Chapter 7

Or, how are we to explain the appearance of so strange a visitant in a universe which is dominated by the "struggle for existence"? The intellectual difficulty of atheism is so insuperable that we hear of it no more from men of science. I think Mr. Spencer's speculations have given it the _coup de grace_. But difficult as is the question of the origin of the cosmos, far more so is that of conscience. On what principles are we to explain how a world, evolving itself mechanically, cycle after cycle, has eventually produced an element so utterly at variance with itself, an element which puts right before might, self-surrender before the struggle for existence, and the law of pity in place of the survival of the fittest? Is conscience a development of the cosmic process? And, if so, how is such a _volta face_ in nature explicable on purely mechanical grounds, even if the process itself were so explicable? And how striking a fact that the last words Mr. Huxley[2] spoke in public should have been devoted to prove that so opposed were the cosmic and ethical processes--in other words, so completely at variance are the law of conscience and the law of evolution--that only by the triumph of the former over the latter is progress possible in the world. Again, I ask, since conscience is not the voice of Nature, of what is conscience the voice and witness if not of one of whom it is written, "In the beginning was Reason; in the beginning was Mind"?[3]

But there is another aspect of the question, and we must now pass on to inquire how far conscience is also "the voice of man commanding us to live for the right". Quite at the beginning of this ethical movement we protested, as plainly as words would allow, our entire allegiance to the teachings of physical science, and our readiness to abandon any doctrine of ethical religion which is disproved by experimental research. So convinced are we of the absolute unity of truth, because with Plato we believe in the unity of its source in the Divine intelligence, that to us it is inconceivable that there should be any fundamental contradiction in the orders of the real and the ideal. Things seen and unseen, the passing and the eternal, both ultimately take their origin in the same source, the Infinite. No finite thing can be the ultimate explanation of the universe, because it itself requires explanation. Hence, whatever science has to tell us about conscience will be enthusiastically acclaimed by us as true equally with what we learn from the masters of the higher experience, the philosophers who break unto us the bread of life.

Now what has experimental science to say about the conscience? It does _not_ say that it is the voice of God--a fact by no means calculated to disturb those who remember that physical investigation is not concerned with such speculations. Half the mischief and misunderstandings which occur over these border questions, which are, so to speak, under two jurisdictions, arise from our forgetting in what capacity and by what principles certain well-known scientific men have made pronouncements on matters such as conscience, morality and religion. There are two sides to them, the physical and the hyper-physical or metaphysical. And here it may not be amiss to offer a suggestion that one should mistrust that parrot cry so often heard from men who speak most confidently about that which they know least, that metaphysic is synonymous with unreality, or in plainer words, moonshine. A very little reflection will be sufficient to satisfy us that without the aid of conceptions higher than those of sense-experience--and that is all the word metaphysic means--it would be absolutely impossible to formulate a single scientific generalisation. What is the very concept of law, or system, but a metaphysical idea? To cease to be metaphysical would be to cease to be rational, to have no higher or wider conceptions than those of a dog. Hence, like M. Jourdain, who had been talking prose all his life without knowing it, some of our most daring anti-metaphysicians have been philosophising by the very method they had in their ignorance so contemptuously denounced.

Therefore, when we hear from Mr. Spencer that conscience, so far from being the voice of God, is but "the capitalised instinct of the tribe," an empirical fact established by heredity, just like fan-tails in pigeons; when Mr. Clifford popularises this teaching in St. George's Hall by announcing that conscience is the voice "of man bidding us to live for man," and Mr. Leslie Stephen tells us that the Socratic conception of conscience "is part of an obsolete form of speculation," we know precisely what judgment to pass upon their assertions. They are speaking, one and all, of the historical growth or natural evolution of that rational faculty in man which they, equally with their opponents, describe as the conscience. And keeping within those limits they are strictly accurate in what they say. Who is there that does not know that time was when the inhabitants of Europe were as destitute of moral instincts, and therefore of a conscience, as the Tonga islanders? Who does not know that man, instead of beginning at the top and tumbling headlong to the bottom, really began at the bottom and learnt everything by a very severe discipline in the hardest of all schools, that of experience? Certainly, we are ignorant of none of those things, and therefore readily assent to Mr. Spencer's teaching that conscience is not a fixed criterion of morality, but a faculty in a ceaseless state of transformation, "in a perpetual state of becoming," that its dicta are, in a certain sense, constantly changing and improving with the progress and development of the race. Certainly, as scientists and anthropologists, we should say precisely the same thing. We should recognise the developed conscience in man as obedient to the law of growth equally with his physical organisation, because we know of men now existent in whom the faculty is still in a very rudimentary state. Every advance in humanitarianism, in our treatment of men and animals, is evidence to us of the illimitable capacities of moral expansion in our nature, and therefore of the growth of conscience, or the moral sentiment.

