Part 22

It remains now only shortly to indicate how Christian ethics has suffered from the admixture of adulterating elements. These are notably three: INTELLECTUALISM, RITUALISM, and SECULARISM. “There is a strange fascination,” says a living distinguished theologian, “in reasoning about mysteries.”[255.2] Every religion of course has its mysteries--for a man reverences that only which he has reason to respect, {256} while he cannot fully comprehend it; but the faculty of reverence when exercised on sacred mysteries should rather deter men from presumptuous dogmatism than invite them to its exhibition. But it has not always proved so in the Church. The unsophisticated intellect of the laity might possibly have been content without the vain attempt to define what is in its nature undefinable. It is not the business of man to define God at all; our finite work in reference to all forms of the Infinite is to acknowledge, to worship, and to obey. But the meddling intellect of professional theologians would not allow matters to rest here; they proceeded to construct certain curious formulæ of doctrinal orthodoxy, an intellectual belief in which was substituted for the living ethical faith by which the heathen world had been regenerated. Men were now taught to entertain the thoroughly unchristian idea that the acceptance by the cognitive faculty of an array of nicely-worded propositions concerning the Divine Nature and the plan of redemption was somehow or other essential to their salvation; was certainly not the least important element in Christian faith, and the non-acceptance of which was held as justly excluding the recusant from the communion of the saints. This was a sad mistake. The fiery denunciations which St. Peter (2 Pet. ii. 1) and the other apostles uttered against those who “privily bring in damnable heresies,” were launched not against intellectual heterodoxies, but against the lusts of the flesh and all sorts of sensualism; but now the hated name of heresy was transferred to the imaginary sin of not being able to believe what a conclave of foolish or presumptuous Churchmen chose to lay down, and artificial creeds {257} were forged and fulminated, and flung with stern anathemas and boastful defiance against every honest thinker who could not be brought to believe that faith must show its efficacy principally by its power of blinding reason and smothering common sense. This gigantic dogmatism of the shallow understanding making an alliance with the fervid religious zeal which has been already mentioned, led consistently to a system of the most organized social selfishness that the history of the world knows,--selfishness only the more horrible that it was dignified by the most venerable names, and consecrated by the most sacred ceremonial The office-bearers of the originally free moral community called the Church now declared themselves infallible, and lorded it insolently over the consciences of those within the Church, and over both soul and body of those without its pale. To think on any of the subjects most interesting to a thinking man was now a sin; men who had the misfortune not to think exactly according to the formulæ prescribed by the Church were prosecuted as criminals, condemned as malefactors, burnt at the stake as monsters, and refused the humanities of common burial. A compact was made with the civil power that no situation of honour, emolument, or trust should be given to any one who was not ready to swear to the established orthodoxy; and thus, as human nature is constituted, not only was thinking forbidden and absurdity enthroned, but a bribe was held out to public hypocrisy; the conscience of young persons was systematically debauched; and the love of truth and the independent searching of the Christian Scriptures in many Christian churches became utterly unknown. Such were the fruits of Intellectualism. {258} But these portentous results were not produced by the impertinence of the meddling intellect alone. Such a hideous domination over the liberties of the individual conscience could not have been achieved by one unassisted evil power. During the same period of Christian corruption the other evil influences of RITUALISM and Secularism were both equally active. Of these the first, though with a distinctively religious feature, was in essential character anti-Christian. Christianity is a religion of inward motives, Ritualism a religion of outward forms. It was not enough that the hand should shrink from offending; that the eye should cease from lustful wandering; the fountains of evil desire had to be stopped in their first wellings; the lawyer and the police might concern themselves with the completed act and its consequences; with the evil thought, which is the germ of all evil deeds, Christianity commenced and finished its purifying action. Occupied with this radical regeneration, the preachers of the Gospel never dreamt of prescribing minute regulations about attitudes, gestures and postures, crosses, crosiers, candlesticks and change of dresses, decorations with banners, flags, festoons, gilded shrines, jewelled images, and other appurtenances of flaunting ceremonial. These might be matters of decency and taste very proper to be attended to; but to have made them the subject of special prescription would have been to assign them an importance which they did not deserve; nay, would have manifestly run counter to the liberty of that religion which they taught, and confounded it with the bondage of that Judaism--a bondage of meats and drinks, new-moons and sabbaths, and other externalities--which neither {259} they nor their fathers had been able to bear. And this leads us to remark, that the oppressive