Part 20

Pride, indeed, is not only the sin by which Lucifer falls in Christian angelography, but it peoples Tartarus also in heathen legends; and the boastful Salmoneus, whose insane ambition aspires to mimic the thunder of Jove, is always the first to be blasted by the bolt. Wherein then shall we say lies the difference--for a difference there certainly is--between the humility of the Christian and the σωφροσύνη of the Greek? The common root of the virtue in both is plain; it is the contrast between mortal and immortal, which belongs equally to Polytheism and to Monotheism; pride was not made for man; let him worship one God or many gods, he is a poor weak creature at the best, and only the more called upon to practise a sober-minded humility because his winged schemes so often end in creeping deeds. The luxuriant pride of our young leafage grows up so frequently into a shrivelled blossom and a hollow fruit. Yet there is a difference. In Monotheism there is an impassable gulf betwixt God and man which exists not in Polytheism. There are steps which lead up with not a few gradations from Pericles to Zeus; the son of a Theban Semele may be raised into a god, and the son of a god, like Hercules, may indulge grandly in many of the stout carnalities of a mortal man. Here therefore lies the primary ground of the more profound humility of the Christian. But there is another, which in practice has proved even more potent,--the intense {232} feeling of the Christian already noted with regard to the exceeding sinfulness of sin. Every Christian looks upon sin habitually as a healthy man looks upon the plague; in some popular catechisms it is even laid down that “every sin, even the smallest, deserves God’s wrath and curse both in this world and in that which is to come;” nay, more: certain theologians, deemed by some peculiarly orthodox, have taught that the whole world lies under a curse on account of the guilt of the great progenitor of the human race, in violating a special divine command, a guilt incurred some six thousand years ago, and transmitted in due course of generation to his hapless progeny. These dogmas, of course, are only strong caricatures of the great fact that every deed, whether good or evil, by the eternal constitution of things, necessarily transmits its influence from the earliest to the latest times; families and races therefore may lie for generations under a curse; the Greek tragedy acknowledges this in the strongest terms; but, as in the other cases that we have been considering, Christianity here not only intensifies a moral sentiment familiar to the heathen world, but it extends immensely the surface over which it is diffused. Æschylus and Sophocles could represent a heavy curse hanging for ages over the royal houses of Pelops and Labdacus as the consequence of monstrous sins committed by the founders of their families; but Christianity makes no selection in this matter, and flings the blackness of a moral blight in the most unqualified phrase over the whole race of Adam. So far as we are sinners we are all under a curse, all children of wrath; and no man is supposed to be so virtuous as that he cannot {233} honestly join in the humble response of the Litany, _Lord have mercy on us, miserable offenders!_ These words repeated constantly in the weekly or daily service of a whole Church should alone be sufficient to prove how much more the virtue of humility is stamped, so to speak, into the Christian soul, than it was into the Hellenic. One cannot imagine either Socrates or Pericles using any such strong language. And I must confess, when coming out into the fresh air from the long Morning Service of the Anglican Church, I have often wondered how far the humble prostration of soul expressed in the refrain of the Litany had been cordially repeated by the great majority of the worshippers. The English, as is well known, are a peculiarly proud and often somewhat insolent people; and for myself, I honestly confess that I have always experienced in reference to my own feelings not a little exaggeration in the expressions of soul-prostration employed whether in the spoken Presbyterian or in the printed Episcopalian formularies. I do not see why Christian worshippers should so constantly avoid the language of a reasonable virtuous self-satisfaction used by King David in not a few places, and by Nehemiah. But however this be, and allowing that many Christians habitually employ phrases in their church service which are plainly at variance with the whole tone and temper of their lives, it is after all true that Christianity, if it errs here, errs on the safe side, and errs only as the medical men do, by using a very drastic drug to combat a very violent disease. For it is only too obvious that self-importance in various forms, not rarely under the decent mask of modesty and diffidence, {234} is the dominant vice of the human character. Young men are apt to glory in their strength, young women in their beauty, fathers are proud of their offspring, scholars of their learning, metaphysicians of their subtleties, and poets of the iridescent and evanescent bubbles of a luxurious fancy and an unpruned imagination. Men of science too are apt to be proud of their knowledge,--whether a knowledge of what is high or what is low matters not; it is the knowledge which puffs them up, not the thing known, which indeed, if well weighed, were oftener the motive to humiliation than to exaltation. We are therefore much in need of getting as much humility from the gospel as it is naturally calculated to inspire; and it may be observed that the public pulse is always ready to beat in unison with the sacred text whenever a man of great original genius stands forward, signally marked with the peculiarly Christian type of humility. Such a man was Michael Faraday, the subtle investigator of those secret laws which regulate the molecular action of particles of matter among themselves.