But are we to conclude therefrom that conscience is nothing more than a product of organic evolution? It is a shallow philosophy, a surface system, indeed, which is content with such an estimate, and is only possible in a school of bald empiricism which imprisons man within the boundaries of his sense-experience, and resolves him into a string of feelings bound together, like a rope of sand, by nothing. The truth is, that Mr. Spencer, Mr. Bain, Mr. Mill and the whole _corps_ of experimental philosophers are confusing the reality with its outward manifestation or history. Indeed, by their principles they are constrained to do so. Once affirm that nothing beyond the reach of your sensory organs is trustworthy, and conscience must be, like the nervous system, the development of a shock or a thrill. But it has never apparently dawned upon these thinkers that the very distinguishing note of conscience, its compulsory power, its assumption of authority to command the obedience of the will and its capacity to torment the soul with an overmastering remorse--to make a man say, "my sin is greater than I can bear"--is left wholly unexplained and unaccounted for in the historical analysis with which they favour us. What we want to know is: Whence has conscience the strange, mysterious power to influence us even in the sanctuary of our thoughts; why does the wicked man flee when no one pursueth except that the sleepless eye of his own outraged conscience is upon him and he cannot tolerate its reproachful gaze? Nowhere do we feel the inadequacy of the sense-philosophy more piercingly than in this matter of conscience. It has cut the world in twain and treated it as a piece of mechanism and reduced man to the position of an automaton.

But the facts are too strong; Nature is too strong. Every time some splendid heroism, some complete self-surrender is made; every time some deed of moral enthusiasm thrills the pulses of the world, or some lonely man or woman succeeds in crushing some infamous desire; every time for the sake of the good, for the sake of the right alone, we resist "even unto blood," conscience is exalted and enthroned above the stars, lifted utterly out of the low and insignificant category of physical experiences in which they would vainly endeavour to imprison it.

The commanding voice is heard throughout the ages, and men will, men must, ask: Who is it--what is it that spoke? They will not be put off with the reply that _all_ they hear is an echo of the past, reverberating throughout the race as the successive generations arise. Ah! but whence has it power to command me, even in the sanctuary of my deepest solitude, in the loneliness of my silent thoughts? No ancestral traditions, no shouts of blessing or curse of multitudes can influence me there. I am alone in the abysmal depths of my personality, solitary as though in a desert world, and yet the mysterious voice is heard, the solemn sense of obligation and duty makes itself felt. It bids me respect myself, my moral dignity, though no one be nigh; it bids me chase the phantoms of evil from my mind.

In vain do you attempt to evade its jurisdiction by pointing to the acknowledged facts that men form different estimates of their duties in different countries and in different ages. Conscience is not concerned with that. Such subordinate tasks as the formation of moral codes, the ascertainment of the conformity or nonconformity of certain precise acts with morality are the work of the reason. Conscience is no _theoretical instructor_. Far more than that, it is a _practical commander_. It speaks but one voice. Obey what you know to be right, for the right's sake alone. And conscience has never wavered in the inculcation of that precept. The reason of man has been constantly advancing, discovering the content of the moral law just as it has been discovering the content of the geometrical, mathematical or musical law; but conscience, like the polar star, has been pointing steadily in one direction, the direction of duty, without error, without failure. "An erring conscience," says the ethical master, "is a chimera."

We learn, thus, from the teaching of both schools that conscience is at once the voice of man, the accumulated and concentrated moral experience of the race, but still more the voice of the eternal Reason which is revealed to our wondering eyes in the true, the good and the beautiful. If "this universe in its meanest province is in very deed the star-domed city of God"; if "the glory of the One breaks through it all in every place," what are we to say of that which is higher than the stars, more radiant than the sun, diviner than all worlds--the conscience of man nobly conformed to the great obedience of the everlasting laws? What are we to say of lives such as those of Gotama, Socrates and Christ? Nothing. Like the psalmist of Israel, I am struck dumb in the presence of a vision so majestical. _Deveni in altitudinem maris et silui_: "I came unto the great deeps and I held my peace".

[1] See his well-known essays, "The Ethics of Belief" and "The Ethics of Religion".

[2] Prof. J. Seth, in his _Study of Ethical Principles_, concludes from Mr. Huxley's Romanes lecture that "agnosticism could scarcely have been the final resting place for such a mind".

[3] I have ventured to repeat here a portion of the argument set forth in the chapter on "Ethics and Theism".

VII.

PRIESTS AND PROPHETS.

