Chapter 2

But from all these charges and counter-charges, it would seem to be clear that real {28} Christianity compels respect even where it is viewed with aversion, that its progress is hindered by nothing so much as by the unworthiness of its adherents, that it gains assent by nothing so much as by the manifestation of Christian lives.

Will any one venture to deny that the world would be vastly improved were every one in it to be a genuine Christian, animated by Christian motives, doing Christian deeds? The revolution would be immense, indescribable: it would be the end of all evil: it would be the establishment of all good. No man's hand would be against another, all would strive together for the welfare of the whole, there would be no contention save how to excel in love and in good works. The human imagination cannot depict anything more glorious, more ennobling, than the will of God done on earth as it is done in heaven, and this is what would be if the thoughts of every heart were brought {29} into captivity to the obedience of Christ. The most splendid dreams of the most exalted visionaries would be more than fulfilled: everything true and lovely and of good report would be ratified and confirmed: everything false and vile would be changed and purified, and nothing to hurt or destroy or defile would remain. The fulfilment of that ideal is simply the universal prevalence of Christianity, the universal triumph of Christ.

The systems and tendencies at which we are about to glance owe their vitality to the Faith which they attempt to supersede. They are, in so far as they are good, either tending towards Christianity or borrowing from it. The insufficiency of mere material well-being, the irresistible association of Religion with Morality, the worship of the Universe, the worship of Humanity, all are signs of the ineradicable instinct of the Unseen and Eternal, of the unquenchable thirst for the Living God; and belief in the Living {30} God finds its noblest illustration and confirmation in Him Who said, 'He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,' in Him to whom the searching scrutiny of critical inquirers, as well as the fervid devotion of believers, bears so marvellous a witness. We hope to show not only that the abolition of Christianity might 'be attended with sundry inconveniences,' or that the assumption of there being 'nothing in' Christianity is 'not so clear a case,' but we hope to show that if, amid present perplexity and estrangement, many feel themselves obliged to go back and walk no more with Christ, we, for our part, as we hear His voice of tender reproach, 'Will ye also go away?' can only, with heartfelt conviction, give the answer, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.'

[1] Tennyson, _In the Children's Hospital_.

[2] _The Martyrdom of Man_.

[3] _The Churches and Modern Thought_.

[4] _Parsons and Pagans_.

[5] _Secularists' Manual_.

[6] _God and my Neighbour_.

[7] _Ibid_.

[8] _Earthward Pilgrimage_.

[9] Dean Church, _Pascal and other Sermons_, p. 348.

[10] Appendix I.

[11] Appendix II.

[12] _Queen Mab_.

[13] Hans Faber, _Das Christentum der Zukunft_.

[14] Appendix.

[15] Sir Leslie Stephen, _English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_, vol. i. p. 144

[16] Appendix IV.

[17] _God and my Neighbour_.

[18] _God and my Neighbour_, ch. ix. p. 197.

[19] Appendix V.

[20] _Parsons and Pagans_.

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II

MORALITY WITHOUT RELIGION

'I am sought of them that asked not for Me: I am found of them that sought Me not.'--ISAIAH lxv. 1.

'Not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified. For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves; which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another.'--ROMANS ii. 13-15.

'Strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.'--EPHESIANS ii. 12.

'The acknowledging of the truth which is after godliness.'--TITUS i. 1.

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II

MORALITY WITHOUT RELIGION

That Religion and Morality have no necessary connection is a popular assumption. In books, in pamphlets, in magazines, on platforms, in ordinary conversation, it is loudly proclaimed or quietly insinuated that the morality of the future will be Independent Morality, Morality without Sanction. Morality, it is iterated and reiterated, can get on quite well without Religion: Religion is a positive hindrance to Morality. This view is, no doubt, extreme. Perhaps it is only here and there in the writings which fall into the hands of most of us, or in the circles with which most of us mingle, that the matter is stated so bluntly and so plainly. But in {34} not a few writings of wide circulation, and in whole classes of the community, the statement is made as if beyond contradiction. Even in works which we are all reading, and in companies where we daily find ourselves, the logical conclusion of arguments, the natural inference from assumptions, would be simply that extreme position. There is no use in evading the fact that if some highly popular opinions are accepted, no statement of the uselessness of Religion in any form or system can be too extreme. The mere assurance that Religion is a reality, is a benefit, is a necessity, though it may not seem a great deal to establish, though it may leave a host of problems still to solve, would be a gain to many, would sweep away the chief doubts by which they are perplexed.

