Part 2

Let us revert to the points of difference between the two creeds as above enumerated. Is a man necessarily _self-interested_ in doing the will of a Being whom he _loves_ and hopes by serving to approach and resemble? Of course, if he is looking for payment,--for health, wealth, happiness on earth or celestial glory,--for any adventitious reward outside of the fact of becoming better and nearer to God,--then, indeed, his service is self-interested. He is a mercenary in the army of martyrs. In strict ethics, his conduct, however exactly legal, is not virtuous; for virtue can only be absolutely without side-looks to contingent profit, present or future. I presume that, when Agnostics boast of the superior disinterestedness of the virtue they inculcate over that of religious men, they think (and cannot divest themselves of the early acquired habit of thinking) of religion as of this kind of labor-and-wages system,--hard duty below, high glory above,--with perhaps the additional complication of certain scholastic doctrines of imputed righteousness. But it is time this confusion should cease. Love of goodness _impersonated in God_ is not a less disinterested, though naturally a more fervent, sentiment than love of goodness in the abstract. The Theist, in his attempt to obey by good deeds the will of the Being he loves, acts as simply as the Atheist, who loves the good deed, thinking that no being higher in the scale of existence than himself has any appreciation of the difference between good and evil. The Theist, indeed, adds to his love of goodness _per se_ a love of goodness impersonated in God, who desires good actions to be done,[3] and possibly also a hope that, by doing good now, he may be given the power to do it again and again for ever; but it is all the same charmed circle of _doing good for goodness’ sake_, out of which he never emerges into any such motive as doing good for the sake of honor, prosperity, or heavenly bliss in a golden city. The sole thing which the Theist asks of God as the reward of obedience is the power to obey better in future, the privilege of obeying forever. The payment of his virtue is to be virtuous now and throughout eternity. Whether it be in this life or another, there is no difference; no new principle comes into play; no bribe unsought for here is hoped for there. He says to God: “It is a joy to serve Thee, but infinitely greater is the joy to serve Thee with the assurance that the term of my service will never expire. Precious is the privilege of calling Thee Father. How glad then am I that I shall be a child at Thy feet forever! Lord, I seek no heaven hereafter. I covet no abode of bliss, no outward reward above. To be with Thee is my heaven and my salvation and the only reward I seek. As I abide in Thee now, may I continue to live in Thee, O Father; and to grow in wisdom and love and purity and joy in Thee, time without end.”[4]

Surely, it is altogether absurd to speak of this religion as involving any, even the very slightest shade of interestedness or detraction from the highest conceivable type of human virtue. If it deserve such a condemnation, then must likewise stand condemned the most pure and exalted human love which friend has ever felt for friend,--for this also, by its very nature, seeks to serve for love’s sake, to arrive at perfect harmony, to dwell with the beloved in unbroken and everlasting union.

Turn we now to the other side of the subject. Theism has been, I hope, vindicated from the charge of interestedness. What shall we say to the general ethical aspect of Agnosticism, which assumes to be the nobler system? Admitting the blameless conduct and the high aspirations of some of its professors, what value shall we attach to their claim to be the heralds of a higher morality?

If I may, without offence, condense their lessons in a very obvious parallel, they amount to this “symbol”: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he cease to believe either in one God or in three; and that he be fully assured that those who have done good and those who have done evil shall alike go into everlasting nothingness.” This creed piously accepted, he will advance to perfection and outrun in two ways any excellence which has been hitherto attained.

1st. While recognizing that, so far as he himself is concerned, death means the annihilation of consciousness, he will act throughout his life with a deep and conscientious concern for the consequences of his actions to those who come after him or, as Mr. Frederick Harrison expresses it, to his own posthumous activity.

2d. By welcoming the conclusions of Atheism, and especially the doctrine of the annihilation of consciousness at death, not as a sorrowful truth, but as the latest and brightest gospel of good tidings; and proclaiming, on all suitable occasions, that they afford a better stand-point and outlook for humanity than any faith or hope which has been hitherto entertained.