“Yet living face to face with these great laws, Great truths, great mysteries, all who saw him near, Knew him how childlike, simple, free from flaws Of temper, full of love that casts out fear.

Untired in charity, of cheer serene, Careless or gold or breath of praise to earn; Childhood or manhood’s ear content to win, And still as glad to teach as meek to learn.”[234.1]

Here we have the general type of a chaste and {235} beautiful Christian humility in the shape of a living man. To this no one objects. It is the dogmas and the doctrinal paradoxes of the professional theologians that are so apt to fret us; to which, accordingly, here as in other cases, in judging of Christian ethics, we shall be wise in not attributing too much importance.

But it were a very great mistake to imagine that in reference to the estimate of personal worth Christianity exercises only a repressing, and as some may picture it, a depressing, influence. On the contrary, there is no religion that has done so much in creating and fostering the feeling of personal worth and dignity. How is this? Plainly because, while the Christian doctrine prostrates every man in a humble equality before God, that very equality makes every man conscious of an equal personality as compared with any other man. All men are sinners; if that be a difficult doctrine to swallow there is one closely connected with it, which is more comfortable: all men are brethren; and if brethren, equal--a wise father has no favouritism. This is another consequence of that monotheistic fatherhood of which we have already spoken; it not only abolished nationalities, it created personalities. In the preaching of the gospel each individual is appealed to as a person with separate responsibilities; he has sinned individually, he repents individually, he is redeemed individually. In this affair of Christian salvation there is nothing done by proxy. Priests are not known in the Church. The people only are the priesthood;[235.1] each individual in the congregation has the value and the dignity of a {236} priest. From this equality of personal dignity before God two remarkable phenomena have flowed, both specially characteristic of modern society--the abolition of slavery and the rivalry of religious sects. Slavery, of course, must appear an intolerable anomaly to a man who believes that all men are brethren and all sons of God; to call a man brother and to sell him as a chattel is a lie too gross to be tolerated even by a world accustomed to cheat itself with the authority of all sorts of mere names. And as to the rivalry of multifarious sects and churches, which some people bewail as the one great gangrene of Christendom, it is really somewhat shallow not to see that in the moral as in the physical world diversity of form only proves the richness and the variety of the vital manifestation. The external unity after which some religious persons sigh existed naturally under heathenism, where the individual conscience was merged in the State; exists now also in Popish countries, where the same conscience is merged in the Priesthood; but in the Christianity of the early Church, founded as it was on a direct appeal to the conscience of the individual sinner, such a purely external and mechanical idea could find no place. The right to exist at all as a Church established the right to dissent from other Churches, by asserting its own convictions when such assertion seemed necessary. This assertion, indeed, might often be made foolishly, forwardly--then it was a sin, the sin of schism; but the right to dissent was inherent, it was part of the indefeasible birthright of spiritual liberty wherewith Christ had made his people free. In this sense, to talk of humility were to establish slavery; while, on the other hand, to send {237} out branching suckers, which anon take independent root, is merely to prove the rich vitality of the stem. Christianity has thus become the great mother of moral individualism; and the many sects, which are so apt to annoy us with their petty jealousies, are, when more closely viewed, merely a true index to the intensity of our spiritual life.

