[7] So that what had been thought to be a papal letter turns out to be a lay homily, showing that a layman could preach as well as a pope in the second century of our era. This suggests the notorious fact that unordained ministers are equally, if not more, successful in awakening ethical and religious emotion than priests and bishops. Nay, women like Catherine of Siena could hold Europe, its kings, and popes spell-bound, when "mere men" were powerless. Has any one in this generation read more powerful appeals to the religious sense than the fragments of the sermons of Dinah Morris in Adam Bede, more thrilling descriptions of an unavailing remorse than in the sermon on the text, "Keep innocency, and take heed to the thing which is right, for this shall bring a man peace at the last," which is preached by the agonised minister in The Silence of Dean Maitland?

[8] The recent papal rescript on Anglican ordination makes it the test of the comparative value of the rival "orders".

[9] Tertullian in the De Corona distinctly declares that though "it is only from the hands of our president we receive the Eucharist, if there be an emergency, a layman may celebrate as well as a bishop". I am indebted to the late Dr. Edwin Hatch for the historical evidence above adduced as to the church practice prevalent in the earliest centuries of Christianity. I would recommend interested readers to consult his Bampton Lectures, delivered in 1882.



VIII.

PRAYER IN THE ETHICAL CHURCH.

The most important consequence of the new faith that religion is rooted and grounded not in doctrine but in morality, is the belief that the religious instinct grows with the growth and advancement of the moral sense. The old conception that everything religious was revealed once for all 1900 years ago, that it is impious to add to, or modify, the heavenly communication then made, we find ourselves obliged to repudiate in terms. And, hence, we have no creed or articles. We never know when, owing to advancing knowledge, we may be compelled to discard them. The desperate straits to which the Churches and their professional apologists are reduced in their endeavours to reconcile antiquarian statements in Scriptures and theologies with the authenticated facts of mental and physical science, are not such as to encourage us to attempt a definition of the Indefinable, or the comprehension of the Infinite within the exiguous limits of human thought and speech. We are too young by some centuries to so much as think about the formulation of a doctrinal code.

The moral sense, it is abundantly obvious, is growing from day to day. The community herein is the counterpart of the individual. And hence, the moral and religious observances of to-day may become obsolete to-morrow. "The altar-cloths of one generation become the door-mats of the next." Hence, I am full of confidence that though everything may be against us now, one thing is on our side—that is, the future. We saw an illustration of this truth in the history of the relations between the priest and the prophet; we shall witness a further instance of its workings in the history of prayer.

What is the attitude of a human and ethical religion towards that characteristic manifestation of piety which we call prayer? Doubtless its views will be found to diverge notably from those which were prevalent in other days when scientific knowledge was imperfect, and conceptions of man and the Infinite even more inadequate than they admittedly are at present. The origin of prayer is, like the origin of all things terrestrial, extremely humble. When primitive man found himself face to face with the more terrible of the natural phenomena—terrors and portents which he was wholly unable to explain—his only resource was to ascribe their appearance to the agency of beings like himself, though, of course, immeasurably more powerful. These phenomena being often attended by the destruction of the results of laborious industry, and even of human life itself, it became a matter of urgency to devise means whereby the anger of the preternatural powers might be appeased, and a cessation of the successive scourges effected. It was then that man began to offer up entreaty, supplication, petition and prayer to the dread divinities in whose power it was to behave so malevolently towards man and his possessions.

That this account of the matter is not fanciful, the reports of travellers and missionaries in savage lands make certain; and as the inhabitants thereof now are, we certainly once were in our ancestors who dwelt in these northern islands, in the days after the cessation of the glacial periods. There is not one shred of scientific evidence available which would help us to the comforting belief that, however it may be with the Matabele or the Tonga Islanders, the ancestors of Christian England were anything different. That, then, which is called the instinct or habit of prayer, had its origin in the ignorance and superstition of an age which knew nothing of the inviolable reign of law throughout the infinities of the Divine creation, in an age whose religious conceptions were as gross as their scientific ideas were absurd.

Now, the unscientific and unphilosophical taint, which marked the earliest heavenward cries of terrified man, has clung to the petitions which he offers up at this hour for material favours and blessings. At the close of a prolonged drought, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York compose a prayer for rain, and as a drought cannot last for ever, rain does eventually come, and the same dignitaries then order a prayer to be offered up in thanksgiving. But does any one really suppose that the natural order of the phenomena has been altered at the request of the clergy by an Almighty mind? It were preposterous, grotesque and irreverent, in the highest degree to think so. And the proof that it is preposterous is seen in the fact that prayers are no longer offered up for the advent or cessation of the effects of phenomena whose causes have been scientifically determined. Thus, in mediaeval days, man placed bells high in the steeples of his churches to deafen the demons who caused the storms of thunder and lightning which destroyed his property. At this day one may read the inscriptions on the bells which testify to the belief of the time. But as soon as the lightning rod was discovered by Franklin, and its absolute ability to conduct the electric current to the soil, bells were no longer requisitioned as antidotes to storms, and prayers and litanies ceased to be sung to petition the Divine clemency against the effects of the weather. In the same way an outbreak of cholera or diphtheria once sent people in their thousands to the churches and chapels; now it sends them to the drains, and while prayers proved but a poor prophylactic against epidemics, the most pious credulity now places unbounded faith in a sanitary system approved by a first-class surveyor. Can there be any possible doubt that, when the laws of meteorology are as well known as those which govern the tides or the thunderbolts, the archbishops will cease to order any more prayers for the purpose of controlling the elements?

Then, there is another aspect of petitionary prayer which demands a passing notice. It actually represents the Supreme Being as an individual who will interfere with what are manifestly natural laws to suit the convenience or even the whim of the votary; and worse than that, that the course of events will be so ordered as to meet the requirements of the individual supplicant, to the exclusion of the needs, the convenience or circumstances, of numberless other human beings who may be seriously incommoded, possibly even wronged, if the first votary's supplications are granted. It is of little avail to have recourse to the mechanical theory that infinite power is capable of so adjusting matters as to satisfy everybody. These are words and phrases more sonorous than satisfactory. When, for instance, war breaks out between two Christian powers, the Almighty is at once petitioned to crown both combatants with victory, and that done, victory is always assumed by the conqueror to mean that the Divine blessing has been with him to the exclusion of his adversary. But the remarkable fact to the impartial observer uniformly is, that victory always rests with those who have made the best preparations, conducted the campaign in the most skilful manner, and fought with the greatest determination, or as Napoleon curtly put it, that as far as he could see, Providence was always on the side of the strongest battalions.

I recently heard read a lady's letter in which she poured forth her most fervent gratitude to heaven because her husband had been elected to a certain influential position over the heads of seventy competitors. Unless sixty-nine other equally desirable posts were magically created by Divine power, it seems difficult to understand, on the supposition that the election was the arbitrary act of God, how the claims of all were satisfied in this individual instance. The truth is that the prayer of petition ought instantly to cease as infantine, irrational, and irreverent. The serious man cannot bring himself to offer up vocal prayers for temporary or spiritual benefits, which are manifestly attainable by the capacity of man's natural powers, or which cannot be heard without a selfish indifference to the equal rights and claims of others. And, therefore, no petitionary prayers find a place in the service of the ethical Church. The God whom we recognise is the "Mind who meditates in beauty and speaks only in law"; the "beneficent Unity," the "beautiful Necessity"; the law which is not intelligent, but Intelligence. It were as impious to pray for an infraction of the natural laws of Divine ordaining as it were foolish to wish that the law of gravitation were suspended to gratify a passing need or whim. In the Talmud there is a prophetic intimation of the religion which asks no favours, but prays by living the moral life. It foretells the day when prayer shall cease in the Jewish Church, and thanksgiving only be henceforth heard. This exactly expresses what we feel should be the attitude of the reverent man in the silence of the Great Presence—his life an attestation of his recognition of what he owes to the Being whose nature he shares.

But, it will doubtless be urged, prayers are answered even when offered for purely temporary blessings, or at any rate, numberless men and women contend that they have been so answered in their own experience. Members of the more emotional forms of Nonconformity are especially emphatic in their testimony to the efficacy of prayer, though I doubt not that their more educated ministers would hesitate to commit themselves to the belief in its more extreme forms. Mr. Armstrong certainly disavows it for the Unitarian body, a Church always to be held in reverence as having done more to rationalise religion in this country and America than any other agency we could indicate. But what are we to say to such testimonies? This, that the prayers have been answered by the supplicants themselves, when even, indeed, we have not to deal with a matter of mere coincidence. But, I would expressly guard against the inference being drawn, that I question the Divine Personality. I lay down no dogmatic statements as to the efficacy of vocal prayers. What I do say is, that all I know of God as revealed in nature and law forbids me to entertain the notion that the order he has seen fit to establish is to be capriciously altered at the request of any of his creatures. It is not irreverence, but a sense of reverence which prohibits me from believing that the Being whose presence and power are revealed in the least as in the greatest of the phenomena of nature, is open to arbitrarily interfere with the established course of things because an individual or a score of individuals wish it.

