268 But no Advance in Morality. [LECT. any particular man, the children to be the property of the nation. He rises not above the polished low-lived Greek. Aristotle seems to rise a step higher. He teaches that the highest good is perfect well-being, virtue the means to reach it. His ideal is simply Greek national life. A State in which slaves were necessary and other nations of no account. He has no idea of humanity, of the sacredness of marriage and home; no conception of love, no feeling of sin to be cured. These are the highest specimens of pure philosophical moralists, showing the workings of the moral apparatus in the human mind, but without its needed supply of truth-material. Vast numbers of teachers and modified teachings appeared afterwards, but degenerated speedily. Roman moral teaching was borrowed from Greece. All this moral teaching of the philosophers was produced in Greece's golden days. Did they take a single step towards winning the world from vice and misery? Not one. Did they effect a moral renovation in their immoral people, and were they a regulative power over the passions of men? Not the slightest. They had no Divine authority. They failed. These Greeks should have gone on and taught the world and won the homage of universal mind. They were highest in products of understanding, fairest of all men in form, cleverest in art, and yet in spite of majestic genius, of science and philosophy and ethics; in spite of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many other great men, they speedily sank, becoming servile and sensual, intolerant and fierce, all society a perfectly indescribable sink of immorality. All history from that day to this proclaims and reiterates that all laws, the very best that highest wisdom can devise, are absolutely useless, null, void, if they have not a sanction behind them, that is a something that will insist on those laws being followed. And so the purest moral law that 1 See also Reynolds, "Supernatural in Nature." VI.] Modern Pagan Ethics 269 could be devised would be completely powerless for good without the consciousness of a Moral Governor behind them, whose will they represented, and who claimed obedience and punished disobedience. Time would fail me to tell, and patience would fail you to hear, the long story of the successors of these men through the ages of degenerate Christianity, and in the later days of skepticism, down to the present day. The story is the same invariable tale of intellectual effort and moral failure. And to-day the culmination of all meets in the latest ethical teachings of pagan thought, ostensibly founded on modern science, but really on a hypothesis, stretched into regions beyond all scientific proof. The ethics of Herbert Spencer claim to be a substitute for Christianity as a regulative system.1 The question before us now is this:-Has Mr. Spencer found that which philosophers have sought in vain for thousands of years, with not a single instance of success? Has he produced a system of morality that will be of the least practical use for humanity? Will Mr. Spencer supplant the "Man of Sorrows as a healer of this world's woes? Will this London Philosopher supersede the Prophet of Nazareth as leader of human hearts? Will he surpass the carpenter's son in building up men and nations into lasting greatness? The question before the intellectual world just now, and before educated Japan is, which will you have-Spencer, or Christ? I use Mr. Spencer's name here because he is formulating in his philosophy and ethics the scientific-paganism of modern tendencies. And I answer him here at length because of the honor accorded him in this land, and because while discussing his ethical teaching I can bring out the ethics of Christ by comparison and contrast. Before I am done I think you will see that Mr. Spencer's ethics 1 See introduction to "Data of Ethics." 270 Represented by Spencer. [LECT. teach no morality at all, are lower indeed than those of Socrates, the Greek of 2000 years ago, with the addition of some bones taken from Christian teaching, robbed of all life, however, and rendered useless in their new setting. Mr. Spencer begins by taking for granted that the Christian religion is failing as a moral power, is being removed from men's beliefs as unscientific. Now this may be true of a certain set of so-called scientists, whose minds are narrowed by their special sphere, and true of some who take their dictum as infallible truth. But that it is true in any general sense of the word, is like much else that Mr. Spencer retails, negatived by simple historical facts. The fact is that Christianity is coextensive with modern civilization. Where civilization goes, Christianity goes and flourishes. Where Christianity goes, civilization goes and flourishes. The best intellects in all branches of science are still Christian. The masses are more Christian than they ever were in the world's history, the converts to Christianity are more numerous and more satisfactory than ever before. Where wrongs are being righted, Christian sympathy is always at the bottom of the movement. But if the gospel of blind force, as preached by Spencer, Tyndal and others, prevails over the minds of men, of course Christianity must cease, and Mr. Spencer does well to attempt to formulate a new regulative system of morals. How has he succeeded? 66 Mr. Spencer's references to "Ethics as they are,”1 “ supernatural Ethics" and "Ethics currently conceived," I take to refer to the teachings of Christianity, which lies at the bottom of morals in civilized lands. I should suppose that a great philosopher like Mr. Spencer, in dealing with majestic widereaching themes such as these, would cope with what he 1Data of Ethics, see Introduction and Chap. I. VI.] Ignorance or Ignoring, which? 271 conceived to be the fundamental principles of the system which he opposed, and not take his impressions from some crude Sunday-school teacher's simple statements to a child, the rough version of a parish beadle, or the mystic dreamings of an aborted ascetic. If he takes these partial, low, erroneous views as representing Christianity, he is unworthy of a higher philosophical place than that of a sophistical trickster; and if he claims to represent the principles of the Christian's Bible in his references to Christian Ethics, I charge him with persistent radical misrepresentation or lamentable ignorance of the teachings of Christ. Christianity is of course the chief trouble in the way of his system, and must be demolished by any means; but really one would like to see facts instead of fictions, arguments rather than the sneers of a suppressed loathing. To represent the relation of Ethics as they are and as they should be, he thus writes: "If a Father, sternly enforcing numerous commands, some needful and some needless, adds to his severe control a behaviour wholly unsympathetic-if his children have to take their pleasures by stealth, or, when timidly looking up from their play, ever meet a cold glance or more frequently a frown, his government will inevitably be disliked, if not hated; and the aim will be to evade it as much as possible." Now I ask any man if that is a fair representation of Christ's moral control? No man could honestly give that as a statement of the influence of the teaching of a personal God in the world, who had any adequate conception of character behind external acts; of the need of discipline to develop that character; of the love behind the discipline which, though sometimes hid, kindles in the disciplined heart the life-impulses of all that is noble and pure and lasting. A father's kindest acts seem often harsh to a wayward lad; but if he were left to control his own discipline, 1 Data of Ethics, p. vi. 272 "Influence" of an Automaton. [LECT. what a wreck he would make of himself! The will of an all-wise Father God may sometimes seem harsh to wayward sinful man; but whenever man makes his own morality-what a perpetual wreck he makes of himself, all history shows only too sadly and well. 1 But Mr. Spencer has another picture: "Contrariwise, a father who, equally firm in maintaining restraints needful for the well-being of his children or the well-being of other persons, not only avoids needless restraints, but, giving his sanction to all legitimate gratifications and providing the means for them, looks at their gambols with an approving smile, can scarcely fail to gain an influence which, no less efficient for the time being, will also be permanently efficient." This is supposed to represent the control of Mr. Spencer's system of morality. And although the idea of simply letting children have their own way so long as they don't hurt themselves or anybody else, is not a very lofty ideal certainly, yet I must protest that his morality does not go even that far, for it provides no father at all but a machine, no restraint, no sanction, but the ceaseless rounds of an automaton, which when it stops, stops forever. The impression conveyed to my mind by this Evolution-Philosophical Ethics may be illustrated by a story I read many years ago. A man dreamed that he was left alone with the care of a little child on his hands. Thinking a living mother, that required to be housed and fed, would bring along with her too many disadvantages, he decided on making a machine-mother, an automaton that would not eat his bread nor bother him with her tongue, but would be sufficient for all the purposes of the baby. So he got timber for bones, and cork for flesh, and wire for springs, and made a woman with lovely hair and smiling eyes, and bewitching mouth, and spotless neck, and arms that would 1Ib. p. vii. |