ii. The second and princ.i.p.al support of the doctrine under review is found in the realm of natural history, and in that province of it which is occupied by _living beings_. Here, it is said, in the field of observation nearest to us, we have evidence of a power in each nature to push itself and gain ground, as against all natures less favorably const.i.tuted. There is left open to it a certain range of possible variations from the type of its present individuals, of which it may avail itself in any direction that may fortify its position; and even if its own instincts did not seize at once the line of greatest strength, still, out of its several tentatives, all the feeble results would fail to win a footing, and only the residuary successes would make good their ground. The ill-equipped troops of rival possibilities being always routed, however often they return, the well-armed alone are seen upon the field, and the world is in possession of "the fittest to live." We thus obtain a principle of self-adjusting adaptation of each being to its condition, without resorting to a designing care disposing of it from without; and its development is an experimental escape from past weakness, not a pre-conceived aim at a future perfection.
I have neither ability nor wish to criticise the particular indications of this law, drawn with an admirable patience and breadth of research, from every department of animated nature. Though the logical structure of the proof does not seem to me particularly solid, and the disproportion between the evidence and the conclusion is of necessity so enormous as to carry us no further than the discussion of an hypothesis, yet, for our present purpose, the thesis may pa.s.s as if established; and our scrutiny may be directed only to its bearings, should it be true.
(1) The genius of a country which has been the birthplace and chief home of Political Economy is naturally pleased by a theory of this kind; which invests its favorite lord and master, _Compet.i.tion_, with an imperial crown and universal sway. But let us not deceive ourselves with mere abstract words and abbreviations, as if they could reform a world or even farm a sheep-walk. _Compet.i.tion_ is not, like a primitive function of nature, an independent and original power, which can of itself do any thing: the term only describes a certain intensifying of power already there; making the difference, under particular conditions, between function latent and function exercised. It may therefore turn the less into the more; and it is reasonable to attribute to it an _increment_ to known and secured effects; but not new and unknown effects, for which else there is no provision. It gives but a partial and superficial account of the phenomena with which it has concern; of their degree; of their incidence here or there; of their occurrence now or then: of themselves in their characteristics it pre-supposes, and does not supply, the cause. To that cause, then, let us turn. Let us consider what must be upon the field, before compet.i.tion can arise.
(2) It cannot act except in the presence of some _possibility of a better or worse_. A struggle out of relative disadvantage implies that a relative advantage is within grasp,--that there is a prize of promotion offered for the contest. The rivalry of beings eager for it is but an instrument for _making the best of things_; and only when flung into the midst of an indeterminate variety of alternative conditions can it find any scope. When it gets there and falls to work, what does it help us to account for? It accounts certainly for the triumph and _survivorship of the better_, but not for there _being a better to survive_. _Given_, the slow and the swift upon the same course, it makes it clear that the race will be to the swift; but it does not provide the fleeter feet by which the standard of speed is raised. Nay more; even for the prevalence of the better ("or fitter to live") it would not account, except on the a.s.sumption that whatever is _better_ is _stronger_ too; and a universe in which this rule holds already indicates its divine const.i.tution, and is pervaded by an ideal power unapproached by the forces of necessity.
Thus the law of "natural selection," instead of dispensing with anterior causation and enabling the animal races to be their own Providence and do all their own work, distinctly testifies to a const.i.tution of the world pre-arranged for progress, externally spread with large choice of conditions, and with internal provisions for seizing and realizing the best. On such a world, rich in open possibilities, of beauty, strength, affection, intellect, and character, they are planted and set free; charged with instincts eagerly urging them to secure the preferable line of each alternative; and disposing themselves, by the very conditions of equilibrium, into a natural hierarchy, in which the worthiest to live are in the ascendant, and the standard of life is for ever rising. What can look more like the field of a directing Will intent upon the good?