puerilities of Ritualism in themselves, perhaps more ridiculous than pernicious, were, in the case of the Jews, and are indeed naturally everywhere, closely combined with another evil no less foreign to the genius of Christianity, which we may call SACERDOTALISM. The Jews and the Egyptians had a closely banded hereditary priesthood culminating in a theocracy; the Greeks and Romans had a sporadic priesthood of special sacred persons, colleges and places; of these a ritual, often cumbrous, seldom graceful, sometimes shameful, generally ridiculous, was the legitimate exponent. Christianity with the performance abolished the performers; prayers were declared to be the only incense, a holy life the only offering, and a people zealous of good works the only priesthood. But this was too good a doctrine for poor human nature to hold by, or at least for the then stage of civilisation permanently to maintain. People were only too glad to get theologians to think for them, and ceremonies to dress up their devout feelings in an imposing though it might be often a tasteless garb. These ceremonies, originally indifferent, by the sacred character belonging to the men by whom they were performed, soon became sacrosanct, and the performing priest naturally attributed a special efficacy to those rites of which he was the instrument. Whatever virtue they possessed was derived originally, no doubt, like everything else, from God, but specially and exclusively through him. He was the conducting rod, the chosen medium of bringing down the spiritual electricity from heaven to earth. Thus he became a wonder-worker more potent than the rainmakers {260} of African superstition. He had but to open his mouth and wine became blood, and bread flesh at the magic mutter of his lips. In a religion thus made essentially sacerdotal, where thaumaturgic rites received such prominence, it was impossible that the ethics of common life should be able to maintain their original place in the idea of its founder. Judaism, in fact, and Heathenism, had been smuggled back into the Church; religion was one thing, moral character another; brigands might rob and kill, and, at the same time, keep up a converse with Heaven by the kissing of crosses, the telling of beads, and the tramping of pilgrimages; the poles of right and wrong might be positively inverted, while piety remained. But a still greater triumph for the evil principle was in store. In the evangelic history of the Temptation, it is narrated that the devil, after trying other methods of seduction, carried our Lord up into an exceeding high mountain, where there was a survey of all the kingdoms of the world and the glory thereof, and pointing out these the tempter said,--“_All this I will give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me_.” This argument, as we know, did not succeed with our Lord; but it succeeded only too well with those who came after Him. The marriage of worldly power and glory, to an essentially spiritual and unworldly religion, gave birth to that last and most potent adulteration which we have called SECULARISM. There is no necessity, of course, that a modern bishop should be a poor man, any more than an ancient patriarch; Christian ethics do not forbid a man to have a fat purse any more than a full stomach; but as a Christian may not live an epicure mainly for the sake of his stomach, so neither {261} may he live for the sake of his purse. And then there is a great difference between the effect of worldly prosperity in individuals and in institutions. An individual may be a man of exceptional virtue, and in the face of many temptations may become more virtuous the more he is exposed; but institutions are composed of the majority, and οἱ πολλοὶ κακοί, the majority are not heroes. It was natural, therefore, to expect, that as the Christian Church in its first epoch possessed a principal element of purity in the poverty and the social insignificance of its members, so one great occasion of its corruption would emerge as soon as the profession of the once despised faith became the high-road to wealth, the badge of social worth, and the guarantee of political power, whether, “as at Constantinople, the attempt was made to imperialize the Church, or, as at Rome, the Church waxed into the dimensions of an empire.”[261.1] But it was not at Rome or Constantinople only that the Church was thus secularized. Wherever official position in a prosperous and popular church presents an open career to persons desirous of making a respectable livelihood, there must always be a class of people, more or less numerous, who are ready to say in their hearts, though they may not dare everywhere to say it openly,--“_Put me, I pray thee, into one of the priests’ offices, that I may eat a bit of bread_.” Only the means by which this bit of bread may be obtained depends always to a great extent on the character of the patrons; and the corruption of the church office-bearers will always be greater where the appointment to valuable benefices is a mere civil right, {262} belonging to private individuals, than where it remains with its original depositaries, the congregations of the Christian people. No doubt where popular election exists in a church there will always be a danger of divisions, and a sort of ecclesiastical demagogy or mean subserviency to the passions and prejudices of the majority can scarcely be avoided; but this is a less evil than open simony, and the usurpation of apostolic functions by men who do not, like St. Paul, work with their own hands that they may preach without fear, but preach that they may feed themselves, and dress themselves, and amuse themselves, and bring up their sons to play billiards, and