There need not, on our part, be any hesitation in declaring, to begin with, that Religion {35} without Morality is worthless. The attempt to keep them apart, to regard them as independent of each other, has often enough been made by nominal champions of Religion. The upholding of certain views regarding God and His relations to mankind has been considered sufficient to make up for neglect of the duties incumbent on ordinary mortals. The performance of certain rites and ceremonies has been considered an adequate compensation for the commission of deliberate crimes. Instances might easily be cited of persons engaged in villainous schemes, achieving deeds of dishonesty which will cause ruin to hundreds of innocent victims, executing plots of fiendish revenge, with little regard for human life, and no regard at all for truth, but exceedingly punctilious in attention to religious observances. One of the most cold-blooded murderers that ever disgraced the habitable globe was careful not to neglect any act of devotion, and while {36} perpetrating the most nefarious basenesses never failed to write in his diary the most pious sentiments. That kind of religion is worse than nothing, was rightly regarded as increasing the horror and loathsomeness of the monster's life. In a minor degree, we have all seen illustrations of the same incongruity, we may even have detected indications of it in ourselves, the tendency to imagine that the more we go to church or frequent the Sacraments or read the Bible, we are entitled to latitude in our conduct. There is no tendency against which we need to be more constantly on our guard, none which is more strongly, more terrifically, denounced in the Old Testament and in the New, by prophets and apostles, and by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. Unbelievers in Christianity are perfectly right when they say that Religion without Morality is absolutely worthless.

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II

We may go further. We may admit, nay, we must vehemently maintain, that Morality without Religion is far better than Religion without Morality. Look at this man who makes no profession of Religion, but who is temperate, honest, self-sacrificing for the public good. Look at that man who made a loud profession, but who was leading a life of secret vice, who was false to the trust reposed in him, who appropriated what had been committed to his charge. Can there be any doubt, we are triumphantly asked, that of these two, the religious is inferior to the irreligious? There can be no doubt whatever, would be the reply of every well-instructed Christian. Morality without Religion is incalculably better than Religion without Morality. But what does this prove with regard to Christianity? It simply proves how eternally true is the parable {38} of our Lord: 'A certain man had two sons, and he came to the first and said, Son, go work to-day in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not, but afterwards he repented and went. And he came to the second and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, sir, and went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto Him, The first,' and our Lord confirmed the answer.

III

That kind of comparison between Religion and Morality is most misleading, for such 'Religion' is not Religion at all. It may be hypocrisy, it may be superstition, it may be self-deception: Christianity it is not, and never can be. The contrast is not really between Morality and Religion, but between Morality and Immorality, Falsehood, Fraud, and Wilful Imposition. Whatever else the Kingdom of God may be, it is at least {39} Righteousness: where there is no Righteousness, there can be no Kingdom of God. Whatever else Christian doctrine may be, it is at least a doctrine according to godliness, a teaching in accordance with the eternal laws of righteousness. For purposes of analysis and convenience, we may distinguish between Religion and Morality, and show them working in different spheres, but it is utterly erroneous to suppose that they can be actually divorced. In every right and rational representation of the Christian Religion, Morality is included and imbedded, otherwise it is only a maimed and mutilated Religion which is held out for acceptance. On the other hand, in all true Morality, especially in its highest and purest manifestations, Religion is present. It is possible to decry Morality. 'Mere Morality,' in the current acceptation of the phrase, may lack a good deal, may be a phase of self-righteousness, self-interest, cold calculation, {40} a keeping up of appearances before the world, but Morality itself is of a higher strain: it is the fulfilment of every duty to one's self and to one's neighbour: it implies that each duty is done from the right motive: the purer and loftier it becomes the more it encroaches on the religious domain: it is crowned and glorified with a religious sanction: it is, visible or hidden, conscious or unconscious, a doing of the will of God. Morality, to hold its own, must be 'touched by emotion,' and Morality touched by emotion is identical with Religion. To admit moral obligation in all its length and breadth, and depth and height, is to admit God.[1]

IV

A curious illustration of the fact that Morality, to be permanent, needs the inspiration of Religion, that Morality, at its best and purest, tends to become Religion, is {41} afforded in such a work as Dr. Stanton Coit's _National Idealism and a State Church_. Dr. Coit has for twenty years been engaged in founding ethical societies, and his high and disinterested aims need not be called in question. But the book is evidence that in order to support the lofty principles which he so earnestly expounds, he is obliged to call in the aid of principles which he imagined himself to have discarded. He begins by denying the Supernatural in every shape and form. He will have none of a personal God, or of a personal immortality. There is no higher being than Man. All trust must be shifted from supernatural to human agencies. 'Combined human foresight, the general will of organised society, assumes the rôle of Creative Providence.' 'This is, then, the presupposition of all moral judgment in harmony with which I would reconstruct the religions of the world: that no crime and no good deed that happens in this world shall {42} ever be traced to any other moral agencies than those actually inhabiting living human bodies and recognised by other human beings as fit subjects of human rights and privileges.' In other words, Morality, Morality alone, Morality without any sanction from Above, or any hope from Beyond, is the all-sufficient strength and ennoblement of man.

