CHRISTIANITY.

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,

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

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 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 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 reasonable creatures owe an instinctive and a necessary obedience.

The immortality of the soul, the second coming of Christ, and the final judgment of the world, form together a group of doctrines, the relation of which to moral practice is too deeply felt to require much discussion in this place. Perhaps, however, everybody does not sufficiently consider how peculiarly Christian these doctrines are, and how the belief in them, and the moral issues of such belief, must necessarily stand and fall with the faith in some such historical religion as has hitherto formed the framework of the Churches of Christendom. For however these doctrines might be dimly conceived and vaguely believed by the people who wrote D. M. upon their tombstones, and however solemnly imagined and grandly depicted they were in the eloquent discourses of the great philosopher of Idealism, there are few mistakes greater than to accept these dim conceptions and grand imaginings as a proof that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, as a point of Polytheistic faith, performed the same function in moulding the morality of the ancient Greeks and Romans that it does at the present day among modern Christian peoples. A single quotation—one of the most trite—from Homer will suffice to show how utterly unfounded such an idea is. In the Cimmerian visit to the unseen world, the wandering king of Ithaca is made to encounter the hot thane of Thessaly, pacing with a stately fierceness through the Elysian fields, like a king among the shades. On being complimented to this effect by his visitor, the son of Peleus replies—

“Name me not death with praiseful words, noble Ulysses; I Would sooner be a bonded serf, the labourer’s tool to ply To a small cottar on the heath with wealth exceeding small, Than be the Lord of all the Shades in Pluto’s gloomy hall.”

A people who could think and speak thus of the state of souls after departure from the body, could not derive much practical advantage from belief in immortality. That belief indeed was held so loosely by the mass of the Greek people that it may rather be described as a dim imagination than as a definite conviction. People were rather unwilling to believe that their beloved human friends had vanished into the realm of nothingness, than convinced that they had gone to where on any account it would be at all desirable to go. To a few select heroes no doubt, men like Menelaus, of divine extraction, and divine affinity, a really enviable abode after death in the cloudless and stormless islands of the blest was by popular tradition assigned; a few perpetrators also of enormous crimes, red-hand murderers, open blasphemers, and traitors who sold their country for gold were consigned for ever to the ensanguined scourge of the Furies in those flaring regions which the genius of Virgil and Dante has so vividly portrayed; but if the belief in these exceptional cases inspired some to acts of unwonted heroism and deterred others from deeds of abhorred foulness, the very good and the very bad in the world are too few in number to admit of the idea that the motives which either stir them to acts of exceptive virtue or deter them from acts of abnormal crime should have any influence in determining the conduct of the great masses. And as for the philosophers, it was Socrates only and Plato who in their teaching gave any special emphasis to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul; and no man who has read the most familiar accounts of the defence which the former delivered to the jury at his trial, or of his last moments as reported by Plato in the Phædo, can have carried off the impression that the great father of moral philosophy taught that doctrine with any dogmatic decision or certainty. We must say therefore, with Dr. Paley, who, though incapable of sounding great depths, had a very clear head, and was a very sensible man, that it was the gospel, and the gospel alone, which “brought life and immortality to light,” and with it introduced whatever real power in elevating or strengthening the moral nature of man such a doctrine, when held as a habitual conviction, must exercise over the masses of men. What Socrates contemplated calmly as a probable contingency, St Paul and the early Christians gloried in as a grand culmination and a triumphant result. And the effective influence of this firm faith on society has been to give an infinitely greater dignity to human life, to increase infinitely the moral worth of the individual, and to add a support of wonderful efficacy to those states and stages of toilsome existence which stand so much in need of such hopeful consolation. That it has always acted, and must always act, as a strong aid to virtuous conduct can scarcely be denied, though they of course are poor philosophers and ignoble men who think that virtue could not possibly exist in the world without the belief in immortality. There are many motives that force the masses of men to be virtuous, according to the respectable righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, altogether independent of any prospect of rewards and punishments in a future state; and as for men of a more than commonly delicate moral sensibility—persons to whom a life in baseness and foulness would under any conditions be intolerable—it is not to be imagined that they would be more virtuous from the prospect of an eternity of bliss, than they are from the fear of a short season of shame. These men will always live nobly, for the same reason that whatever they do they must do well. If they play cricket, they will play a good game; if they ride, they will ride well; and if they boat, they will boat well; and, for the same reason, if they live, they will live well—not because they expect a reward, but because they have no pleasure in living badly. To them vice is always rottenness, putrescence, and loathsomeness; and no man will consciously condemn himself to these who knows what soundness means.

