Chapter 6

And, now, what is the truth about the "judgment to come"? What is the ethical equivalent of "hell fire"? In the first place, we refuse to believe in a "last judgment" because we know that judgment is not only pronounced but executed instantaneously, automatically, I would say, on the commission of wrong. There is no need to wait for the day of judgment or even for the hour of death. If a man has done wrong he sits condemned that self-same moment. _Illo nocens se damnat quo peccat die_. There is no need of God, angel or devil, to announce the fact or deliver judgment; the man has pronounced his own sentence, executed judgment on himself. This is, in essence, the ethical doctrine of compensation, that this universe is so woven, that the nature of things is such that "things are what they are, that the consequences of things will be what they will be," that we can no more hope to avert them by crying out for help to man, saint or God, than we can hope to hurl back the waves that dash upon the strand at flood tide. Our view is that moral laws are as irresistible as physical, and admit of no more dispensation than the everlasting order of Nature. One of our main reasons for repudiating the conception of the miraculous is that it involves a violation of eternal order and therefore of eternal reason, and if freely admitted in the physical, would doubtless be speedily introduced into the moral order, to the destruction of civilised society. We believe that this universe is "so magically woven" that it is absolutely impossible to escape the consequences of our deeds, and if the Buddhist doctrine of Karma represents that teaching, then we are among its most enthusiastic adherents, because it is absolutely true to fact.

But let us look at the matter more closely.[1]

Have we ever sufficiently reflected how that "all things are double, one against the other," in this mysteriously governed world, that everything has its counterpart? the world appears to be split into halves, which yet cleave to each other, as a man is haunted by his shadow. "An inevitable dualism bisects Nature, so that each thing is half, and suggests another thing to make it whole." Thus--spirit, matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper, under; action, rest; yea, nay. "All things are double, one against the other."

All the woes of existence arise from our deliberate resistance to the law of oneness, to that integration which is so conspicuous in Nature. We are incessantly seeking to take the one half and leave the other, and straightway Nemesis overtakes us. We want to enjoy the pleasures of sense without attending to the inexorable requirements of mind, and such an appalling satiety sickens our souls, that we forget ourselves in the commission of deeds unspeakably wicked; we possibly degrade ourselves in the eyes of all men by falling even into the clutches of the law, or we border on the verge of self-destruction in our unspeakable _ennui_. We would have the half, while Nature planned the whole, and we pay the last farthing. The results are naturally so appalling that it is not to be wondered that men sought to express them under the image of a fire which will not be quenched, a worm of remorse which can never die--an immense despair for which there is no relief.

Life is full of distressing illustrations of this ethical law. A man who owns but the clothes he wears one day, is a millionaire the next, and he attempts the impossible task of bisecting life, which has been manifestly planned as a whole. He appears to succeed for a time, but one day men are startled to hear that he has owned up that he had chosen the wrong path, and has determined to quit it in suicide. A few months after, the community is compelled to witness an almost unparalleled degradation, that of a young man born in the purple, with every advantage that birth, position, education or matrimonial connections could give him, sentenced as a felon for the meanest treachery, because he would halve life which was planned a whole, and forgot the Fates, the dread Erynys, who administer the ethical law of compensation.

But it is the same in lesser as in greater things. Without hesitation, we may ascribe our minor sorrows to the one self-same source, the attempt to dissever the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright, from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair. We forget that purity of heart and the law of gravitation arise in the same eternal spring, that the world is a whole, that moral and physical are grounded in one source, and we pay the penalty. "The soul says eat; the body would feast. The soul says the man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have power over things to its own individual ends."

Now, this conduct never yet met with any success. You thrust your arm into the stream to divide the water, but it re-unites behind your hand. You attempt to live your life on one side only, to dissever that which was made for unity, and calamity comes to crush you. Men and women marry for flesh or gold, they put half their whole into the contract, and their sacrilegious bargain smites them with a curse. It is the law of compensation, the workings of that moral gravitation which causes all things to fit into their own places, and is to us the clearest indication of the workings of the Divine in all this tumultuous life.

Wonderful discernment of the ethical prophet! We cease to see God omnipresent in all things, and our blindness ends in our destruction. We see the sensual allurement, but not the sensual hurt; we see the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; we think we see our way to cut off that which we would have from that which we would not have. "How secret art Thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence, that bringest penal blindnesses on such as have unbridled desires," quotes Emerson from Augustine's confessions.