Indeed, the doctrine of "natural selection" owes a large part of its verisimilitude to its skilful imitation of the conditions and method of Free-will;--the indeterminate varieties of possible movement; the presentation of these before a selective power; the determination of the problem by fitness for preference,--all these are features that would belong no less to the administration of a presiding Mind; and that, instead of resorting for the last solution to this high arbitrament, men of science should suppose it to be blindly fought out by the competing creatures, as if they were supreme, is one of the marvels which the professional intellect, whatever its department, more often exhibits than explains.
(3) But, before compet.i.tion can arise, there must be, besides the field of favorable possibility, _desire or instinct_ to lay hold of its opportunities. Here it is that we touch the real dynamics of evolution, which rivalry can only bring to a somewhat higher pitch. Here, it must be admitted, there is at work a genuine principle of progression, the limits of which it is difficult to fix. Every being which is so far individuated as to be a separate centre of sensation, and of the balancing active spontaneity, is endowed with a self-a.s.serting power, capable, on the field already supposed, of becoming a self-advancing power. Under its operation, there is no doubt, increasing differentiation of structure and refinement of function may be expected to emerge; nor is there any reason, except such as the facts of natural history may impose, why this process should be arrested at the boundaries of the species recognized in our present cla.s.sifications.
Possibly, if the slow increments of complexity in the organs of sentient beings on the globe were all mapped out before us, the whole teeming mult.i.tudes now peopling the land, the waters, and the air, might be seen radiating from a common centre in lines of various divergency, and, however remote their existing relations, might group themselves as one family. The speculative critic must here grant without stint all that the scheme of development can ask; and he must leave it to the naturalist and physiologist to break up the picture into sections, if they must. But then, _Why_ must he grant it? Because here, having crossed the margin of animal life, we have, in its germ of feeling and idea, not merely a persistent, but a self-promoting force, able to turn to account whatever is below it; the mental power, even in its rudiments, dominating the vital, and constraining it to weave a finer organism; and, for that end, to amend its application of the chemical forces, and make them better economize their command of mechanical force. Observe, however, that, if here we meet with a truly fruitful agency, capable of accomplishing difficult feats of new combination and delicate equilibrium, we meet with it _here first_; and the moment we fall back from the line of sentient life, and quit the scene of this eager, aggressive, and competing power, we part company with all principle of progress; and consequently lose the tendency to that increasing complexity of structure and subtlety of combination which distinguish the organic from the inorganic compounds. Below the level of life, there is no room for the operation of "natural selection." Its place is there occupied by another principle, for which no such wonders of constructive adaptation can be claimed;--I mean, the dynamic rule of _Action on the line of least resistance_,--a rule, the working of which is quite in the opposite direction. For evidently it goes against the establishment of unstable conditions of equilibrium, and must therefore be the enemy rather than the patron of the complex ingredients, the precarious tissues, and the multiplied relations, of sentient bodies; and on its own theatre must prevent the permanent formation of any but the simpler unions among the material elements. Accordingly, all the great enduring ma.s.ses that form and fill the architecture of inorganic nature,--its limestone and clay, its oxides and salts, its water and air,--are compounds, or a mixture, of few and direct const.i.tuents. And the moment that life retreats and surrenders the organism it has built and held, the same antagonist principle enters on possession, and sets to work to destroy the intricate structure of "proximate principles"
with their "compound radicals." With life and mind therefore there begins, whether by modified affinities or by removal of waste, a _tension_ against these lower powers, carrying the being up to a greater or less height upon the wing; but with life it ends, leaving him then to the perpetual gravitation that completes the loftiest flight upon the ground. Within the limits of her Physics and Chemistry alone, Nature discloses no principle of progression, but only provisions for periodicity; and out of this realm, without further resources, she could never rise.
The downward tendency which sets in with any relaxation of the differentiating forces of life is evinced, not only in the extreme case of dissolution in death, but in the well-known relapse of organs which have been artificially developed into exceptional perfection back into their earlier state, when relieved of the strain and left to themselves.
Under the tension of a directing mental interest, whether supplied by the animal"s own instincts or by the controlling care of man, the organism yields itself to be moulded into more special and highly finished forms; and a series of ascending variations withdraws the nature from its original or first-known type. But wherever we can lift the tension off, the too skilful balance proves unstable, and the law of reversion reinstates the simpler conditions. Only on the higher levels of life do we find a self-working principle of progression: and, till we reach them, development wants its dynamics; and, though there may be evolution, it cannot be self-evolution.
