Part 4

These are some of the indirect ways in which mankind must lose beauty and truth and goodness, as it loses faith in God and immortality. But the direct losses inevitably to follow are, if possible, graver still.

The course of the moral life, after it has been commenced in earnest, probably passes through the same two great phases in almost every man who lives long enough. At first, duty is a hard effort and _all_ effort. A strong hand seems to be laid on the man, urging him up a toilsome road. Every evil tendency of his nature has to be separately fought with and trampled down, every act of self-sacrifice for others to be performed with exertion of his will. The man labors heroically under his stern sense of duty, taking consolation in it _as_ duty, but still looking rather to fulfil _his_ obligation than desirous that the end of each task should be accomplished. If he die at this stage, it is in some sense a release. He has discharged his duty as a soldier, and is glad to lay down his arms. If he be a religious man, he hopes to hear it said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant! enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”

But if a man live many years, striving in earnest, however failingly, to do his duty, there comes by degrees a change in his condition. Old temptations lie down; and, if no new ones arise to give him trouble, the friction of the inner life diminishes so sensibly that he is apt to be alarmed lest he be growing indifferent. As to his positive duties, those which he has been fulfilling merely because he felt it laid upon him to undertake them, by degrees they acquire interest for him for their own sake. He is intensely anxious for the success of his labors, and no longer measures his efforts by what may be considered his moral obligations. He _wants_ such and such aged or suffering persons to be relieved, such sinners to be reclaimed, such children trained to virtue, such truths published, such wrongs redressed, such useful laws or reforms or discoveries introduced. There is no need now for him to spur himself by reflections that it is his duty to work for these ends: the difficulty with him now lies to moderate his work with a view to the preservation of health and strength. It would be cruelty to tell him his task has been honorably fulfilled, though the object of it has failed. He would cry, “Let me be accounted a faithless servant, but let the work be accomplished by another, and I shall be content.” If he die _now_, he takes very little comfort from thinking he has discharged his duty. The work is not finished, and will miss his hand. He says, as Theodore Parker said to me on his death-bed: “I am not afraid to die, but I wish I might carry on my work. I have only half used the powers God gave me.”

Now, in all this history of the moral life, it appears that no ostensible difference need exist between the sentiments of an Atheist and a Theist, _provided we can carry the Atheist safely to the second stage of progress_. Once there, it is evident that no change in his opinions about God or loss of hope of heaven will practically affect his conduct. The habits of self-control whereby he has ruled his passions will not be lost, the interest he has taken in unselfish objects will not dwindle. He will go on to the end, laboring for the good of his kind, and regret his own death mainly because it will stop those labors. But how are ordinary men, of no specially elevated moral fibre, to be carried up to that turning-point where Law is superseded by love? I am far from thinking that men may not and do not often begin their self-reformation when they are (so far as their own consciousness goes) quite alienated from God or disbelieving his existence. I know, on the contrary, that it is no uncommon experience that this should be so. But, in the ordinary history of the soul, the resolute effort to obey conscience after a very little time brings with it a sense, first dim, then shining more to the perfect day, that there _is_ (as Mr. Matthew Arnold says) “a Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness”; or, in plainer revelation, that God watches and helps the soul which strives to do right. Henceforth, the mechanical moral effort is aided by the electric force of religion, burning away the dross of sin in the fire of a divine Presence, and making self-sacrifice sweet as an offering of love. But if this normal process, whereby morality leads up to religion and becomes thereby aided through all future effort, is to be rigidly prohibited by reason, if we are to starve out the religious sentiment as a passion not to be indulged by a rational being, then, I ask, how many are the men and women who, after their first good resolutions, will persist in the course of arduous moral effort long enough to reach that stage when duty becomes comparatively easy? Where are the aids to come from to keep them from self-indulgence? We have seen that the moral law itself is to be represented to them as merely an hereditary set of the brain; that they are not to dream there is any Holy Eye looking at them, any strong Hand ready to aid their feeble steps, any Infinite Love drawing them to itself, any Life beyond the grave where the imperfect virtue of earth shall grow and blossom in eternal beauty. All these ideas are to be resolutely dismissed. The habit of prayer (irreparable, immeasurable loss) is to be discarded. Nothing is to be left save only the one motive of the Enthusiasm of Humanity, which is to replace God and conscience and heaven. Let me speak out concerning this much-boasted modern sentiment.

I have heard a good man, one of the best men I know, preaching on this subject, and saying: “Do you ask why should you love your neighbor? _Because you cannot help it!_” Now, as I listened to that genuine philanthropist’s utterance, my heart smote me, and I said to myself: “But I _could_ help it, and only too easily! It comes to him spontaneously, I have no doubt, to love his neighbors; but I have been trying to do it for many years, and have very imperfectly succeeded. Instead of _beginning_ with love, and going on to duty toward them as the result of love, I have had to begin with duty, and, only with many a self-reproach for hardness of spirit, learned at last to feel love--for some of them!”

