honesty; and after the vote was taken I was told confidentially by some of those who had voted against my views, that they had a strong conviction I was in the right, only they could not venture to vote with me in the face of such an overwhelming majority! This is the moral courage of the world. ‘Have any of the Scribes and Pharisees believed in him? If so, we will speak out; if not, we keep silence.’ This tendency to follow authority is in many persons, no doubt, the necessary consequence of their own ignorance; ignorance is always afraid, and it knows by a sure instinct that its only safety lies in being led by superior knowledge. This no one can blame. But when a man acts against his own conviction in giving his vote as a member of a corporate body, or in a political assembly, to shield himself from the indignation or to gain the favour of an unreasonable multitude,--when, as in pure democracy, the question of right and wrong never comes before a man at all, but the one rule of political life simply is to submit to what such and such a local majority may choose to dictate,--this is sheer cowardice and simple slavery, from which a man of honourable and independent mind, not tainted with the baseness of democratic life, must shrink with abhorrence. And so in fact we do find that in democratic countries, where all {219} things are controlled by political cliques, who dictate the local policy, to which the puppet called a Member of Parliament, or a Deputy, is expected to swear, men of independent spirit, manly courage, and large intelligence are found systematically to shrink from the arena. How different from this demoralizing miasma is the atmosphere which we breathe in the New Testament! There a single manly individual stands forward, and in the name of God solemnly calls upon men to renounce the dearly-cherished errors, and to trample under foot the warmly-worshipped idols of a whole people. “_If it be lawful in the sight of God to hearken unto men rather than unto God, judge ye!_” This is what Peter said, speaking the truth boldly, in the face of roaring multitudes, frowning dignitaries, and lines of bristling lances. A religion in which such rare manhood was as common as cowardice is common in general society, if it was not crushed in the bud, as Protestantism was in Bohemia, could not but grow up to a mighty tree in the end. The stoical death of the gladiators in the Colosseum was wont to draw admiration, and sometimes even to extort pity, from the spectators; but their death was compulsory, and the stoicism of their last moments only a theatrical grace to fall decently before an applauding multitude. The Christian, on the other hand, whether as a fearless preacher or as an unflinching martyr, made a voluntary protest, and chose a self-imposed torture. If he was not a fool or a madman, he was a hero; and the heroism he displayed was of such a high order, that being repeated only for a generation or two, it caused the combined force of popular prejudice and traditional authority in the heathen world to blush itself into a {220} not unwilling subjection. So much of lofty courage and of genuine manhood did subtle Greece and powerful Rome learn from the moral missionaries of poor and despised Palestine!