Chapter VIII: The Peak in Darien: the Riddle of Death, 245 (2)

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the links of habitual thought, and which the doctrine of Evolution (according to some of its teachers) has already withdrawn from the domain of a Creative Power.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?

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.”

Then Dives answered yet more placidly: “I never dream of wishing anything were otherwise than it is. I am frankly satisfied to have done with life. I have had a noble share of it, and I desire no more. I utterly disbelieve in a future life.”

At that moment, my respected friend Mr. Greg passed by, and heard what Dives was saying; on which, to my great surprise, he made the following observation: “This is, unquestionably, the harder--_may it not also be the higher_?--form of pious resignation, the last achievement of the ripened mind.”

As for Lazarus, on catching Mr. Greg’s remark, he turned himself painfully on the ground, and groaned: “I never heard before of anybody being ‘_piously resigned_’ to the woes and wants _of other people_. La Rochefoucauld was right, I suppose, to say, ‘_Nous avons tous assez de force pour supporter les maux d’autrui_’; but, for my part, I should not precisely call Dives’ satisfaction in his ‘noble share’ of the feast, while I am doomed to perish starving, by quite so fine a name as ‘pious resignation.’ Pray, Mr. Greg, with your large humanity, take _my_ case into consideration, before you credit Dives with anything better than stupendous egotism.”

Startled by the vehemence of poor Lazarus, I awoke.

I am, Sir, etc.

HYGEIOLATRY.

The advance of physical science and the simultaneous retreat of religious faith threaten, among their numerous consequences, to introduce a new principle into morals. We may call it Doctor’s Doctrine,--not because it is by any means the exclusive property of the medical profession, or that all doctors can be supposed to hold it, but because it is more rife among them and tells more directly on their work than in the case of other men. It is indeed excusable for a physician to attribute to bodily health, wherewith this new principle is concerned, more importance than a poet, a preacher, or a soldier, is likely to concede to it; and to this natural tendency is added, pretty frequently perhaps, a tolerably defined materialism, which not merely connects but identifies genius, happiness, and virtue with physical soundness, and stupidity, misery, and crime with diseased organization. With such views, and deprived of that vista of an eternal future which alone gives to human things their true perspective, it is not wonderful that many should come to regard bodily health as the _summum bonum_, and thence to deduce the principle to which I desire to call attention as an innovation in ethics. Reduced as nearly as possible to a formula, that principle is as follows:

_That any practice which, in the opinion of experts, conduces to bodily health or tends to the cure of disease, becomes_, ipso facto, _morally lawful and right._

I do not mean to imply that this principle has yet been clearly stated by any of its adherents, or that they are even generally conscious that they have adopted it. Possibly, many who have practically embodied it in their conduct for years may repudiate it on seeing it defined in words. Nevertheless, it may be traced as the substructure of innumerable arguments on all manner of subjects of public and private interest,--arguments which, if the principle were knocked from under them, would instantly be seen to fall baseless to the ground. It is, in short, the implied major term of a thousand syllogisms which we hear in every debate and read in every magazine and newspaper.

Now, to measure the extent of the change which the adoption of this Doctor’s Doctrine must introduce into ethics, it is only necessary to cast a glance backward at the older view of the relation of duty to health which has hitherto prevailed in the world, and been taught pretty equally by moralists of every school, with the exception of ascetics on one side, and pure hedonists on the other. That older lesson--which we may for convenience call Divine’s Doctrine, since it is the general teaching of every Protestant theologian and moralist, may be summed up in the canon--

_Bodily health may not be lawfully sacrificed to our desire of pleasure or fear of pain. It may and ought to be sacrificed to the health of our souls, to the service of our fellowmen, or to fidelity to God._

In other words, it has been taught that the man who injures his health by debauchery is guilty of a serious moral offence, and he who commits suicide is guilty of a crime; but that, on the other hand, the man who sacrifices his health in the performance of his duty as physician, clergyman, or soldier, or in endeavoring to save a fellow-creature from flood or fire, or who gives up life itself rather than forswear himself or renounce his religious faith, or commit a base or unclean action, is not only exonerated from any guilt, but is, in the highest degree, virtuous.

On these lines, Christian civilization may be said to have been built up. The natural selfishness of human nature has been counteracted by the sense of duty; and if, now and then, needless and exaggerated self-sacrifices without adequate reason have been made, and there was room for brave Charles Kingsley to preach the claims of the natural laws of life, a thousand times more often has the sense of duty enabled men and women to perform alike the painful daily tasks whereby our homes are made beautiful and sacred, and the occasional acts of heroism wherewith human existence on earth is crowned and glorified.

It needs no words to prove to any one who reflects that two-thirds of what we have been wont to reverence as homely virtue and all the martyrdoms of history consist precisely in the voluntary sacrifice of health, or of health and life together. To withhold from such sacrifices the meed of moral admiration would be to reverse the judgment of all the ages,--to prefer Sardanapalus and Heliogabalus to Curtius and Regulus, and to treat as a deluded fanatic the apostle who converted the Gentile world, but spent his years in perils by sea and land amid prisons and scourgings. From the crucifixion of Christ to the silent self-immolation of the poor consumptive girl who works half-blinded through the winter’s night to support her aged mother, the holiest and the sweetest things this earth has witnessed have been the actions of those who counted not their lives dear to them, so long as they could obey the law of truth, of righteousness, and of love.

