Part 21

The first, and in its epiphany one of the earliest and most wide-spread excesses of Christian morality, was ASCETICISM. The temptation to this lies very near, in the practice of the Christian life, and is suggested in the strongest manner by its very language. If sin is the flesh, and some of its most shameless and rampant exhibitions are characteristically designated the lusts of the flesh, it would seem that the simplest way to get the mastery of such lusts is to keep the body under, as St. Paul has it,--to frown upon cakes and ale, and perhaps even to extirpate certain passions, as you would pull up dock by the long tape root, to make more room for the grass. Nor was this altogether an unreasonable procedure. It might be very admissible, in certain cases, to {244} become a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake; “for the present need” he who abstained from marriage might save himself from much incumbrance and from some misery. The error lay in setting up that as a general ideal which was valuable only as a device for special occasions, and possible only in a rational way to persons of a peculiar temperament. Our Saviour showed himself publicly at marriage-feasts as well as retired into the mountains; he was found eating and drinking, and even changing water into wine. St. Paul also never denied that a glass of wine was a good thing; but Christians afterwards very soon began to act as if the stern Baptist of the wilderness, and not the social Jesus of the waysides, had been the pattern set up for their imitation. This degeneration, no doubt, was the fruit of the anti-sensuous impulse which it had been necessary to give them; and they saw daily in the streets of Rome and of Corinth unseemly spectacles enow, of which the lesson seemed to be: it is better to abstain than to be poisoned. Add to this that Plato and his Alexandrian successors had thrown the whole force of their ethics of reason on the spiritual side, and spoken of the body often in terms of greater contempt than the Christian apostles had ever done of the flesh. Of Plotinus, his biographer Porphyry tells that “he lived like a man who was ashamed of being in the body at all;” and Clemens of Alexandria, one of the most intelligent of the Fathers, though not going to the extreme of these Platonic devotees, speaks of a good dinner in a style calculated to lead by a violent plunge on the other side into an artificial appetite for dry pease and hard crusts. “We must not,” he says, “have any care of external things, but be {245} anxious rather to purify the eye of the soul and to chasten the flesh. Other animals live that they may eat; man eats that he may live; for neither is eating his business nor pleasure his good. Therefore those are strongly to be condemned who seek after Sicilian lampreys, Mæandrian eels, Pelorian mussels, oysters from Abydos, sprats from Lipara, Attic flounders, Mantinean turnips, Ascræan beetroot, thrushes from Daphne, and Chalcedonian raisins.”[245.1] Of course the sensible old Father meant this partly as a protest against the monstrous gastronomic luxury of the Romans, of which we read in Suetonius and other Latin writers of that age; but it seems no less true that he was carried away in these matters by an ideal of extravagant anti-sensualism, which had then strongly taken possession of the Christian Church, and was indeed a rank native growth of the East, specially of Syria and Egypt, as Church history largely testifies. Nay, even in modern times, and in Western Europe, where the cold climate partly excuses, partly necessitates, high feeding, we find young persons, in the first start of a religious life, not unfrequently led into a course of ascetic practice, as prejudicial to their bodies as the excessive bookwork of the colleges is to the mind. Young Whitefield, we are told, suffered not a little from exercises of this kind; and the prolonged formal fastings prescribed as God-pleasing by recent Ritualistic clergymen in this country, have on more than one occasion enfeebled for a whole lifetime the bodily functions of their virgin devotees. This is sad enough; but it is not the worst. Such absurdities make Christianity ridiculous, and force revolted nature into the {246} school of a benign Bentham or an easy Hume, where one may at all events be moral and reasonable. When we read in the biography of some modern Anglo-Catholic saint that he feared nothing so much as the soft seduction of a slice of buttered toast, and the golden deliciousness of a glass of Madeira, we begin to sigh for Aristotle; it were better to have no religion at all as an inspiring soul of morality, than a religion which lends importance to such puerilities. But if these things have been done by certain pseudo-Christians, and are paraded even now, there was one belief, very common in the early ages of the Church, which tended not a little to intensify the tendencies which lead to them. At all times it is possible for the expectation of a future life to encroach on the enjoyment of the present; and the growth of the asceticism of the first centuries was beyond doubt powerfully aided by the overwhelming influence of a newly promulgated and greedily accepted immortality, and yet more perhaps, by the belief in the speedy second coming of Christ. The renunciation of the world, and the more characteristic worldly enjoyments, becomes of course much more easy when the machinery of the world is shortly expected to stop. And thus the weakness of human nature concurred with a number of accidental causes to make the ascetic caricature of Christian ethics one of the most wide-spread diseases, and an altogether astounding phenomenon in the moral history of man. The ascetic oddities of Diogenes and a few Greek cynics were nothing to it. The multitude of strange, and ridiculous, and even disgusting forms which it assumed, will be found amply detailed in the second volume of Mr. Lecky’s excellent _History_ {247} _of European Morals_, and need not be enlarged on here.