These considerations appear to me to break the back of this formidable argument in the middle; and to show the impossibility of dispensing with the presence of Mind in any scene of ascending being, where the little is becoming great, and the dead alive, and the shapeless beautiful, and the sentient moral, and the moral spiritual. Is it not in truth a strange choice, to set up "_Evolution_," of all things, as the negation of _Purpose_ pre-disposing what is to come? For what does the word mean, and whence is it borrowed? It means, to unfold from within; and it is taken from the history of the seed or embryo of living natures. And what is the seed but a casket of pre-arranged futurities, with its whole contents _prospective_, settled to be what they are by reference to ends still in the distance. If a grain of wheat be folded in a mummy-cloth and put into a catacomb, its germ for growing and its alb.u.men for feeding sleep side by side, and never find each other out. But no sooner does it drop, thousands of years after, on the warm and moistened field, than their mutual play begins, and the plumule rises and lives upon its store till it is able to win its own maintenance from the ground. Not only are its two parts therefore relative to each other, but both are relative to conditions lying in another department of the world,--the clouds, the atmosphere, the soil; in the absence of which they remain barren and functionless:--and _this_, from a Cause that has no sense of relation! The human ear, moulded in the silent matrix of nature, is formed with a nerve susceptible to one influence alone, and that an absent one, the undulations of a medium into which it is not yet born; and, in antic.i.p.ation of the whole musical scale with all its harmonies, furnishes itself with a microscopic grand-piano of three thousand stretched strings, each ready to respond to a different and definite number of aerial vibrations:--and _this_, from a Cause that never meant to bring together the inner organ and the outer medium, now hidden from each other! The eye, shaped in the dark, selects an exclusive sensibility to movements propagated from distant skies; and so weaves its tissues, and disposes its contents, and hangs its curtains, and adjusts its range of motion, as to meet every exigency of refraction and dispersion of the untried light, and be ready to paint in its interior the whole perspective of the undreamed world without:--and _this_, from a Cause incapable of having an end in view! Surely, nothing can be evolved that is not first involved; and if there be any thing which not only carries a definite future in it, but has the whole _rationale_ of its present const.i.tution grounded in that future, it is the embryo, whence, by a strange humor, this denial of final causes has chosen to borrow its name. Not more certainly is the statue that has yet to be, already potentially contained in the pre-conception and sketches of the artist, than the stately tree of the next century in the beech-mast that drops upon the ground; or the whole cla.s.s of Birds, if you give them a common descent, in the eggs to which you choose to go back as first; or the entire system of nature in any germinal cell or other prolific _minimum_ whence you suppose its organism to have been brought out.
Evolution and Prospection are inseparable conceptions. Go back as you will, and try to propel the movement from behind instead of drawing it from before, development in a definite direction towards the realization of a dominant scheme of ascending relations is the sway of an overruling end. To take away the ideal basis of nature, yet construe it by the a.n.a.logy of organic growth, will be for ever felt as a contradiction. It is to put out the eyes of the Past, in order to show us with what secure precision, amid distracting paths, and over chasms bridged by a hair, it selects its way into the Future.
If the Divine Idea will not retire at the bidding of our speculative science, but retains its place, it is natural to ask, what is its relation to the series of so-called Forces in the world? But the question is too large and deep to be answered here. Let it suffice to say, that there need not be any _overruling_ of these forces by the will of G.o.d, so that the supernatural should disturb the natural; or any _supplementing_ of them, so that He should fill up their deficiencies.
Rather is His Thought related to them as, in Man, the mental force is related to all below it; turning them all to account for ideal ends, and sustaining the higher equilibrium which else would lapse into lower forms. More truly, yet equivalently, might we say, these supposed forces, which are only our intellectual interpretation of cla.s.ses of perceived phenomena, are but varieties of His Will, the rules and methods of His determinate and legislated agency, in which, to keep faith with the universe of beings, He abnegates all change; but beyond which, in His transcendent relations with dependent and responsible minds, He has left a glorious margin for the free spiritual life, open to the sacredness of Personal Communion, and the hope of growing similitude.