The first of these doctrines was set forth, a few years ago, in two eloquent and affecting papers, by Mr. Frederick Harrison, in the _Nineteenth Century_. How much sympathy I feel with a great deal which is said in these papers,[5] how sincerely I respect Mr. Harrison’s noble conception of the aim of life, even where I most completely misdoubt the validity of the method he proposes for attaining it, there is scarcely need to say. It is precisely because such Positivists as he and Mr. Morley and the late George Eliot, and such Agnostics as many I could name, assume such really high ground in their teaching, and appeal (though, as I think, in a fallacious way) to our very noblest sympathies and aspirations, that I feel urged to raise my feeble voice and call in question their guidance. There, in truth, stand, as they point to them, the snowy summits of purity and goodness. But by what path would they guide us to ascend them? Even if their own strong souls may climb those arid crags, can they be in any possible sense a better way than that by which millions of believers in God and immortality have gone up on high?

Let us take Mr. Harrison’s doctrine of the “Posthumous Activities” of the soul, and endeavor to estimate how far it is calculated to act as an efficient motive of virtue on ordinarily constituted, well-intentioned men and women. We must bear in mind that it is formally proposed as a substitute for the old belief in the immortality of the individual,--that is (according to the Theist creed), in the immortality of the _virtue_ of the individual. While a Theist believes that, having lighted that sacred torch, he shall be permitted to bear it onward, burning more purely and brightly forever, the Comtist thinks he must lay down his at the side of his grave, though other men may ignite their own from it, and so carry on its light from age to age.

In the first place, I must remark that, like the promise on which such stress is laid in Dr. Bridge’s _General View of Positivism_, that attached husbands and wives may be solemnly interred side by side, there is nothing _new_ in these anticipations. We have always known that we might be buried in the same vault with our next friend, as we have always known that our actions would continue to bear fruit after our departure. We entertained the first hope (so far as such a pitiful matter as the future position of our deaf and blind decaying dust deserves to be considered a hope), and we were aware of the responsibility,--_plus_ the belief that we ourselves should enjoy free converse with the spirit of our friend, and afford to smile together on our poor mouldering garments laid up side by side in the tomb,--and _plus_ the belief that we might ourselves be cognizant of our posthumous activities. There is nothing in the fact that both the hope and the sense of responsibility must now stand by themselves for what they are worth, to give them (so far as I can see) any fresh leverage as motives of conduct. People who did not love each other better while they expected to be at liberty to spend eternity in conscious communion, as well as to be buried in the same grave, certainly will not love each other better when their future prospects are limited to the family vault. And people who have not regulated their conduct with a view to their _post-mortem_ influence while they anticipated to be living somewhere to know, or, at all events, to be obliged to think about it, are very little likely to regulate it the better when they are convinced that, if they leave the deluge behind them, they will neither know nor care one iota. As to the good man, he will, under the old creed and under the new alike (and neither more nor less, so far as I can perceive), entertain a solemn sense of a responsibility to do all the good and refrain from every evil in his power during his threescore years and ten,--_not_ first, or chiefly, for the sake of consequences near or remote to himself or other people in this world or another, but because goodness, truth, courage, justice, and generosity are good in themselves, lovable in his eyes and in the eyes of God, and falsehood, impurity, cruelty, and treachery are bad and despicable, hateful to him and to his Maker. Afterward, and as a reinforcement of his choice of Scipio, he will reflect that every good act entails good consequences in widening circles of loving-kindness, honor, and honesty, and every bad one the reverse; and he will hope in dying to reflect that the sum of the influence he leaves to work after him will be wholly on the side of truth, justice, and love. It is monstrous for Mr. Harrison to say that “the difference between our (Positivist) faith and that of the orthodox is this. _We_ look to the permanence of the activities which give others happiness. _They_ look to the permanence of the consciousness which can enjoy happiness.” Why should looking to the permanence of consciousness and happiness make a man care less for the activities “which give others happiness”? Does A care less for B’s welfare because he would like to be alive to see it, or even alive at the antipodes at the same time?

Moralists and divines of all ages have not overlooked the remoter consequences of our actions in rehearsing the motives in favor of virtue. But it is idle to attach to it, as applied to the bulk of mankind, more practical force than it possesses. In the first place, when such an observer of things as Shakspere could say that

“The evil which men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones,”

it is open to us all to doubt whether some of the very noblest achievements of human virtue have left any other mark than on the virtuous souls themselves, which (as we Theists think) enjoy even now in a higher existence their blessed inward consequences. The martyrs who perished unseen and unknown in the loathsome dungeons and amid the protracted tortures of the Inquisition in Spain, where the Reformation they would have established was absolutely extinguished and left no ray of light behind,--could these men cheer themselves under the awful strain of their agonies by a motive of such tenuity as the prospect of their “posthumous activities”?

