Chapter VII: Part 7

“Again, it is obvious that the great-minded man, if he is worthy of the greatest consideration, must be not only a good man, but one of the very best; for always the better a man is the greater is his desert, and the best man alone may claim the most. The really great-minded man, therefore, must be good; or rather, let us say that to be entitled to the praise of great-mindedness a man must be great in all virtue. Least of all, certainly, is it consistent with the character of a great-minded man to droop his crest at the face of danger and run away, or to do any act of injustice; for why should a man do anything dishonourable, {175} to whom even the greatest things in the world are small measured by the estimate that he entertains of his own worth? And, indeed, it is quite ridiculous to imagine a man of genuine great-mindedness who is not at the same time a virtuous man. For, if he is bad he is certainly not worthy of honour, honour which is the reward of virtue, and is given only to the good. Let us say therefore that great-mindedness is a sort of crown and blossom of the virtues, for it elevates all the virtues, and without them it cannot exist. For which reason it is a hard thing to be truly great-minded; for this elevation of the soul is not possible without general goodness. We see therefore that it is with demonstrations of honour and dishonour that the great-minded man is principally concerned; and it is characteristic of him, that when great honour is done him by good persons, he is pleased, but always moderately, because on every occasion he only gets what he deserves, or perhaps less; because, in fact, virtue never can receive a proper equivalent for itself in the shape of anything external: he will not, however, reject any such offering, however inferior to his merits, because he will consider that people have given the best they had to give. But the honour that he receives for small services, and from persons of no excellence, he will hold very cheap; for it is not of such respect that he considers himself worthy. Exactly similar is his relation to dishonour; for disrespect in no kind can under any circumstances have reference to him. But honour, though the principal, is not the only external thing that belongs to the great-minded man; money, and power, and prosperity, and their opposites, affect him also in their proper place and degree, in such a {176} fashion always as that he shall neither be much elevated by their presence, nor much depressed by their absence. For not even the absence of that honour, which he justly claims, will he allow to affect his peace very deeply, much less the withholding of that wealth and that influence, which are desired by the good only for the sake of the honour which they bring with them. He therefore who can look calmly on the absence of that which is most desired, will not break his heart because he finds himself destitute of those things which are valued only as they contribute to the attainment of that desire. For this reason it is that men of a high self-esteem are apt to appear proud and contemptuous. It would appear also that the accidents of birth and fortune contribute in some degree towards great-mindedness; for persons of noble birth are considered worthy of honour, and persons of great influence, and wealthy persons; and there is a superiority belonging to all such persons, which brings a certain amount of honour along with it that is grateful to a good man. And it cannot be denied that such things have a tendency to engender a certain loftiness of soul, for they are never without honour from some quarter. Nevertheless the only thing really deserving of honour is virtue, though where virtue is conjoined with these external advantages it will always command a latter share of public respect. But those who possess such external advantages without virtue have neither any reason for thinking themselves deserving of great consideration, nor are they properly called great-minded; for it is only of those who possess virtue that such things can be predicated. On the contrary, those who possess such external goods are apt to {177} become insolent and haughty. For without virtue it is by no means easy to bear prosperity well; and, not bearing it well, such persons are apt to conceit themselves better than their neighbours, and to despise them, while themselves spend their lives at random, and do what chance throws in their way. For they imitate the manner of the great-minded man, not being like him in soul; and, while they do nothing on which a lofty estimate of themselves might justly be founded, they find it easy to usurp an apparent superiority by looking down upon their fellow-men. This superiority belongs of right to the great-minded man, for his opinion of himself is founded on reality; but these, as chance may have thrown some exceptional tag of distinction in their way, despise their neighbours. Again, the great-minded man is not fond of running petty risks, nor indeed is it by rash and hasty ventures in any shape that he would catch a small breath of honour; but when a great risk presents itself then he willingly confronts danger, and spares not his life, as deeming life secondary when higher interests are concerned. Moreover, in reference to benefits, he is more given to confer than to receive them; for he who confers a benefit always stands in a position of superiority, while he on whom it is conferred feels inferior. And when a benefit is conferred on him, he will repay it in larger measure; for thus the benefactor will seem to be put under a new obligation, having received more than he gave. He seems also to have a more wakeful memory for those on whom he has conferred benefits, than for those from whom he has received them; for the person benefited is always inferior to the person conferring the benefit, {178} and the great-minded man always wishes to feel