But what of the alleged answers to prayers which are held to establish its efficacy? I unhesitatingly ascribe the results to increased activity, more resolute determination, on the part of the natural will of the votary. Let a man, for example, become convinced that the crisis of his life has arrived, that a certain policy must be at once adopted, a certain post secured, or an examination passed, and the natural bending of the energies in a given direction redoubles his ordinary powers. If a post has to be obtained and influence is necessary, he prosecutes a more resolute canvass; if an examination must be passed, a degree secured, he reads with increased application, and, as a matter of course, he succeeds. If, in the meantime, he has had recourse to prayer, his womankind, or possibly he himself, will ascribe the entire results to that agency, while the results are altogether due to his own persistent efforts. He has answered his own prayers. Does the most pious individual believe, if all efforts were remitted, or no exceptional energy put forth by the individual in question, but the whole matter left entirely "in the hands of God," as the phrase runs, that any successful results would have ensued? Not one. And hence those axioms which the common-sense, even of the most credulous, adopts as true, namely, that, "Heaven only helps those who help themselves," or, as another pious recommendation goes, "Pray as though everything depended on God, act as though everything depended on yourself". What wonder, when this advice is followed out to the letter, that we are overwhelmed with assurances that prayers have been answered, when a man is appointed to a sinecure or has obtained a life-pension? What one would like to ask is this: Do these credulous people suppose that the event would have been otherwise, had the young candidate not prayed? Do they suppose that the Deity would positively have snatched away the prize at the last moment, and given it to another, simply because he had not been consulted in the matter? If they do, then we must confess our ideals of the Divine are very different from theirs.

Powers are given to man for one purpose—that he may use them—and to us it is wholly irrational to suggest that what is given with one hand is to be taken away with the other, because the formality of supplication is not employed when anything of moment is to be put into execution. The notion that intelligence was put in man only to be shattered, a will given him only to be forthwith distorted by passion or blinded by ignorance, and that "there is no health in us" unless we abase ourselves to the dust and proclaim our utter worthlessness, is to men and women of this time wholly inconceivable. That nothing ethically valuable can be accomplished except after instant prayer, or after copious outpourings of Divine grace, that the curse of absolute sterility is upon all our attempts to conform to the dictates of the moral law, unless God be with us in prayer, is henceforth an impossible theology.

Tell us that the man and the world are dependent at every instant of time on the sustaining and prolonged creative act of the Infinite Being, and we are one with you, nay, we probably go beyond you. "He is not very far from any one of us" means more to the scientific philosopher than to the mediaeval theologian. But spare us the repetition of those stale legends that man was made and unmade in the space of a few moments, and that ever since the manducation of the forbidden fruit his powers have withered, and that there is no remedy available for their recovery but incessant prayer and sacramental ordinances. Our reading of history is exactly the reverse. With the progress of time we discern the advance of man, and with the diminution of sacerdotalism and a mechanical religion we think we note an accelerated progress; that in those countries in which men are nobly self-reliant, and look within instead of without for the source of their inspiration and power, the course of moral life takes a higher turn; that in proportion as men are true to themselves and the powers of their own being, they ascend in the scale of moral perfection. We think that to teach a man to look without him for assistance is to cripple half his powers, to make him unlearn the grand gospel of self-reliance, to loosen the fibres of his moral being, and thereby to check his individual progress.[1]

It must have been some such conviction as this which led the late Master of Balliol to say that the longer he lived the less he prayed, but the more he thought. Precisely; it is not irreverence but a deepening reverence for the Divine powers within us, which shames us into trusting them when anything great is to be done. What god are you praying to, we ask in dismay, when you lift up your hands and your eyes, or turn to east or west, or kneel or lie? Is there any god in the wastes of infinity, in a sunstar, a swarm of worlds, who is not in that miraculous soul of yours? Is there aught anywhere greater than a son of God? Is a stone, a star, a heaven studded with infinite glories, a greater place than your eternal soul? Then look within you. Speak with yourself, commune with your own heart, summon up the irresistible energies of your nature and nothing shall be impossible to you. This is "the prayer of faith" that never shall, that never can, go unanswered, the concentration of the myriad energies of our souls to meet an attack, to prosecute an enterprise, to overcome obstacles, aye, to make our lives sublime with a heroism that men shall call divine. "The less I pray, but the more I think!" Aye, it is not prayer in the old sense, the cry of the soul that believes itself craven, weak and wanton, because it has always been told so by blind guides; it is not this aimless outpouring of energy directed towards a Divinity in the skies, when the very Life and Mind Divine are the endowments of every rational creature, that has made man great; but thought, concentration, the serious, resolute application of the powers that man does possess, the bending of the iron energies to the accomplishment of the individual task—this it is which has "conquered kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained the promises," riveted man's dominion over nature and made him what he was intended to be—the crown and glory of the universe.

And at this point we may make a further suggestion towards explaining the genesis and the continued maintenance of vocal prayer as a part of religious worship. The practice would seem to be due not merely to ignorance or disregard of the obvious law of cause and effect, by which material phenomena are necessarily controlled, but to less worthy conceptions of the Divine Mind governing all things. The Deity of the Christian and Mohammedan worlds is a Being eternally dissevered from a world which he has by an omnipotent effort evoked from nothingness—a conception now regarded as impossible. Consequently, while God is in his high heaven, surrounded by his court, the world holds on its courses, and is periodically corrected by special interferences, generally said to be due to the intervention of prayer. Thus, the grand historical evolution, which caused the Roman Empire to appear at the close of the three great Eastern Empires, and that monument of human genius itself to ultimately collapse and make way for the nations which now constitute modern Europe, in no wise strikes Augustine, or any orthodox teacher, even of to-day, as the outcome of purely natural forces and influences—the action and reaction of powers wholly human—but as part of a Divine scheme, which was foreordained for the purpose of founding the Christian Church. This, in briefest outline, is the famous argument of "The City of God," the first Christian attempt at a philosophy of history. Everything mapped out by Divine ordinance, and men moved like puppets to accomplish the scheme. Attila the Hun appears at the gates of Rome, in the fifth century, and threatens to sack it, and thereby delay the execution of the plan, and prayer averts the disaster. In all moments of danger, threatened catastrophe, public or private, the doctrine inculcated was recurrence by prayer to the external Deity, who would so modify things by his omnipotent power, as to reconcile the interests of all concerned. I do not think it can be said that such a frame of mind is distinctive of the Protestant of to-day, certainly not of the instructed Protestant, who may acquiesce in the vicarious repetition of certain formulas by his clergyman on Sunday morning, but would certainly not in practice endorse the theory that Divine intervention might be called in at any moment by prayer. But it is the attitude of the Roman and Greek Churches, as it is of the Mohammedan religion, and doubtless of the less educated in the sects of Nonconformity.

Now this conception of Divinity is Oriental, whence indeed our current religion arose. It represents the Supreme Being as an aged man clothed in flowing robes, his hair "white as wool," seated on a golden throne and ceaselessly adored by myriads of voices who sing day and night, Holy, Holy, Holy, or Hallelujah. It is the conception of a Divinity who existed an eternity in the solitude of his own kingdom, amid silences unbroken by any voice, who suddenly comes to the determination to create worlds and man out of nothing, and orders men to pray and to praise him. He is angry if they do not; he is "a jealous God," and will punish those who offend him "to the fourth generation". He is sorry he has made man and proceeds to destroy him, and then subsequently regrets that decision. In a word, the God of the Hebrew tradition, whom the Christian Church still popularly preaches, is in reality a magnified copy of an Oriental Sultan, whose tastes and proclivities are such as the Arabian Nights has familiarised us with—greedy of praise, adulation and homage, cruel and vindictive to those who refuse their worship and adoration.

Now this Orientalism is no longer tolerable in the eyes of thoughtful people. We cannot conceive that the Infinite Being should find pleasure in hearing all day and night how wonderful he is, and how miraculous his works. It is not easily intelligible how services and litanies of "praise" can be acceptable to the Creator when they would certainly be nauseous to the best men on earth. Jesus openly reproved one who praised him as "the good master". "Call no man good," he said: "God only, he is good." Wellington's reply to the famous individual who claimed to have "saved the life of the saviour of Europe" is too well known to repeat. The truth is, that these prayers and chants are offered up not for God's sake, but for ours. They are a relief to the heart surcharged with religious emotion, the outcome of the vehement impulse of the soul towards communion with the Life of its life. Speaking reverently, prayer and praise are like a lover's protestations, which are not an act of adulation at the shrine of his mistress, but an irresistible unburdening of the greatness of the emotion that fills his heart. But no lover could speak from his soul in a public place, in the sight or hearing of other men. Solitude, silence, "the element in which everything truly great is made," is needed above all else, that the soul may find adequate utterance for thoughts so sublime.

And, therefore, Jesus warned man to pray in his own chamber, in secret, the lonely soul bared in the presence of the Alone, "to the Father which seeth in secret". Hence no sound of spoken prayer is heard at our services. The deed is too solemn. Nevertheless, the whole object of the series of acts which are done is to suggest, to create, first thought, and then emotion, after the manner of the Hebrew psalmist, who sang "In the midst of my thoughts shall a fire flame forth". The hymns are chosen with the idea, not of praising the Almighty, who needs no such praises, but of filling our souls with a sense of the unearthly beauty of the moral life, of the life perseveringly devoted to high ideals of self-culture and human service, and thereby lifting our souls to thoughts of that fair world of the Ideal in which such conceptions are eternally realised. Likewise the readings set before us the burning words of first one and then another prophetical soul to deepen in our own the conviction of the seriousness of life, its far-reaching responsibilities, the realisation of the boundless capacities for good or evil which man has within him, and the utter worthlessness of all things on this earth compared with character, integrity, the perfection of the will by conformity with the moral law.