Let us now look at the beautiful portraiture of the Christian man in the detail of his most characteristic virtues.

And first, as the starting-point here, we must observe that the Christian is pre-eminently equipped with that self-denial and self-control, and what we generally call strength of character, which are the necessary postulates of all moral excellence. A man who will take the world easily will never take it grandly; χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά· omnia præclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt: all excellent things are difficult; the Christian recognises the difficulty, but delights in it as the stout old Roman did in the foes which added fuel to his victories, or as the strong modern engineer does in mountains, that he may show the triumph of his art in boring through them or winding round them. Modern sensualists and preachers of the low doctrine that pleasure is the only good have delighted to fling discredit on this grand Christian virtue of self-denial, as if anything great ever was performed without it. The man of genius denies himself in a thousand ways that he may work out a perfect body for the imaginary ideals which possess him; the great soldier denies himself through leagues of hardship that he may repel the rude invader and preserve the honour of his country unstained; and the man of virtue must deny himself also, if virtue is a thing which a creature of high enterprise and lofty purpose may reasonably have to do with. To lie in the lap of pleasure may be the highest enjoyment of which a feeble character is capable; the alternation betwixt sensuous languor and sensuous excitement may be the only grateful change of which a predominantly sensuous nature can be made to partake; but a strong man must have something difficult to do; and the strong Christian man has to “work out his salvation with fear and trembling;” to mortify the body, lest being overindulged it should learn to be the master instead of the servant of the soul; and “laying aside every weighty and the sin which more easily besets him,” learn to “run with patience the race which is set before him.” What race? The race of realizing as much goodness as possible in his own personal life lend in the life of that society of which he is a part, by the twofold process of nursing virtues and weeding out vices: an ideal which never can be reached by those who commence life, after the Epicurean fashion, with a low calculation of pleasures and pains, but by those only who we inspired by the vision of what Plato preached as divine ideas, and Paul as divine commands. The recognition of a divine ideal in some shape or other is the first step to the prosecution of a divine life; and this alone can supply the inspiration which makes difficulty easy, educes pleasure from pain, and converts the most severe acts of self-denial into the materials of an elevating warfare, and the occasion of a glorious triumph.