I do not think my experience is exceptional. I think the people who can and do love spontaneously that terribly large section of our race who are commonplace, narrow-minded, and small of heart, are the exceptions, and that, if we are to have no benevolence except from born philanthropists like the good man I have named, we shall see very little in future of the Enthusiasm of Humanity.

No! It takes, for most of us, all the help to loving our brother which comes from believing that we have a common Father and a common home,--all the help which comes to the heart in answer to the prayer that God would melt its stoniness, and make it blossom into tenderness and sympathy,--to enable us to attain the love which is not the _spring_ of social duty, but its _climax_,--the “fulfilling of the law.”

I honestly think that the process of making Atheists, _trained as such_, into philanthropists, will be but rarely achieved. And I venture to propound the question to those who point to admirable living examples of Atheistic or Comtist philanthropy,--How many of these have passed through the earlier stage of morality _as believers in God_, and with all the aid which prayer and faith and hope could give them? That they _remain_ actively benevolent, having advanced so far, is (as I have shown above) readily to be anticipated. But will their children stand where they stand now? We are yet obeying the great impetus of religion, and running along the rails laid down by our forefathers. Shall we continue in the same course when that impetus has stopped, and we have left the rails altogether? I fear me not.

In brief, I think the outlook of Atheism, as a _moral educator_, as black as need be. Viewed with the utmost candor, and admitting all the excellence of many of its disciples, I think Atheism must deduct from morality the priceless training to reverence afforded by religion; the illuminating consciousness of an unseen Searcher of hearts; the invigorating confidence in an Almighty Helper; the vivifying influence of divine love; and, finally, the immeasurable, inestimable benefits derivable from that practice of prayer which is God’s own education of the soul.

But, whatever may be its results as a system of moral training, Atheism, in its ultimate aspect, must be, to every religious man and woman who is driven to adopt it in later life, the setting of the sun which has warmed and brightened existence. We may _live_ in the twilight; but that which gave to prosperity its joy, to grief its comfort, to duty its delight, to love its sweetness, to solitude its charm, to all life its meaning and purpose, and to death its perfect consolation and support, is lost forever. There are no words to tell what that loss must be,--worst of all to those who are least conscious of it, and who have therefore lost with their faith in God those spiritual faculties in the exercise of which man has his higher being, and of which the pains are better worth than all the pleasures of earth.

Atheism involves a far _worse_ loss to humanity than the exclusion of the belief in a Life after Death; but we can form no fair estimate of the deduction which our complacent Agnostics are prepared to make from the sum of human virtue and happiness, if we do not thoroughly realize what it is they are talking of when they tell us so cheerfully to abandon the hope of Immortality, as well as the belief in God, and that they are quite satisfied to do both.

As far as each individual is personally concerned, such Hope is of course a very variable sentiment. There are those who say (as Miss Martineau mentions Mr. W. E. Forster saying to her), “I would rather be damned than annihilated.” And there are others who say, as she does herself, “I have had a very noble share of life, and I do not ask any more.” With the latter feeling _per se_, no one has a right to quarrel. To many, no doubt, especially persons of feeble bodily health or overstrained conscientiousness, the notion of final repose is more grateful than that of an immortality of activity. They feel in our day, as it would seem almost everybody did in more trying times, that it was the “rest which remaineth for the people of God,” beyond the storms of the world,--the “everlasting beds of rest” on which the weary may lie,--rather than our more modern notion of a Heaven of Progress, to which they aspire. There are Buddhists of the West as of the East, to whom, by some natural or acquired habit of mind, existence itself seems a burden; and they extend the _taedium vitae_ which they feel here by anticipation to any future state to which they could be transferred. With such persons as these, as I have just said, we have no claim to contend, even though we may think, with Tennyson, that, if they knew themselves better, they would recognize that, even in uttermost lassitude,

“’Tis _life_ of which our veins are scant; O Life, not Death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, _that_ we want.”

The dreams of men as to what they desire beyond the grave are infinitely varied, from Nirvana to Valhalla; and nothing is to be said, so far as he himself is concerned, respecting a man who wishes it to be written on his tombstone that he

“From Nature’s temperate feast rose satisfied, Thanked Heaven that he had lived and that he died,”

except this,--that his choice of eternal sleep betrays the fact _that there is no one in this world or the next whom he loves well enough to wish to be awakened to meet him again_. Of course, a man may have abundance of kindly and dutiful sentiments for his relatives and friends, and yet (thinking they will do well enough without him) be satisfied to quit them for ever. But I cannot believe that any one who has ever lost the object of the higher and more absorbing human affection, or who leaves behind him in dying one united to him by such transcendent love, can fail passionately to desire immortality. He may _resign_ himself through philosophy or religion (if his religion take the strange and rare form of belief in God and disbelief in a life to come) to see his beloved one no more. But not to _desire_ to meet, at any cost of unwelcome ages of life, the being we profess to love supremely, seems to be a contradiction in terms. Were there to loom before us worlds to climb, and centuries of labor, we would surely thankfully go through them all to reach the hour when we shall say,

“Soul of my soul, I shall meet thee again! And with God be the rest.”