No "last judgment," then, but a first judgment, a judgment here and now, swift, sudden, irreversible upon every man and woman who dare to take their lives by halves, to forget the seamless unity wherewith the universe is woven. This is the ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in the universe and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies are the attendants on justice, and if the sun in the heavens should transgress his path, they would punish him.

This is that awful yet sublime doctrine of retribution which is the groundwork of the masterpieces of the ancient Greek tragedies, the inspiration without which the world would never have known the Agamemnon or the immortal trilogy of Sophocles. It is the doctrine which made Plato describe punishment as going about with sin, "their heads tied together," and Hegel define it as "the other half of sin," while Emerson shows that "crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit which, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of pleasure which concealed it." They are linked together inexorably, as cause and effect, and no god can dispense in this law, because the law itself is God.

Hence, there can be no such thing as "forgiveness of sin". An act once done is irreparable. Its consequences must endure to all time. Our most agonising repentance cannot undo the past, it can only avail to safeguard the future. We cannot escape the law of compensation. There is no magnified man in the skies, swayed by human passions, ready, at the call and entreaty of prayer, to obstruct the operation of natural laws. Theories of atonement by blood shedding, sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins, arose in the days when man believed in such a deity as that, but we know none such now, and wise are we if we recognise--oh, how well it had been if in our youth we all could have known--that the consequences of an act are absolutely inevitable, that deeds once done, words once spoken, are traced ineffaceably on the tablets of universal nature and must reverberate throughout the universe to all time!

Severe teaching, you say. Yes, one pauses here when thoughts of hell and devils never once made man pause. The truth is, no one really believes the insensate teaching of the Churches on punishment. Even their adherents have outgrown them. Nothing is clearer from history than that fear of hell fire never yet made man moral. It could not keep the Church of mediaevalism, its priests and its bishops, aye, and its supreme pontiffs--numbers of them--even decent living men, to say nothing of morality or virtue. It is worse than useless now;--an insult to reason and an outrage on religion. But what _will_ hold a man is the doctrine of compensation, of judgment pronounced _by himself_ directly his iniquity is accomplished, of sentence self-executed, unpardonable and irremissible, now and for ever.

And, added to this, the conviction that his crimes are committed, not "against God," who can in no wise be personally influenced or injured by man's misdeeds, being wholly destitute of human passions and emotions, but against his fellow man, or against his sister woman.

One knows, alas! the beginning of the end to which the lost have come. If only youth had been taught in the opening days of life, when impressions are so vivid, that there is no such article as the creeds of the Churches falsely proclaim--"the forgiveness of sin"--that one only wrong act may, rather must, be the starting point which will one day precipitate a catastrophe, how many would have been saved from the nameless depths, of which we must be silent, how many spared the anguish of an unavailing remorse!

Must this false teaching indeed go on for ever? Will it never dawn upon our priests and ministers, our masters and mistresses in schools, that God bears none of the burden of humanity; his heart never breaks because a life is withering in despair? He takes no hurt from the weltering sorrows by which so many are overwhelmed. It is man, it is woman, who bears the agony; the crushing burden of wrong-doing falls on them. Look no more then, we urge, to a phantom deity, to an idol-god in the skies, a figment of a disordered imagination, but think on your brother man before you dare to set mischief in motion. When you apprehend the nearness of danger, think of the future, think of consequences, think only of the irremissibleness of sin, which not all the waters and baptisms, though it were of blood, through which the Churches can pass you, will ever be able to efface.

How much knavery in actual progress in this wilderness of men in London might one not hope to stop if this doctrine of compensation could be brought home? How much company-promoting, fraud, mendacity, adulteration of food, could we not render impossible, if ethical and prophetical teaching took the place of the Church catechisms and the creeds, if men could be persuaded that the success of their ventures--quite legitimate in the eyes of the civil and criminal law--can only be purchased by the tears and ruin of human beings? The dogma of endless future punishment was apparently impotent to restrain the ultra-orthodox directors of the Liberator Company, but I take it that no man who had been schooled in Emerson, could have sat at that board and thanked an Almighty God for the exceptional favours he had been mercifully pleased to bestow on their conscious frauds. The vindictiveness of a purposeless hell has, of course, failed ignominiously as a deterrent from crime. We cannot conceive infinite Intelligence inflicting an excruciating and endless punishment simply for punishment's sake. We are superior to such methods ourselves; we refuse to associate them with God. What we do believe in, what we are sure of, is that a man's sin must find him out, that he must reap as he sows, that the consequences of his misdeeds are eternal, that--

All on earth he has made his own Floating in air or pent in stone, Will rive the hills, the sea will swim, And like his shadow follow him.