In the midst of such influences by which we are surrounded during the hour, all too brief, which we devote to the world of the Ideal on one day out of seven,[2] it is hoped that thoughts will sometimes burn in many hearts, that reverence, awe, fear, regrets for the past, fervent resolutions for the future, hope, aspiration, and love; in a word, all the sanctified emotions of the human heart, which together melt into the supreme emotion of religion, will sometimes arise to sternly rebuke the selfish life, shame us out of our moral lethargy, and comfort those whose one solace is that their honour is intact, though misfortune has stricken them in mind or body, or robbed them of the goods of earth, or the cheer and comfort of friendship and of love. It is hoped that the influence of what is said and done then will endure beyond the hour of our meeting, and fill some other moments of our lives when we are, as we should be, at seasons, alone—alone with ourselves, and therefore alone with God, in solemn communion with the Soul who is the soul in us, and who asks for no articulate voice of prayer, but only that our life in every word and deed should be worthy of our exalted nature. Life is prayer. Conduct is sacrifice. Morality is religion.

When I am stretched beneath the pines, When the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools and the learned clan; For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet? —EMERSON.



[1] See the concluding words of Emerson's essay on "Self-Reliance".

[2] The Ethical Religion Society meets weekly on Sunday mornings.



IX.

THE ETHICAL ASPECT OF DEATH.

There is a common but none the less erroneous impression amongst those who walk and worship in the old ways, that the newer forms in which the religious sentiment expresses itself are insensible to the more solemn aspects of life, its sins and sorrows, its disappointments and disillusionment, and most of all to the final catastrophe which men call death. Ours, they would impress upon us, is a fair weather creed, good enough when all goes well, but painfully inadequate in the storm and stress which the inevitable trials of existence inflict upon us. Sorrow, they impressively warn us, is ever the rock upon which all such systems must split.

Now, to say nothing of the obvious reflection that what we now call the old, that is, the orthodox ways, are in reality exceedingly new, and that even the "chosen people," or their immediate predecessors, were left wholly destitute by the Deity of any such comforts as are held so indispensably necessary to a well-ordered existence—to say nothing of this, the argument, if worth anything, would go to show that the religion which offered most consolation was the true one; and since no traveller ever returns from that bourne, so near and yet so far, to advise us of the truth or falsity of these ultra-mundane comforts, we seem compelled to hesitate more than ever before we forsake that sturdy and plain-spoken guide called reason, whom we as confidently follow in the region of religion as in the business of everyday life. The Society for Psychical Research has some remarkable evidence to offer, apparently establishing to physical demonstration that the man [Transcriber's note: the man?] in us does not die but lives, and communicates with his fellows after the final fact of this earth called death. But, however this may be, and we are not called upon now to offer any opinion on these matters, the so-called revelations are wonderfully silent on those topics which sentimentarians apparently erect into the supreme test of a religion's truth or falsity. As far as one may judge, the departed appear to be occupied with nothing more sublime than filled their thoughts during this present sphere; in fact, as is well known, they often appear to exhibit a painful declension in moral life and to have lost immeasurably in character by their passage from this stage of being to the unknown land beyond the grave.

Reason, therefore, being in no position to settle the rival claims of the physical delights of the Mohammedan paradise, the comparatively insipid ideal of the Apocalypse, and "the nameless quiet" of the Buddhist Nirvana, feels compelled to pass them all by and to hold that of the invisible universe we are painfully ignorant, and that the only deathless reality is the will of man conformed to the great obedience of the moral law. It believes that the test of a system is not what it promises but what it performs, and we may take it as an absolutely certain thing that if any of the "systems" of our day secured palpably higher ethical results amongst its adherents, the world would flock to that Church forthwith. As Augustine says, "no one loves the devil," which, being ethically interpreted, means no one wants to be bad, and if any ecclesiastical corporation, by an appeal to history or to present and urgent visible facts, could justify its claims to successfully strengthen man's oftentimes rebel will in the pursuit of the great ideal, men would follow it to the world's end, such is the power of truth and goodness over the human heart. But the truth is, no such agency has ever been discovered. In the sixteenth century the Council of Trent was summoned "to reform the Church in its head and members," a plain confession of ethical failure. Do men suppose that Luther, or a whole synod of monks, could have torn Europe in pieces in about a score of years, when Anglicans have been debating auricular confession and the eastward position for the last fifty, unless the Continent had undergone a moral debacle? Luther's paltry diatribes about indulgences would have left men as cold as stone; it was the fervour of the ethical enthusiast thundering against immoralities in high places which rent the Christian Church in twain by the most violent and widespread schism it had ever known.

No, the test of a thing is not what it promises but what it does. Exitus acta probat. And if the enlightened men and women of our time are disposed less and less to rely upon creeds as a basis of religious communion, it is because they see that whatever the future life may have in store for mankind, they cannot better prepare for it than by living worthily in this.

But as evidence that they who follow the ethical obedience are in no wise insensible to the sterner aspects of life, we shall now pass on to say what in our judgment should be the religious attitude of man face to face with the inevitable certainty of death.

If we pause one moment to reflect on the physical aspect of death, it would only be to remark that it is as natural an occurrence as birth. In fact, as is obvious to the most superficial mind, birth and death are inextricably interwoven. The great life of the worlds is so one, so powerful, so omnipresent, that nothing can so utterly pass away as to give birth to nothing—no, not even the cremated remains which are blown to the four winds. The theory that death is a non-natural occurrence arbitrarily inflicted by the Deity in his anger at Adam's disobedience is no longer taught even in the nursery, because aeons upon aeons before man's advent hither death reigned supreme over sentient existence, and the bones of the doomed are in our museums to attest the fact. Nay, we have recovered the ice-embedded body of the mammoth, its stomach filled with undigested food, food it ate as far back as the glacial period, by which it was overtaken and frozen in its ice grave 200,000 years ago. The Roman sentinel, overwhelmed where he stood by the lava of Vesuvius, defiant of disaster in his inflexible devotion to duty, is not a surer proof of the natural fact of death than the mammoth that died in Alaska before man's appearance on the earth. The law of growth is the law of death. Life begins, it increases, it reaches its meridian, it begins to waver and then steadily to decline, till at length the bodily frame dissolves, and then—

That which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.

It is so with all things, from a fungus to a giant of the forest, from a stone to a cluster of stars whose light takes 4000 years to reach us. It is only a question of time when our own sun shall set in impotence and rise again no more. All things are passing away, everything is unstable, change is at the heart of all. How solemn, how true the words, whose melancholy haunts the more the memory dwells on them: "this world passeth away and the desire thereof, but he that doeth the Divine will endureth for ever"! As we said, the one changeless thing, beyond the doom of sun-stars and swarms of worlds, is the will of man nobly submissive to the Great Obedience of the Supreme Law—the Law of Justice and of Truth. That alone can never die.

Let us turn now to the ethical and religious aspect of that which we have seen to be in itself so natural, so inevitable.

In the first place, we conceive that it in no wise interrupts the progress of the individual life. Certainly the conditions under which existence maintains itself in that other state must be far other than those which obtain here, for there man is destitute of his bodily environment. The conditions of such a life are wholly unpicturable, wholly unimaginable, but not inconceivable. These are high matters, like the truths of sublimest philosophy, wherein it is impious to intrude with so inferior a faculty as imagination, and demand that an image or representation of a bodiless existence be presented to it. What picture does man make for himself of the force of gravitation, nay of the force which drives the crocuses out of the soil in spring? It is enough to know that the force is there; it is enough to know that a man's body is not his self. Surely every one who reflects must be conscious that his body is his, just like his clothes; and therefore not he, any more than the raiment wherewith he is covered. Foolish, then, is it to ask for pictures like children; let us be satisfied to know with the reason, which we alone of all earth-born creatures possess, that the body is not we but ours, and that we are not mere ephemerals, but are "going on and still to be".

Now these words of Tennyson exactly express our ethical teaching, that man is "ever going on and still to be," and that death, so far from putting a stop to the eternal progress, is but a stage, an incident in the journey, possibly—for we know so little of these matters—a very insignificant one. The theory commonly inculcated, certainly commonly held, is that the fact of death ushers in a perfect transformation scene, more wonderful than anything thought of or devised by man, nor should we be accounted irreverent did we describe the language of the book of Revelation as pantomimic in the exuberance of its splendour. All sorrow is supposed to cease as if by magic, the sun shines perpetually, it is eternal noon; the home of the blessed is a wondrous city, built four-square, whose streets are of pure gold, whose rivers are of crystal, and whose foundations are laid in precious stones. Sweetest songs of earth resound in the heavenly courts; yea, even musical instruments are there, and life would appear to be one prolonged religious service. Into this celestial blessedness departed souls enter new-born, and take their allotted places once and for ever; they never apparently move from them; they grow no better; there is no room for further development, nor possibility of deterioration, but a fixed and immovable moral status is, to all appearances, arbitrarily imposed upon them for evermore. The impression one gathers is, therefore, of a large and glorified amphitheatre, tiers rising above tiers into infinity, seats along them, each of which is tenanted by an individual elect spirit whose merits are precisely proportioned to its place.