THE RELATIONS
OF
ETHICS AND THEOLOGY.
By ANDREW P. PEABODY.
My subject is the mutual relations of Ethics and Theology.
Ethics is the science of the Right; and we would first inquire whether this science is a mere department of theology, or whether it has its own independent existence, sphere, and office. Our opening question then is: What is the ground of right? Why are certain acts right, and certain other acts wrong? Are these characteristics incidental, arbitrary, created by circ.u.mstances; variable with time or place, or the intelligence of the agent; contingent on legislation, human or Divine?
Or are they intrinsic, essential, independent of command, even of the Divine command?
We can best answer this question by considering what is implied in existence. Existence implies properties, and properties are fitnesses.
Every object, by virtue of its existence, has its place, purpose, uses, relations. At every moment, each specific object is either in or out of its place, fulfilling or not fulfilling its purpose, subservient to or alienated from its uses, in accordance or out of harmony with its relations, and therefore in a state of fitness or of unfitness as regards other objects. Every object is at every moment under the control of the intelligent will either of the Supreme Being or of some finite being, and is by that will maintained either in or out of its place, purpose, uses, and relations, and thus in a state of fitness or unfitness as regards other objects. Every intelligent being, by virtue of his existence, bears certain definite relations to outward objects, his fellow-beings, and his Creator. At every moment each intelligent being is either faithful or unfaithful to these relations, and thus in a state of fitness or unfitness as regards outward objects and other beings. Thus fitness or unfitness may be predicated at every moment of every object in existence, of the volitions by which each object is controlled, and of every intelligent being with regard to his voluntary position in the universe. Fitness and unfitness are the ultimate ideas that underlie the terms _right_ and _wrong_. These last are metaphorical terms: right, _rectus_, straight, upright, according to rule, and therefore _fit_; wrong, _wrung_, distorted, twisted out of place, abnormal, and therefore _unfit_. We are so const.i.tuted that we cannot help regarding fitness with esteem and complacency; unfitness, with disesteem and disapproval, even though we ourselves create it or impersonate it.
Fitness is the law by which alone we have the knowledge of sin, by which alone we justify or condemn ourselves. Duty has fitness for its only aim and end. To whatever object comes under our control its fit place or use is due; and our perception of that _due_ const.i.tutes our _duty_, and awakens in us a sense of obligation. To ourselves and to other beings and objects, our fidelity to our relations has in it an intrinsic fitness; that fitness is their and our due; and the perception of that _due_ const.i.tutes our _duty_, and awakens in us a sense of obligation.
Conscience is the faculty by which we perceive fitness or unfitness. Its functions are not cognitive, but judicial. Its decisions are based upon our knowledge, real or imagined, from whatever source derived. It judges according to such law and evidence as it has; and its verdict is always, relatively, a genuine _verdict_ (_verum dictum_), though potentially false and wrong by defect of our knowledge,--even as in a court of law an infallibly wise and incorruptibly just judge may p.r.o.nounce an utterly erroneous and unjust decision, if he have before him a false statement of facts, or if the law which he is compelled to administer be unrighteous. What we call the education of conscience is merely the acc.u.mulation and verification of the materials on which conscience is to act; in fine, the discovery of fitnesses.
Permit me to ill.u.s.trate the function of conscience by reference to a question now mooted in our community,--the question as to the moral fitness of the temperate use of fermented liquors. Among the aborigines of Congo and Dahomey, there being no settled industry, no mental activity, and no hygienic knowledge as to either body or mind, it seems fitting, and therefore right, to swallow all the strong drink that they can lay their hands upon; for it is fitted to produce immediate animal enjoyment,--the only good of which they have cognizance. Among civilized men, on the contrary, intoxication is universally known to be opposed to the fitnesses of body and mind, an abuse of alcoholic liquors, and an abuse of the drinker"s own personality; and it is therefore condemned by all consciences, by none more heartily than by those of its victims.