Very closely connected with the stern self-denial and the manly strength of character so conspicuous in the first Christians was their moral courage. It requires very little knowledge of the world and experience of life to be made aware, in the case of those who are capable of being made aware of these things, that the general habitude of the world is not moral courage, but moral cowardice. The majority of men, like the majority of dogs I presume, are not physical cowards; the dog is naturally a fighting animal, and so is man. But that the majority of men are moral cowards is certain. No consideration is so powerful with schoolboys as that of being laughed at for any singularity in dress or appearance; the slavery of fashion among grown-up persons is founded partly on the same dread; and the fear of standing in a minority restrains many a man in public life from giving voice to a salutary truth, and planting a gag on the barking mouth of popular error. I have myself been present at meetings of corporate bodies, where I gave my suffrage, confident that I was right in acting consistently on a plain principle of common honesty; and after the vote was taken I was told confidentially by some of those who had voted against my views, that they had a strong conviction I was in the right, only they could not venture to vote with me in the face of such an overwhelming majority! This is the moral courage of the world. ‘Have any of the Scribes and Pharisees believed in him? If so, we will speak out; if not, we keep silence.’ This tendency to follow authority is in many persons, no doubt, the necessary consequence of their own ignorance; ignorance is always afraid, and it knows by a sure instinct that its only safety lies in being led by superior knowledge. This no one can blame. But when a man acts against his own conviction in giving his vote as a member of a corporate body, or in a political assembly, to shield himself from the indignation or to gain the favour of an unreasonable multitude,—when, as in pure democracy, the question of right and wrong never comes before a man at all, but the one rule of political life simply is to submit to what such and such a local majority may choose to dictate,—this is sheer cowardice and simple slavery, from which a man of honourable and independent mind, not tainted with the baseness of democratic life, must shrink with abhorrence. And so in fact we do find that in democratic countries, where all things are controlled by political cliques, who dictate the local policy, to which the puppet called a Member of Parliament, or a Deputy, is expected to swear, men of independent spirit, manly courage, and large intelligence are found systematically to shrink from the arena. How different from this demoralizing miasma is the atmosphere which we breathe in the New Testament! There a single manly individual stands forward, and in the name of God solemnly calls upon men to renounce the dearly-cherished errors, and to trample under foot the warmly-worshipped idols of a whole people. “If it be lawful in the sight of God to hearken unto men rather than unto God, judge ye!” This is what Peter said, speaking the truth boldly, in the face of roaring multitudes, frowning dignitaries, and lines of bristling lances. A religion in which such rare manhood was as common as cowardice is common in general society, if it was not crushed in the bud, as Protestantism was in Bohemia, could not but grow up to a mighty tree in the end. The stoical death of the gladiators in the Colosseum was wont to draw admiration, and sometimes even to extort pity, from the spectators; but their death was compulsory, and the stoicism of their last moments only a theatrical grace to fall decently before an applauding multitude. The Christian, on the other hand, whether as a fearless preacher or as an unflinching martyr, made a voluntary protest, and chose a self-imposed torture. If he was not a fool or a madman, he was a hero; and the heroism he displayed was of such a high order, that being repeated only for a generation or two, it caused the combined force of popular prejudice and traditional authority in the heathen world to blush itself into a not unwilling subjection. So much of lofty courage and of genuine manhood did subtle Greece and powerful Rome learn from the moral missionaries of poor and despised Palestine!

In the estimation of Christian love one of the most interesting points is its strongly pronounced contrast with what has been called Platonic love. As for that which is commonly called love in novels and in life, though capable of affording a very exquisite bliss in its little season, it is a matter with which mere puberty and the bloom of physical life has so much to do, that except in the way of regulation (which is anything but an easy matter), it does not come under the category of morals at all; only this general remark may be made with regard to it, that in all well-conditioned human beings it springs originally from a certain affinity of souls shining through the body, as much as from the mere attractions of physical beauty; and in so far as this is the case, the purely physical instinct is elevated into the sphere of genuine Platonic love. Now, what is Platonic love? As described by the great philosopher of Idealism in the Phædrus, its root lies plainly in the rapturous admiration of excellence, and its consummation in the metamorphosis of the admirer into the perfect likeness of that which he admires; whereas Christian love, most characteristically so called, has its root in an infinite depth of divine tenderness, and for its fruit broad streams of human pity and grand deeds of human kindness. Platonic love is more contemplative and artistic; Christian love more practical and more fruitful; the one is the luxury of an intellectual imagination, the other the appetite of a moral enthusiasm.

It would be doing injustice to Christian love, however, to suppose that it has nothing at all in common with intellectual admiration, and that its only spring of movement is pity. “Visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction,” though in our present imperfect state the most characteristic, is not absolutely the most essential, feature in its exercise. If it were so, indeed, the Christian would never be comfortable except in the midst of misery; as a nurse can ply her vocation only at the bed of the sick or the wounded. But in fact his infinite tenderness for the lost sinner is produced and heightened by his experience of joy from communion with saints; and the contemplation and imitation of the image of moral perfection in the person of the great Captain of his salvation sustains him in his unwearied and often apparently hopeless endeavours to gather in recruits to serve under that so glorious captainship. We shall therefore justly say that without a Platonic love, that is, a fine spiritual passion for the character and person of Christ, the performance of the thousand and one works of social charity and mercy for which the Christian is so famous would be impossible. But we may say further, that the picture of Charity given in that wonderful chapter of St. Paul is very far from confining the sphere of Christian human-heartedness to that field of healing and of comforting in which so many charitable institutions in all Christian countries are the watch-towers. His picture evidently exhibits the ideal of a human being, not merely in the habit of lifting the fallen, healing the sick, and ministering, as the good Samaritan did, to those who may have fallen into the hand of robbers—these are extraordinary occurrences, which will excite even the most sluggish to extraordinary demonstrations of human sympathy,—but the apostle of the Gentiles will have it that in our daily intercourse with our fellow-men we learn to live their lives sympathetically as intimately and as completely as we live our own; that we study on all occasions to identify ourselves with their position and feelings and interests, and then only pass a judgment on their conduct. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” What a problem is here, what a lesson of humanity, of catholicity, and of something far more human than that mere toleration, which the nations of Christendom have taken now nearly two thousand years to learn, since the first preaching of the gospel, and are scarcely learning even now! How much of our daily judgments, spoken and printed, seems leavened in any degree by the genuine humanity and manifest justice of this divine ideal? “Speaking the truth in love” is the acknowledged law of Christian intercourse; speaking lies in hatred were often a more appropriate text for certain large sections of British practice. We ought to pass judgment against our brother on our knees, fearful to offend; we do it rather, not seldom with pride and insolence and impertinence, mounted on the triumphal car of our own conceit, riding rough-shod over the real or imagined faults of our brother. So far does the ideal of Christian love, in the preaching of the Christian apostle, transcend its reality in the lives of men who, if not Christians, at least breathe a Christian atmosphere, and ought to have received some benefit from the inhalation!