[1] In what follows I have freely borrowed from the great "Essay on Compensation".

VI.

CONSCIENCE THE VOICE OF GOD AND THE VOICE OF MAN.

We have already learnt in the study of the doctrine of Compensation that the misfortunes of life are due to man's attempt to bisect the world and life, and seize greedily on one half to the partial or total neglect of the other. Life having been planned a whole, inevitable disaster overtakes the man who would behave as though it were a thing of shreds and fragments. Now this law of what we may call the Divine unity is equally valid in the purely intellectual order. That, likewise, refuses to admit schisms and divisions to break in on the solidity of its unbroken ranks. An attempt to view life and its problems exclusively from our own standpoint, is to fail to grasp truth; our shadow gets projected over the surface, and the light is partially concealed, if not wholly confused. No better illustration of this fact, I believe, could be afforded than that supplied by conscience, the practical dictate of reason which controls the moral life of man.

In days of old when man was nothing in his own or anybody else's eyes, in the ages when he thought to magnify the Deity by belittling himself, an interfering agency of the Divine was necessarily invoked on almost every conceivable occasion; "the hand of God" was seen in every occurrence. From the comparatively minor matters of bodily ailments up to the colossal disasters which nature is capable of inflicting--in all the visible interference of the supra-mundane power was discerned. Those were naturally the days of the "Divine right of kings," when all civil power was held to have been centred in one individual by the express act of the Divinity; those were likewise the days when the conscience of man was exclusively interpreted as the articulate utterance of God. But, inasmuch as man was too ignorant and wicked to rightly interpret that supreme oracle, he was bidden to leave it in the custody of a sanctified corporation, the Church, and to keep his thoughts and his conduct in tune with the dominant ecclesiastical sentiment of the hour.

Now, from that extraordinary position a reaction was of course inevitable. Man could not go on for ever describing himself as "a worm" and an outcast, or avowing himself "a miserable sinner" and a limb of Satan; and consequently, with an awakened sense of human dignity, inspiring him, not with vainglory, but with an ever-deepening self-reverence, the ascription of all agency to supernatural power began to be seriously curtailed. "The Divine right of kings" went its way with other archaisms into the limbo of oblivion, from which the reigning monarch in Prussia would appear to be vainly endeavouring to rescue it, while man began to realise that the causes of natural and human phenomena were to be sought in nature and in man. As a consequence of this, a new theory of conscience began to take shape, which was ultimately described by one of the boldest of later English philosophical writers, the late Professor Clifford, as "the voice of man commanding us to live for the right".[1]

In these definitions of conscience, as "the voice of God" and "the voice of man," we have an instance of propositions which in logic are called _contraries_. Both, therefore, cannot be exclusively and simultaneously true, but both may be simultaneously false. Thus, "all men are white" and "no men are white" are contraries, but they are both false. And this, I submit, is the judgment to be pronounced on these two exclusive definitions of conscience. Neither is, exclusively speaking, true, but there is a measure of truth common to both, and that measure it will be the purpose of the following remarks to determine.

But, before going any farther, we must get a clear idea of what we mean by conscience. In a general way, of course, we all know what is meant by the word: an appeal to conscience would be intelligible by every one. We understand it to be a faculty which decides on a definite course of action when alternatives of good and evil are before us. We look upon it as an instinct, magnetic in its power, incessantly prompting us towards the fulfilment of duty, and gravely reproaching us on its dereliction. We recognise it as the sweetest and most troublesome of visitants; sweetest when the peace unspeakable sinks into our souls, most troublesome when we have been guilty of a great betrayal. So delicate is that voice that nothing is easier than to stifle it; so clear is it that no one by any possibility can mistake it.

Thus, in general terms, we may describe conscience. Coming now more closely to a philosophical analysis of the conception, we shall find therein much enlightenment for the purposes of our present investigation. In the first place, the word is of comparatively late origin. It does not occur in the Hebrew writers of the Old Testament. Its earliest appearance is in the Book of Wisdom, the work of a Hellenistic Jew extremely well acquainted with the trend of Greek thought in the third century B.C. It does not occur in the Gospels, except in the story of the sinful woman whom Christ refused to condemn--a history which, though profoundly in accord with the sympathetic genius of Jesus, is none the less an interpolation in the eighth chapter of the Johannine Gospel, so much so that Tischendorff excised it from his last edition of the text of the New Testament. St. Paul certainly uses the word once in the Epistle to the Romans, and though known in the latter days before the advent of Christianity, we may assume that mainly through that religion the word was popularised throughout the world.