On the relation of Christian Ethics to civil AUTHORITY, on the one hand, and to the sacred right of LIBERTY on the other, much has been written, but most frequently by partisans too interested to be capable of an impartial judgment. The wisdom of the original preachers of the Gospel was in nothing more manifest than in the care with which they avoided mixing themselves up in any way with the social and political questions of the hour; while at the same time they did not omit to enunciate principles and to exhibit conduct opposed equally to the servility which despotism demands and the licence in which democracy delights. It would be easy to marshal forth an array of texts by which the doctors of divine right on the one hand, and the preachers of the sacred right of insurrection on the other, have endeavoured to enlist the Saviour of mankind as a recruit in the internecine wars which they have waged. But however Churchman and Puritan might expound and denounce, the serene face of the Son of Mary looked always strange through the smoke and sulphur of such struggles; his name was invoked on both sides with most vehement protestation; but it was difficult all the while for the impartial spectator to perceive that he was part of the battle; he seemed always to belong to both sides, or to neither. But sensible men of all parties {238} have at length become convinced that to attempt to stamp the name of Christ as the special patron of our little partisan cliques and warfares is as absurd as to expect that the sun should come down from heaven and confine his illumination to our private parlours. As for purely secular parties, it is quite certain that both the extremes which divide the political world are equally remote from the spirit of moderation and toleration which is the very atmosphere that Christian charity breathes. Absolute despotism, or the unlimited authority of one man over his fellows, is a condition of things which, as Aristotle remarks, could only be natural and legitimate in cases where the one absolute ruler happened to be both the strongest and the best man in the community; but to acknowledge as absolute rulers those who have no authority for their rule but their own imperious will, and are always more likely to be the worst than the best members of the society to which they belong, is manifestly as directly opposed to the sense of righteousness in the Christian code of morals as to the dictate of reason in the Greek. On the other hand, the right of the mere numerical majority to rule, which is the characteristic principle of pure democracy, never can be admitted by a religion which teaches that the majority are bad, and that we ought not to follow a multitude to do evil. The equality which belongs to all Christians is not so much an equal right to rule as an equal duty to obey; an equal right only to participate in those privileges and obligations which belong to an independent human being, not a mere chattel, as a member of a moral society called the Church, and of a legal society called the State. The Christian {239} rejoices indeed in his liberty; but it is not in the liberty to do what he pleases, much less in the liberty of a majority to outbawl and to overbear a minority by the mere power of numbers. He is free from the pollution of sin, from the slavery of the senses, from the forms of a cumbrous ritualism, and the exactions of a lordly priesthood; but he is not free, and never dreams of being free, from the homage which vice ought always to pay to virtue, from the natural subordination that ignorance owes to intelligence, and from the sacred authority of law. Here Christ and Socrates agree. “_Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s_.” “_Let every soul be subject to the higher powers_.” If laws are bad or impolitic, the guilt of their viciousness lies at the door of those who made them, or who gave themselves no concern to have them altered. But so long as they are laws let them be obeyed. The first duty of the Christian is obedience to all existing laws, respect for all established authorities, and a reverence generally for those gradations of dignity and excellence into which the fair proportions of the social architecture have been piled. Generally speaking he is not an eager politician; the inspiration of large human love which possesses his breast tenders him incapable of entering warmly into those party struggles in Church and State with which large human love has seldom much to do. He can neither despise the lowly majority of his fellow-men to please the oligarch, nor trample upon the intelligent minority to please the democrat. He has no great appetite for power; he does not covet office; he will not intrigue for place; he will not grasp the sceptre of civic rule with a forward hand, {240} but wield it when it naturally falls to him with firmness as respects others, and with a holy jealousy as respects himself; and he will rejoice with trembling then chiefly when the victorious car of his party friends is riding over the prostrate army of his foes. Ambition is with him the love of usefulness, not the love of power; he comprehends the spirit which dictated the answer of a pious English clergyman when he refused the cure of a parish which was offered him, for the singular reason that “the emoluments were too large and the duty was too small;”[240.1] and he fears the dangers which may flow from the abuse of authority more than he desires the pleasures which are connected with its use.