One of the most interesting of the contrasts generally drawn between Christian and heathen ethics, is that which concerns the very difficult virtue of Self-estimate. “Let every man,” says St. Paul, “strive not to think of himself beyond what he ought to think, but soberly, according as God has divided to every man the measure of faith.” And accordingly we find that in the lives of eminent Christians, as well as in formal treatises on Christian ethics, humility has always had a prominent place assigned to it in the roll of the virtues. But here again we must beware of running into a vulgar extreme, by imagining that the Greeks and Romans knew nothing of this virtue, and that they systematically fostered pride and self-importance. It is no doubt true, as every schoolboy knows, that the word ταπεινός, which in classical Greek signifies mean and paltry, in New Testament Greek is used to designate that sort of person who thinks of himself modestly, or, as St. Paul in the verse quoted says, “soberly;” but the mere change in the shade of colour belonging to certain words when passing from Attic into Alexandrian Greek, proves nothing in such a case; and if the matter is to be settled by words, the phrase σωφρονεῖν used by St. Paul, taking the place of the ταπεινοφροσύνη of other passages, is the very word by which the Greek moralists constantly express that golden mean between a high and a low estimate of self, which Aristotle their spokesman lauds as the habitual tone of the perfectly virtuous man. So far indeed was the Hellenic mind from recognising no sin in pride, that it looked upon self-exaltation and ramping self-assertion in every form as not only a great sin, but the mother of all sins. This sin they designated by the significant term ὕβρις—a word which etymologically signifies beyond the mark, and which, if it had not already existed, might well have been coined by Aristotle, had he been given, like Bentham, to the pedantry of making a language for himself.

“Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines Quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum.”