superior. And he does not hear of benefits conferred on him with the same pleasure as benefits which he has conferred on others, for which reason in Homer Thetis does not commemorate her services to Jove; and in the same way the Spartans do not speak to the Athenians of the benefits they have conferred on Athens, but of those which they have received. It is also a mark of the great-minded man that he will either not ask a favour at all, or do it with difficulty; on the other hand, he is ready to do a service to all, but with this difference, that while he bears himself loftily to those high in position and worldly fortune, he is of easy access and condescending to the common man; for not to bow before the mighty is not easy, and is possible only to those who are inspired by a high sense of personal worth, whereas with common men any man may plant himself on an equality; and indeed even a little excess of pride in the presence of the proud is never ignoble, while to be haughty to those beneath us is always the sign of a vulgar mind, and a person of low ambition, as when one makes a vaunt of strength before the weak. Again, the great-minded man will not be the first to seize on honourable distinctions when offered, but he will gladly let others precede, being slow and backward, except, indeed, where a difficult thing is to be done, and a very rare honour achieved; generally he will meddle with few things, but what he does put his hand to must be something great and nameworthy. We may further note that he will be open and above ground, whether in his hatreds or his friendships, for to conceal a man’s feelings is usually a sign of fear. And in every case he will {179} be found more concerned for truth than for opinion, and he will shrink as little from an act as from a word that the occasion may demand; for his contempt of small men and small things makes him indifferent as to results, and inspires him with a lofty confidence. For which reason also he is much given to speak the truth, except indeed when he wishes to speak ironically; and it is his delight to use a little humorous self-concealment or self-misrepresentation when he speaks in mixed company. Neither is he able easily to adapt himself to another person, unless, indeed, that person be a special friend, for in this ready adaptability there is generally implied something slavish, as we see that flatterers have always something menial in their character, and low persons more readily condescend to flatter. Nor again is the great-minded man much given to wonder; for to him there is nothing great. As little is he apt to store up a grudge; for a great-minded man will not remember trifles, especially petty offences, but will rather overlook them. Nor will he indulge in personal remarks of any kind, speaking little either about himself or others; for neither is he careful to be praised, nor pleased that others should be blamed; as little is he given to laud other people, or, on the other hand, to speak evil of others, even when they are his enemies, except perhaps occasionally, when insolence requires to be chastised. Further, about necessary evils, or vexatious trifles, he is not the man to make many bewailings and beseechings, for to behave in this manner a man must take these things much to heart, which he never can. And oftentimes he will be found preferring what is noble and brings no profit, to what is useful and gainful, {180} for his self-dependence stands out the more thereby. Finally, as to his appearance and manner, it will be noted that the great-minded man is slow in his movements, that his voice is deep, and his discourse weighty, for it is not natural that one who is not anxious about small matters should be in a hurry, or that a person should be very much excited on common occasions, to whom common matters are unimportant. Such then is the great-minded man. The two extremes between which he represents the mean, are, as we have said, the man of low self-estimate and the man of large pretensions and conceit. Now these two are manifestly not bad men, for they are not evil-doers; they only miss the ideal of what is true and noble in character. For the man who thinks meanly of himself, depriving himself of what he might justly claim as his due, though not a vicious man, suffers under a great vice of character, the defect of not knowing himself; for had he known himself, he would certainly have desired to possess the good things to which he has a natural right. At the same time such a person is not to be called foolish; he is only backward. But such a misprision of one’s self, however removed from flagrant viciousness, has unquestionably a tendency to deteriorate the character; for the imagination of their own unworthiness, by which these persons are possessed, not only cheats them of valuable external good which might naturally have fallen to their lot, but it causes them also to retire from many noble and excellent spheres of usefulness, and to shrink from the performance of most excellent actions. A conceited man, on the other hand, is both foolish and self-ignorant, and exhibits himself in a more {181} ridiculous fashion to the general eye; for deeming himself fit for some honourable office, the moment he appears in public his inefficiency is exposed, and he parades himself in showy dress, and puts himself into attitudes, and wishes that the whole world should take notice of his good fortune, and claims honour as rightfully due to him for such display. There is, however, a greater opposition between the man who thinks meanly of himself and the great-minded man, than between this man and the conceited, person; for in truth the mean abnegation of self, the cheapening of a man’s capabilities, and despair of all lofty achievement, is of more common occurrence amongst the masses, and on account of its negative character leads in the practical warfare of life to more sad results.”[181.1]

