Part 3

It is needless to repeat that the delusive exhortations of some amiable but short--sighted philosophers of the last century to “labor for the good of Humanity in future generations” (a motive which they supposed would prove a substitute for the old historic religions) have been once and for all answered by the grand discovery of astronomers that our planet cannot long remain the habitation of man (even if it escape any sidereal explosion), since the solar heat is undergoing such rapid exhaustion. When the day comes, as come it must, when the fruits of the earth perish one by one, when the dead and silent woods petrify, and all the races of animals become extinct, when the icy seas flow no longer, and the pallid sun shines dimly over the frozen world, locked, like the moon, in eternal frost and lifelessness,--what in that day, predicted so surely by science, will avail all the works and hopes and martyrdoms of man? All the stores of knowledge which we shall have accumulated will be forever lost. Our discoveries, whereby we have become the lords of creation and wielded the great forces of Nature, will be useless and forgotten. The virtues which have been perfected, the genius which has glorified, the love which has blessed the human race, will all perish along with it. Our libraries of books, our galleries of pictures, our fleets, our railroads, our vast and busy cities, will be desolate and useless forevermore. No intelligent eye will ever behold them, and no eye in the universe will know or remember that there ever existed such a being as man. _This_ is what SCIENCE teaches us unerringly to expect, and in view of it who shall talk to us of “laboring for the sake of Humanity”? The enthusiasm which could work disinterestedly for a Progress destined inevitably to end in an eternal Glacial Period must be recognized as a dream, wherein no man in a scientific age can long indulge.[8]

The second counsel of perfection of the Agnostic teachers is, as above said, “to welcome the conclusions of Atheism, and especially the doctrine of annihilation of consciousness at death, not merely as truth, but as the latest gospel of good tidings.”

This lesson, though repeated more or less by nearly all Agnostic and Comtist writers, has been perhaps most prominently brought to the front in the Life of Harriet Martineau. I shall take her observations and example as the text for the remarks I wish to offer upon it, as I have done the papers of Mr. Frederick Harrison for those just made on the doctrine of Posthumous Activities. These are some of her utterances which touch on the matter:--

I soon found myself quite outside of my old world of thought and speculation, under a new heaven and a new earth, disembarrassed of a load of selfish cares and troubles.... Hence it followed that the conceptions of a God with any human attributes whatever, of a principle or practice of design, of an administration of the affairs of the world by the principles of human morals, must be mere visions, necessary and useful in their day, but not philosophically or permanently true.... The reality that philosophy founded upon science is the one thing needful, the source and the vital principle of all morality and all peace to individuals and good-will among men, had become the crown of my experience and the joy of my life.... My comrade (Mr. Atkinson) and I were both pioneers of truth. We both care for our kind, and we could not see them suffering as we had suffered without imparting to them our consolation and our joy. Having found, as my friend said, a spring in the desert, should we see the multitude wandering in desolation, and not show them our refreshment?... _Then_ (in younger days) I believed in a Protector, who ordered my work and would sustain me under it; and, however I may now despise that sort of support, I had it then, and have none of that sort now. I have all that I want, ... and I would not exchange my present views, imperfect and doubtful as they are,--I had better say I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition,--if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of Orthodoxy. Nor would I for my exemption give up the blessing of the power of appeal to thoughtful minds.... When I experienced the still new joy of feeling myself to be a portion of the universe, resting on the security of its everlasting laws, certain that its Cause was wholly out of the sphere of human attributes, and that the special destiny of my race is infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of “divine moral government,” how could it matter to me that the adherents of a decaying mythology were still clinging to their Man-God?... Under this close experience (of illness), I find death in prospect the simplest thing in the world,--a thing not to be feared or regretted or to get excited about in any way. I attribute this very much to the nature of my views of death.... Now, the release is an inexpressible comfort. I see that the dying naturally and regularly, unless disturbed, desire and sink into death as into sleep.... I feel no solicitude about a parting which will bring no pain.... Under the eternal laws of the universe I came into being, and under them I have lived a life so full that its fulness is equivalent to length: thus there is much in my life that I am glad to have enjoyed, and much that generates a mood of contentment at its close. Besides that, I never dream of wishing that anything were otherwise than as it is; and I am frankly satisfied to have done with life. I have had a noble share of it, and I desire no more. I neither wish to live longer here nor to find life again elsewhere. It seems to me simply absurd to expect it.[9]

It is no part of the purpose of this article to discuss the _truth_ of the doctrine that there is no God, and that death terminates human consciousness. Nor yet do I question whether a high sense of loyalty to what is understood to be truth may not make it appear to any one holding such doctrines that he is under the obligation to publish them frankly to the world. Many a man who is an Atheist as regards God holds (what many believers in Him lack) a noble faith in Truth _as_ Truth, a firm conviction that nothing can be better than Truth, and that, as Carlyle said, “To nothing but error can any truth be dangerous.” It is not, then, the holding of such views as those above quoted, nor yet their frank publication and defence, wherewith we are now concerned; but with the _tone of exultation_ with which they are announced, the disregard and contempt which are manifested for the dearest hopes, the purest aspirations, of the great mass of mankind.