But there still remains open the question as to the moderate use of fermented liquors; and this is not, as it is commonly called, a question of conscience, but a mere question of fact,--of fitness or unfitness.
Says one party, "Alcohol, in every form, and in the least quant.i.ty, is a virulent poison, and therefore unfit for body and mind." Says the other party, "Wine, moderately used, is healthful, salutary, restorative, and therefore fitted to body and mind." Change the opinion of the latter party, their consciences would at once take the other side; and, if they retained in precept and practice their present position, they would retain it self-condemned. Change the opinion of the former party, their consciences would a.s.sume the ground which they now a.s.sail. Demonstrate to the whole community--which physiology may one day do--the precise truth in this matter, there would remain no differences of conscientious judgment, whatever difference of practice might still continue.
From what has been said, it is necessarily inferred that right and wrong are not contingent on the knowledge of the moral agent. Unfitness, misuse, abuse, is none the less wrong because the result of ignorance.
If the result of inevitable ignorance, it does not indeed imply an unfitness or derangement of the agent"s own moral powers. Yet it is none the less out of harmony with the fitness of things. It deprives an object of its due use. It perverts to pernicious results what is salutary in its purpose. It lessens for the agent his aggregate of good and of happiness, and increases for him his aggregate of evil and of misery. In this sense--far more significant than that of arbitrary infliction--the maxim of jurisprudence, _Ignorantia legis neminem excusat_ ("Ignorance of the law excuses no one"), is a fundamental principle of human nature.
We are now prepared to consider the relation of moral distinctions to theology. In the first place, if the ground which I have maintained be tenable, ethical science rests on a basis of its own, wholly independent of theology. Right and wrong, as moral distinctions, in no wise depend on the Divine will and law; nay, not even on the Divine existence. The atheist cannot escape or disown them. They are inseparable from existence. For whatever exists, no matter how it came into being, must needs have its due place, affinities, adaptations, uses; and an intelligent dweller among the things that are cannot but know something of their fitnesses and harmonies, and, so far as he acts upon them, cannot but feel the obligation to recognize their fitnesses, and thus to create or restore their harmonies. Even to the atheist, vice is a violation of fitnesses which he knows or may know. It is opposed to his conscientious judgment. He has with regard to it an inevitable sense of wrong. I can therefore conceive of an atheist"s being--though I should have little hope that he would be--a rigidly virtuous man, and that on principle.
But while atheism does not obliterate moral distinctions, or cancel moral obligation, these distinctions are a refutation of atheism; and from the very fitness of things, which we have seen to be the ground of right, we draw demonstrative evidence of the being, unity, and moral perfectness of the Creator: so that the fundamental truths of theology rest on the same basis with the fundamental principles of ethics. Let me ask you to pursue this argument with me.
Every object, as I have said, must, by virtue of its existence, have its fit place and use; but, in a world that was the dice-work of chance, there would be myriads of probabilities to one against any specific object"s attaining to its fit place and use. This must be the work of will alone. If chance can create, it cannot combine, co-ordinate, organize. If it can throw letters on the ground by the handful, it cannot arrange them into the Iliad or the Paradise Lost. If it can stain the sky or the earth with gorgeous tints, it cannot group them into a Madonna or a landscape. Its universe would be peopled by straylings, full of disjointed halves of pairs,--of objects thrown together in such chaotic heaps that seldom could any one object find its counterpart or subserve its end.
The opposite is the case in the actual world. The first discoveries which the first human being made were of the fitnesses of the objects around him to himself and to one another. With every added year his microcosm enlarged, so that, before he left the world, he had within his cognizance a range of fitnesses and uses sufficient to guide his own activity, and to enable him to predict its results, together with numerous other results not contingent on his own agency. Beyond this microcosm, indeed, lay a vast universe impenetrable to his search, in which he could trace no relations, no filaments of order; in which all seemed to him a medley of chaotic confusion, mutually intruding systems, clashing and jarring forces. On this realm of the unknown man has ever since been making perpetual aggressions; and every step of his progress has been the discovery of fitnesses, relations, reciprocal uses, among the most remote, diverse, and at first sight mutually hostile objects, cla.s.ses, and systems. Natural history, physics, and chemistry, are the science of mutual fitnesses and uses among terrestrial objects.