Pride, indeed, is not only the sin by which Lucifer falls in Christian angelography, but it peoples Tartarus also in heathen legends; and the boastful Salmoneus, whose insane ambition aspires to mimic the thunder of Jove, is always the first to be blasted by the bolt. Wherein then shall we say lies the difference—for a difference there certainly is—between the humility of the Christian and the σωφροσύνη of the Greek? The common root of the virtue in both is plain; it is the contrast between mortal and immortal, which belongs equally to Polytheism and to Monotheism; pride was not made for man; let him worship one God or many gods, he is a poor weak creature at the best, and only the more called upon to practise a sober-minded humility because his winged schemes so often end in creeping deeds. The luxuriant pride of our young leafage grows up so frequently into a shrivelled blossom and a hollow fruit. Yet there is a difference. In Monotheism there is an impassable gulf betwixt God and man which exists not in Polytheism. There are steps which lead up with not a few gradations from Pericles to Zeus; the son of a Theban Semele may be raised into a god, and the son of a god, like Hercules, may indulge grandly in many of the stout carnalities of a mortal man. Here therefore lies the primary ground of the more profound humility of the Christian. But there is another, which in practice has proved even more potent,—the intense feeling of the Christian already noted with regard to the exceeding sinfulness of sin. Every Christian looks upon sin habitually as a healthy man looks upon the plague; in some popular catechisms it is even laid down that “every sin, even the smallest, deserves God’s wrath and curse both in this world and in that which is to come;” nay, more: certain theologians, deemed by some peculiarly orthodox, have taught that the whole world lies under a curse on account of the guilt of the great progenitor of the human race, in violating a special divine command, a guilt incurred some six thousand years ago, and transmitted in due course of generation to his hapless progeny. These dogmas, of course, are only strong caricatures of the great fact that every deed, whether good or evil, by the eternal constitution of things, necessarily transmits its influence from the earliest to the latest times; families and races therefore may lie for generations under a curse; the Greek tragedy acknowledges this in the strongest terms; but, as in the other cases that we have been considering, Christianity here not only intensifies a moral sentiment familiar to the heathen world, but it extends immensely the surface over which it is diffused. Æschylus and Sophocles could represent a heavy curse hanging for ages over the royal houses of Pelops and Labdacus as the consequence of monstrous sins committed by the founders of their families; but Christianity makes no selection in this matter, and flings the blackness of a moral blight in the most unqualified phrase over the whole race of Adam. So far as we are sinners we are all under a curse, all children of wrath; and no man is supposed to be so virtuous as that he cannot honestly join in the humble response of the Litany, Lord have mercy on us, miserable offenders! These words repeated constantly in the weekly or daily service of a whole Church should alone be sufficient to prove how much more the virtue of humility is stamped, so to speak, into the Christian soul, than it was into the Hellenic. One cannot imagine either Socrates or Pericles using any such strong language. And I must confess, when coming out into the fresh air from the long Morning Service of the Anglican Church, I have often wondered how far the humble prostration of soul expressed in the refrain of the Litany had been cordially repeated by the great majority of the worshippers. The English, as is well known, are a peculiarly proud and often somewhat insolent people; and for myself, I honestly confess that I have always experienced in reference to my own feelings not a little exaggeration in the expressions of soul-prostration employed whether in the spoken Presbyterian or in the printed Episcopalian formularies. I do not see why Christian worshippers should so constantly avoid the language of a reasonable virtuous self-satisfaction used by King David in not a few places, and by Nehemiah. But however this be, and allowing that many Christians habitually employ phrases in their church service which are plainly at variance with the whole tone and temper of their lives, it is after all true that Christianity, if it errs here, errs on the safe side, and errs only as the medical men do, by using a very drastic drug to combat a very violent disease. For it is only too obvious that self-importance in various forms, not rarely under the decent mask of modesty and diffidence, is the dominant vice of the human character. Young men are apt to glory in their strength, young women in their beauty, fathers are proud of their offspring, scholars of their learning, metaphysicians of their subtleties, and poets of the iridescent and evanescent bubbles of a luxurious fancy and an unpruned imagination. Men of science too are apt to be proud of their knowledge,—whether a knowledge of what is high or what is low matters not; it is the knowledge which puffs them up, not the thing known, which indeed, if well weighed, were oftener the motive to humiliation than to exaltation. We are therefore much in need of getting as much humility from the gospel as it is naturally calculated to inspire; and it may be observed that the public pulse is always ready to beat in unison with the sacred text whenever a man of great original genius stands forward, signally marked with the peculiarly Christian type of humility. Such a man was Michael Faraday, the subtle investigator of those secret laws which regulate the molecular action of particles of matter among themselves.

Here we have the general type of a chaste and beautiful Christian humility in the shape of a living man. To this no one objects. It is the dogmas and the doctrinal paradoxes of the professional theologians that are so apt to fret us; to which, accordingly, here as in other cases, in judging of Christian ethics, we shall be wise in not attributing too much importance.