For commenting on some of the remarkable characteristics of this chapter, hovering as they do so delicately on the slippery border that separates a justifiable pride from a salutary humility, more apt occasion may present itself in our next discourse; in the meantime it will serve more the purpose of the present inquiry to ask, whether there may not be grave objections to a system of ethics based on the mere prudential calculation of a mean? and whether, granting this calculation to be wise and salutary, so far as it goes, it may not require to be strengthened by some stronger force than any which the philosophy of the Stagirite supplies? Now, in the first place, here there is one very common class {182} of objections to the doctrine of the μέσον, to which we hope the whole tone of our previous remarks has already supplied the answer. “_Is it possible_,” some one has often asked, “_to possess too much love? Of what good emotion is envy the exaggeration? Can any modification of spite be virtuous? Can any mere deficiency of the quality of truth account for the viciousness of a positive lie?_” To some of these objections Aristotle has himself supplied the answer; but the best general answer to all is their impertinence as bearing upon a treatise which does not pretend to set forth a curious definition, proof against every subtle objection, but only to supply a useful practical rule. Whosoever accepts the _Nicomachean Ethics_ in the practical spirit in which it was written, will soon find, perhaps by no very pleasant experience, that there is nothing more common among good people than to have too much even of such a rare virtue as Christian love; for there is too much always when there is too much for the occasion, or too much for the use or the abuse that is likely to be made of it; and unchastened generosity, inconsiderate philanthropy, and indiscriminate kindness are certainly not among the rarest of social faults. Equally certain is it that some of our most odious vices are only the despotic usurpations of certain instincts, natural and healthy in themselves, and when acting under the habitual check of other instincts equally natural, so as to preserve the just balance of a harmonious whole. Thus envy is merely the natural fruit of a salutary rivalry, when a generous sympathy is wanting; it is an odious state of mind arising out of an excess of rivalry on the one hand, and a deficiency of sympathy on the other. Let this style {183} of objections therefore pass. But a more serious deficiency in the Aristotelian doctrine seems to reveal itself, when it is said, This morality is merely prudential and calculating; it regulates but it does not move: it supplies the pilot at the helm, and gives him a curiously marked compass to steer by, but it leaves the ship in a stagnant ocean without wind and without tides. Now there is something in this objection, but not nearly so much as appears on the surface. Aristotle certainly is not an emotional writer; he does not stir the affections; he will never be a favourite with women, or with poets, or with evangelists, or with any person--and this is by no means the worst sort of person--whose head requires to be reached through his heart. It is not true, however, that he commits the folly of attempting to construct a steam-engine without steam. He finds the steam there, and the engine too ready-made, and his only object is to supply a regulator, because a regulator is the chief thing wanted. Whatever an unprincipled or paradoxical Sophist here and there might assert, neither Aristotle nor any notable philosopher of antiquity ever thought it necessary, to commence his moral theory with a systematic controversion of the Hobbesian doctrine that man is naturally all selfish, a creature that if left without policemen and executioners would necessarily grow up into a mere intellectual tigerhood. Aristotle assumed, and expressly asserts, that man is naturally a social animal; the social instincts which form families and friendships, clanships and nationalities, being among the most marked peculiarities of his complex nature: these instincts, he knew well, constantly exist in sufficient and more {184} than sufficient strength; they bubble out like streams from the mountain side, which require only a calculated control to make them useful; they are the luxuriant overgrowth of a rich soil, which demands, not the stimulus of a strong manure, but the check of a wise pruning-hook. That this was Aristotle’s view is quite plain; for he not only believes in nature generally, as opposed to the institutions and conventions (νόμος) so much in favour with the Sophists, but he devotes two whole books to what he calls Φιλία, a word commonly translated “friendship,” but which in the Nicomachean Ethics is used in the widest sense to designate all the social sympathies and feelings implanted in man by Nature, with the relations springing therefrom; and this part of his work, as Grant well observes, is treated with a depth and moral earnestness that makes the reader feel the supreme importance attached to it by its illustrious author.[184.1] Aristotle therefore is not to be blamed for ignoring the great motive powers of moral life; he only does not directly address them; it was not his vocation; he was no poet, no apostle; and even without poets and apostles, Nature, he might well imagine, was always strong enough for that part of the business. But even without the fervid wheels of passion there lies in the Aristotelian philosophy, at least for a certain class of noble minds, a driving power of the most approved efficiency. That driving power is simply the love of perfection. “_Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect_.” To live in the most excellent way, according {185} to the true excellence of man, is the constant ideal of an Aristotelian philosopher. And so long as the lofty consciousness of this ideal bears him up, he requires neither whip nor spur to incite him to continue in a virtuous career. He acts in the true spirit of the poet when he says--