Astronomy is the science of harmonies among all the worlds,--of fitnesses in their relations and courses to the condition of things in our own planet, approximately to other bodies in the solar system, and, by ascertained a.n.a.logies, to those distant orbs of which we know only that they stand and move ever in their order. Geology is the science of mutual fitnesses in former epochs and conditions of our own planet, and of prospective fitnesses in them to the needs and uses of the present epoch; so that by harmonies which run through unnumbered aeons we are the heirs, and sustain our industries by the usufruct, of the ages, the great moments of whose history we are just beginning to read.
Mathematical science reveals geometrical and numerical fitnesses, proportions, and harmonies, which are traced alike in the courses of the stars and in the collocation of the foliage on the tree, and which promise one day to give us the equation of the curve of the sea-sh.e.l.l, of the contour of the geranium-leaf, of the crest of the wave. There is still around us the realm of the unknown; yet not only are daily aggressions made upon it, but science has advanced so far as to render it certain that there is no department or object in the universe, which is not comprehended in this system of mutual fitnesses, harmonies, and uses.
Now consider the relation of organized being to this system. What is an organ? It is the capacity of perceiving, choosing, and utilizing a fitness. The rootlets of the tree by the river-side perceive the adjacent water, elongate themselves toward it, in a drought make convulsive and successful efforts to reach it; while the corolla of the heliotrope perceives the calorific rays, and turns toward their source in the heavens. The organs of the plant select from the elements around it such substances as are fitted to feed its growth, and appropriate them to its use, even though they be found in infinitesimal proportions, in ma.s.ses of alien substance. In all this there is a semi-self-consciousness, corresponding, not indeed to the action of mind, but to that of the spontaneous life-processes in intelligent beings.
The animal carries us a step higher. His instincts are an unerring knowledge of fitnesses and uses within his sphere. He seeks what is fitted, shuns what is unfitted to his sustenance and growth, is never deceived when left to his own sagacity, and fails only when brought into anomalous relations with the superior knowledge of man. He lives, merely because he is conscious of the fitnesses of nature, and yields up his life to a stronger beast, in accordance with those same fitnesses--beneficent still--by which all realms of nature are kept fully stocked, yet never overstocked, with healthy and rejoicing life.
The fitness which thus pervades and unifies the entire creation, man as an animal perceives, as a living soul recognizes and comprehends; and to his consciousness it is an imperative law, obeyed always with self-approval, disobeyed only with self-condemnation. Of disobedience he alone is capable, yet he but partially. In order to live, he must obey in the vast majority of instances; still more must he obey, if he would have society, physical comfort, transient enjoyment of however low a type; and the most depraved wretch that walks the earth purchases his continued being by a thousand acts of unintended yet inevitable obedience to one of voluntary guilt. Man"s law--the law which, in violating or scorning it, he cannot ignore or evade--is the very same fitness which runs through all inorganic nature, and which the semi-conscious tree, shrub, or flower, the imperfectly self-conscious bird, fish, or beast uniformly obeys.
Now can chance have evolved this universal fitness, and the souls that own their allegiance to it? Is it not the clear self-revelation of a G.o.d, one, all-wise, omnipotent? Has it any other possible solution?
Bears it not, in inscriptions that girdle the universe in letters of light, the declarations of the Hebrew seer, "In the beginning G.o.d created the heavens and the earth," and "The Lord our G.o.d is one Lord"?