One of the most striking characteristics of the ecclesiastic, as opposed to the religious mind, is its tendency to concentrate its attention upon detail to the exclusion of fundamental principles. We are assured that the same habit distinguishes the statesman from the party man, or mere politician. At any rate, we have had abundant evidence during the past fifty years--evidence which has been emphasised during the past year--that the love of detail, of all that comes under that washing of cups and platters, of first places and salutations in the market-place, resplendent raiment and broad phylacteries, which Jesus so summarily denounced in the official religion of his own time, is still a mark of the ecclesiastic temper in the England of to-day. If a man--even though that man be a pope--should question the validity of its "orders," volleys of sacerdotal refutation are fired from the press, the whole atmosphere is electric with the controversial charges such profanity provokes. But let a man proclaim that there is no such institution as "orders" at all, that true religion, that Christianity, as conceived by its founder, is destitute of ritual, priest and sacrifice, and everything is still as a Quakers' meeting. How is it that men will seriously devote their energies to repelling such side attacks as those directed against them by rival churches, while they totally neglect to satisfy an enlightened age as to the validity of the fundamental assumption on which their entire system reposes? The pope and the Eastern Churches may be serious rivals in the camp ecclesiastic, but what are our native pontiffs and priests to reply to men like Hatch, Jowett and Stanley, to say nothing of Martineau, who roundly proclaim that "orders," as understood by them, are nothing more nor less than a superstition? For instance, what would the patrons of the "mass in masquerade" answer to Stanley's direct and emphatic pronouncement: "In the beginning of Christianity there was no such institution as the clergy; it grew naturally out of the increasing needs of the community . . . the intellectual element in religion requires some one to express it, and this, in some form or other, will be the clergy"?[1] Surely if there were no "orders" in the beginning, then a priesthood was no creation of Jesus, his apostles were no priests, they created, therefore, no priests, and a priestly caste grew up as an intrusion in Christendom just as it arose in the religion of the holy Buddha in India, and attempted, though unsuccessfully, to invade the severely simple religion of Mohammed.

The view which ethical religion takes of sacerdotalism is very well known, but it is essential to do more than merely repudiate the notion of priesthood as an integral portion of religion; our duty is also to possess ourselves of the facts of history and criticism so as to satisfy ourselves and others who may need such instruction, that sacerdotalism is not only not ethical, but is anti-Christian, and that the greatest anomaly the world presents to-day is that of the clergymen of the Eastern and Western Churches arrogating to themselves the possession of powers which the founder of their religion and his earliest followers not only never exercised, but of which they had not even a remote conception.

A singular interest has been added to this inquiry by the recently-revived controversy between two of the many Churches into which Christendom is divided on the highly debatable matter of Anglican orders. The said controversy had been in a state of suspended animation from the time of the Stuarts up to the Tractarian movement, when it was partially revived, and a fair crop of literature sprang up around it. It has been reserved, however, for our own days to witness its complete vivification under the auspices of the High Church societies and certain _sagrestani_ among "the nobility and gentry" of our day. To the credit of the female sex, we hear of no ladies being _prominently_ identified with the movement. Even Oxford, once "the home of lost causes and impossible ideals," concerns itself with these _minutiae_ no more. Like the later pantheon of imperial Rome, it offers its impartial hospitality to representatives of every form of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The shadowy warfare is now waged, apparently, in the London press and magazines, in the bulls of popes and the responsions of archbishops. Of course, the renewed inquiry set on foot by the industry and temerity of Lords Halifax and Nelson--_tanti nominis umbra_ surely, in this latter case, to engage itself in such a battle--could have but one ending, namely, the reiterated and emphasised condemnation of our national ecclesiastics as nothing better than mere laymen, and the renewed degradation of the officiating curate to the level of his neighbouring Nonconformist minister who celebrates "the Supper" and preaches in his coat.

The papal representatives in this country have published a rejoinder to the official reply of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, which, if I may shelter myself behind the authority of the _Times_[2] reviewer, does not err on the side of dignity, moderation and scholarship. It is said to be jaunty, perky, off-hand, suggestive of "the smart evening journalist"--this last is very serious--and, worse than all, it is an appeal, not to theologians or scholars, nor even to thoughtful and instructed men, but "to the gallery".

Who the gallery in this particularly Divine comedy may be I really do not know. I strongly suspect that if the piece were put upon the boards--and everything is now dramatised, from the trials of Satan to the Dreyfus case--the gallery would be the emptiest department of the theatre. And this opinion I am pleased to see confirmed by the closing remarks of the review above noticed, which warns the Christian bishops and pastors of the present day that the comparative merits of one set of "orders" as opposed to those of another set have "little interest and not much meaning for nine Englishmen out of ten".

