Note 192.1 — CHRISTIANITY.

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