Now that existence prolonged, I will not say into eternity, but into a week is the very reverse of inspiring. Of course, we are aware that Dean Farrar has as effectually explained away the Orientalisms of the Christian heaven as the Paganisms of the orthodox hell; we are ready to believe that the Apocalypse—which is held now not to be a Christian book at all, but a Jewish composition, edited and amended by a Christian hand—sets forth only figures and types of the great supernal blessedness. This we know, but our difficulty is not with the form but with the content, that is, with that which these hyperboles symbolise. It is fairly inconceivable to us that a matter which, according to the Churches, merely concerns the body, soon to be resolved into its component gases, should exercise so miraculous a transformation on the soul, or the real man. He did not die; his body did, and yet they would have us believe that that mere physical occurrence, that catastrophe of flesh and blood, means the subsequent and eternal stagnation of all psychical life; that men either go forthwith into scenes with which ninety out of a hundred would be wholly unfamiliar, or are thrust headlong into a subterraneous locality called Sheol, or the grave in Hebrew, the English equivalent of which is hell, the only difference being that, whereas the good can grow no better, the wicked can and do grow worse.

Doubtless, I shall be reminded that these teachings do not occur explicitly in the Thirty-nine Articles, any Church Confession, or a Papal Decree. That may very well be so, as regards them all, but there can be no doubt that the main assertion is accepted as dogmatically true by all Christian Churches—namely, that a wonderful and searching change does occur at the moment of death, whereby "the time of probation," as it is called, comes to an end, and all possibility of further "merit before God," or, as we should say, of ethical advancement, relentlessly cut off. To quote a letter of Cardinal Newman's, written in 1872 to the Rev. W. Probyn-Nevins, and published subsequently by him—in the Nineteenth Century of May, 1893—"The great truth is that death ends our probation, and settles our state for ever, that there is no passing over the great gulf". Amidst much that is uncertain, for instance, as to whether real devils are in hell, a real fire, and whether it be bright or dark, whether the appalling torments are ever mitigated, say on certain feasts of the Christian Church, such as Christmas Day and Easter, or whether eventually the pains ultimately die completely away and thus usher in that "happiness in hell" in which Mr. Mivart is, or was, so deeply interested five years ago—amidst all these highly debatable points, Newman pronounces one thing certain, that "death ends our probation," that "there is no passing over the great gulf".

Now, whence did he learn this strange teaching? How is he dogmatically certain of that one thing, while all the rest is in a haze? From stray texts, such as, "Whether the tree falleth to the north or the south, in whatsoever place it shall fall, there shall it lie"; or, from the parable of wise and foolish virgins, some of whom happened to be asleep, and awoke at the critical hour to find that during the long night-watch for the bridegroom their store of oil had become exhausted? Surely tropes and parables are a highly insecure foundation whereon to build such a momentous teaching. Certainly, it is gravely questionable whether any direct statement in the Hebrew or Christian writings can be adduced to support the common notion that bodily dissolution is a spiritual reagent, and ipso facto seals the destiny of a spiritual essence. Vast numbers of even Anglicans repudiate the notion in the name of theology and religion. We repudiate it in the name of reason, which was put into us for no other purpose, we know well, than to judge not only the statements Churches put forth, but the sacred documents on which they build them. We repudiate the notion in the name of that reason which shows us that the Infinite Mind, whose light and life we share, was millions of years preparing this earth for man's habitation, aeons of time so fashioning the course of things that a body might be prepared in which that mind which we call soul might energise; aeons of time so ordering the course of events that man should emerge one day from the savagedom and animalism of the past to enter upon the path of a progress which we believe to be endless. I say the reason which demonstrates this to us with a certitude which not the most intolerant bigotry dares to question to-day, tells us also that it is wholly preposterous that all that is left to man wherein to work out his own individual moral progress is the brief span of threescore years and ten, that after these days "few and evil," the chapter is closed, the book sealed for ever, and the status of man inexorably and unalterably determined.

I frankly avow I would as soon believe the Buddhist Jataka as such a wholly irrational account of the ways of God with man. Just think of the palaeolithic man, who had no glimmering of moral discernment; think of the cave-men whose skulls we possess in scores, that bear eloquent testimony to their deplorable degradation—think of such creatures dying, and their mental and moral status stereotyped for ever. "Death ends our probation!" A precious revelation this! Where and what are these men now? When Newman visited Greece in the thirties what impressed him, or rather oppressed him, as he stood above the glorious bay of Salamis, over which once rode the hundreds and thousands of galleys and triremes which transported the unnumbered hosts of Xerxes to Greece, was the awful thought that all those million men, including the proud monarch who reviewed them from the spot on which he then stood, were "still alive". Alive! And where were they, and what were they doing? I cannot conceive anything more appallingly depressing, nay, maddening, than to believe that all that heavenly orchestration is going on while Xerxes is possibly in an Apocalyptic hell, and his hosts either bearing him company or wandering aimlessly about in the same stupid, stolid, unmoral, unspiritual condition in which they were the moment they were engulfed in those blue waters. Why, Nero fiddling while Rome was burning is a pleasant memory compared with it!

But we have not reached the end yet. "Deep calleth unto deep," and the extreme deductions from the perverse notion that the act of dying is the signal for the infliction of an everlasting mental and moral sterility, finally convince us of the groundlessness of this feckless theology. According to these deductions of which I speak, one grievous offence against Divine or ecclesiastical law—such, for instance, as grave scandal or the omission to attend at mass—is sufficient to condemn a man to eternal reprobation. If it be supposed that death cuts the offender off before he has the opportunity to make confession of his fault or otherwise express his sorrow, we are soberly asked to believe that the horrors of Tartarus are his eternal doom. Surely the mediaeval authorities who formulated this precious teaching must have been bereft of the most elementary notions of ethical law. One act, or a dozen such acts, do not stamp the delinquent as habitually bad, still less as one irredeemably wicked. Habits are only generated by a constant repetition of corresponding acts, just as good habits are formed with difficulty, and only after persevering and resolute attention on the part of our wills. So, also, an evil disposition is only the outcome of a deliberate surrender of our moral nature to perverse inclinations.

Now, the hell dogma implies that the so-called "lost" are so irredeemably depraved as to be incapable of as much as a good thought; they are described in the graphic language of Aquinas and Suarez as "obstinated in evil," "confirmed immutably in malice"; in fact, absolutely diabolised. And all this for missing attendance at mass on one of the Church's festivals! "Paris vaut bien une messe," said Henri Quatre. It would be well worth attending a mass to escape such a destiny! "There must be something rotten in the state of Denmark," where such horrors go stalking about unreproved. As though infinite justice could be conceivably associated with such a transaction as the branding of a man as an eternal criminal, blasting every moral sentiment he ever possessed, arbitrarily reducing him to a condition infinitely beneath the bestial—and all because he had broken a Church law in neglecting to attend Divine service. Many of us incline to believe that our own punishments, inflicted in the name of law, often tend rather to degrade the prisoner than to improve him. At any rate, not a man in the land but believes that no punishment should be administered except with a view of amending what is amiss in the culprit's character. But contrast this moral attitude of ours with the method of procedure deliberately ascribed to Deity, and let us ask ourselves whether the God of some men is not worse than their devil? No such scruples, apparently, affect that supreme tribunal, but if bodily death by accident overtake the erring man, then, forthwith, and as if by magic, the spiritual in him is rendered fiendish, and henceforth and for ever he is fit for nothing but that genial society and those edifying occupations which are described in the cheerful manuals known as, A Glimpse of Hell, and Hell open to Christians.

Those who witnessed the recent revival of Hamlet—a revival which it would appear is destined to be historic—cannot have failed to notice how the great master of song permits himself to express the perverse conception that death is synonymous with everlasting moral stagnation. Hamlet steals into his murderous uncle's apartment, sword in hand, but discovering the criminal upon his knees, forbears to strike then, lest somehow his devotions should save him from his doom. No, he will wait until the miserable creature is off his guard, so that death may overtake him at a moment when no prayer or cry for mercy is possible. As though a momentary act could undo the mischief of years! As though a man is in himself any different after years, of crime because he utters a sudden cry for mercy! And, as though by killing him at an opportune moment, Hamlet could damn his soul for ever! And it will be noted, moreover, that the ghost emphasises the treachery of which he has been the victim, in that he was sent into eternity "unhouseled, unaneled," as though momentary acts can make up for years wasted and misspent. As well might one scatter one's fortune in luxury and riotous living, and resolve to win it all back in a moment, as misuse these glorious powers of mind and will we bear within us, turn them to evil, steep them in iniquity, and then think to suddenly turn and by a single act bend them successfully to the arduous service of the good. This is stern teaching, but it is the truth; and a mercy would it be, a mercy would it have been for us all in the days of our youth, if instead of the too frequent insistence on the doctrine of the forgiveness of sin, the doctrine of compensation and retribution, as taught by Ralph Waldo Emerson, had been instilled into our hearts. "Ye shall not go forth until ye have paid the last farthing," is the teaching. Dare to break those solemn laws, to pervert these mysterious powers we possess, Amen, Amen, we cannot escape retribution; we cannot go forth until we pay the last farthing.