Magnanimity has two phases. We may be magnanimous on our own account,--brave, calm, and self-reliant in the face of things which appall feebler souls. Of this sort of personal magnanimity, this remarkable woman has given a very fine example. Here are the words she wrote twenty years after the foregoing pages, in her last letter to her friend:

I cannot think of any future as at all probable except the annihilation from which some people recoil with so much horror.... For my part, I have no objection to such an extinction. I well remember the passion wherewith W. E. Forster said to me, “I had rather be damned than annihilated.”... I have no wish for any further experience, nor have I any fear of it.[10]...

These words have in them a calmness, simplicity, and courage which demand our honor, written as they were by an aged woman (as she herself describes them a few lines further) “under the clear knowledge of death being so near at hand.” The old vulgar theory, so frequently harped upon in the last generation, that the right place to judge a man’s religious views is his death-bed, and that, while orthodox believers alone can die bravely, sceptics must needs expire in anguish and alarm, with “a certain fearful looking-for of judgment,” has been thoroughly exploded by the now numberless instances of perfect courage exhibited by dying men and women who had long before abandoned the hopes of a happy futurity which revealed or natural religion has to offer. Harriet Martineau’s serene self-resignation into eternal nothingness ought, if any further evidence were wanting, to suffice to set the matter finally at rest; and it may be cited very properly by disbelievers in immortality, as exhibiting what they deem to be the fitting and dignified tone of a philosophical mind drawing near to the horizon beneath which it will presently disappear forever. No one can help respecting courage, under whatever form or circumstances it is manifested; and, if a man think that he is on the verge of annihilation, it is truly dignified and praiseworthy to approach it with unflinching eye and unblenched cheek. This is _so far as the individual is concerned_. But is there not another and larger side of the question, which the very noblest man _ought_ to feel as awful and heart-rending,--nay, must feel to be so, in proportion to his nobleness and his power to extend his view beyond his own petty personality?

True magnanimity, it seems to me, must look far outside of a man’s own lot, of his past share of life’s feast, and his readiness now to rise from it satisfied, and must take a wide survey of the lives (so far as they can be known or guessed) of all other men,--of the poverty-stricken, the savage, the ignorant, the diseased, the enslaved, the sin-degraded,--and attain the conclusion that for _these_ also, as well as for himself, life on earth has been sufficient good, and none other need be asked or desired before he can complacently speak of the _joy_ of abandoning faith in God and immortality. “I have had a noble share of life, and I desire no more,” is an expression of personal sentiment which may or may not be right and fitting on the assumed hypothesis. But to join to such expression of individual contentment no word of regret for the closing in of all hope to the suffering millions of our race who have _not_ had “noble” shares of life, and who do, with yearning hunger, desire more than has ever fallen to their lot,--this is, as it seems to me, the reverse of magnanimity. This is littleness and selfishness almost as bad as that of the bigots whom these Atheists abhor, who rejoice to expect heaven for themselves, while leaving thousands of their brethren to perdition. It might be pardonable in one brought up to believe in hell, and who hurriedly leaped to the doctrine of annihilation from that intolerable yoke, and cried, “Let us all perish together rather than that hideous doom overtake a single creature!” Such a choice would be generous and worthy. But when a woman who probably never, at any period of her life, believed in the eternal perdition of a soul, proclaims herself enraptured at the joy of finding out that there is neither a God to protect the weak, nor, finally, any holiness or happiness beyond the grave,--then, I repeat, this is _not_ magnanimity, but gigantic selfishness.

Let us think a little what it would signify to mankind to give up God and heaven,--that is, the _belief_ in God and heaven; for--God be praised!--it rests with no philosophic school to put out the sun or prevent the morning from breaking, but only to _blind our eyes to them_.