But what is the superstructure which Dr. Stanton Coit proceeds to build upon this foundation? One would naturally expect that Prayer and Churches and Sacraments would have no place. But these are exactly what he insists on retaining; these will apparently be more important, more necessary, in the future than in the past. 'We should appropriate and adapt the materials furnished us by the rites and ceremonies of the historic Church. As the woodbird, bent on building her nest, in lieu of better materials makes it of leaves and of feathers from her breast, so may we use what is familiar, old, {43} and close at hand. It is all ours; and the homelike beauty of the Church of the future will be enhanced by the ancient materials wrought into its new forms.' So much enhanced, indeed, that most people will be inclined to tolerate the new forms simply because of the ancient materials which are allowed to remain. Among the ancient materials which Dr. Coit appropriates or adapts, prayer occupies a prominent place. And he is severe upon those, _e.g._, Comte and Dr. Congreve, who would banish petition from the sphere of worship. He delights in pointing out that, in despite of themselves, they include requests for personal blessings. Nor is prayer to be a mere aspiration or inarticulate longing of the soul. 'No mental activity can become definite, coherent, and systematic, and remain so, except it be embodied and repeated in words.... A petition that does not, or cannot, or will not, formulate itself in words, and let the lips move to shape them, and the {44} voice to sound them, and the eye to visualise them on the written or printed page, becomes soon a mere torpor of the mind, or a meaningless movement of blind unrest, or a trick of pretending to pray. Perfected prayer is always spoken.'

To whom, or to what, this prayer, uttered or unexpressed, is to be offered, may be difficult of comprehension. It is not to God, as we have hitherto employed that sacred name; but Dr. Coit insists that the word 'God' shall be retained, and that we have no right to deny to this God the attribute of Personality. 'Any one who worships either a concrete social group or an abstract moral quality may justly protest against the charge that his God is impersonal: he may insist that it is either superpersonal or interpersonal, or both.' The worship of Nature appears to be discouraged, and to be considered as of comparatively little worth. 'We dare never forget that moral qualities stand to us in a {45} different dynamic relation from the grass and the stars and the sea--no effects upon us or upon these will result from petitions even of a most righteous man to them. But no one can deny that prayers to Purity, Serenity, Faith, Humanity, England, Man, Woman, to Milton, to Jesus, do create a new moral heaven and a new earth for him who thirsts after righteousness.' Leaving the name of our Lord out of the discussion, why should a prayer to Serenity have more moral influence than a prayer to the Sea? Why should a prayer to the Stars be less efficacious than a prayer to Milton, whose soul was like a star and dwelt apart? We have only to invest the stars and the sea with certain qualities evolved from our own imagination to make them as worthy of worship as either Milton or Serenity. Dr. Coit is scathing in his criticism of the Positivist prayers, whether of Comte or of Dr. Congreve: they are 'screamingly funny': 'the most monstrous {46} absurdity ever perpetrated by a really good and great man.' The epithets are possibly justified; but are they quite inapplicable to one who supposes that an invocation of the Living and Eternal God means no more than an invocation of England, or Faith, or Woman? It is only when God has become to us an abstraction that an abstraction can take the place of God.

A manual of services fitted to a nation's present needs is what, according to Dr. Coit, is required to ensure the progress and triumph of the ethical movement. 'Until the new idealism possesses its own manual of religious ritual, it cannot communicate effectively its deeper thought and purpose. The moment, however, it has invented such a means of communication, it would seem inevitable that a rapid moral and intellectual advancement of man must at last take place, equal in speed and in beneficence to the material advancement which followed {47} during the last century in the wake of scientific inventions.' The ritual of ethical societies will not outwardly differ much from the ritual to be found in existing religions. Its details have yet to be arranged or 'invented.' The only things certain are that a book of prayers ought to be provided at once, and that in Swinburne's _Songs before Sunrise_ may be found an 'anthology of prayer suitable for use in the Church of Humanity,' prayers 'as sublime and quickening in melody and passion as anything in the Hebrew prophets or the Litany of the Church.'