“I would do all that best beseems a man; Who would do less is none.”

Or, as Burns has it in the well-known lines,--

“The fear o’ hell’s the hangman’s whip
To haud the wretch in order;
But whaur you feel your honour grip,
Let that aye be your border.”

This is not a bad driving power by any means in the world, as things go. True, it may not make a man a missionary, but it will keep him out of the mire, and teach him sooner to die than to do a base action. Certainly it will not confine him to the performance of virtues of mere prudential calculation.

So far well. But there is another view which, if we honestly take, we shall find it impossible to acquit the Aristotelian morals of a very serious defect. This defect is the want of the religious element. In saying this I do not mean to assert that God--or rather the gods--are not mentioned from beginning to end of his famous book; they are alluded to in several places, but merely in the form of a passing remark, as a pedestrian with a long day’s journey before him may pick up a primrose from a moist bank, or a fragrant orchis from a dry brae, and fling it away. Now, there is nothing more nobly characteristic of Christianity than this, that piety is identical {186} with morality; that faith and works--not ritual, or ceremonial, or externally imposed works at all, of course, but genuine works of moral fervour and moral firmness--are one; stand to one another, at least, as the root does to the flower, or the fruit of a wholesome plant, of which not the root but the fruit is the valuable part. That this is the only true and philosophical relation of the two great moral potencies no thinker will deny. Or, to take another simile, which will suit equally well: Every arch must have its keystone; and the keystone of every solid doctrine of ethics, as of every close compacted system of speculative philosophy, is God. That there is a great defect here in the Aristotelian ethics is plain. A man might as well write a treatise on the Affections without mention of reverence, as set forth a system of morals without mention of God. As the discipline of a well-ordered family implies the recognition of the father as the great source from which the family flows--as the prime power by which it is regulated--so a treatise on human ethics implies a chapter on human piety, or rather a pervading soul of human piety, without which all other chapters want their highest inspiration. And in this view the Aristotelian author of the “_Magna Moralia_” is wrong in blaming Plato for mingling up the doctrine of Virtue with discussions on the Absolute Good--that is, God. It is important to inquire what was the cause of this defect. That the subject was not altogether ignored by our philosopher is plain from the single sentence of allusion in Book viii. 12. 5; and, indeed, that a man of such reach of intellect should by mere accident or carelessness have omitted such an important factor in all moral calculations {187} seems in the highest degree improbable; but so far is the idea of God from giving any colour to his system of Moral Philosophy, that the very occurrence of the phrase, θεραπεύειν τὸν θεόν, in the last section of the Eudemian Ethics, has been justly adduced by Grant among the many proofs of the inauthenticity of that treatise. That Aristotle was a theist is certain, both from other places of his voluminous writings, and specially from a famous passage in the _Metaphysics_ which has lately been brought forward with due prominence by the noble-minded Bunsen in his great work, _God in History_; it seems impossible, indeed, for such a profound thinker as Aristotle to be an atheist, because, as Schleiermacher well remarks, “Philosophy cannot inquire into the totality of things, without at the same time inquiring into their unity, and as the totality of things is the world, so the unity of things is God;” or, as Spinoza has it in one of his propositions--“_Quicquid est in Deo est, et nihil sine Deo neque esse neque concipi potest_.” But it is one thing to be a theist as a matter of speculative belief, and another thing to be a man of devout temper and pious practice. And herein, if I mistake not, lies the real cause of the defect in the Ethics now under consideration. For if Aristotle had been a man of any fervour of religious sentiment, he had two courses before him with regard to the Greek religion, neither of which he has followed--he might either, like his great master Plato, or Xenophanes of Colophon among the pre-Socratic thinkers, have attacked the Homeric theology, and shown how its general tendency and some of its most distinctive features were inconsistent with a pure and elevated morality, or, like Socrates, {188} Xenophon, Pindar, Æschylus, Plutarch, and many other far-sighted and large-hearted men, he might have taken Jove as the impersonated Providence of Hellenic piety, and, allowing the immoral deities quietly to drop, shown how all the highest qualities of the moral nature of man are collected and concentrated in the supreme sovereign of gods and men. In the one case, he would have shown his zeal for true religion by his zealous iconoclasm of false gods; in the other case, he might have shown a still nobler form of piety by his kindly exhibition of the soul of good in things evil. But he did neither of these things; and the conclusion plainly is that the omission arose from a defect in his mental constitution, which curtailed the reverential faculties of their fair proportions. From all which we learn a most important lesson: that the analytic work of the mere understanding, even when practised by a Titan like Aristotle, is an inadequate method of reaching the highest form of vital reality, or, to use the words of Grant, it forces even the greatest minds at times to degenerate into a sort of smallness; and, generally, that mere intellectual culture never can of itself produce a complete and healthy manhood--never can elaborate for a human soul that rich blood which then only appears when the watery element of the understanding is thoroughly permeated by the red particles of the moral and emotional nature. So true is it, to use St. Paul’s language, that “_knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth;_” and of charity there is no perfect form except that reverential recognition of the common fatherhood of God, and the common brotherhood of man, which we call religion. Let this want of the devout element, therefore, stand {189} strongly pronounced as a defect in the ethical system of Aristotle; he is less than Socrates and Plato as a moralist, principally because he is less in this. Omitting from his calculation one element of that Nature which is stronger than all philosophies and wider than all churches, he has so far failed; and the failure of such a man in such a field should teach our modern philosophers, physical, mechanical, and utilitarian, to beware of following his example.

CHRISTIANITY.

{190}

AN ancient Greek poet, of grave thoughts and weighty words, describing the character and functions of one of the great primeval divinities of his country, says that she is

πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μορφὴ μία, One shape of many names,