And this last thought prepares for the statement of our view of the attitude a rational religion takes up in the solemn presence of death. "Stoicism shall not be more exigent," said Emerson of the new Church. We take no lax view of life and its responsibilities, but we refuse to magnify death into the one thing worth living for or thinking about. Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat. We do not set about digging our graves, we do not carry our coffins about with us, still less do we sleep in them—a gruesome practice which has attracted some fanatical folk. To us, death is a fact, not an effect, an incident as natural as birth, in no wise affecting the real, the spiritual, man. We therefore utterly disavow all sympathy with the groundless assumption that a magical change comes over the psychical powers of a man at that supreme moment, whereby he can do no more good, but may harden into a more hopeless reprobate. The notion that a judgment of the soul takes place, as in the hall of Osiris, of Egyptian mythology, at the instant of dissolution, whereby the destiny of the individual is sealed for ever, we repudiate in terms. Man is judged, not then, but at every moment of his life. "The moral laws vindicate themselves" without the intervention of any external tribunal. And, therefore, the eternal progress of the man in us is maintained uninterruptedly across the gloomy chasm of death, under other circumstances, no doubt, but still it is the same ceaseless approach towards the Infinite Ideal, the same untiring journey along "the everlasting way". All are in that "way," we may be sure, even those whom we foolishly deem hopelessly reprobate. Something can be made of those failures of men, for

After last returns the first, though a wide compass round be fetched; What began best can't end worst, nor what God once blest prove accurst.

But such men, the Neros, Caligulas, the Wainwrights and Palmers of all ages and nations, are but a fractional, an infinitesimal, element in the great human family. Sanabiles fecit nationes super terram. "He hath made earth's peoples to be healed;" they shall redeem themselves one day. The moment of awakening comes sooner or later to all; there is an unextinguished capacity for good under the sores and scars of the most dissolute life, and we may believe that awakening comes when the spirit enters new-born, as it were, into a world where the illusions of the flesh, the deceptions of the sense, obtain no more.

There are no final, irredeemable failures. The Divine in man must emerge one day; its glory pierce through the gloom of his sin and shame, and transfigure him anew after the beautiful and pathetic image of the holy Christ in the legend,[1] whose closing days on earth, they say, were illumined by one supreme wonder—his face calm and blissful, glowing radiant like the glory of a setting sun, his very raiment turned white like the driven snow. A beauteous imagery! But there was no external transfiguration. It was but a type of the radiant purity within; a witness to the "beauty of holiness". It was an emblem of what all may be in some far-off day, when the lowliest amongst us learns to follow the Christs, the blessed company of all elect souls, in the way which begins and ends in the eternal righteousness.



[1] In the same way the Buddha was "transfigured". See Doane's Bible Myths.



X.

THE ETHICAL ASPECT OF WAR.

An idealism such as that which substantially identifies religion with morality, is suitably occupied, as occasion offers, in the discussion of those questions of public interest which have an immediate bearing on the well-being of communities. In this respect it departs markedly from the attitude taken up by those Churches, which afford little or no guidance on such matters, probably because it is felt by priests and prelates that their functions are rather of an ultra-mundane character, and that their most important duty is to prepare humanity for the enjoyment of another life after this unsatisfactory stage has passed. Hence the sharp line of distinction they draw between the Church and the world, the one the kingdom of saints, the other "lying" hopelessly "in wickedness". Hence, again, their distinction of "holy days" and secular days, Sunday being devoted to religious exercises, while the remaining six days are presumably to be occupied in wholly secular enterprise. The distinction affects our very attire. Religious rites being of a totally different character from the duties we accomplish during the week, there is nothing for it but to don "our blacks," to quote the language of a current popular play, and enact subsequently the ceremonial described as the church parade. It is the same feeling which causes the average Englishman to lapse into a sort of funereal solemnity at the very mention of the word religion, or of anything allied to it. The divorce of religion from ordinary life could not be more plainly indicated than by such phenomena as we have noticed.

It is, of course, one of the main objects of our movement to show the falsity of this distinction between the Church and the world, between religion and morality. We submit that it is not the institution of the founder of Christianity, but of his later followers. The Church of Christ meant the assemblage of men as men, as citizens. The entry thereto was not by the magical washing away of an imaginary birth-sin, but through the natural and beautiful sacrament of human birth. The world is the Church, and the Church is the world, and the "living stones" out of which "the kingdom of heaven" is built here on earth are precisely the stones out of which the civil commonwealth arises. There is nothing secular, nothing profane, but from first to last the life of every man, from the miraculous moment of his conception to the closing of his eyes in bodily death, and beyond death, through the perfecting of him by an ever-increasing approximation to the standard of all moral perfection, everything is religious, sacred, divine. The Church is nothing but an ethical society, co-extensive with the race, and it is for the realisation of this ideal that the ethical movement is working, to show men that religion is morality, is life.

This preamble, then, may serve as a justification for introducing here such a subject as war. The Christian Churches, with one single exception, that of the Quakers, vouchsafe no guidance whatsoever on the moral aspects of this question. On the contrary, they rather suggest that it is a highly moral proceeding, for their ministers pray to their Deity for the success of their country's arms, and sing their Te Deums over the mangled corpses of the vanquished. An archbishop in Spain offered to guarantee the harmlessness of every American bullet, and unctuous prayers were reported in the newspapers of last spring as emanating from Transatlantic pulpits. Indeed, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine what the supreme court of their heaven must be, the perplexities of patron saints and angels, and ultimately of their Deity himself, in face of the immoral mingling of bloodshed and religion which went on during the recent Spanish-American war. But the Churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, see none of the impiety which is so revolting to moral men and women, who to their lasting advantage have emancipated themselves from ecclesiastical guidance. On the contrary, the public in America which looks for moral inspiration to clergymen, is fed upon this sort of doggerel:—

Strike for the Anglo-Saxon! Strike for the newer day! O strike for heart and strike for brain, And sweep the beast away.

And let no feeble pity Your sacred arms restrain; This is God's mighty moment To make an end of Spain!

It is our purpose to endeavour to make an end of the immoral inspiration behind this profane piffle by speaking out our mind on the subject of war as viewed from the standpoint of ethics.

By war we understand the appeal to might to decide a question of right between two or more civilised peoples, and of war thus defined I say that it is the great surviving infamy[1] of our unmoral past, the persistence in us of animal instincts, of the ape and tiger which should long since have died out. That man, in the childhood of the world, should have decided questions of justice by an appeal to brute force is only what we should expect. The laws of life, which are laws of development, necessarily presuppose the imperfect before the perfect, the animal as a preparation for the human. As Immanuel Kant puts it in a sentence which flashes the light over the whole panorama of existence, "the cosmic evolution of Nature is continued in the historic development of humanity and completed in the moral perfection of the individual". This is the synthesis of the greatest of the masters of modern philosophy. The non-moral cosmos makes way for a process of moral human development, which is consummated in the perfection of each individual man. Here is the Alpha and Omega of all existence.

Now, warfare, or the invocation of might to settle right, was as natural an accompaniment of earlier conditions as theft or cannibalism. But is it not obvious that with the disappearance of other unmoral ideals of the past, we have a right to expect, and to demand, that the last and crowning infamy of wholesale and systematised manslaughter, called war, should cease also? The humanity which has got rid of slavery in all civilised countries, which has now through England's instrumentality succeeded in destroying its last strongholds on the Upper Nile, will also ultimately get rid of war. The manhood of the race, which in this country has long since put down the immorality of duelling as a means of settling private differences, will indubitably assert itself elsewhere to the final overthrow of warfare as a means of deciding public disputes. The great reform is in the air. It is everywhere except in the pulpits of Christendom and the "yellow press"—the jingo journalism of the world. We all experienced the growing sense of the unsuitability of war to our modern ideals during the earlier months of this year while matters were reaching the acute stage between Spain and the United States. The best Press in this country reflected the common sentiment, that the whole proceeding is savage, barbarous, inhuman, and therefore utterly unworthy of rational men. I believe it is this growing horror of legalised carnage which prevented the late President of the United States' ill-judged message leading to any rupture between our two countries. It was felt that Englishmen and Americans deliberately setting about the destruction of each other's property and taking one another's lives would amount to a scandal positively unthinkable—a fratricidal horror to be prevented at all and any costs. I am not sure that the same opinion was so universal on the other side, though undoubtedly it existed amongst the best men of the country.

America has at present two difficulties to contend with. First, she is a young nation, and young people are fond of trying experiments. And, next, they are burdened, perhaps I should say cursed, with the most violent, anti-cosmopolitan Press anywhere existent. A set of fire-eaters appear to control the New York section, of it, and in the judgment of many sober-minded Americans, with some of whom I have myself spoken, the late war was wholly due to their ceaseless, incessant clamour, and that, given a few months' patience, the Cuban people might have by plebiscite been able to settle their own destiny. The starving peasants concentrated in the towns were the alleged object of the hurry. Long months passed before any succour reached them. If they were veritably starving, surely every man of them must have died long before an American army of liberation could have been effectually landed for their relief. The sympathies of this country were not with Spain, for it is by her misrule, her acknowledged misgovernment of her colonists, that all the mischief has been brought about. One regrets to have to say it, but Spain has been strangled in the coils of her own superstition, and progress for her ceased to be when she elected to live by the light of ideals and principles which are henceforth impossible. It is the frantic endeavour of France and Italy to escape Spain's doom which explains their incessant strife between Church and State. The enlightened Frenchman or Italian has a horror of sacerdotalism as the beginning of the end, always and everywhere, and as the only religion in those countries is sacerdotal, they are, alas, in their national capacity, bereft of any religious guidance or inspiration. We are, therefore, unable to see anything in Spain's present position, but the working of the inevitable law of Compensation, which is sovereign over States as over individuals, though there are many of us who believe that the avowed humanitarian objects of the American Government might have been attained by peaceful methods, had not the country been goaded into a fever of restlessness and impatience by that deplorable phenomenon of democratic institutions known as the "yellow press".