But because a loveless man may, without blame, be content to let death drop a final curtain on his consciousness, it is quite another matter for him to be equally placidly resigned to the extinction of the hopes of others, who have had no such feast of life as he, or who yearn for the renewal of affection hereafter. As I have elsewhere attempted to show, in a little parable, such resignation _on behalf of other people_ is very much like that of Dives,[13] who, having fared sumptuously, should be contented to let Lazarus starve.

Nor is it only the _comfort_ of expecting to see our beloved ones again which we shall lose with the hope of a future life. I am persuaded that a great deal of the higher part of love itself will fade out of human existence altogether, if that hope be generally abandoned. Every one knows how friendship and marriage are hallowed by the thought of their perpetuity even in this world, and how a union is debased if it be, consciously to those who make it, temporary and transitory. Hitherto, we have loved one another _as immortal beings_, as creatures whose affections belonged to the exalted order of eternal things. When that ennobling and sanctifying element evaporates, when Love, like everything else, is reduced to a question of days and months and years, will it not undergo somewhat of the degradation which now belongs to the brief contracts of passion? Even those who might still be able to feel all the holiness of love would, when they learned it was destined to end in the agony of eternal separation, check themselves from indulging a sentiment leading up inevitably to such a termination, just as a man would turn from a path ending in a precipice.

Thus, I believe, the affections must irretrievably suffer from the loss of the hope of immortality. So must, in a measure, the intellect and the imagination, driven from the wider expanse back on that poor fleshly life which is to be the end-all of man, and which must be destined to assume an importance it has never possessed since our race emerged from its brute and barbarian origin. Nor would our moral life fail to suffer also very grievously, though in another way from that which has been alleged. I think we can scarcely now estimate the _minifying_ consequences of closing all outlook beyond this world, and shutting up morality within the narrow sphere of mortal life. As I have said in my _Hopes of the Human Race_, it is not possible we should continue to attach to virtue and vice the same profound significance, when we believe their scope to reach no further than our brief span, and justice to be a dream of our puny race never to be realized throughout the eternal ages. In theory, right and wrong must come to be regarded as of comparatively trivial importance; and, practically, the virtue destined shortly to be extinguished forever must seem to the tempted soul scarcely deserving of an effort. Life, after we have passed its meridian, must become in our eyes more and more like an autumn garden, wherein it would be vain to plant seeds of good which can never bloom before the frosts of death, and useless to eradicate weeds which must be killed erelong without our labor. Needless to add that of that dismal spot it may soon be said,--

“Between the time of the wind and the snow, All loathsome things began to grow”;

and, when the winter comes at last, none will regret the white shroud it throws over corruption and decay.

But it is when we come to think of humanity _as a whole_ that the prospect of final extinction appears so unutterably deplorable, so lame and impotent a conclusion for all the struggles, the martyrdoms, and the prayers of a hundred generations who have gone to the grave in hope and faith, _and perished there_. We English men and women have been wont to think proudly of the vast geographical extension of our country’s dominion, the grandeur of the Empire on which the sun never sets; and the remark has often been made that there is not a petty corporation or board in the kingdom whose proceedings are not, in a degree, dignified by the sense of England’s greatness. The politicians who have expressed a readiness to give up our Colonies have been taunted, and justly, with lack of the nobler patriotism which regards not only financial and administrative details, but the larger interests and glory of what we have delighted to call our Imperial Race. But what would be the loss to the _prestige_ of England of the severance of Australia and Canada and India, compared to the loss to mankind of that glorious empery of Immortality in which it has prided itself since the beginning of history? Everything we have achieved and thought--our literature, art, laws, kingdoms, churches--has all been wrought and built up in this faith, which has given value to the soul of the humblest child, and added grandeur to the most splendid deeds of the hero and the martyr. With that hope disappears not only the consolation of all bereaved hearts, but the very crown upon the head of humanity.

