The Peak in Darien, With Some Other Inquiries Touching Concerns of the Soul and the Body / An Octave of Essays

by Frances Power Cobbe

MAGNANIMOUS ATHEISM.

“Be of good cheer, brother!” said John Bradford to his fellow-martyr while the fagots were kindling: “we shall have a brave supper in heaven with the Lord to-night!” “Be of good cheer, everybody!” cry an army of modern confessors, seated in library chairs: “there is no heaven and no Lord, and when we die there will be an end of us all, in saecula saeculorum; but the generations who come after us will be greatly edified by our beautiful books and our instructive example.”

Perhaps the moral vitality of our age is in no way better exemplified than by the fact that certain doubts, which seem to strike mortal blows at the head and heart of human virtue, yet leave it breathing, and even pulsating with aspirations after some yet loftier excellence than saints and heroes have hitherto attained. To look back to the “infidels” with whom Massillon and Jeremy Taylor had to do, and compare them with the Agnostics of our time, is indeed more encouraging than to compare the “faithful” of past centuries with those of the present age. While the old Atheist sheltered his vice behind a rampart of unbelief where no appeals could reach him, the new Agnostic honestly maintains that his opinions are the very best foundations of virtue. No one can for a moment say of him that he chooses darkness rather than light because his deeds are evil. If it be (as we think) darkness which he has chosen, there can be no question that his deeds are good, and that his conceptions of duty are truly elevated and far-reaching, and enforced by every argument which he has left himself at liberty to use. Renouncing faith in God and in the life hereafter,—that is to say, in Goodness Infinite and Goodness Immortalized,—he retains the most fervent faith in goodness as developed in human life,—that is to say, in goodness finite in degree and in duration. If we are to accept his own statement of the case, the Agnostic has completely turned the front of the theological battle. It is now the pagans who have seized and hold aloft the sacred labarum of duty and self-sacrifice, and in hoc signo are destined to victory.

The claim is one of the gravest which can be put forth between man and man. It was not easy—it was, alas! often beyond our strength—to combat our doubts or those of others, while yet we fought against them as a sailor fights against enemies cutting his anchor cable on a stormy night. We stand amazed and disarmed by the strange intelligence that, when these doubts have done their work, and cast us adrift altogether from allegiance to God and hope of another life, then, when all seems lost, we shall suddenly discover that we have touched the Fortunate Isles of virtue and peace. Only the thorough sceptic, we are assured, can be the perfect saint. Nobody can disinterestedly serve his brother on earth till he is entirely persuaded he has no Father in heaven. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (of course it is always assumed that it is a tree of genuine knowledge on which Atheism grows) is to be desired, not only because it will make us “wise,” but because it will make us good. Who will hesitate any more to pluck and eat?

To the consideration of this now common pretension of Agnosticism to be the true Friend of Virtue, in the room of the old delusion of religion, the following pages will be devoted. For the purposes of our particular argument and to avoid entangling ourselves with too many collateral questions, I shall treat it here as the Assumption of the Moral Superiority of Atheism over Theism. Is that assumption justifiable? I, for one, am entirely ready to admit that, if there be anything in the faith in God and immortality which detracts from the highest conceivable perfection of human virtue,—if, in short, Atheism have a better morality to teach than Theism,—then the case of Theism must be abandoned. The religion which is not the holiest conceivable by the man who holds it is condemned ipso facto.

For the present, I may assume that no important difference of opinion exists as to the practical rules of morality. It is the proper motives to a virtuous and self-sacrificing life which Agnostics claim to place on higher ground than that which has been hitherto given to them. They propose to tell us to “do justice and love mercy” both in a better and more disinterested way than while we added to those unquestionable duties the mistaken attempt to walk humbly with our God. The question lies in a nutshell,—Can they do it? Is there anything in the true Theistic faith detracting from the disinterestedness of virtue, or calculated to rob it of a single ray of purity and glory? This must be our first contention, since religion now stands on its defence as a basis of morality. When it is settled, it may perhaps appear that religion may justly again assume the offensive, and challenge Atheism to prove its capacity for serving equally efficiently as a support for the virtue of humanity; and, if it appear that to such a challenge no satisfactory reply can be given, then it will be manifest that, in their expressions of satisfaction and joy at the anticipated downfall of religion, Atheists display disregard of the moral interests of their race.

Let the lists be cleared in the first place. I shall not be expected to defend all the base and demoralizing things which, in the misused name of Christianity, have been inculcated concerning “Other-worldliness,”—the doing good for the sake of getting to heaven, and avoiding evil from fear of hell. Since the day, recorded by Joinville, when the mysterious old woman carried her waterpot and torch before St. Louis, and told him she intended to put out the fires of hell and burn up heaven, so that men might learn to love God for his own sake, and not from fear or hope,—since that distant time, there have not been wanting righteous souls who have girned and spurned at the vile lessons current in the Churches, and asked with Kingsley,—

“Is selfishness,—for time, a sin,—stretched out into eternity,
Celestial prudence?”