their daughters to dance quadrilles with the aristocracy of the land. This thorough secularisation of religion is one of the most revolting spectacles that the moral history of the world presents; and to its existence in any country, along with the other two adulterations mentioned, must be attributed its full share of guilt in creating that reaction in favour of a morality without religion, and a State divorced from Church, which is one of the favourite ideas of the democratic age in which we live. For while Intellectualism and Ritualism expose an ethical religion to attack, the one by planting faith in an attitude of hostility to reason, the other, by making its worship puerile and ridiculous, the secular corruption cuts deeper and proves suicidal to the very essence and soul of Christianity. For by this infection a religion of the most chivalrous love, the purest unselfishness, and the profoundest humility, is worked up into a monstrous combination of selfishness, pride, and hypocrisy, which tears up the very notion of public virtue by {263} the roots; and so in point of fact it came to pass that, in the lives of some of the most conspicuous of Christian pontiffs, there was exhibited to the world a march of scarlet sins, unsurpassed by the bestialities of Roman or the ferocities of Byzantine autocrats. In the holiest courts of the most holy all was rankness, loathsomeness, putrescence; only a theatric show of sanctitude was kept up scarcely with decency, to deceive those who might be deceived by the good fortune of not living too near the actors. And thus was realized the most sorrowful example of the truth of the ancient adage--_corruptio optimi pessima;_ THE CORRUPTION OF THE BEST THINGS IS THE WORST.

UTILITARIANISM.

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OF recent British phenomena in the domain of ethical philosophy, what is called Utilitarianism is the most notable, certainly the most noisy. If, indeed, there is anything distinctive in the most recent tone of philosophic thought and sentiment in this country, apart from speculations springing out of pure physical science, it is this very thing, or something that claims close kindred with it. It is talked of in the streets and commented on in the closet; and numbering, as it does, amongst its advocates some of the most astute intellects of the age, it certainly deserves an attentive examination. No doubt its merits, whatever they be, are likely to fall short of its pretensions; for never was a system ushered in with a greater flourish of trumpets and a more stirring consciousness on the part of its promulgators that a new gospel was being preached which was to save the world at last from centuries of hereditary mistake. At the watchword of the system, shot from Edinburgh to Westminster more than a hundred years ago, the son of a London attorney felt “the scales fall from his eyes;” all was now clear that had hitherto been dim; a distinct test was revealed for marking out by a sharp line a domain where, previous to the arrival of the great discriminator, all {265} had been mere floating clouds, shifting mists, and aërial hallucinations; the unsubstantial idealism of Plato and the unreasonable asceticism of the New Testament were destined at length to disappear; only let schools be established for the creation of universal intelligence to assert itself by universal suffrage, and the redemption of the world from imaginary morality and superstitious sentiment would be complete. This, so far as my observation has gone, is the sort of tone under the inspiration of which the doctrine of Utility has been proclaimed to the world; and that I am not exaggerating but rather understating the self-gratulation of the school, is evident from the fact that Dr. Southwood Smith, one of Bentham’s most admiring disciples, actually believed and printed that his discovery of the principle of utility marked an era in moral philosophy as important as that achieved for physical science by Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the principle of gravitation. Nor was Dr. Smith at all singular in this tone of transcendental laudation. The dogmatism which, as we shall see, was a characteristic feature in the intellectual character of Bentham, was inherited more or less by most of his disciples; and the importance which they attribute to themselves and their own discoveries is only surpassed by the superciliousness with which they ignore whatever has been done by their predecessors. This ignoring of the past, indeed, to the best of my judgment, seems to be the radical defect, not only of the Benthamites, but of the great body of our British philosophers from Locke downwards; we do not start from a large and impartial survey of the inherited results of thought, so much as from some point of local or {266} sectional prominence; our petty systems are of the nature of a reaction rather than an architecture, and like all reactions are one-sided in their direction and extravagant in their estimate of their own importance. If scholars sometimes make their learning useless by their ignorance of the present, the men of the present are not less apt to make their intellectual position ridiculous by ignoring, misunderstanding, or misrepresenting their relation to the past;--for a large appreciation of what has been achieved by our predecessors alone can guarantee a just estimate of the true value of our own labours. All judgments are comparative; and as Primrose Hill is a mighty mountain to the boy born within the chime of the Bow Bells, so Locke and Hume and Bentham may be taken for the greatest captains of thinking by men to whom Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are unknown.