* * * * *

It is no argument for the truth of any opinion that the disclosure of its falsehood may have disastrous consequences. Nothing that has been advanced in this paper proves, or has been offered as proof, that there is a God or a life to come. The foundations for those beliefs belong to a different order of considerations. But I think thus much may be presumed to have resulted from our inquiry; namely, that their value to the virtue and the happiness of mankind is so incalculably vast that the work of demolishing them ought to be carried on, by men professing to love their kind, in a very different spirit from that which is generally exhibited by Agnostics. Even if their position be true, and if they be morally bound to make known to the world that such is the case, and to put an end to the baseless dream which has deluded our race for so many thousand years,--even granting this, I think it remains clear that their task is one to be undertaken only under the sternest sense of duty, and with immeasurable mournfulness and regret. I think that, instead of rejoicing over the discovery of “a spring in the desert,” it behooves them to weep tears, bitter as ever fell from human eyes, over the grave wherein they bury the Divine Love and the Immortal Hope of our miserable race.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Moral Philosophy_, B. I., chap. vii.

[2] _Deontology_, p. 191.

[3] Miss Martineau says: “I saw with the pain of disgust how much lower a thing it is to lead even the loftiest life from a regard to the will or mind of any other being than from a natural working out of our own powers” (_Autobiography_, Vol. II.). I must humbly confess I have not come yet to see anything of the kind. Provided that the Being to whose will we have regard is Supreme Goodness itself, it seems to me infinitely _higher_ to strive to assimilate our will to His than to “work out our own powers.”

[4] _Alone to the Alone_, p. 110, third edition.

[5] _E.g._, the following passage, which deserves to be reprinted a hundred times, _Nineteenth Century_, July, 1877, p. 832: “We entirely agree with the theologians that our age is beset with a grievous danger of materialism. There is a school of teachers abroad, and they have found an echo here, who dream that victorious vivisection will ultimately win them anatomical solutions of man’s moral and spiritual mysteries. Such unholy nightmares, it is true, are not likely to beguile many minds in a country like this, where social and moral problems are still in their natural ascendant. But there is a subtler kind of materialism, of which the dangers are real. It does not, indeed, put forth the bestial sophism that the apex of philosophy is to be won by improved microscopes and new batteries. But then it has nothing to say about the spiritual life of men. It fills the air with pæans to science, but it always means physical, not moral science. It shirks the question of questions,--To what human end is this knowledge? How shall man thereby order his life as a whole? Where is he to find the object of the yearnings of his spirit?”

I am not concerned to defend the orthodox ideal of heaven against Mr. Harrison’s strictures; but I cannot help entering a protest against his sneer at the “eternity of the tabor” as “so gross, so sensual a creed.” It seems to me it errs by an excessive and unreal spirituality. It was, certainly, not a “gross” or “sensual” order of mind which deemed the act of _adoration_ to be one wherein man could spend an eternity of ecstasy.

[6] Pages 838, 839.

[7] _Autobiography_, Vol. II., p. 356.

[8] _Age of Science_, p. 49.

[9] _Autobiography_, pp. 333, 438.

[10] Harriet Martineau’s last letter to Mr. Atkinson, Ambleside, May 19, 1876, _Autobiography_, Vol. III., p. 453.

[11] I have heard of two very great living philosophers who thought they had pretty nearly got rid of Final Causes, but who, in talking together, found it hard to avoid assuming their existence. One of them, in fact, in detailing his own observations and discoveries concerning animals and plants, used so often terms implying that there was a _purpose_ visible in natural arrangements that his friend stopped him, and said, “Mr. ----, you are getting strangely _teleological_!”

[12] Or at least _our_ right from wrong; for, on Mr. Darwin’s showing, there may, it seems, be a different right and wrong for creatures differently constituted in other worlds, whose interests, being different, will cause different “sets” of their brains toward the lines of action useful to their tribes accordingly.

[13] The following letter appeared in the _Spectator_:--

SIR,--Indulging in the pernicious habit of reading in bed, I last night perused with profound interest Mr. Greg’s letter in your current number, your own remarks thereupon, and also Mr. Greg’s generous defence of his old friend, Harriet Martineau, in the _Nineteenth Century_. As my eyes closed on the last paragraph of this article, I seemed to behold a vision, which I shall take leave to describe to you.

Dives had just eaten a particularly plentiful dinner, and was standing at the door of a pretty cottage in Ambleside. Lazarus, looking up at him, said pitifully, “I perish with hunger.” Thereupon, Dives observed, with great serenity: “Lazarus, I have had an excellent dinner. There is not a crumb left. But I am quite content, and you ought to be the same.”

Poor Lazarus, however, instead of seeming satisfied, wailed yet more sadly: “But I hunger, Dives! I hunger for the bread of life! I hunger for human love, of which I had only begun to taste, when it was snatched away. I hunger for justice, of which such scant measure has been dealt me, and to millions like me. I hunger for truth, I hunger for beauty, I hunger for righteousness, I hunger for a love holy, divine, and perfect, which alone can satisfy my soul. I hunger, Dives! I hunger, and you tell me there is not a crumb left of the rich feast of existence, and bid me be content. It is a cruel mockery.”