But what is the faculty which corresponds to the word conscience? We shall find etymology of great assistance in giving precision to our thoughts. The word is, of course, a derivative from the Latin, _conscientia_, knowledge with, or together. Now, _scientia_ is the simple knowledge of things by the reason, while _conscientia_ is the knowledge which the reason has of itself; it is the realisation of one's selfhood--the realisation of the _ichkeit des ego_, as the very expressive German phrase has it, "the selfhood of the I". In English philosophical language we commonly denominate this self-realisation consciousness, a word of precisely the same etymological origin as conscience. If, in the next place, the reason is occupied, not with the reflex action of self-contemplation, but with moral action or the discernment of right from wrong, then it is called, and is, no longer consciousness, but _conscience_. Putting it technically, consciousness is a psychological expression, while conscience is ethical.

Nevertheless, it must be most carefully remembered that the two functions are performed by one and the same reason--immaterial and indivisible in us. Truly speaking, there is no real, but only a conceptual, distinction between the reason of a Darwin elaborating his famous law, realising his selfhood, and acknowledging his obligations to the eminent man--only less so than himself--who had simultaneously lighted on the great discovery of the age--the law of organic evolution. As Paul says of those manifold endowments of the earliest Christians, "A diversity of gifts and a diversity of graces, but in them all worketh the self-same spirit," so say we of the reason at the very heart of our being, the sole, self-sufficing explanation of the multitudinous phenomena of our mental life. Hence we arrive at a definition of conscience as "the practical dictate of the reason in us prescribing obedience to the good and avoidance of the evil". Two elements, therefore, are discernible in this definition: first, reason, as such, pointing out what is good and evil; and, secondly, reason, as conscience, ordaining that the good is to be done and the evil left undone--a distinction to be carefully borne in mind when the problem of conflicting consciences has to be faced; how it comes, for instance, that morality appears to differ in different countries, and even in the same individual at different periods of his life.

But of that nothing further need be said now, but we may immediately pass on to see in what sense conscience, thus explained, is, in the first place, to be accounted the voice of God.

Outside a philosophy avowedly atheist it seems difficult to understand how there can be any doubt that the eternal distinction between right and wrong betokens the presence in this world of men of a supreme power and a supreme mind. "How comes it," let us ask with Emerson, "that the universe is so constituted," that that which we instinctively recognise as good makes for the individual and the general welfare, and that which we must perforce reprobate as evil works uniformly disaster? We recognise that things are unalterably so ordered that by no possibility could lying, slander, malice and hatred be other than intrinsically evil, and their opposites be other than essentially good. But how is it that things are so ordered? Whence these uniformities of approbation and disapprobation? Is there any answer conceivable but that the power responsible for the world is a moral power? Whence is existence itself but from the subsistent source of all being? Whence is life but from one ever-lasting source? Whence is intelligence but from the world's Soul, which is the soul of men? And towering above being, above life and reason, is conscience, the supreme guide, the light enlightening every man that cometh into this world.

Luce intellettual, piena d'amore, Amor di vero ben pien di letizia, Letizia die trascende ogni dolzore.

What is this "light intellectual," this "love of the true," so unutterably blissful as to quiet all pain and sorrow, but the radiance of the eternal falling athwart the shadows of this lower life? What is this miraculous monitor--this "man within the breast," as the Stoics called it--but the very articulate utterance of the supreme Reason bidding man to live for the right? No great son of earth ever interpreted it otherwise. From the days when Socrates scattered "the sophist clan" in Athens, and forced men by the irresistible majesty of his own moral elevation to believe in a morality which was more than a string of rules sanctioned by convention; from the hour when he refused to escape from prison because his conscience bade him submit to die;--from the days of the sublime martyrdom of Socrates and Jesus, the noble school of the Stoics, down to the philosophic Titans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany, with the glorious sage of Königsberg at their head, there has been but one answer to the question, What is conscience? Conscience, they proclaimed, is the voice of God. So surely as the maternal instinct in woman is the voice of universal Nature, so surely is conscience the witness in us that we are indeed "sons of God". If that teaching of the "Over-soul" be the truth, then since the Divine is incarnate in every man, by what other voice _can_ we be guided than by the Divine utterance commanding us to live by a moral law? We are Divine by nature, by what other law of life should we live?