At all events, the feeling universal in this country in the early spring of this year, showed how far and fast we are travelling along the road which will lead us to the final abandonment of warfare as unworthy of rational men. Doubtless we are in advance of other nations in this respect. But that is only what history leads us to expect. We were the first to free slaves, abandon duelling, reform prisons and criminal law, and erect humanitarianism into a veritable religion. And have we not taught representative institutions to the world? We are evidently destined, I believe, to lead the way towards the final surrender of war. We keep no standing army. We shall never again enter on a war of conquest or aggression. Our naval armaments and such military power as we possess are notoriously created and maintained for defensive purposes only. Brigandage and pillage we have most certainly been guilty of in past times, but such a policy could not now survive the day it was mooted. We are in the last trenches, preparatory to finally abandoning the field.

But here it will be urged that there are circumstances which render war absolutely inevitable, such for instance as an unjust aggression upon the territory we own, or even live upon; an attack on the national honour, or a reckless disregard of rights sanctioned by treaty or international usage. Were arbitration in such cases even admissible, we may conceive the would-be aggressor unwilling to have recourse to it, or possibly to abide by its award. What is a government to do then?

Now, arguments and pleas such as these are valid enough against a proposal of universal disarmament to be compulsorily carried out in six months or a year's time, but they in no wise, I submit, constitute an inseparable bar to the realisation of "that sweet dream," as Immanuel Kant called it, of a "perpetual peace". The ideal is none the less real because it cannot be at once put into practice; and had we to wait another whole century, it would still be the duty of our movement to stand by Kant and boldly set up the grand conception of an universal peace as the goal for which all that is best among men is inevitably making. Still, I trust that in our enthusiasm for ethic and for the ideal of its master, we have not lost our heads and betaken ourselves to Utopian impracticabilities. No ethical man could think of fixing a limit within which a national disarmament must take place, and the swords of the world beaten into ploughshares, any more than he could name the date at which the millennium is to be introduced. But this implies no insuperable, or rather, no serious, obstacle to our belief that the ideal of universal arbitration, through the medium of a congress of all nations, must in the future, near or distant, be realised, because it is an ideal which is alone worthy of rational men. And, moreover, the essential rationality of the ideal gives us a right to demand that it should be recognised by all public men, by our legislators who represent us, the Press which aims at reflecting the life and thought of the age, the professors and masters who have the care of our youth, and above all by fathers and mothers to whom tender children are confided, and those men who assume the responsibility of speaking to their generation in the sacred name of religion.

I say the ideal gives us the right to demand its recognition by men in such positions of responsibility, and implies a corresponding obligation on their part, no less than on our own, to labour seriously for its speedy realisation. We are, every one of us, agreed that war is essentially a cruel, barbarous, horribly vindictive and degrading method of serving the interests of the sublimest thing known to man, namely, justice. Wanton warfare, merely for the sake of fighting or killing, or openly avowed oppression, can scarcely be acknowledged now even by the most cynical of statesmen. The public conscience is become too sensitive for that, so that some question of justice, or the semblance of it, must be invoked in order to justify its unspeakable barbarities. But what an outrage, the deliberate destruction of hundreds of thousands of innocent men—men who in their simplicity or ignorance are positively unable to even dimly comprehend why they are being lashed into a blind fury and goaded to the madness of steeping their hands in each other's blood—what barbarity, what savagery to invoke as the minister, as the vindicator of justice! Let us keep our eyes steadily fixed on this central, essential wickedness of the whole business, that it dares to offer its polluted services in the interests of justice and thereby to profane the holiest thing we know.

Remembering this, therefore, let us ask ourselves what help we get in our endeavours to effect its overthrow from the recognised ministers of religion. Why, it is notorious that what has long been clear to philosophers like Immanuel Kant, and philanthropists among humble laymen, has not yet dawned upon the imagination or touched the consciences of bishops or priests. Popes, themselves, have created military orders, "knights and commanders of Christ and the Cross," whose profession it was to destroy life in the name of the most merciful, pitiful man known to us Western people. Popes have led military expeditions, conducted campaigns and crossed swords with the most daring, though the impetuous fisherman, founder of their line, was bidden by Christ to put up his sword into its scabbard, "for all they that take up the sword shall perish by it". Can any man point to one single condemnation of war as immoral, irrational, opposed to the law of their Deity or of Christ, in all the collection of councils, bulls and canonical legislation? And can any man quote to us the charge of an archbishop or bishop in the Anglican Communion or the Greek Communion wherein he has raised his voice against the barbaric survival of war and condemned it in the name of his Saviour Jesus, who spoke of the meek, the mourners, the merciful, the pure in heart, the hungerers and thirsters after righteousness, or, as we say, the ethical enthusiasts, as his followers?

Why, religion, in the hands of bishops and priests, has allowed a trail of blood to be drawn across the path of the ages. I say nothing of religious persecution and the millions who have gone to torture and to doom for erroneous beliefs. I confine myself entirely, to field warfare. During a period of 674 years, from 1141-1815, it is an historical fact that this country and France were at war for no less than 266 years, or considerably more than one-third, and we must remember that up to the Reformation both countries were under the direct guidance, one might almost say the exclusive inspiration, of the Catholic Christianity of the day. But where does history record the act of any religious leaders of those times denouncing war as contrary to the gospel of Christ and of reason alike? We are able to quote numbers of despised heretics who had grasped the truth and emphatically condemned the brutal institution. Thus Erasmus: "They who defend war must defend the dispositions which lead to war, and these dispositions are absolutely forbidden by the gospel". Wickliffe, "the morning star of the Reformation in England," thought it "utterly unlawful," according to Priestley; and as Southey writes in his History of Brazil: "There is but one community of Christians in the world, and that unhappily of all communities one of the smallest, enlightened enough to understand the prohibition of war by the Divine Master in its plain literal and undeniable sense and conscientious enough to obey it, subduing the very instinct of nature to obedience".

These facts are noteworthy because they show that had the official churches—the Roman, Greek and Anglican—been true to their charge and commission from their founder; had they been unworldly enough to defy the world and denounce its barbarous practices, we might have been far nearer Kant's "sweet dream" of universal peace. But the churches, as churches, have done very little for the cause of the "Prince of peace," and now the world itself has outgrown their moral standard and looks to them for guidance and inspiration no more. By the light of reason alone, by the inspiration we gather from the grands esprits of the race, above all by the teaching of Immanuel Kant in his beautiful treatise on "Perpetual Peace," we intend to do what in us lies to put down this surviving, crowning infamy of war, the very thought of which brutalises the mind, outrages its humanitarian instincts, and degrades the ideals whereby we desire to live.

But, surely, it will be urged, we cannot refuse to acknowledge undoubted benefits, both public and individual, which war has conferred in the past. It has welded nomad peoples into nations, bred courage, devotion, loyalty, unselfishness, self-sacrifice even to death in the hearts of those who have nobly borne their part therein. Is not the soldier hero, the military chieftain, the idol of all mankind?

Doubtless he is, and unquestionably through the instrumentality of war great services have been rendered to the communities of peoples in the past and noble individual traits of character created. It is an axiom with us that the universe is so wondrously ordered that out of the worst things a soul of good may and does emerge, and so goodly is creation that its very evils become a source wherefrom good may arise.

What was good shall be good with for evil so much good more.