But admitting, for argument’s sake, that the motive would serve always to support the heroic order of virtues, would it likewise aid the still more important ones of every-day conduct? His own illustrations ought surely to have made Mr. Harrison pause before he assumed it. He speaks of Newton as “no longer destroying his great name by feeble theology or querulous pettiness,” of Shakspere as “the boon companion and retired playwright of Stratford,” of Dante as the “querulous refugee from Florence,” and of Milton as “the blind and stern old malignant of Bunhill Fields.” Now these are his chosen exemplars of the enormous “posthumous activity” which a man may exert, and certainly nobody now living can hope that he shall ever exercise one-tenth as much. But _their_ “pettiness” and “querulousness” and “boon companionship” and “sternness” in their lifetimes did not hinder, or even essentially detract from, their stupendous “posthumous activity.” Why, then, should lesser people have any scruple in being petty, querulous, or stern, or indulging in pot-companionship, or any other faults of temper or habit, on account of their little posthumous activities, whatever they may hope that these may prove?

Obviously, Mr. Harrison has a misgiving as to the force which his argument can be expected to exert on ordinary mortals or for the daily purposes of life. Though he says that the truth he teaches “is not confined to the great,” and adds the beautiful remark that “in some infinitesimal degree the humblest life that ever turned a sod sends a wave--no, more than a wave, a life--through the evergrowing harmony of human society,” yet even while he alleges that a concern for such posthumous activity is “no doubt now in England the great motive of virtue and energy,” and asks, “Can we conceive a more potent stimulus to daily and hourly striving after a true life?”[6] he says in the next page that “it would be an endless inquiry to trace the means whereby this sense of posthumous participation in the life of our fellows _can be extended to_ _the mass_, as it certainly affects already the thoughtful and refined.” Honestly, he admits that it is “impossible it should become universal and capable of overcoming selfishness” “without an education, a new social opinion without a religion; I mean an organized religion, not a vague metaphysic.” “Make it,” he cries, with almost the enthusiasm of a discoverer, “at once the basis of philosophy, the standard of right and wrong, and the centre of a religion,” and then it may perhaps be achieved.

But, in sober truth, what “education” or “organized religion” (_i.e._, of course, Comtism) can possibly transform this remote anticipation of the results of our actions after we are dead into a practical lever for daily duty for the great bulk of mankind? It is the specialty of all vice to be selfishly indifferent to the injurious consequences of our actions, even to their immediate and visible consequences, to those nearest to us. Is it not almost ludicrous to think of exhorting the drunkard who sees his wife and children starving round him to-day, or the ill-conducted girl who is breaking her mother’s heart, or the hard task-master or landlord who is grinding the faces of the poor to fill his pocket, to refrain from their misdoings on account of the evil which they will cause fifty years hence to people unborn? Or let us try to apply the principle to that sound mass of every-day English virtue which is, after all, the very air we breathe,--the daily dutifulness, the purity, the truthfulness, the loving-kindness of our homes, the beautiful patience to be witnessed beside a thousand sick-beds. Were we to ask the simple-hearted men and meek women who exemplify these virtues whether they ever think of the excellent “posthumous activities” which they will exert on their surviving acquaintances, would they not be utterly bewildered? The clergyman (or let us have the Comtist philosopher) who will go through a workhouse ward, or round the cottages of a village, and offer such a suggestion as a topic of encouragement, would, I think, effect a very small measure of reformation. Nor do I think it is necessarily a low type of mind which does not project itself much into the future, whether in this world or the next; but which is vividly affected by the idea of a _present_ righteous law claiming immediate obedience, and a _present_ adorable God watching whether that obedience be paid, but which takes in even the idea of immortality more as adding an infinite dignity to moral things and human souls than as a direct motive to moral action. To such a person, the promise of “posthumous activities” is as remote and inoperative a principle as it is possible to propose; and he can scarcely help smiling at it, as he does at the observation of Pliny, that the “happiest of all possible anticipations is the certain expectation of an honorable and undying renown.” Posthumous activity affords a far nobler motive than posthumous fame; but they both appeal to sentiments which have little weight with the majority of minds, and no weight at all with a great number not undeserving of respect.