Beyond a doubt, one of the heaviest charges against the popular creed is that, while its ministers have raged against the smallest theological error, and convulsed the world by their ridiculous disputes concerning mysteries altogether beyond the reach of human comprehension, they have complacently endured and even fostered moral heresies which withered up the very roots of virtue. The whole tone of ordinary Romish exhortation, faire son salut, is often base beyond expression; and the teaching of the Church of England in the last century was no better. Here are some specimens of it. Rutherford says (Nature and Obligations of Virtue, 1744), “Every man’s happiness is the ultimate end which reason teaches him to pursue, and the constant and uniform practice of virtue becomes our duty when revelation has informed us that God will make us finally happy in a life after this.” Paley is no better. He says:[1] “Virtue is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting happiness. According to which definition, the good of mankind is the subject, the will of God the rule, and everlasting happiness the motive of virtue.” Waterland, the great champion of Trinitarianism, went even further. He says that “being just and grateful without future prospects has as much of moral virtue in it as folly or indiscretion has.” These are the kind of doctrines which have been placidly admitted among the recognized teachings of the great Christian Churches. Nor have some of the philosophers proved a whit more conscious of the simple notion of duty. Bentham, for example,[2] plainly lays it down that for a man to give up a larger pleasure of his own for a smaller one of his neighbor’s is an act not of virtue, but of folly.

Certainly, if the new Agnostics had no types of religion or morality save these thoroughly debased ones wherewith to compare their system, they might well claim to be the evangelists of a purer gospel. Better, assuredly better, would it be to believe in no God than to pay homage to the all-adorable Author of Good for the sake of the payment we expect him to give us. Better, assuredly better, to expect no life beyond the grave than to poison every act of courage, justice, or beneficence by the vile notion of being rewarded for it in heaven; or to refrain from treachery and cruelty and lies, merely, like a beaten hound, from dread of the bloody scourge of hell.

But it would be an insult to the well-informed and widely-read advocates of Agnosticism, if we were to assume for a moment that they were ignorant that this base alloy of religion has been almost universally repudiated by the higher class of English divines of the present day, of every shade of Orthodoxy; while, outside of the Churches, there is not a religious man who does not regard them with unmitigated disgust. The question really is, not whether religion may be made to corrupt morality with bribes and threats, but whether it properly does so; whether a religious man ought, in accordance with his theology, to be less disinterested than an Atheist. To reply to this question, it seems only necessary to recall what a Theist believes about God and immortality as concerned with his own virtue.

A Theist believes, then, that the goodness and justice, which the Agnostic recognizes and loves so well in their human manifestations, have existence beyond humanity, and are carried to ideal perfection in a Being who is, in some sense, the Soul and Ruler of the universe.

This belief, at all events (whether legitimately held or only a dream), cannot, I presume, so far as it goes, be charged with detracting from the purity of virtue. Goodness cannot be esteemed less good, or justice less just, because there exists One who is supremely good and just.

Further, as regards himself, the Theist believes that this supremely good and just Being so constituted his nature and the world around him as that the law of goodness and justice should be known to him as the sacred rule, whereby he is inwardly bound to determine his actions and sentiments. In other words, he believes that he has acquired his moral sense of God, and not from any undesigned, fortuitous order of things which may have impressed it as an hereditary idea on his brain.

I am at a loss to guess how this step further can be supposed to be hostile to the disinterestedness of virtue. It is easy to see how the opposite theory of the origin of conscience, as exhibited in Mr. Darwin’s Descent of Man,—whereby the authority of the human intuition, “Thou shalt do no murder,” is traced to the same origin as the bees’ intuition of the duty of killing their brothers, the drones (namely, the hereditary transmission of ideas found conducive to the welfare of the tribe),—should dethrone Conscience from her assumed supremacy, and place her among the crowd of other hereditary notions, neither more nor less deserving of honor. And, on the other hand, the attribution of our moral ideas, directly or indirectly, to the teaching of a Being immeasurably above us,—a theory which represents conscience as a ray shot downward from a sun, instead of a marsh-fire illumined under special conditions of social existence, and liable to blaze up, die down, or flit hither and thither as they may determine,—must inevitably elevate and sanctify the laws of morals to our apprehension. In truth, it is obvious that, had the first hypothesis (of the hereditary transmission of useful ideas) been heard of in the days of our ancestors, the “mystic extension” (as Mr. Mill calls it) of utility into morality could never have been accomplished, and repentance and remorse would have been unknown experiences. But all this refers to the practical authority of moral laws. It is with the disinterestedness of the man who obeys them that we are at present concerned; and this disinterestedness is not, that I perceive, influenced one way or the other by the theory he may hold of how he comes by his knowledge of them.