Dr. James Martineau once made in a sermon the startling remark that, “if it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of Berlin or Paris.” The observation was doubtless true; for, of _direct_ thought of God, the streets of great cities are probably the emptiest of any places wherein mortals may be found. But there is an enormous share of human ideas and feelings not directly or consciously turned toward God, yet nevertheless colored by the belief that such a Being exists. Perhaps it would be more proper to say that in Christendom every idea and every feeling have imperceptibly been built up on the theory that there is a God. We see everything _with Him for a background_. Inanimate nature and the lower animals, human history and society, poetry, literature, science, and art,--every one of them has its religious aspect, which can only be excluded by a mental _tour de force_. Take inanimate nature, for example,--the region where it seems easiest to sever the links of habitual thought, and which the doctrine of Evolution (according to some of its teachers) has already withdrawn from the domain of a Creative Power. We all love this nature; and our hearts are moved to their depths by sympathy with it when we gaze round of a summer morning upon the woods and hills and waters, or, later in the year, upon the “happy autumn fields” of ripened corn, or, on a winter’s night, up into the solemn host of stars. But is it merely the glittering “patines of bright gold,” or fields of yellow wheat, or the block of wood and rock which form the forest or the mountain, which awaken in us such mysterious emotion? Are we not dimly worshipping the soul of nature through earth and sky,--the spirit wherewith our spirits are in ineffable harmony, and of which all the loveliness we behold is but the shadow?

Let some Agnostic disenchanter come to us at such an hour and tell us that, though it takes a man of genius to depict worthily on canvas a corner of this wide field of loveliness, yet that the whole great original had no Painter, no Designer; that the mountains had no Architect, the well-balanced stars no supreme Geometer, but that it all came about as we behold it through the action of forces, unguided by any mind, undirected by any Will,--and what revulsion shall we not experience? Shall we not feel like a man enamoured of a beautiful woman whom he has believed to be good and wise and tender, but, when he comes at last to look close into her face, he finds her to be a soulless idiot, from whose stony and meaningless gaze he turns shuddering away?

Science, again, is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God.[11] In every department of human thought, in short, something--and that something the most beautiful in it--must be lost, some sacred spell must be broken, if we are to think of it as divested from the deeper sense which religion has (all unconsciously to ourselves) given to it,--the thread of purpose running through; the understood promise of justice; the sympathy of an unseen, all-beholding Spectator.

In the same way, all human relationships will be stripped of the majestic mantle under which they have been sheltered. The idea of the common Fatherhood of God, which Paganism in its best days had begun to teach, and which Christ’s lessons have made the familiar thought of every European child, has put a meaning into the phrase of human brotherhood, which it is much to be doubted if the warmest “Enthusiasts of Humanity” would, without such preliminary training, have been able to give to it. The idea (poorly as it has been hitherto recognized) that the most degraded of mankind, those from whom we naturally turn in disgust, have yet the same Creator and the same Judge as ourselves, has, beyond question, an indirect influence of no small force over all our sentiments concerning them. The same reflection has even at last begun to exercise a perceptible influence over our conduct to the brutes. Christians and Theists of every shade may be found impressed with the sense that religion demands the humane treatment of all sentient creatures; and this, whether they take the view of Cardinal Manning, that, “if I owe no moral duties to the lower animals, I owe all the moral duties that are conceivable to the Creator of those animals,--humanity, mercy, and care for them,” or take the simple Theist stand-point, that, as we love Him, so we naturally look with sympathy and tenderness on everything He has made. Of course, this motive of humanity to brutes disappears with the belief in God; and, accordingly, we find, with quite logical fitness, that, while the opposition to brute torture is maintained by men of every varied shade of religion, the majority of the chief vivisectors of Europe are professed Materialists. Vivisection is the logical outcome of Atheism as regards the brutes; and M. Paul Bert and Carl Vogt are only the most candid examples of men who have carried it out.

But it is in the region of the personal virtues--purity, truth, temperance, contentment--that the loss of the belief in God will be most disastrous. I am far from maintaining that, putting religion wholly out of sight, there are not motives of a purely ethical kind left which _ought_ to make men practise the highest inward virtue. But I think it needs only a slight knowledge of human nature to perceive that the shutting up of the window of the soul, through which an awful and most holy Spectator has hitherto been believed to gaze into all its secrets, must leave a great deal in darkness which has been till now illumined with a sin-exposing light. It takes much for a man to say, like the author of _In Memoriam_,--

“The _dead_ shall look me through and through.”