I am not disposed to cavil at the argument from design in the structure and adaptations of any one organized being; but immeasurably more cogent is this argument from a consenting universe, in which filaments of fitness, relation, and use cross and recross one another from bound to bound, from sun to star, from star to earth, from the greatest to the least, from the order of the heavens to the zoophyte and the microscopic animalcule. In the human conscience I recognize at once the revelation and the perpetual witness of this all-pervading adaptation, this universal harmony. Conscience is the G.o.d within, not in figure, but in fact. It is the mode in which He who is enshrined in all being, who lives in all life, takes up his abode, holds his perpetual court, erects his eternal judgment-seat, within the human soul.
We pa.s.s to the consideration of the moral attributes of the Creator. I have spoken of moral distinctions as logically separable from and independent of the Divine nature. From this position alone can we establish the holiness, justice, and mercy of the Divine Being. In order to show this, let me ask your attention to the distinction between necessary and contingent truths; that is, between truths which have an intrinsic validity, which always were and cannot by any possibility be otherwise than true, and truths which were made true, which began to be, and the opposite of which might have been.
Mathematical truth is necessary and absolute truth,--not made truth even by the ordinance of the Supreme Being, but truth from the very nature of things, truth co-eternal with G.o.d. Omnipotence cannot make two and two five, or render the sum of the angles of a triangle more or less than two right angles, or construct a square and a circle of both equal perimeter and equal surface. In our conception of mathematical truth we are conscious that it must have been true before all worlds, and would be equally true had no substance that could be measured or calculated ever been created. Every mathematical proposition is an inherent property or condition of the infinite s.p.a.ce identical with the Divine omnipresence, or of the infinite duration identical with the Divine eternity.
Moral truth is of the same order, not contingent, but necessary, absolute. This is distinctly declared in one of the most sublime bursts of inspiration in the Hebrew Scriptures. If you will trace in the book of Proverbs the traits of Wisdom as personified throughout the first nine chapters, you will find that it is no other than a name for the inherent, immutable, eternal distinction between right and wrong. It is this Wisdom, who, so far from confessing herself as created, ordained, or subject, proclaims, "Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was.... When he prepared the heavens, I was there.... When he appointed the foundations of the earth, then I was by him, AS ONE BROUGHT UP WITH HIM; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him."
It is only on the principle thus vividly set forth that we can affirm moral attributes of the Supreme Being. When we say that He is perfectly just, pure, holy, beneficent, we recognize a standard of judgment logically independent of his nature. We mean that the law of fitness, which He promulgates in the human conscience, and which is our only standard of right, is the self-elected law of his own being. Could we conceive of omnipotence and omniscience devoid of moral attributes, the decrees and acts of such a being would not be necessarily right.
Omnipotence cannot make the wrong right, or the right wrong; nor can it indue either with the tendencies of the other, so that the wrong, that is, the unfitting, should produce ultimate good, or the right, that is, the fitting, should produce ultimate evil. G.o.d"s decrees and acts are not right because they are his; but they are his because they are right.
On no other ground, as I have said, can we affirm moral attributes of him. If his arbitrary sovereignty can indue with the characteristics of right that which has no intrinsic fitness, beauty, or utility, then the affirmation that He is holy, or just, or good, is simply equivalent to the absurd maxim of human despotism, "The king can do no wrong." It is only when we conceive of the abstract right as existing of necessity from a past eternity, and as a category of the Divine free-will and perfect prescience, in which the creation had its birth and its archetypes, that holiness, justice, and goodness, as applied to the Divine character, have any meaning.
We thus see that our ethical conceptions underlie our theology, and that, however explicit the words of revelation may be as to the Divine nature, he alone can understand them, who recognizes in his own heart the absoluteness and immutableness of moral distinctions. How many Christians have there been in every age since the primitive, who, in using the terms _just_ and _holy_ with reference to the Almighty, have employed them in an entirely different sense from that in which they are applied to human conduct, and with regard to supposed dispositions and acts, which in man they would call unjust and cruel! And this simply because they have attached no determinate meaning, but only a conventional and variable sense to ethical terms, and have imagined that arbitrary power could reverse moral distinctions, or that G.o.d could impose on man one law of right, and himself recognize another.
We have thus seen that theology is indebted to the fundamental principles of ethics for the most luculent demonstration of the being, omnipotence, and omniscience of G.o.d, and for the clear conception of his moral attributes.