Let us now, in the last place, inquire how the Christian law of right conduct has approved itself in the history of society since the first institution of the Church. And we seem certainly justified in starting here with the expectation that, moved by such a fervid steam-power, strengthened with such lofty sanctions, and displaying a scheme of virtues at once so manly and so gentle—virtues not preached merely in sermons or discussed in ethical treatises, but set forth in the living epistles of two such opposite and yet both eminently Christian types of character as St. Paul and St. John—so accoutred surely, and clad with the perfect panoply that belongs to a great moral warfare (Eph. vi. 13), Christianity could not but go forth conquering and to conquer, especially when the living faith in extraordinary, and miraculous demonstrations everywhere accompanied its march; and if it has in any considerable degree failed to fulfil its bright promise in regenerating the face of the moral worlds this, in those who accepted the religion, must have proceeded mainly from one of three causes: either because the ideal was too high for them, as we are accustomed to observe that certain nations are not socially far advanced enough for free constitutions, and thrive best under despotism; or from, the neglect of a regulative force which might check the natural tendency to excess, extravagance and one-sidedness, to which all human movements are liable; or again, from the disturbance of the proper healthy action of the regenerative virtue of the doctrine by the admixture of certain foreign, incompatible, and corrupting elements. Of the first cause of failure nothing need be said; it is with high morality as with high art, it is and it always must be above the average reach of the great mass of men; and it may be that in morals, as in art, some nations have tacitly agreed to let the high standard drop, and content themselves with attaining a manifestly inferior but more generally attainable ideal. But however such compromises and refuges of despair may be the necessary wisdom of politicians and of lawyers, who have to deal practically with the selfish element in the masses of mankind, in the theory of morals, as of art, they can certainly find no place. The Church and the Academy must always set up the highest ideal; if they fail to do so it is only because the inspiration which created them was originally feeble, or has waxed faint; and if the members of the Church or the scholars of the Academy fail to realize in their lives and in their works the perfect pattern which has been set before them, it is the defect of the learner, not the fault of the teacher. No one thinks of elevating the character of art by lowering the standard. And so if Christianity is too good for mankind it must just remain too good, till in the slow process of the ages men shall become more worthy of it. But the two other causes of failure require to be looked into more seriously. To the danger of excess Christian morality is peculiarly liable, just because its steam-power is so very strong and its action so efficacious. I read but the other day in a newspaper of a girl, studious, as girls are apt to be, of personal beauty, who, having picked up somewhere a fact well known to horse-dealers, that arsenic has a specific beneficial action on the skin, set to work of her own motion to mingle her daily potations with an infusion of the potent metal, and did this so assiduously that in a very short time, instead of improving her complexion, she had well-nigh removed herself for ever from the society of the living. Now this is exactly what has happened with Christian Ethics. Men have taken too much of a certain virtue, say Reverence—which is the virtue most closely bound up with religion—and have changed it into stupidity. That which was meant to elevate human beings out of their finite littleness has been used to depress them below the level of their meanest selves. And not only have Christians by the excessive culture of favourite virtues turned them into caricature, but they have assumed that because they have learned to be Christians they should forget to be men. There are certain human instincts, either purely physical, or closely connected with our animal existence, so strong that the first preachers of the evangelic ethics seem to have thought they might be safely left to take care of themselves; but these same instincts certain high-pressure Christians who came afterwards, with more zeal than sense, thought it their duty studiously to repress, or even violently to extirpate. The result has been that we have seen Christianity set at work systematically to maim that humanity which it was intended to heal. As to the third cause of failure, the admixture with foreign elements, it is of the same nature as the water which dilutes the milk and the sand which debases the sugar in the adulterated traffic of low traders. That such adulteration should exist to a large extent in Christianity was unavoidable, so soon as the profession of a religion so high above the measure of vulgar ethics became respectable. When everybody was born and baptized and bribed into Christianity, the morality which each Christian of this external type professed must have been something as cheap as the blood from which he was procreated, the water with which he was washed, and the work by which he gained his livelihood.