an expression which might have been varied with equal truth, as

One Power of many shapes,

and indicating that the motley polymorphous harlequinade, as it appears to us, of a polytheistic Pantheism, is at bottom reducible to a few fundamental forms; and if this be true of such a shifting kaleidoscopic exhibition as popular mythology, it holds good much more of popular morals. All moral philosophies are fundamentally the same, and cannot indeed be otherwise, being only the variously emphasized expression of the one self-existent and self-organizing Reason--the βασιλικὸς Νοῦς of Plato--which makes either a physical or a moral world possible. We shall not expect therefore to find absolutely new principles in the laws which regulate human conduct any more than in the laws of those primary vitalizing forces--Light and Heat--which {191} shape and regulate all organism, immutably and infallibly, by the inherent necessity of the great Being of sleepless underived energy of whom they are the manifestation. We shall, on the contrary, believe with an assured faith, that the principles of morals, and the primary forces of the physical universe, are as immutable and self-congruent in the essential nature of things, as the laws of measure and of magnitude traced out by the mathematician; with this advantage in favour of what has been sometimes ignorantly talked of as contingent truth, that whereas the certainty of mathematical propositions depends on the fact that they are founded on self-limiting definitions of mere thoughts, with which no disturbing condition, not even the fiat of Omnipotence, can interfere, the certainty of physical and of moral laws flows from this, that they are facts, subject to no man’s definition, and necessarily existing as normal manifestations of the great primary fact, which we call GOD. The variations therefore which undoubtedly are observed in human morals--variations peculiarly notable in the infancy and in the decline both of individuals and of races,--are not contradictions, but only partial, feeble, and inadequate expressions of immutable morality. The ebb of the tide, looked at from a local and narrow point of view, is a contradiction to the flow; but both flow and ebb are parts of the grand harmonious motion of the sleepless waters of ancient Ocean. Morals vary under varying conditions of society, as plants vary under more or less favourable conditions of growth, or landscapes under more or less happy incidences of solar light; but these variations, so far from contradicting each other, could not even exist without {192} a fundamental identity; as the element of likeness in the different members of a large family could not exist without a common parentage. And where there may not be a striking unity of expression, traceable through all the varieties of popular morality, there is always at least, as Mr. Lecky has well pointed out, a unity of tendency;[192.1] even as a plant, when it first spreads out the green lobes of its radical leaves, may present a very different appearance from the distinctive leafage of its perfect growth; but the type nothing the less is one, and the necessary law of the whole congruous growth lay in the unity of the germ. There is nothing accidental in nature; so neither in morals. All things are necessary; all things are self-consistent; all things are harmonious; all things upon a whole view of the whole are complete. The distinctive character therefore of such an ethical system as Christianity is to be sought not in the fundamental invariable absolute types of right and wrong, which are the same everywhere, but mainly in the following two things--_First_, In its method of operation and in the steam power, the strong convictions and fervid passions by which the moral machinery is set in motion; or, to adopt another simile, in the fountainheads from which the necessary water-courses of a systematic social irrigation are supplied. _Secondly_, In the particular virtues which its method of operation and its moral steam, in conjunction with the nature of the materials acted on, brings on the stage with a certain preference. For though a moral system may, or rather must, include theoretically all {193} the virtues, and is justly blamed if it exclude one, even the smallest, yet from the narrowness of finite natures, and the laws of habit, it seems practically impossible that as soon as any moral system becomes a traditional law for great masses of men, there should not be manifested a strong tendency to put certain virtues into the foreground, while others are left to find their places without favour, or even with a certain amount of discouragement. All soils are not equally favourable to all plants; and the most healthy climates, where human beings of the greatest amount of robustness and grace are produced, have never been free from peculiar diseases, springing from a source indissolubly intertwined with the conditions of their remarkable salubrity. Another influence also materially tends to give even the most large and comprehensive system of Ethics a certain apparent narrowness and one-sidedness in practice. A world-regenerating system of Ethics, such as Christianity, is not a thing, like a treatise on Logic, written in a book and laid on the shelf, and allowed quietly to work its way with whosoever may choose to take it up. It is an active, aggressive, invasive power; it is a strong medicine to knock down a strong disease; it is a charge of cavalry dashing onwards, like a storm, to break the solid squares of an opposing infantry, bristling with many spears. Such a movement is necessarily one-sided; all movement is one-sided; speculation only is catholic. We must not therefore expect Christianity, of all moral forces the most impetuous and the most imperious, to be free from this fault. It had to swoop down, so to speak, on violent wings from the spiritual side of our nature upon the sensualism of {194} the Greeks, otherwise it could not succeed; and its most distinctive features will be found to spring mainly from this necessary attitude of imperious hostility. There is no time to temper blows in the moment of battle. A great victory is never gained by moderate blows; though, when gained, a wise general will always know how to use it with moderation.

I will now proceed to attempt a sketch of Christian Ethics from the two points of view here indicated.