But how is this recognition of the duty and glory of the sacrifice of health and life at the call of every higher law to be reconciled with the “Doctor’s Doctrine” that the interests of health are so supreme that they themselves constitute the highest law, and render any practice conducive to them _ipso facto_ lawful? Either we must admit, according to the Divine’s Doctrine, that moral interests transcend bodily interests, or we must hold, according to Doctor’s Doctrine, that bodily interests transcend moral interests. There is no third alternative. One principle or the other must prevail, and sooner or later leaven society with its ennobling or else its debasing influence. There are signs apparent that the Doctor’s Doctrine is already bearing its proper fruit, and that, soothed by a becalmed conscience, absolved by the authority of the priesthood of Science, men and women are beginning to be systematically selfish and self-indulgent where their health is concerned, or where there may appear a chance of curing their maladies in modes not hitherto witnessed. I can only indicate a few of the ways in which this deliberate self-preservation is exhibited.

Notably, it seems that the old courage of Englishmen is dwindling away. Almost every month, cases come to light wherein men, even soldiers, fail to stand by their comrades in danger; or wherein a crowd of fifty people witness a child drowning in a shallow pond without an effort to save it; or men who witness a cruel murder rush from the spot, leaving the yet breathing victim dying unaided on the ground. There is even, among young men, a cynical avowal of prudent concern for their own lives and limbs which constantly strikes the old, who remember the joyous youthful fearlessness of their fathers, as something altogether new and far indeed from pleasant to contemplate.

Nor are our personal acts of selfishness and cowardice on a small scale the only logical consequences of the new principle which are already visible. Cruelty of the most heinous and systematic kind is another result. The unanimous resolution passed by the great Medical Congress in the year of grace 1881 has proclaimed that vivisection leads to discoveries conducive to the cure of disease, and _therefore_ should be sanctioned and left unrestricted by law. That is to say, that all the fiendish imaginations of men like Mantegazza and Schiff, and Goltz and Bernard, and Paul Bert, should be freely permitted in England for the sake of a chance of useful hints for therapeutic science. Thus, the whole medical profession in England stands committed to the demand that the vice of cruelty in young men and old should be deliberately unchained, expressly for the sake of anticipated benefits to bodily health.

So far indeed has Doctor’s Doctrine made its way that, whenever any Bill concerning sanitary measures or public hygiene is before Parliament, there is exhibited by the speakers in the House, and by the journalists who discuss the matter, a readiness to trample on personal rights to an extent which would excite indignation, were any religious or commercial interest in question. Men may spread the most deadly _moral_ diseases, and teach doctrines which make virtue a mockery and life a hopeless desolation, and scarcely an effort is made to stop them. But let them threaten to spread bodily disease, and (unless they be medical men, and thus authorized transmitters of infection) the most stringent measures are adopted; and besides a Compulsory Vaccination Act and the ever-infamous Contagious Diseases Acts, even while these sheets are passing through the press, no less than three Bills are before Parliament to make compulsory the notification of infectious disease and segregation of infected persons. I am not now discussing the merits of these Acts and Bills: I am only observing that the spirit wherewith they are carried forward is quite an innovation in English legislation. Health of body has been accorded the importance which the--real or supposed--interests of the soul alone commanded two centuries ago; and the tyranny of the priesthood of Hygeia threatens to be as high-handed as ever was that of the Churches of Rome or of Geneva.

Lastly there is, outside of legislation, and hidden from the knowledge of the majority of the laity, one remaining application of the new principle of morals which more than all exhibits its evil, its disastrous tendency. For obvious reasons, I cannot write plainly of this moral poisoning, which I believe to be going on to a frightful extent, both in this country and abroad. I can only quote some observations made on it by an experienced minister of religion, published in the _Modern Review_ for April, 1880:--

Any one who will make a few casual inquiries will be amazed to discover the frequency with which medical men of high repute--men who are admitted to the friendship of good and unsuspecting women--offer counsel to young men, and even to boys, which strikes at the root of all morality, and indeed can proceed from nothing else than scepticism concerning the very possibility of morality itself. We speak what we know not of one, but of many, and what no medical man will deny, though many a medical man will revolt from the action of his fellow-practitioners as vehemently as we ourselves. What we ask of these purer spirits in the healing fraternity is that they will speak out on this and other matters of professional practice, and condemn their less honorable colleagues with no faltering tongue.

The Bishop of Bedford taking the chair at the meeting, May 3 of the present year (1882), of the Social Purity Alliance, alluded to this heavy charge against the medical profession in the following terms: “I know what doctors say, and I here publicly protest against the terrible thing that is often said by doctors to young men,--that sin is good for their health. I say God forgive those who have said it.”

But it will be replied: “All these evils have existed for ages. There have always been found selfish, cruel, cowardly, and profligate men, ready to transgress when their inclinations goaded them, willing to rank their own health, life, and enjoyment far before the law of God or the interest of their fellows. What signifies, then, a new formula of selfishness?”

It signifies, I venture to say, a great deal. Hitherto, men did evil; but they (or their neighbors for them) had at least the grace to recognize that it was evil. The selfish man was charged with selfishness. The cruel man did not assume the airs of a benefactor of mankind. The coward was kicked as a poltroon, not rewarded with sympathetic smiles for his candor. The man who sought the dens of vice did not go thither with his conscience pacified by his physician’s orders in his pocket. To teach men that “a practice conducive to health is _ipso facto_ morally right” is then, at one and the same moment, to damp every aspiration after the nobler kinds of virtue, and to supply a justification for every meaner kind of vice.

Neither selfishness, nor cowardice, nor cruelty, nor unchastity, can be justifiable by the plea that they may conduce to the bodily health of one man or of a thousand men; and he who will save his life by such means will assuredly lose all that makes “life worth living,” all for which life was given.

PESSIMISM, AND ONE OF ITS PROFESSORS.