One of the strangest fancies that was ever begotten by the translation of sense into nonsense is the idea of the Society of Friends, that Christianity forbids war, and that self-defence is a sin. Unquestionably Christianity forbids the spirit of hatred and the desire of revenge; for the religion of Christ is a religion of motives, of purity of heart, and of humanity of purpose, and could not but forbid every spring of action that had in it the least tincture of selfishness; but hostility between diverse interests is a fact which Christianity could not deny, and common sense would not attempt to explain away. What Christianity denounced was the spirit from which wars generally arise--“_From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not even from your lusts that war in your members?_” And so far as this is the case, if these lusts were regulated by Christian principle--that is, if love and sympathy took the place of selfishness and jealousy, the wars that spring from their feverish ferment and fury would not take place. But this is a quite different thing from the natural right of self-defence; there are wars where the aggression is all on one side, and where to yield to the assault would be to offer a bribe to brigandage; there are wars also of pure stupidity, where both parties don’t know what they are about, and where it is not a pure heart but a disciplined intellect that is necessary to prevent the fray. But whatever be the cause, wherever there is a fermenting bed of conflicting interests of divergent opinions and of antagonist passions, even amongst good men wars are unavoidable; unless, indeed, such a court of impartial {248} arbiters could be appointed, as it has hitherto proved beyond the reach of human wit to realize; and what Christian Ethics in this case requires is, that, contests of right being unavoidable, after every attempt at peaceful adjustment has failed, men should go to war with a certain mutual self-respect, and with a generous chivalry such as the knights of the middle ages systematically fostered, carrying on hostilities like men, and not like tigers. In this sense it has been proved perfectly possible to love our enemies without betraying our rights, and will become more and more practicable in the degree that international recognition becomes more common, and a large Christian philanthropy more diffused. But the idea that Christian love should become so intense as absolutely to annihilate the instinct of self-preservation, and to train every creature to love every other creature a great deal better than itself, is pure maundering, and will then only be tolerated among men when a decadent humanity shall have entirely divorced piety from reason, and Buddhism instead of Christianity shall have become the religion of the most advanced pioneers of civilisation.