The first thing that strikes us in attempting a critical estimate of Utilitarianism is its name. Names are sometimes attached to systems accidentally, and in that case need not be curiously analysed; but when they are deliberately chosen by the propounder of a new theory, they are significant, and provoke question. “WHY UTILITY PLEASES” is the heading of one of Hume’s chapters; and the answer to it simply is, that as Utility consists in the adaptation of means to ends, and as the recognition of such adaptation is a peculiar function of reason, it cannot but be that reasonable creatures should receive pleasure from being affected in a manner so suitable to their nature. The eyes, as Plotinus says, are susceptible of pleasure from light, because an impressibility to light is of the essence of their quality and {267} the idea of their structure;[267.1] so reason is necessarily pleased with what is reasonable, and utility must please a creature whose whole energy, when he acts according to his best nature, is expended in discovering and applying means which shall be useful to secure certain ends. But the answering of this question does not advance us one step in moral philosophy; moral philosophy is a science of ends, not of means--a science of what Aristotle calls the ἀρχιτεκτονικόν, or supreme τέλος--the ultimate aim. So our new philosophy has taken as a watchword a term that means nothing by itself, any more than the terms _plus_ and _minus_ in algebra. To give the term a meaning, the further question must be put, _Useful for what?_ and then the old commonplace comes out--Useful for what all men desire, Happiness, of course; for “all men desire Happiness, that’s past doubt,” says Locke,[267.2] and Aristotle also, for that matter; but we do not consult philosophers to hear such truisms. What then comes next? The truism is put into an antithetic shape, and we are told as the grand result of the profoundest modern thought that _the greatest happiness of the greatest number_ is the ultimate principle of moral science, the pole-star of all social navigation, by attention to which alone the blinding mists of transcendental sentiment and the sharp ledges of unnatural asceticism can be avoided. But is this maxim really in any way worthy of the applause with which it has been received? May we not well ask, in the first place, _Who ever {268} doubted it?_ If happiness is desirable, and if man is naturally a social and sympathetic animal, as all the ancients took for granted, then the more that can be made to partake of it so much the better. Of this neither Aristotle nor Plato ever had any doubt. They wished every country to contain as large a population as was compatible with the conditions of health; beyond these limits, indeed, they saw a difficulty, and, to prevent the evil of overpopulation, were willing to allow certain remedies which, to modern sentiment, may appear harsh and inhuman; but they never doubted that in a well-ordered State happiness was the common right of the many, not the special privilege of the few; and Aristotle in his _Politics_ lays it down expressly as a reason why oligarchy is to be reckoned among the worst forms of government, that it assumes that power is to be used for the interest of the few, not for the good of the many. The famous Benthamite formula, therefore, can be regarded only as a very appropriate war-cry for an oppressed democracy fighting against an insolent oligarchy; to this praise it is justly entitled, and in this sphere it has no doubt been extensively useful; but as a maxim pretending to enunciate a fundamental principle of ethical philosophy it has neither novelty nor pertinence.