The truth seems to be that the leading Comtists and Agnostics of the day not only belong to an exceptional type of human nature, little touched by grosser impulses and highly sensitive to the most rarefied order of influences, but are unable to descend from such altitude, and realize what ordinary flesh-and-blood men and women are made of. As Mr. Darwin unconsciously betrayed that he had never once had occasion to repent an act of unkindness, when he theorized about repentance as _beginning_ by a spontaneous reversion to sympathy and good-will to the people we have injured (in bold contradiction to Tacitus’ too true maxim, “_Humani generis proprium est odisse quem laeseris_”), so the disciples of Comte unwittingly allow us to perceive that they really consider an exalted and far-reaching interest in the welfare of our kind as the sort of motive which is already “now in England the great motive of virtue and energy.”

Let me explain myself. I do not think there is any precept too high to be accepted by the mass of mankind: nay, I think that the higher, nobler, more self-sacrificing the lesson, the warmer response it will draw forth from the heart of humanity. But this is the _moral_ excellence of the precept, the loftiness of the purity, the nobleness of the generosity, the courageousness of the self-devotion, which are demanded. It is quite another thing to choose to present, as the proper motive of daily virtue, an idea requiring a trained _intellect_ to take it in and a vivid _imagination_ to realize it. Every argument for virtue, for sobriety, veracity, and so on, drawn from considerations of future consequences, labors under this irremediable defect: _that it appeals least to those whom it is most necessary to influence_. When we go further, and place our fulcrum of moral leverage in the period after the death of the man to whom we appeal, and candidly tell him that he will neither enjoy the sight of any good he may have effected, nor suffer from the spectacle of the results of his wrong-doing, we have reached (as it seems to me) the _ne plus ultra_ of impracticability. Woe to human virtue when its advocates are driven to attach primary importance to such an argument, and dream it can be made “the centre of a religion”!

To sum up this subject. To a man of high calibre and gifts, the consideration of “posthumous activities” may act as a spur to doing great actions, but scarcely as a motive to regulate his daily life and temper. He will, perhaps, under its influence reform the prisons of Europe, and at the same time break his wife’s heart; write a great epic poem, and treat his daughters like slaves; paint splendid pictures, and remain a selfish and sordid miser; fight heroically his country’s battles, and lead a life of persistent adultery; be at once a disinterested statesman in a corrupt age, and an habitual drunkard.

As to the mass of mankind, who are endowed neither with any superior gifts to employ, nor vivid imagination to realize the results of their actions hereafter, an appeal to them to act virtuously in consideration of their posthumous activities would draw forth some such reply as this: “Our conduct can, at most, leave after our deaths only very small results on a very few people whom we shall never know. We find it hard enough to make sacrifices for those whom we do know and love, and whose happiness or misery we actually witness. It is asking too much of us that, for remote, contingent, and evanescent benefits to our survivors, we should undergo any pain or labor, or renounce any of the pleasures which in our poor short lives (so soon to end forever in darkness) may fall within our grasp.”

Thus, in its capacity of the _Friend of Virtue_, it seems that Atheism begins by depriving virtue of some of the strongest, if not the very strongest, motives by which it has hitherto been supported, and offers in their room, as the best substitute for them and the future “centre of religion,” a consideration of Posthumous Activities, whose force is of necessity both partial as to the virtues it inculcates, and extremely limited as to the persons over whom it can exercise any influence. And _that_ force, such as it is, appears to be in no way specially connected with the Atheistic view of human destiny, but belongs to every moral system in the world.

* * * * *

Finally, as if to complete the nullity of the motive of Posthumous Activities, there comes a reflection which must take erelong a prominent place in disquisitions of this kind. Comtists talk of the “immortality,” the “eternity,” of a dead man’s influence. But, if each individual human soul is destined to be extinguished at death, then there is _nothing_ wherewith man is concerned which is immortal or eternal. Our race is destined irretrievably to perish _as a race_, if it perish piecemeal with every soul which drops into the grave. Miss Martineau’s wild talk about “the special destination of my race” being “infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of divine moral government”[7] (an assertion in itself simply absurd, since the believers in a scheme of divine government hold that whatever is noblest is _by the hypothesis_ assuredly our destination), is rendered doubly preposterous when we bear in mind what science teaches regarding the inevitable lapse of this planet within a limited epoch into a condition of uninhabitability. The following observations are made on this subject in a little _jeu d’esprit_ which I may be pardoned for quoting. It assumes to be an extract from a newspaper of the next century, and the men of that period are supposed to look back upon the doctrine of “Posthumous Activities” with very little respect:--