Thus, for example, the young lieutenant ordered to sink a hulk across the bay of Santiago, and his handful of companions have, by exposing themselves to imminent risk of an awful death, deeply stirred the feelings of their fellow-countrymen and filled us all with a sense of admiration at the heroism which can contemn danger and death in the execution of duty or the quest of glory. But we must ask whether humanity is in need of such exhibitions of bravery, whether there are not other fields of danger which offer tasks equally arduous and difficult of accomplishment? We are not insensible to the claims of military or naval heroism, but I confess I see much more to admire in Father Damien voluntarily surrendering himself to the slow and loathsome martyrdom of Molokai, more in the self-devotion of our "white slaves," as they must, alas! be called, who toil all the day and a deal of the night in a heavy, noisome, almost disease-laden atmosphere in the disgracefully crowded slums of our great cities, and all to earn a few pence wherewith to buy just enough bread to keep body and soul together in themselves and their children. Think of the matchbox-makers, who turn out a gross for a few halfpence, out of which they must supply some of their own materials. Think of the seamstresses, the shirt-makers and tailors' assistants in the veritable dens of East London, who by slaving for fifteen hours out of twenty-four can earn eighteenpence a day, out of which four or five shillings must be paid weekly for rent. Think of these mean, squalid surroundings in which a life of positively ceaseless toil must be lived, the patience and long-suffering with which it is endured, the silent martyrdom of monotonous, unrelieved existence prolonged over long years. Think of it, I say, and compare it with the intoxication of the battle-field, the cavalry charge, the roar of cannon and musketry, the rapid movements and counter-movements, the exultation which the sight of numberless men produces, grim, deadly determination on their faces, the thought of glory, the hope of renown, the dash of a few minutes, the stroke perhaps of a few seconds, the wild burst of untamed, savage human nature temporarily released from the restraint of reason! What cannot, what shall not man under such circumstances accomplish? Yes, we are not insensible to deeds of immortal daring, of courage, that must live for ever; nor to the memory of Leonidas and his Spartans, of the deathless glories of Thermopylae, of the unbroken chain of chivalric deeds from the days of ancient Greece to "the thin red line" that broke the fiercest charge, and the handful of Englishmen that shot away their last cartridge and then stood to die with their country's anthem on their lips—we are not insensible to all this, but we say the day for it is past and gone, and the heroism of the battle-field must be consecrated anew to the service of peace and the poor. The millions on millions we are spending on those majestic engines of destruction, those ships of ours that bastion the brine for England, what could they not do for the moralisation of the poor and outcast at our very doors in this city! Why, in three years that inferno of the East End, that foul, reeking, pestilential nest of tenements, unfit for even animal habitation, could be swept clean away and human homes erected which, to put it on the lowest grounds, would positively pay a dividend on the capital outlay, as has been convincingly proved over and over again.

"How long, O Lord, how long," we exclaim with the prophet of old, shall men be consumed with this ignoble fever, this war-madness which degrades the combatants far more than it exalts them, which senselessly destroys valuable property, scatters ruin broadcast, paralyses industry, robs the poor of all the bread of life, fills the land with mourning and desolation, with widows and orphans?—war, which we learnt from wild beasts, our ancestors, which cannot therefore determine a question of justice, which makes the wrong triumph as often as the right, which degrades all that touch it by isolating them for months, for years perhaps, from civilised life, which demoralises the victors, embitters the vanquished, and, by creating strife, perpetuates the possibilities of renewed strife—war, which at this moment keeps Europe in the condition of an armed camp, millions of men leading comparatively idle lives, with long hours on their hands which they cannot fill, with the inevitable results, the nauseating record of filth, disease and abominations too utterly loathsome even to think about—war, which is the curse of the poor and unfortunate, consuming the energies of men and the material means whereby their unhappy lot might be alleviated—war, the hard, cruel, relentless, inexorable monster of unregenerate man's creation—we, since no pope, bishop or priest will do it—we execrate it in the name of all we hold holiest, in the name of reason, morality and religion, and we pledge ourselves so to act, privately and politically, as to promote such measures—a federation of all English-speaking nations of the earth, if that will serve the purpose, or any other method equally or more serviceable—as will finally exorcise this last of the besetting demons of humanity, and fulfil thereby the "sweet dream" of our master and inspirer, Immanuel Kant.

Ring out the old, ring in the new; * * * * * Ring out the false, ring in the true; Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old; Ring in the thousand years of peace.



[1] Since these words were written the Daily Chronicle of 10th September, 1898, quotes them as having been used by a distinguished living English general.



XI.

THE ETHICS OF MARRIAGE.

There is probably no department of morality in which a metaphysic of ethic is more conspicuously needed than in that which concerns marriage. The insurrection of woman against the disabilities to which her sex was in the past unjustly subjected, due perhaps more to custom and tradition than to the statute law of the land, has developed in more recent times into a serious attack on the central institution of civilised life, on that fundamental fact of Nature on which posterity and society repose. We have had an outbreak in literature culminating in the giddy glory of the "hill-top novel," with its heroine "who did," and in America what is tautologically described as the "Free-Love Society" was founded to propagate the truth of what Rousseau euphemistically describes as mariage apres la nature. For all that, however, one seems to hear less of the "hill-top" species, and possibly—with the problem play, without which no theatre was complete a couple of years ago—it may be fading into the mist of the past. It is with communities, we may take it, as with individuals. There are moments when, as it has been said, "every one is an atheist, from archbishops downwards," when a sense of the purposelessness and futility of perpetual combat seizes the most ardent. These are the dark hours when attacks are planned and delivered against the most sacred institutions, when people are not at their best, but are restless, rebellious and impatient of restraint; for nations like individuals can go mad. Then it is that the wide-awake novelist and playwright see their opportunity, and the temporary success of the sex-play or the breezy romance is the reflection of the thoughts—none of the best—that are for the moment flitting through men's feverish minds. But we soon return to saner moments; our moral sense resumes its normal sway, and sex-plays and romances fade away into oblivion.

Now, it need not be said that the contention on behalf of the rights of woman is heartily espoused by a movement which bases itself on the conception of reason and justice as the root facts of existence. There was no justice in the "subjection of woman," and we hold that those opportunities of learning which a cultured age opens up to man should likewise be at the disposal of his sister; that that freedom, which is the birthright of the man, to expand the energies, mental and moral, of his being to their fullest extent and in whatever calling, should also be acknowledged to be the right of woman. The constitutional agitation for the recognition of her rights has met with notable success, and it has the fullest support of the ethical Church; but we believe that that agitation has been pushed too far by a very small and insignificant minority, and made to cover an attack on the institution of matrimony, which her wisest friends see could only end in the ultimate downfall of woman herself. Such an agitation, such an attack, must encounter the most resolute opposition from a body which derives all its idealism and inspiration from a life motived, not by the sense, but by reason. Its leaders in America have pronounced decisively against any tampering with the natural sacrament of marriage, and where they detect tendencies—as unfortunately they do in many of the States of their Union—to further loosen its bonds, they, with all the influence at their command, endeavour to strengthen them.

Let me now proceed to justify this attitude of the ethical communion.

We do not base our action on considerations of authority such as move the Churches of Christendom. It is not because Jesus assisted at a wedding breakfast and performed an alleged wonder; not because the Apostle Paul calls marriage "a great mystery in Christ and the Church," but because both Jesus and Paul and the Churches express a truth of nature itself, that the union of man and woman is not, and cannot be, the herding of animals; that the bestowal of the body cannot but be the outward symbol of an invisible bond which is the very soul and life of the contract. We thus go behind all Churches and apostles and ascend to the very roots of Nature herself, and discern in the golden glory wherewith she surrounds the ideal marriage the significance of her intentions in its regard—that it is her true and real Sacrament, that her sons and daughters are themselves its ministers, for they alone are kindled with the heavenly fire; that not the Church, not the priest nor ritual celebrates it, but these twain made one by that same

Love which moves the earth and heavens and all the stars.

That man has so regarded marriage as a sacred and sacramental fact is authenticated by history in an abundantly available form. No doubt, ages must have passed before he emerged from his animalesque condition and abandoned polygynous and polygamous manners, the marriage by capture and purchase, which were the stages which mark the historical evolution of the contract. But ultimately these barbaric stages passed away, and we discover in the Teutonic ancestors of Britain that monogamy which was Nature's ideal from the first. Just as man was potential in the primordial slime, so was the marriage of Robert Browning a possibility in the earliest union of scarce-emancipated man and woman. What the institution could become, what it has become, shows what was the intent of Nature from the beginning. In the nobler days of Rome, under the republic and early empire, the same lofty conception animated her best sons. It was the decay of reverence for the sacred bond, the era when a woman's years were told by the number of her divorces, which called forth the solemn warnings of her moralist poets and philosophers, and ultimately brought about the emasculation of the nation's manhood and the downfall of the empire. We have not the remotest doubt but that a similar contempt in modern Europe for Nature's ordinance would involve us in the same catastrophe. A low estimate of marriage means contempt of woman; the contempt of woman means her degradation from her position at the side of man as his counsellor and his friend to that of his plaything, the instrument of his pleasure; that again means the enthronement of licence and licentiousness; that, the softening of the brain power of the manhood of the race, leading to degeneracy, imbecility, and ultimate extinction. We need no ecclesiastical organisation to tell us these things, nor threaten us with direst penalties here or hereafter. These are the penalties of nature's own aboriginal enactment. As it was in the beginning, so it is now, and so it shall be unto all time. No wonder St. Paul called marriage "a great mystery"!

Now, though it be true that Nature's ideal is that which we call monogamy, it may be perfectly true that we have not yet reached that level of morality which makes that condition universally practicable. That wisest of teachers, Jesus of Nazara, expressly recognised this distinction when he told the Jews of his own day that their lack of ethical enthusiasm, "their hardness of heart," as he accurately expressed it, the emptiness of their souls of everything save narrow nationalism and religious formalism—an emptiness by no means peculiar to them—was the sole reason which justified a departure from Nature's great ideal. "In the beginning it was not so," he declared, but "Moses gave ye permission to write out a bill of divorce". That one exception may be necessary still, but, let it be understood, it is not the ideal, and every one knows it, faithful and faithless alike, they whose honour is intact and they whose souls are smirched. It is an instinct in the human heart—no one can deny it—that love is for evermore. Shakespeare is right, "Marriage is a world-without-end bargain," for love is felt to be eternal. The old Roman digest interprets nature with philosophic accuracy when it describes marriage as "Conjunctio maris et feminae et consortium omnis vitae, divini et humani juris communicatio". "The union of man and woman and the companionship of all life, the sharing of right, human and divine." That is the majestic conception of matrimony as it took shape in the brain of those Roman masters of jurisprudence to whom we owe the law which is the nerve of civilisation. They learnt it from that ethical religion which we, too, reverently follow, from that morality which they found in things, in themselves, in Nature's plain teaching that the union of man and his wife was a sacramental fact and therefore indelible.