FIRST, Let us inquire what is the steam-power, the lever, the motive force of Christian Ethics. And here at once the most distinctive part of the Christian moral system meets us in the face; it is presented to us prominently, essentially, radically as a religion. It is not merely connected with religion, not only, like the moral philosophy of Dr. Paley, willing to stamp its precepts with a religious sanction, and to found moral obligation upon the will of the Supreme Being; much less, like the philosophy of Socrates, ready to fraternize with religion, and eager to prove with Heraclitus, the profoundest of the pre-Socratic thinkers, that all human rules of conduct are derived ultimately from the necessity of the divine nature.[194.1] It is more than all this; it is a religion; by its mere epiphany it forms a church; in its starting-point, its career, and its consummation it is “a kingdom of Heaven upon earth.” In its method of presentation, though not certainly in its contents, it is as different from its great ally Platonism {195} as Platonism is from its great enemy, the Homeric theology; for Platonism, however nearly allied to Christianity, is a philosophy and not a religion; a philosophy which did not even propose to overthrow the Polytheistic faith, whose poet-theologer it had so rudely assaulted. The moral philosophy of the Greeks, indeed, generally was either a simple wisdom of life in the form of precepts loosely strung together, as in the early Gnomic poets, or it was a wisdom of life deduced from principles of reason, as in all the Socratic and post-Socratic teaching. But the Ethics of the Gospel came down upon men like a flash from Heaven; suddenly, violently, fervidly and explosively, not with a curious apparatus of slowly penetrating arguments. There is no talk about reasons here at all; the λόγος of St. John came afterwards and meant a very different thing. “_Repent ye, and be baptized, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand!_” is the form of the Evangelical appeal, in which no argument is attempted or indeed required. Your conscience tells you that you are rebels against God; as rebels you can only live under a curse; the whole sense-besotted Greek and Roman world is evidently lying under a curse; repent and be converted; return to God and be saved; to man there can be no safety anywhere except in God, who is the source of all good, and in Christ, who gave himself a living sacrifice that we might be redeemed from all evil. This is the whole style of the greatest moral Evangel the world has ever heard; absolutely and simply an act of religion; all immorality is departure from God, all morality return to God. In the Christian Ethics God is not a secondary figure; he is not brought in merely for a sanction: he is the central sun of the {196} whole system, from whose bright fountain of perennial excellence all the little twinkling lamps of our minor moralities are lighted up. The individual virtues of a Christian man are merely the flower and the fruit of a living plant, of which the root is theology and the sap piety; nay more, the piety accompanies the flower and the fruit, and imparts to them a fragrance and a flavour, which gives them more than half their charm. A rose without smell would still be a rose; but what a world of difference to the sense and to the sentiment would the absence of that fine invisible essence imply! Christian virtue, in fact, can no more exist without piety than Socratic virtue can exist without logic. Socrates was, no doubt, a remarkably pious man; but, while the piety of Socrates was a strong shoot from his reason, the virtue of a Christian is the fair issue of his piety.

The distinct proof of what we have here stated will be found everywhere in the New Testament, but in the Acts of the Apostles specially rather than in the Gospels. For the ideal of Christian character we refer naturally to the Sermon on the Mount and to the character of our Lord as exhibited in the evangelic narrative; but for the manner in which Christianity was presented to men, for the method of operation by which in so short a time it so wonderfully overcame the stern ritualism of the Jew and the fair sensualism of the Greek, we must look to the actual facts of the great early conversions as they are presented to us in the apostolic memoirs of Luke. Let us see therefore, in the first place, what we can learn from the early chapters of that most interesting narrative. Now, the starting-point here plainly is the effusion of the Holy Ghost, an influence which, {197} whether we take it on this first occasion as miraculous, according to the traditional understanding of the Church, or as something extraordinary but in the course of nature, is a phenomenon altogether different in kind from the action of arguments upon the ratiocinative faculty of the mind, and had indeed been preceded not by inductions or deductions, or analytic dissections, or any scholastic exercitations at all, but by meetings for social prayer (i. 14)--prayer which is the great feeder of the moral nature of man when reverting to the original source of all moral life in the form of religion. It was therefore not in the philosophic way of debate and discussion, but in the religious way of inspiration that the regenerative afflatus of the first Christian Ethics came upon the Jewish and Hellenic world; and it worked, let us say, by a fervid moral contagion, not by the suasion of cool argument. And there can be no doubt, that if even in the intellectual world a wise ancient might justly say, _Nemo vir magnus sine aliquo afflatu divino unquam fuit_, much more in the world of moral and political action it is by the infection of noble passions that men are moved to any grand issues, not by the cogency of strong arguments. Melanchthon was as good a reasoner as Martin Luther, perhaps a better, but he had not the volcanic fire of his fellow; and it was an eruption of this fire only that could prevail to shake the stout pillars of the Popedom. And it was by an influence manifestly quite akin to the impetuous energetic eloquence of the great Saxon reformer, that by the first sermon of the Apostle Peter, as we read, great masses of men were suddenly pricked in their hearts, conscience-stung as we phrase it, and in one day three thousand {198} human beings, previously indifferent or hostile, were added to the new moral community afterwards called the Christian Church. Precisely similar in modern times has been the action of the so-called religious revivals, which, from the days of the Methodists downwards, have done so much in this country to rouse from a state of moral lethargy the most neglected and the most abandoned portions of the community. Of Martin Boos, the celebrated Bavarian evangelist, we are told that his “sermon was as if he poured forth flame;”[198.1] and not less striking were the moral effects of the eloquent Whitefield when he drew the tears in white gutters down the grimy cheeks of the congregated Bristol colliers, and, what is even more significant of his power, in Savannah elicited from the prudential pockets of sage Benjamin Franklin, sitting before the preacher with a stiff determination not to contribute, first a handful of coppers, then three or four silver dollars, and then five golden pistoles![198.2] Preachings of this kind have been the subject of scoffing with light-witted persons in all ages; but they stand firm as grave attestations of the fact that the Christian method of conversion, not by logical arguments, but by moral contagion and the effusion of the Holy Ghost, has, with the masses of mankind, always proved itself the most effective. Socrates did much more perhaps as a reformer of sinners than any preacher in the guise of a philosopher ever did; but he could not have done what Whitefield did with the colliers. The arguments of Socrates convinced the few; but the fervour of Peter, the loftiness of his religious position, and {199} the felt firmness of his historical foundation converted the many.