The idea of any eye perceiving all that is going on in the recesses of the mind,--the double motives, the unfaithfulnesses, the vanities, the memories of old shameful errors,--this is hard enough. But the belief that such introspection is always taking place, and by the Holiest of all beings, is undoubtedly a sort of purification such as no mere solitary process of self-examination can resemble. Even a warm human friendship in youth brings with it always a burst of self-knowledge. We see ourselves quite freshly in our friend’s view of us. But a thousand times greater inevitably is the self-revelation which comes with the realized presence of God in the soul, the flood of sunshine which discloses all the motes which fill the atmosphere of our thoughts. Now, though it is only spiritually-minded men who know this experience in its full intensity, yet every man who believes in God has gleams of it at intervals through life which are never afterward quite forgotten. But, more (and this is a point which concerns the whole Theistic moral argument most importantly), the supreme experience of spiritual men is _filtered down_ through all grades of minds by books and intercourse. The lofty standard of purity which has been revealed to them is partially exhibited by their words and example, and forms a kind of high-water mark for lesser souls. It is an immense gain, even to very poor sinners, that there should be a few rich saints; and every man who has attained a lofty conception of holiness helps to make all the world around him conscious of its unholiness. He is a mirror in a dark place: the ray of light which has fallen on him dispels somewhat of the gloom around.

Thus, if the belief in God be lost to humanity, we shall lose not only the direct, the incalculable effects on individual souls of the belief in a divine Searcher of Hearts, but also the indirect and universal uplifting influence on society of the presence of men who have experienced such effects, and formed their moral standard accordingly. Is it too much to augur that the result will be a depreciation of the common ideal standard, and a consequently still further depression of the practical level of personal virtue?

What is left, when religion is gone, to give to the personal virtues of purity (of _thought_ as well as of act), of truth, temperance, and contentment, the high status they ought to hold? These virtues, in the history of the moral development of mankind, are always the last to be recognized. In the earlier ages of morality, nobody asks for more than negative merits,--_not_ to murder or rob or deal treacherously. Then comes the great step, when the rabbinical precept, “Thou shalt _not_ do to another what thou wouldest not he should do to thee,” is exchanged for the positive Christian law, _Do_ to another what thou wouldest he should do to thee. But only very slowly, above and beyond all social duties, the principle, “Be perfect, as thy Father in heaven is perfect,” has dawned on mankind as the aim of life; and how little it is yet the practical rule of conduct there is no need to tell. Let us but let slip our faith in the perfect Father in heaven, and will it not sink again by degrees into oblivion? We shall hear a great deal, doubtless (for a time, at all events), of the duty of “laboring for the cause of humanity,” and be encouraged by promises of “posthumous activity.” But where are the motives for personal and secret virtue to come from,--that inward virtue without which even warm social benevolence soon becomes tainted? It _must_, it would seem, fall more and more into the background. There is, theoretically, no more reason for placing it forward: there is no more any “end of creation” in contemplation, to which the virtue of each soul, to be wrought out by its own struggles, must contribute its quotum. _The intrinsic moral character of each soul_ will no longer be deemed the concern of any being except the man himself, but only what _each is able to achieve in the way of contributing to the welfare of other people_. While the lesson of the higher ethics has been, “It is more important to _be_ good than to _do_ good,” that of the new ethics must inevitably be, “It is very important what you _do_: it is of the smallest possible consequence what you _are_ except in so far as your neighbors may know it and be affected thereby.”

In another way, also, I think morality would be affected enormously, though still indirectly, by the downfall of religion. Many of my readers will recall a very able article on Atheism in the _National Review_ for January, 1856, by Mr. R. H. Hutton, in which it was maintained that “Atheism has no language by which it can express the infinite nature of moral distinctions.... It is not, as has been falsely said, that right and wrong take their distinction from measures of duration, but that faith in infinite personal life, and in communion with or separate from infinite good, is the only articulate utterance which our conscience can find for its sense of the absolutely boundless significance it sees in every moral choice.” Take away this _expression_ of the infinite nature of moral distinctions, and the _sense_ of it will very rapidly dwindle away.

And, after all, can it be said in the same sense, under an Atheistic as under a Theistic creed, that moral distinctions _are_ “infinitely” significant? Is there any “infinite” left for us to talk about, when we have abolished God and immortality? Some few thousands of years ago, on the Atheistic hypothesis, when man was just emerging from apehood, there was no Being anywhere who distinguished right from wrong;[12] and some few thousand years to come, when the final glacial period sets in, there will be nobody left to know anything about it. There is no Being now in whom righteousness is impersonated, nor any world to come wherein the injustices of this will be rectified. From the eternal and immutable law of the universe, the ἄγραπτα κᾀσφαλῆ θεῶν νόμιμα, which Sophocles held it to be, the moral law has sunk to a mere “Rule of Thumb,” whereby certain ephemeral creatures on our small planet find it most beneficial, on the whole, to regulate their behavior. Is it in the nature of things to pay to such a rule the sort of obedience and reverence we have paid to the divine law? And if, with the very highest sanctions which can be conceived, that law has but too often failed to secure our obedience against the temptations of selfishness and passion, does anybody expect that, when it is divested of all those sanctions, it will prevail even so far as it has done hitherto?