But the most general excess which runs, so to speak, in the blood of Christian ethics, arises from the overflow of zeal without knowledge, at one time boiling over in floods of the most savage intolerance, at another ossified into the rigid features of the most unrelenting bigotry. This is an evil which springs naturally from the connexion of morality with religion; and it is an evil of so enormous a magnitude that it seems in some sort to supply an excuse for those inadequate ethical systems of recent growth which take no cognisance of the reverential and devout {249} instincts of human nature, and, after the model of Aristotle, would build up an architecture of Ethics without piety. And if religious zeal generally is prone to run into intolerance, it is specially so in the case of monotheism. For monotheism is naturally intolerant; it will bear no assessor on the supreme throne; if true, it is exclusively true. And this is indeed no more than what it is entitled to; but it should be intolerant only of polytheism as a system, not uncharitable to polytheists as men; whereas it has become almost a proverb that the zeal of Christian theologians stands divorced not only from charity, but from truth; of all disputants men of the clerical profession are the most unfair, so much so, that among churchmen as a class candour is scarcely a mentionable virtue. A candid evangelist is generally a black sheep to his brethren; assuredly he will not be found prominent in Church debates, or forward as a leader of Church parties. But neither must we bear too hard upon the clergy in this matter. It is human nature, in fact, more than clerical inoculation that is to blame; and we shall find if we look round with an impartial eye, that humanitarian democrats, anti-church Radicals, scientific crotchet-mongers, mathematical formulists, and conceited young poets, are equally intolerant in their own way; only religion, like love, by the very intensity of its excellence, raises the natural intolerance of human nature to its highest power; it is so pleasant to stamp the name of God upon our passions and ride triumphantly over the world in the character of armed apostles of the most sacred truth. Hence religious wars, which, as all the world knows, have generally proved the most bitter and sanguinary; hence conquests, robberies, {250} and oppressions in the name of the God of Christians; which for systematic cruelty, treachery, and all manner of baseness, have not been surpassed in the annals of Spartan helotage or Venetian espionage; hence assumptions of infallibility which make reason blush, and consecrations of absurdity which petrify common sense. And when this flaming zeal, in more quiet times, has settled down, it does not therefore always cease to exist, but stiffens into bigotry, and, united with that self-importance which is so natural to man, produces an exclusiveness and a Pharisaism of which all Christian Churches, in seeming rivalry of the Jews, whom they revile, have presented a very sharp and well-marked adumbration. If the religious Hindu will not eat from a Christian’s platter, the religious Episcopalian will not dine in the same room or stand on the same platform with the religious Dissenter. The hissing fervour which originally forbade the approach of two adverse churches has now been changed into a dead wall or partition, which keeps those who ought to know, and love, and co-operate with one another, habitually as far apart as Greeks and Turks; so that it has become the most difficult of all social operations to unite two Christian churches, separated perhaps by some notion more political than religious, in the prosecution of some common object which they both confess to be supremely desirable.

That which makes the ebullition and overflow of religious zeal so fatal in its effects, is not merely the excess of the zeal itself, which like all excess is bad, but the tendency of all religions to subordinate the moral element which they contain to the religious: to make religion a separate business instead of an ethical instrument; to hang it as an amulet round {251} the neck, not to breathe it as an atmosphere of social health, to nurse it as a sacred fire in the heart, and to feel it as a power which purifies every passion, ennobles every motive, and braces the nerve to the robustness of all manly achievement. If there is one characteristic of Christianity more prominent than another, it is certainly this, that it is essentially an ethical religion; other religions favour certain virtues, or give a certain sanction to all virtues, but Christianity is morality; the moral regeneration is the religion. There are religions which profess to possess a power by which its priests can bring down rain, banish the pestilence, make the devil speak truth, and charm a murderer into heaven. Christianity knows nothing of these tricks. Its ministers supply no passports by which knaves and sluggards, when they escape from the body, may pass the celestial police without question. The Christian religion is not a special training which pious persons are to go through in order to prepare themselves for a future world; it calls upon every man with a loud voice to do the work of God in this world, here where alone work is possible for us; and not until our assigned task has been bravely done here, can there be any question of what promotion may await us there. Had the gospel been intended according to the vulgar prejudice now under consideration, as a religion having an existence apart from the details of everyday morality, John the Baptist certainly would never have been sent as its precursor, nor the Sermon on the Mount been given forth as its manifesto. Neither again does the famous doctrine of St. Paul, that men are saved by faith not by works, in any wise contradict the essentially ethical character {252} of the faith which he preached. The works which in the Epistle to the Romans he so unconditionally denounces, are works either of self-conceit or of sacerdotal imposition, by which persons