And this brings us to the second important point in the original attitude of Christianity, and the manner in which it moved the moral world. This point is the historical foundation on which the moral appeal stood; and this historical foundation was the miraculous life, death, and resurrection of the Founder of the ethical religion. It concerns us not to inquire here, whether Christ was a real person, or, as certain Germans with their ingenious whimsicality will have it, a mere myth; as little need we ask whether the miracles were really suspensions of the laws of nature, or were mere acts of remarkable power somewhat exaggerated by the wondering narrators; much less can it be necessary for the present argument to weigh the evidence for the great crowning miracle of the resurrection. Concerning these matters, every man must either judge for himself or take the authority of nearly two thousand years of effective Christian teaching as a sufficient guarantee. But what we have to do with here is simply this: that these facts were believed, that the Apostles stood upon these facts, and that the ethical efficiency of Christianity was rooted in these facts. Take the facts away, or the assured belief in the facts, and the existence of such an ethico-religious society as the Christian Church becomes, under the circumstances, impossible. Consider what an effect the personality of Socrates had in establishing what we with no great license of language may call the Socratic Church in Athens. The various schools of philosophy, first in Athens and then in Rome, were sects of that Church. Had Socrates not lived and died {200} with visible power and effect before men, the existence of these schools, fathered by this great teacher, would have been impossible. A person is the necessary nucleus round which all social organisms form themselves. But the personality of Socrates was a much less important element in the formation of the Socratic schools than that of Christ was in the formation of the Christian Church. Socrates was only a teacher--one who, like other teachers, might in time create disciples as wise, perhaps wiser than, himself; Christ was a redeemer, whose function as such could be performed by no vicar, and transmitted to no successor: the one was a help and a guide, the other a foundation of faith and a fountain of life. Socrates taught his disciples to become independent of him, and rely on their own perfected reason; from Christ His disciples always derive nourishment, as the branches from the vine. And if the relation of Christ to His disciples, conceived only as a living Saviour walking on the earth, was so much closer than that of Socrates to his disciples, how much more intimate does the relation become, when He who lived and died to redeem humanity from sin rose from the dead as a living guarantee that all who walked in His ways, should follow up their redemption from sin by a speedy victory over that yet stronger enemy. Death![200.1] From the moment that the resurrection stood amongst the disciples as an accepted fact, the Founder of the religion was not merely a wonder-working man, a prophet and the greatest of all the prophets, but He was an altogether exceptional and miraculous Person, either {201} God in some mysterious way combined into an incorporate unity with man, or at least a Person that, compared with the common type and expression of humanity, might pass for God. The influence which the belief in the actual existence of such a human, and yet in so many regards superhuman, character as the Founder of their faith, must have exercised on the early preachers of the gospel, cannot easily be over-estimated. Plato and Plotinus often talk of the raptures with which the human soul would be thrilled if not only, as now, the shadows and types of the Beautiful, but the very absolute Beautiful itself, the αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν, stood revealed to mortal sight. But granting for the moment that the manifestation of such a vague abstraction is possible, it is quite certain that, when manifested, it could not possibly act upon men with anything like the power of a human Christ actually risen from the dead. Man, with all his range of imagination, is at bottom as much concrete as any creature, and as little capable of being moved by mere abstractions. Jesus Christ, and Him crucified; Christ risen from the dead; believe in Him--this was the short summation of that preaching of the gospel which regenerated the then world, lying as it did in all sorts of wickedness. See how emphatically the resurrection is alluded to as the main anchor in all the early preachings of the Apostles (Acts ii. 32; iii. 15; iv. 2; v. 30, etc.) And as to St. Paul, he declares again and again that if Christ be not risen, the faith of Christians is vain, and those to whom the world was indebted for its moral regeneration were justly to be accounted amongst the most miserable of men; a method of speaking which plainly implies that, in the Apostle’s {202} estimation, the firm fact of a risen Saviour was the only real assurance that Christians had of a life beyond the grave. So true is the utterance of a distinguished modern divine that “the resurrection was the central point of the apostolic teaching, nay more, the central point of history, primarily of religious history, of which it is the soul. The resurrection is the one central link between the seen and the unseen.”[202.1] Let this, therefore, stand firm as the main principle of any just exposition of the machinery by which the ethics of the gospel achieved the conquest of the world. The Church--“the peculiar people zealous for good works,” of whom St. Peter speaks--was formed out of the world not by the clear cogency of logical arguments, but by the vivid belief in miraculous facts.