Are we asked for further evidence of this position? We see it as a law of our rational being, which refuses to believe that Nature makes no other provision for us than she does for the animals; that their instinctive and impulsive association should be the norm of man's intercourse with woman. Nay, we see Nature herself as she advances to the higher stages of animal existence anticipating, in a sense, that ideal which was only to be fully realised in man. The lion, the king of beasts, as he is called, tends towards that ideal, and the elephant is believed to be even more strictly monogamous. The loves of birds, of doves and pigeons, are too well known to need more than a passing mention, and the grief they experience on the death of their partner not unfrequently ends in a broken heart. But how much better is man than many animals, and what is merely instinctive in them shall not he consciously obey as his acknowledged law of life?

We may see the truth also in Nature's ordinance, that man's offspring must be educated in order to reach maturity; that training of a serious character is indispensably necessary to the development of the powers latent in them. But how is such training possible, except through the unceasing watchfulness of the parents'? People here and there darken counsel with the suggestion that the State should assume such responsibilities. Was there ever such a suggestion? As a matter of mere finance, we are told by the Vice-President of the Council, that the assumption of the quite partial responsibility for the education of the children now taught in the elementary schools of the denominational bodies of the country, would mean an addition of some millions yearly to the rates. The education rate is high enough in all conscience, but where the "hill-top" theory would land us one can scarcely conjecture. So urgent is this consideration of the claim which offspring has upon parent, so imperative the need that children should be fittingly instructed so as to be worthy citizens of a great community, that we find writers like Karl Pearson, in his Ethic of Free Thought,[1] consistently excepting from the operation of the free-love gospel those unions which have resulted in the procreation of children. Mr. Pearson being of the school of those who deride marriage as "the tomb of love," "the source of the stupidity and ugliness of the human race," his admissions as to the necessity of maintaining some element of permanence in the contract, if only for the sake of children, is well worthy of our attention. It shows how grounded in nature is that conception of the marriage tie which the Roman digest has put before us.

We may see the truth, once again, in the acknowledged instability of the passional element in human nature—particularly in man. It is nothing short of amazing to see this very instability urged as a reason why the marriage tie should be still further weakened, as though man should deliberately subject himself to the vagaries of sense, instead of the guidance of reason. We hear much to-day about the "return to nature," and, soundly interpreted, that gospel sounds like a breath of pure mountain air after the stifling atmosphere of modern convention and unreality. Would to heaven, I say from my heart, that we were more natural, that a greater frankness and directness marked our intercourse with one another, that the shams and pretences of so much of our social life were made away with, that our lives were more open and free! The grand old Stoic maxim had it thus: Live in accordance with nature. Yes, but with what nature? No thinker, from Socrates to Kant, from Buddha to Hegel, ever had a doubt but that man's nature was twofold, and that the law of reason must be supreme in him. Let an animal live for sense; it is its nature; but for man another law is ordained, which bids him think last of enjoyment, and to partake only of that in obedience to the law of the mind. The modern evangel of the apotheosis of the unstable we understand to convey the teaching, "Live in accordance with sense, or the feeling of the moment". Be like the dame du monde whom Mrs. Ward has so accurately drawn in Madame de Netteville, who did not hold herself responsible to our petty codes, and judged that feeling was guidance enough for her. That may be all very well for Madame de Netteville, but how does such teaching look in the light of Kant's solemn injunction: "Act so that thy conduct may become a law unto all men"? Could any one seriously propose to erect feeling into a supreme criterion whereby to judge of the conduct of life?

And, to show that the line of argument here adopted is no mere false asceticism surviving from an undisciplined and pre-scientific age, as the solemn verbiage of so much second-rate talking expresses it to-day, we may quote some words of David Hume, Huxley's "prince of agnostics," from the Essay on Polygamy and Divorce. The least emotional of philosophers—a hard-headed Scotsman—he makes short work of the sentimentality which is invoked now-a-days against the natural law of marriage:—

"We need not be afraid of drawing the marriage knot . . . the closest possible. The unity between the persons, where it is solid and sincere, will rather gain by it; and where it is wavering and uncertain that is the best method for fixing it. How many frivolous quarrels and disgusts are there, which people of common prudence endeavour to forget, when they lie under the necessity of passing their lives together; but which would soon be inflamed into the most deadly hatred, were they pursued to the utmost under the prospect of an easy separation! We must consider that nothing is more dangerous than to unite two persons so closely in all their interests and concerns, as man and wife, without rendering the union entire and total. The least possibility of a separate interest must be the source of endless quarrels and suspicions. The wife, not secure of her establishment, will still be driving some separate end or project; and the husband's selfishness, being accompanied by no power, may be still more dangerous." Thus our conception of marriage as a nature sacrament, a permanent contract in Nature's original intention, is abundantly confirmed by the sceptical philosopher of the eighteenth century. Whatever man may make of the contract, there stands the fact that that Nature meant it to be enduring which whispered into the lover's heart that "love should be for evermore".

It is a far cry from the abstractions of philosophy to the realisms of French fiction, but we could not better conclude this portion of our subject than by citing one single sentence from Balzac, in the judgment of many the first romancer of this century, and one of the greatest masters of the social sciences. "Nothing," he declares, "more conclusively proves the necessity of indissoluble marriage than the instability of passion."

But here our difficulties begin. Though it may be abundantly clear that Nature's ideal is Hume's and Balzac's, is it not a fact that this "high has proved too high, this heroic for earth too hard"? Is it not true that there are murmurs and mutterings of revolt both amongst men and women against a burden too grievous to be borne? Does not the fiction of the day represent a tendency to allow an increased laxity in the interpretation of the matrimonial contract? And where there is smoke there is fire. What novelists write other people are thinking. Has the time come to reconsider our position with regard to marriage and the permanent obligations hitherto associated with it?

We answer decisively, No. It is not the institution which is at fault, but the individuals who embrace it. We spoke of marriage as Nature's great sacrament, and so it is. And as with "the Lord's Supper" the unworthy participant is said to "eat and drink only condemnation to himself," so is it with they who draw near to Nature's banquet and attempt, unprepared, to partake of the deepest joys of life. Their profanity smites them with a curse. We hold up our hands in no Pharisaic spirit of holy horror, but we ask the men and women of this generation and of those classes from which these mutterings and threatenings of revolt mainly emanate—we ask them, whether marriage, as they understand the term, can be other than a bloodless martyrdom? If that individual who gave her name to a novel two or three seasons ago, if the young woman known as Dodo be a type—and it was noted by the critics of the time that such was the character of the fashionable young mondaine of the day, greedy for nothing but excitement and sensuous existence, incapable of serious thought, rebellious against, I will not say the restraints, but even the convenances of civilised life, with no pretension to anything remotely resembling character or moral earnestness, a wild, gay, frittering, helpless creature, whom it were blasphemy to think of in the same day with noble womanhood as we all have known it—if that, I say, is the type of the young mondaine of the hour, then I have no doubt they will give the novelists and playwrights plenty of employment in describing their self-imposed torments, the insufferable bondage to which they are subjected. But does any one propose to alter the moral law for them? If mothers in modern Babylon are ready to labour day and night in attempting to catch as husbands for their daughters men in whom one and one only qualification is asked, namely, that of wealth, then their perdition be upon their own heads and on those of the luckless pair who are literally speaking "crucified on a cross of gold". If girls continue to be brought up with the preposterous notion that marriage is the one profession open to them, and that therefore they are by no means to risk the loss of an "engagement," no matter who the employer may be, and that the wealthier he is the more suitable he is to be adjudged, then let us abandon all attempts at reaching our ideal. But let us at the same time prepare for the overthrow of the home and the family; for the destruction of "pure religion breathing household laws," and of the stately, dignified, domestic life, which has been the glory of every land where Nature's true ideal has been worthily upheld.

If boys are brought up at school, or taught by the social atmosphere they breathe on first entering into early manhood, to conceive of marriage as in no wise nobler or loftier in essence than any of those mariages apres la nature, those ephemeral associations, terminable at will; that the only difference between them is, that the one is legal and permanent, the other voluntary and dissoluble, then so long will the scandals of divorce and the revolt against marriage continue to be heard. What one complains of is the utter lack of reverence in the view which is taken of this most solemn of all acts. There is no idealism in the contract. The thoughtless youth who has grown up in what one may call the "wild oats" theory is, we suggest, utterly incapable of appreciating the absolutely inestimable blessings which wedded love might have brought him. How can he? He has "wasted his substance, living riotously," and the most precious of all the treasures he has squandered is that of his idealism. His wife can scarcely be to him what she might have been had he come to her as he expected her to come to him. "The golden gates are closed," "a glory has passed from the earth". This is pain enough to make hearts weep, but it is the operation of that inflexible law of Compensation, that not all the tears of sorrow, not all the absolutions and sacrificial atonements of Churches, can undo that past, can make that young man to be as in the days of his youth, before the experimental "knowledge of good and evil" touched him.