One of the strangest fancies that was ever begotten by the translation of sense into nonsense is the idea of the Society of Friends, that Christianity forbids war, and that self-defence is a sin. Unquestionably Christianity forbids the spirit of hatred and the desire of revenge; for the religion of Christ is a religion of motives, of purity of heart, and of humanity of purpose, and could not but forbid every spring of action that had in it the least tincture of selfishness; but hostility between diverse interests is a fact which Christianity could not deny, and common sense would not attempt to explain away. What Christianity denounced was the spirit from which wars generally arise—“From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not even from your lusts that war in your members?” And so far as this is the case, if these lusts were regulated by Christian principle—that is, if love and sympathy took the place of selfishness and jealousy, the wars that spring from their feverish ferment and fury would not take place. But this is a quite different thing from the natural right of self-defence; there are wars where the aggression is all on one side, and where to yield to the assault would be to offer a bribe to brigandage; there are wars also of pure stupidity, where both parties don’t know what they are about, and where it is not a pure heart but a disciplined intellect that is necessary to prevent the fray. But whatever be the cause, wherever there is a fermenting bed of conflicting interests of divergent opinions and of antagonist passions, even amongst good men wars are unavoidable; unless, indeed, such a court of impartial arbiters could be appointed, as it has hitherto proved beyond the reach of human wit to realize; and what Christian Ethics in this case requires is, that, contests of right being unavoidable, after every attempt at peaceful adjustment has failed, men should go to war with a certain mutual self-respect, and with a generous chivalry such as the knights of the middle ages systematically fostered, carrying on hostilities like men, and not like tigers. In this sense it has been proved perfectly possible to love our enemies without betraying our rights, and will become more and more practicable in the degree that international recognition becomes more common, and a large Christian philanthropy more diffused. But the idea that Christian love should become so intense as absolutely to annihilate the instinct of self-preservation, and to train every creature to love every other creature a great deal better than itself, is pure maundering, and will then only be tolerated among men when a decadent humanity shall have entirely divorced piety from reason, and Buddhism instead of Christianity shall have become the religion of the most advanced pioneers of civilisation.

But the most general excess which runs, so to speak, in the blood of Christian ethics, arises from the overflow of zeal without knowledge, at one time boiling over in floods of the most savage intolerance, at another ossified into the rigid features of the most unrelenting bigotry. This is an evil which springs naturally from the connexion of morality with religion; and it is an evil of so enormous a magnitude that it seems in some sort to supply an excuse for those inadequate ethical systems of recent growth which take no cognisance of the reverential and devout instincts of human nature, and, after the model of Aristotle, would build up an architecture of Ethics without piety. And if religious zeal generally is prone to run into intolerance, it is specially so in the case of monotheism. For monotheism is naturally intolerant; it will bear no assessor on the supreme throne; if true, it is exclusively true. And this is indeed no more than what it is entitled to; but it should be intolerant only of polytheism as a system, not uncharitable to polytheists as men; whereas it has become almost a proverb that the zeal of Christian theologians stands divorced not only from charity, but from truth; of all disputants men of the clerical profession are the most unfair, so much so, that among churchmen as a class candour is scarcely a mentionable virtue. A candid evangelist is generally a black sheep to his brethren; assuredly he will not be found prominent in Church debates, or forward as a leader of Church parties. But neither must we bear too hard upon the clergy in this matter. It is human nature, in fact, more than clerical inoculation that is to blame; and we shall find if we look round with an impartial eye, that humanitarian democrats, anti-church Radicals, scientific crotchet-mongers, mathematical formulists, and conceited young poets, are equally intolerant in their own way; only religion, like love, by the very intensity of its excellence, raises the natural intolerance of human nature to its highest power; it is so pleasant to stamp the name of God upon our passions and ride triumphantly over the world in the character of armed apostles of the most sacred truth. Hence religious wars, which, as all the world knows, have generally proved the most bitter and sanguinary; hence conquests, robberies, and oppressions in the name of the God of Christians; which for systematic cruelty, treachery, and all manner of baseness, have not been surpassed in the annals of Spartan helotage or Venetian espionage; hence assumptions of infallibility which make reason blush, and consecrations of absurdity which petrify common sense. And when this flaming zeal, in more quiet times, has settled down, it does not therefore always cease to exist, but stiffens into bigotry, and, united with that self-importance which is so natural to man, produces an exclusiveness and a Pharisaism of which all Christian Churches, in seeming rivalry of the Jews, whom they revile, have presented a very sharp and well-marked adumbration. If the religious Hindu will not eat from a Christian’s platter, the religious Episcopalian will not dine in the same room or stand on the same platform with the religious Dissenter. The hissing fervour which originally forbade the approach of two adverse churches has now been changed into a dead wall or partition, which keeps those who ought to know, and love, and co-operate with one another, habitually as far apart as Greeks and Turks; so that it has become the most difficult of all social operations to unite two Christian churches, separated perhaps by some notion more political than religious, in the prosecution of some common object which they both confess to be supremely desirable.