Let us now, in the last place, inquire how the Christian law of right conduct has approved itself in the history of society since the first institution of the Church. And we seem certainly justified in starting here with the expectation that, moved by such a fervid steam-power, strengthened with such lofty sanctions, and displaying a scheme of virtues at once so manly and so gentle--virtues not preached merely in sermons or discussed in ethical treatises, but set forth in the living epistles of two such opposite and yet both eminently Christian types of character as St. Paul and St. John--so accoutred surely, and clad with the perfect panoply that belongs to a great moral warfare (Eph. vi. 13), Christianity could not but go forth conquering and to conquer, especially when the living faith in extraordinary, and miraculous demonstrations everywhere accompanied its march; and if it has in any considerable degree failed to fulfil its bright promise in regenerating the {241} face of the moral worlds this, in those who accepted the religion, must have proceeded mainly from one of three causes: either because the ideal was too high for them, as we are accustomed to observe that certain nations are not socially far advanced enough for free constitutions, and thrive best under despotism; or from, the neglect of a regulative force which might check the natural tendency to excess, extravagance and one-sidedness, to which all human movements are liable; or again, from the disturbance of the proper healthy action of the regenerative virtue of the doctrine by the admixture of certain foreign, incompatible, and corrupting elements. Of the first cause of failure nothing need be said; it is with high morality as with high art, it is and it always must be above the average reach of the great mass of men; and it may be that in morals, as in art, some nations have tacitly agreed to let the high standard drop, and content themselves with attaining a manifestly inferior but more generally attainable ideal. But however such compromises and refuges of despair may be the necessary wisdom of politicians and of lawyers, who have to deal practically with the selfish element in the masses of mankind, in the theory of morals, as of art, they can certainly find no place. The Church and the Academy must always set up the highest ideal; if they fail to do so it is only because the inspiration which created them was originally feeble, or has waxed faint; and if the members of the Church or the scholars of the Academy fail to realize in their lives and in their works the perfect pattern which has been set before them, it is the defect of the learner, not the fault of the teacher. No one thinks of elevating the character of art by lowering {242} the standard. And so if Christianity is too good for mankind it must just remain too good, till in the slow process of the ages men shall become more worthy of it. But the two other causes of failure require to be looked into more seriously. To the danger of excess Christian morality is peculiarly liable, just because its steam-power is so very strong and its action so efficacious. I read but the other day in a newspaper of a girl, studious, as girls are apt to be, of personal beauty, who, having picked up somewhere a fact well known to horse-dealers, that arsenic has a specific beneficial action on the skin, set to work of her own motion to mingle her daily potations with an infusion of the potent metal, and did this so assiduously that in a very short time, instead of improving her complexion, she had well-nigh removed herself for ever from the society of the living. Now this is exactly what has happened with Christian Ethics. Men have taken too much of a certain virtue, say Reverence--which is the virtue most closely bound up with religion--and have changed it into stupidity. That which was meant to elevate human beings out of their finite littleness has been used to depress them below the level of their meanest selves. And not only have Christians by the excessive culture of favourite virtues turned them into caricature, but they have assumed that because they have learned to be Christians they should forget to be men. There are certain human instincts, either purely physical, or closely connected with our animal existence, so strong that the first preachers of the evangelic ethics seem to have thought they might be safely left to take care of themselves; but these same instincts certain high-pressure Christians {243} who came afterwards, with more zeal than sense, thought it their duty studiously to repress, or even violently to extirpate. The result has been that we have seen Christianity set at work systematically to maim that humanity which it was intended to heal. As to the third cause of failure, the admixture with foreign elements, it is of the same nature as the water which dilutes the milk and the sand which debases the sugar in the adulterated traffic of low traders. That such adulteration should exist to a large extent in Christianity was unavoidable, so soon as the profession of a religion so high above the measure of vulgar ethics became respectable. When everybody was born and baptized and bribed into Christianity, the morality which each Christian of this external type professed must have been something as cheap as the blood from which he was procreated, the water with which he was washed, and the work by which he gained his livelihood.