We will now consider the reciprocal obligations of ethics to theology; and, in the first place, to Natural Religion. Pure theism attaches the Divine sanction to the verdicts of conscience, makes them the will, the voice of G.o.d, enforces them by his authority, and elevates the conception of virtue by establishing a close kindred between the virtuous man and the Ruler of the universe. And this is much, but not for many. It has raised some elect spirits to a degree of excellence which might put Christians to shame. It has conjoined virtue with lofty devotion and earnest piety in a Socrates and a Marcus Antoninus, and refined it into a rare purity, chasteness, and tenderness of spirit in a Plutarch and an Epictetus. But on the ma.s.ses of mankind, on the worldly and care-c.u.mbered, on the unphilosophic and illiterate, it has exerted little or no influence. Moreover, while among the virtuous men of pre-Christian times and beyond the light of the Jewish revelation, we recognize some few of surpa.s.sing excellence, we find not a single ethical system, or body of moral precepts, which does not contain limitations, deficiencies, or enormities utterly revolting to the moral sense of Christendom. Thus Plato had lofty conceptions of virtue, but there are directions in which his precepts give free license to l.u.s.t and cruelty; and even Socrates sanctioned by his unrebuking intimacy and fondness the leaders and ornaments of the most dissolute society in Athens.
The acme of extra-Christian piety, and consequently of moral excellence, is presented in the writings and lives of the later Stoics, whose incorruptible virtue affords the only relief to our weariness and disgust, as we trace the history of Rome through the profligacy of the declining commonwealth and the depravity of the empire. We find here the Simeons and Annas of the Pagan world, who, though with the fleshly arm they embraced not the Son of G.o.d, needed but to see him to adore and love him. Yet in nothing was Stoicism more faulty than in its exalted sense of virtue. For it had no charity for sin, no tolerance even for the inferior forms of goodness. It was the ethics of the unfallen. It proffered no hope of forgiveness; it let down no helping hand from the heavens; it uttered no voice from the eternal silence; it opened no Father"s house and arms for the penitent. In Moore"s "Lalla Rookh" the Peri, promised forgiveness and readmission to Paradise on condition of bringing to the eternal gate the gift most dear to heaven, returns in vain with the last drop of the patriot"s blood. Again, when she brings the expiring sigh of the most faithful human love, the crystal bar moves not. Once more she seeks the earth, and bears back the tear of penitence that has fallen from a G.o.dless wretch melted into contrition by a child"s prayer; and for this alone the golden hinges turn. Stoicism could boast in rich profusion the patriot"s blood, could feed the torch of a love stronger than death; but it could not start the penitential tear,--it failed of the one gift of earth for which there is joy in heaven.
Let us rise, then, from the purest philosophy of the old world to Christianity in its ethical relations and offices.
Christianity, as a revelation, covers the entire field of human duty, and gives the knowledge of many fitnesses, recognized when once made known, but undiscoverable by man"s unaided insight. The two truths which lie at the foundation of Christian ethics are human brotherhood and the immortality of the soul.
1. _Human brotherhood._ The visible differences of race, color, culture, religion, customs, are in themselves dissociating influences. Universal charity is hardly possible while these differences occupy the foreground. Slavery was a natural and congenial inst.i.tution under Pagan auspices, and the idea of a missionary enterprise transcends the broadest philanthropy of heathenism. We find indeed in the ancient moralists, especially in the writings of Cicero and Seneca, many precepts of humanity toward slaves, but no clear recognition of the injustice inseparable from the state of slavery; nor have we in all ancient literature, unless it be in Seneca (in whom such sentiments might have had more or less directly a Christian origin), a single expression of a fellowship broad enough to embrace all diversities of condition, much less of race.[16] Even Socrates, while he expects himself to enter at death into the society of good men, and says that those who live philosophically will approach the nature of the G.o.ds, expresses the belief that worthy, industrious men who are not philosophers will, on dying, migrate into the bodies of ants, bees, or other hard-working members of the lower orders of animals.