Dr. Coit does not denounce theology as theology, he even insists on being himself ranked among theologians. His readers may be surprised to learn on what doctrines he dwells with particular fondness. He laments that belief in the existence and power of the devil should be waning. 'We may not believe in a personal devil, but we must believe in a devil who acts very like a person.' {48} He predicts that teachers will more and more teach a doctrine of hell-fire. Out of kindness they will terrify by presenting the evil effects, indirect and remote, of selfish thoughts and dispositions. 'We must frighten people away from the edge of the abyss which begins this side of death.' Finally, though, of course, the word is not used in the ordinary sense, the necessity of the doctrine of the Incarnation is upheld. 'The Incarnation must for ever remain a fundamental conception of religion. Until all men are incarnations of the principle of constructive moral beneficence, and to a higher degree, Jesus will remain pre-eminent; and it is quite possible that in proportion as he is approached, gratitude to him will increase rather than diminish.' 'Even should any one ever in the future transcend him, still it will only be by him and in glad acknowledgment of the debt to him. There never can in the future be a dividing of the world into Christianity {49} and not Christianity. It will only be a new and more Christian Christianity, compatible with liberty and reason.'

Thus the drift and tendency of this book bring us back, however unintentionally, to the Faith of which it appears, at first sight, to be the renunciation. It establishes irresistibly that Morality, to be living and permanent, must have religious sanction and inspiration, that we need to be delivered from the awful thraldom of evil, that the supreme realities are the things which are unseen; that prayer is the life of the soul; that public worship is a necessity; that in Christ the greatest redemptive power has been embodied, and the purest vision of the Eternal has been granted; and that, in its adaptation to human needs, its fostering of human aspirations, its ministering to human sorrows, its renewal of human penitence, its consecration of life and its hope in death, no Ethical Society yet devised gives any {50} symptom of being able to supplant the Church of Him Who said, 'Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.'

V

Now, from the fact that Morality at its best assumes a religious tinge, merges itself in Religion, we may legitimately infer that, without the inspiration of Religion, Morality at its best will not long prevail.[2] 'Love, friendship,' said Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 'good nature, kindness carried to the height of sincere and devoted affection, will always be the chief pleasures of life, whether Christianity is true or false; but Christian Charity is not the same as any of these, or all of these put together, and I think that if Christian Theology were exploded, Christian Charity would not survive it.'[3] At present, when Religion has pervaded everything with its sacred sanctions, it is easy to say that Religion {51} would not be greatly missed were it discarded, and that Morality would be unaffected. This is pure conjecture. To test its worth we should need a state of society from which every vestige of Religion had disappeared. It will not do to retain any of the beliefs or the customs which owe their origin to a sense of the Unseen and Eternal, to a sense of any Power above ourselves, ruling our destinies and instilling into our minds thoughts and desires and hopes beyond the visible and the material. If Morality, in the limited acceptation of the term, is sufficient for the elevation and welfare of mankind, it is not to be supported by any admixture of Religion: it must prove its power by itself. Religion must be utterly abolished, its every sanction must be universally rejected, its every impulse must have universally ceased before it can be contended with any measure of assurance that the world will be none the worse, may be even the better, for its vanishing.

{52}

If Religion is a delusion, remember what must be eliminated from our convictions. There can be no higher tribunal than that of man by which our actions can be judged.[4] A life of outward propriety is the utmost that can be demanded of us, if it is only against the wellbeing of our neighbour or the promotion of our own happiness that we can transgress. What has human law to do with our hearts? What legislation can deal with 'envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness,' unless they manifest themselves in outward acts? A base, unloving, impure, acrimonious, untruthful man may crawl through life, never having been arrested, never having been sentenced to any term of penal servitude. He can stand erect before all the laws of the country and say, 'All these have I kept from my youth up.' And unless there be a higher law than the law of man, unless there be a law written on our hearts by the Finger of {53} God, unless there be One to whom, above and beyond all earthly appearances, we can mournfully declare, 'Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned,' nothing more can be reasonably demanded. If there is nothing higher than the visible, it can be only visible results which are of any value. The giving of money to help the needy, and the giving of money in order to obtain a reputation for generosity, must stand on the same level. The widow's mite will be worth infinitely less than the shekels which come from those who devour widows' houses. If there be none to search the heart, none save poor frail fellow-mortals to whom we must give account, what an incentive to purity of motive and loftiness of aspiration is removed! But let men talk as they will, there is a conscience in them which whispers, It does matter whether our hearts as well as our actions are right; it does matter whether we have good motives, good intentions; there is a scrutiny of hearts, {54} making and to be made more fully yet; there is One before Whom, even though we have not broken the law of the land, we confess with anguish, Against Thee have I sinned and done evil in Thy sight: where I appear most irreproachable, Thine eye detecteth error: it is not the occasional trespass that I have chiefly to lament, it is the sin that is almost part and parcel of my very being, the sin that corrodes even where it does not glare, the sin that undermines even where it does not crash.

VI