But what, I think, the average man would be interested to know is whether there be such things as "holy orders" at all. Very many of them are, in this matter, I believe, in the position of those interesting Asiatics who "knew not whether there be such a thing as a Holy Ghost," and I think it will be abundantly easy to show that the ignorance of the ordinary man as to the precise nature of "orders" was shared in also by our Asiatic friends whose existence is noticed in an early chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. We shall therefore proceed to show the groundlessness of the entire controversy from evidence which satisfactorily establishes that the authentic form of Christianity, as fixed by its founder and his followers for two centuries, admits of no such thing as a priesthood in the sense contemplated by the disputants whose wordy warfare has now, we understand, been closed for ever.

To begin, then, whence arose the idea of a priest? What is the meaning of the word? Etymologically, we may take it to be identical with the Saxon word _preost_, which again is doubtless, though it is not admitted on all hands, identical with the Greek _presbys_ or elder. A priest, then, originally and literally, signified senior or elder, whether in the family or the State. How an elder came to be associated with religion was in this wise. Every philosopher and anthropologist has been constrained to admit the presence in man of an instinct of unity, impelling him not merely to society or intercourse with his fellows, but to communion with a power unseen. This instinct, as already defined in a former chapter, is religion. Now the initiatory development of this aboriginal instinct was very humble, and if we wish to know what our direct ancestors once were, we need only consult the record of anthropological research among such savages as the Fijians or Tonga Islanders. The shape assumed by religion amongst such people was most probably ancestor or ghost worship. The dead father or chieftain is still seen in the dreams of his children or people, and the mysteriousness of the new shape and presence he assumes excites the awe and reverence which is at the root of the religious habit. The chief becomes the tutelary deity or protector of his tribe, or locality over which he ruled. Other chieftains are added to him in course of time, and soon we have a veritable pantheon of gods, good and evil, whom it is necessary to placate by certain offices and functions, very much as it is necessary to covet the favour of powerful men on earth. Whose duty shall it be to perform such rites? Naturally, it falls to the head of the family and the head of the State. They are the born officers of religious functions, the father for his home circle, the chieftain for his clan or tribe. Thus Livy tells us that Numa, the Roman king, was accustomed to offer sacrifice, but that the increasing cares of State caused him to relinquish the office in favour of specially appointed individuals who were called Flamens, and Mr. McDonald,[3] in his account of the Blantyre negroes, informs us that during the temporary absence of a chief, it devolved upon his wife to take his place at the sacrificial altar. Numberless instances are supplied in such works as Tylor's, Lubbock's, and Spencer's _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, which go to show this primatial or pontifical authority resident in the chief of the State, and the transference of its offices to subordinate people, who gradually and naturally became an official body or caste called priests or elders, as representatives of heads of families, or of the tribe or State.[4] At any rate, however much interested people may be inclined to dispute the lowly origin of religion and worship, the indisputable fact remains that such worship and sacrifice goes on among aboriginal peoples at this very hour, and there is not one shred of evidence, beyond a mistaken prejudice, which goes to show that our religion had any other origin than that.

We may now enter on the further inquiry whether Christianity, meaning thereby the religion personally professed and practised by Jesus of Nazara, was a sacerdotal or sacrificial system in the sense already explained. Such an inquiry necessarily resolves itself into this further one, namely, whether there is any reliable evidence that the founder of the Christian religion was himself a priest, taught a sacerdotal doctrine, or exercised any sacerdotal functions.

Though he died a comparatively young man, if we may believe the gospel narrative, which makes him to have lived either to thirty-one or thirty-three years, though Irenaeus emphatically asserts that he lived to fifty years, we may most assuredly proclaim him a priest in the sense of elder, or leader of men. One whom schools of thought, represented by men so opposed as Mill, Renan, Matthew Arnold, Spinoza, Goethe, Napoleon and Rousseau, conspired to honour must have been indeed a "king of men". But this is not what is meant by the question. By priest we mean here what the ecclesiastic means, namely, one who is set apart by the act of God, signified by some external rite or ceremony, whereby power is conferred to perform certain definite functions impossible to the ordinary man. He alone, in virtue of his consecration, can mediate between man and the Deity, can propitiate him for the sins of men, can forgive those sins, and mechanically communicate holiness by the adoption of a definite ceremony and the pronouncement of a precise formula. Nay, in virtue of his peculiar status, the priest is able to superinduce a physical sanctity in solid and liquid substances, like bread and wine, and quite independently of his own belief, or the belief of the bystanders, or even the recipients, cause those substances to be no longer what to every conceivable physical test they still continue to be, but the body and blood of a man who lived more than 1800 years ago. In a word, a ritual may be described as "a system of consecrated charms or spells, and the priest is the great magician who dispenses them".[5]