uninspired by a lofty moral ideal seek to recommend themselves to God. From such a germ no moral good can possibly grow; for as in the realm of speculation the oppressive sense of ignorance is the commencement of true knowledge, so in the practical world, the honest confession of sin is the commencement of sanctification. But how little Christian faith can have any significance apart from works, the same Apostle shows largely in the 11th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the only part of the New Testament by the way in which a formal definition of faith is given, and a chapter at the same time from whose copious historical illustrations, it is plain to any child that faith is merely a religious synonym for what we in secular language call moral heroism, a heroism peculiarly marked as Christian only by the distinct recognition on the part of the actor that the moral law which he obeys is the accredited will of the Moral Governor whom he serves. Clear as this is, however, there has always been manifested in the Christian church a tendency to separate faith from works, a tendency which, like other aberrations, has sometimes had the hardihood to stilt itself up into the dignity of a dogma, and in this attitude has been known in these latter times under the name of Antinomianism. Of a leaning towards this monstrous doctrine, the Calvinistic churches have been specially accused; and there can be no doubt, that in Scotland and other countries where a Calvinistic creed is professed, notions of this kind will always {253} find an open soil in souls of a certain nature, notions too that will often be practically acted upon even where they are not theoretically professed; but it is historically certain, that of all Christian teachers the great Genevan reformer himself was the least chargeable with any absurdity of this kind. On the contrary, he found himself involved in a serious war with the city to which he ministered, just because he insisted that his religion should be practical, and his faith if it meant anything, should mean good works; and he carried his point too in the end in spite of those who stoutly protested that the stern limitations of gospel law marked out by the preacher, should have nothing practically to do with the broad licence that might be convenient for the libertine and the publican. And indeed, it would be the greatest reform that could be made in the Christian church at the present moment, if our popular preachers were to give us fewer sermons, and when they did preach, take care, like St. Paul in his Epistles, to have some distinct practical point to speak to. For the difficulty of Christian as of all ethics, lies not in the general rules, but in the special application of the rules; and vague condemnations of sin however severe, and commendations of holiness however fervid, will have little effect if people are not to be made to understand distinctly what those phrases so awfully sounded forth on Sunday are meant to signify on Monday. The dignity of the pulpit, I suspect, like the dignity of history, has often made it dull; certain it is, that whether from a false sense of dignity, or from a religious zeal without ethical depth, or from ignorance of those affairs to which ethical maxims must be applied, or {254} from fear to offend those whose support is thought necessary, the ministrations of the Christian pulpit lose not a little of their efficiency from dealing more in the generalities of sin and holiness, than in special vices and virtues, and from yielding to the easy temptation of expatiating on scholastic subtleties or ecclesiastical crotchets, instead of unravelling the perplexities of social practice, or unmasking the disguises of individual character. Many things are left to be handled lightly by the novel-writer, which with much more effect might have been handled seriously in the pulpit; and in fact, I have found not a few excellent sermons in novels, which I should have sought for in vain in our pulpits; but the misfortune is, that people read novels mainly to be amused, and will see the living portrait of their own follies painted in the firmest lines, and with the most glowing colours, without making the slightest attempt to amend their faults. But of this enough. One thing is certain, that no amount of faith, no amount of preaching, and no amount of prayer, can be taken as a true measure of the genuine Christianity of any country, unless the faith professed shall be found to be permeating every form of social life, and elevating every trait of individual character. To any one who wishes to see what real Christianity can do for a district in the person of a truly evangelic and wise man, I recommend the perusal of the life of the Rev. John Frederick Oberlin, who, in the latter half of the last century, was, during the course of a long life, pastor of the mountain district of the Ban de la Roche in Alsace. This remarkable man was not content with the common ministerial routine of preaching and praying; he saw that in the circumstances {255} in which he was placed, nothing was to be done by mere talk; so with pick-axe in hand he set himself to make roads; he became the forester of his parishioners, and planted trees; their schoolmaster, and built them schools; their architect, and reformed their cottages; their deacon, and taught them trades; their professor, and lectured to them on science; their physician, and taught them to live according to the laws of health. Thus the faith which he professed turned a neglected parish in a few years into a perfect museum of all good works, of which a religion of the purest love was the soul; and the unobtrusive Christian worker, who of this wilderness made a garden, was perhaps the greatest man in France at a time when the thunders of Napoleon were shaking the world from west to east, while his own fame had scarcely travelled beyond the bleatings of the sheep of his own parish. So little has the noisy applause of the world to do with some of the highest forms of Christian virtue.[255.1]