But the miraculous personality of the teacher, however essential to the proclamation and reception of the teaching, was not the teaching itself. There were doctrines of an essentially theological character, and strong emotions that only religion could excite, which operated along with the unique personality of the Founder in laying a firm foundation for the ethics of the gospel. The most important of these doctrines was the doctrine of the unity of the Godhead. This is a matter with which in Christian countries we are now so familiar that not a few find it difficult to realize how prominent an element it was in the Christian creed, and how powerful must have been its action in the creation of a new school of morals in the midst of the heathen world. By the Fathers of the Church, however, in the first and second centuries, the ethical virtue of this element {203} was never overlooked; they knew only too well, from their own personal experience most of them, and all of them by what they saw written in the habits and maxims of a corrupt society, how easily Polytheism had lent itself to draw a beautiful veil over what was ugly, and to stamp the most debasing vices with consecration. Philosophers, like Xenophanes and Plato, in whose breasts these things had long ago roused a rebellious indignation, might well despair of converting to a pure morality a people who, though they might be sober on all the other days of the year, would think it necessary, as an act of piety, to appear publicly intoxicated on the feast of Dionysus. The salt of goodness, it is quite true, which kept the body of Polytheism so long from rotting, has often been overlooked, principally by the exaggeration of Christian writers, seldom remarkable for candour; and the early Fathers of the Church, engaged, as they were, in actual warfare with the many-headed foe, may well be excused if their zeal was not always accompanied by that fairness to which even error is entitled. But with the most honest purpose to do justice to the moral element of Polytheism, as we may find it exhibited most favourably perhaps in the living pictures of the Homeric poems, it cannot be denied that the obvious deduction from the Polytheistic creed was, in all cases to palliate, in some cases even to justify, vice; and that this deduction was often made we may gather from the familiar fact that the most illogical people even now suddenly become very acute reasoners, the moment it is necessary to defend their prejudices, or to protest against the amendment of their faults. In a system of faith, where every {204} instinct had its god, and every passion its patron-saint, it required either a rare training, or a remarkably healthy habit of mind to keep the low and the high in their just seats of subordination and supremacy. No doubt the more imperative moral virtues to a well-constituted Heathen mind were conceived as represented by Jove, who was the real moral governor of the world; and the supremacy of Zeus in Olympus was a sufficient assertion of the superiority which belongs to the moral law in the little republic of the soul: but as the son of Kronos in the Greek heaven was only a limited monarch, and often, as the Iliad plainly indicates, obliged to wink at the contravention of his own commands by the unruly aristocracy of the skies, so Polytheism could never invest the τὸ ἡγεμονικόν--the regulating principle of the soul--with the absolute sovereignty which to its nature rightfully belongs. Christianity, as an essentially monotheistic faith, applied a perfect remedy to this evil. The highest part of man’s nature was now the only sacred part. The flesh, so far from being glorified and worshipped, was denounced, degraded, and desecrated as a synonym for all corruption. The deification of mere sensuous pleasures, which with Polytheists had passed for orthodox, was now impossible; the moral law became supreme; and surely the sanction which this law requires can never be conceived in more imperative terms than as the distinctly enunciated command of the all-powerful, all-wise, and all-beneficent Father of the human family. No sanction, deduced from a mere reasoning process, can ever approach this in broad practical efficiency. It is the impersonated, incarnated, and enthroned Reason, to which all {205} reasonable creatures owe an instinctive and a necessary obedience.

But there is another corollary to a monotheistic creed, which, in estimating the influence of Christian faith on Christian Ethics, is by no means to be overlooked. If there is only one God, the father of the whole human race, then there is only one family; all men are brethren; nationality ceases; philanthropy, or love of men in the widest sense of the word, becomes natural; mere patriotism has now only a relative value; Leonidas is no longer the model hero; the Jew is no longer of the one chosen people; and the Greek, full of wisdom, and full of conceit, must condescend to call the ignorant barbarian his brother. This breaking down of the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile, between every nation and its neighbour, removed two of the greatest obstructions which have ever stood in the way of a generous morality, in the shape of what Lord Bacon would have called idols of the place and of the race; these idols could be worshipped no longer; and no shibboleth of separation could be mumbled to consecrate the unreasonable prejudices which every nation is so apt to entertain against its neighbour. No doubt towards the propagation of these catholic and cosmopolitan principles, ancient philosophy also, and specially Stoicism, contributed its share;[205.1] the consolidation of the Roman empire and the policy of the Roman emperors worked in the same direction; {206} but the monotheistic creed of the Christian Church, proclaimed with such dignity and moral courage by St. Paul in his discourse on the Hill of Mars, supplied the only effective leverage. Compared with what the preaching of St. Paul did for the grand idea, of humanity and fraternity, all that modern science, modern political theories, modern commerce, and modern philosophies have achieved or may yet achieve, can only be counted as a very small supplement.