But now we reach the point where, it is to be presumed, the Atheist finds ground for his claim to superior disinterestedness. The Theist believes not only that goodness and justice are attributes of God, and that God has taught him to be good and just, but that God further holds what the old Schoolmen called the Justitia Rectoria of the universe,—that he so ordains things as that, sooner or later, good will surely befall the good, and evil the evil. So much as this is included in the simplest elements of Theism. In its fuller development, Theism teaches more: namely, that God takes the interest of a Father in the moral welfare of his children; that he has created every human soul (and doubtless thousands of races of other intelligent beings) for the express purpose that each should attain, through the teaching and trials of existence, to virtue, and so enter into the supreme bliss of sympathy and communion with himself. Theism thus understood teaches that God is perpetually training each soul for that sublime end, inspiring it with light, answering its prayers for spiritual aid, punishing it for its errors, hedging up its way with thorns to prevent its wanderings, and finally certainly conducting it, through this life and perhaps many lives to come, to the holiness and blessedness for which it was made.

The position of a Theist differs therefore essentially from that of an Atheist as regards the practice of virtue, inasmuch as the Atheist thinks he has no superhuman spectator or sympathizer; that the thoughts and feelings which awaken his conscience and move his heart do not originate in any mind out of his own; that the woes of his life bear with them no moral meaning of retribution or expiation; and finally that, whether he be a hero or a coward, a saint or a sinner, it will be all one, so far as himself is concerned, when the hour of his death has sounded. His actions may and will have important consequences to other men, but as regards his own destiny they can have no consequences at all; for the grave will receive everything that remains of him. The virtues he may have acquired with unutterable struggles will die away into nothingness, like the sound of a broken harp-string. He will neither rejoin his dead friends nor come into any fresh consciousness of God. Neither dead friends nor God have any existence; and a little sooner or later, as he may chance to be a more or less important person, he will be altogether forgotten, and no being in the universe will ever more remember that he once was.

Now, I think it would be idle to deny that it must be far harder to be virtuous under the shadow of this Atheism than in the sunshine of Theism. The tax and strain upon the moral nature of a man who holds the views just indicated of the emptiness of the universe of any One absolutely good and just, of the low and haphazard origin of conscience, and of the utter loneliness and unaided state wherewith man pursues his weary course from the cradle to the inevitable, eternal grave, must be simply enormous. All honor, sincere and hearty honor, and full recognition of their noble disinterestedness, be to those Atheists who, under such strain, yet struggle successfully and incessantly to do good and not evil all their days, and to die bravely and calmly, letting go their grasp of life and joy and love, and sinking without a groan under the waters which are to cover them for evermore. There is something in the self-sustained, Promethean courage of such a man which commands our admiration; and we can well imagine him looking round on his suffering fellows pitifully, as on his orphaned and disinherited brothers and sisters, with infinite compassion, deeming them destined like himself to perish with all their aspirations and capacities disappointed and unfulfilled. For such a man to devote himself to the labors of practical benevolence and the relief of the woe which surrounds him, whence he usually draws his strongest arguments for his desolate creed, would seem to be the fittest, if not the only fit pursuit; and, when we behold him engaged in it (as in instances I could readily name), our whole hearts recognize his virtue as absolutely beautiful and disinterested. But because the Atheist’s virtue, when he is virtuous, is without alloy, is there any just reason to hold that it is more pure than that of the Theist? His task is, as I have readily admitted, the harder of the two; so hard indeed is it that there seem the gravest reasons for fearing that, if a few noble spirits perform it, the mass of tried and tempted men who can scarcely lift themselves from their selfishness even with the two wings of Faith and Hope will lie prone in the very mire of vice when those wings are broken. But, because the Atheist’s duty is harder to do, is it consequently better done? Is the music which he draws from that one string of philanthropy sweeter than the full chord of all the religious and social affections together?

Let us revert to the points of difference between the two creeds as above enumerated. Is a man necessarily self-interested in doing the will of a Being whom he loves and hopes by serving to approach and resemble? Of course, if he is looking for payment,—for health, wealth, happiness on earth or celestial glory,—for any adventitious reward outside of the fact of becoming better and nearer to God,—then, indeed, his service is self-interested. He is a mercenary in the army of martyrs. In strict ethics, his conduct, however exactly legal, is not virtuous; for virtue can only be absolutely without side-looks to contingent profit, present or future. I presume that, when Agnostics boast of the superior disinterestedness of the virtue they inculcate over that of religious men, they think (and cannot divest themselves of the early acquired habit of thinking) of religion as of this kind of labor-and-wages system,—hard duty below, high glory above,—with perhaps the additional complication of certain scholastic doctrines of imputed righteousness. But it is time this confusion should cease. Love of goodness impersonated in God is not a less disinterested, though naturally a more fervent, sentiment than love of goodness in the abstract. The Theist, in his attempt to obey by good deeds the will of the Being he loves, acts as simply as the Atheist, who loves the good deed, thinking that no being higher in the scale of existence than himself has any appreciation of the difference between good and evil. The Theist, indeed, adds to his love of goodness per se a love of goodness impersonated in God, who desires good actions to be done,[3] and possibly also a hope that, by doing good now, he may be given the power to do it again and again for ever; but it is all the same charmed circle of doing good for goodness’ sake, out of which he never emerges into any such motive as doing good for the sake of honor, prosperity, or heavenly bliss in a golden city. The sole thing which the Theist asks of God as the reward of obedience is the power to obey better in future, the privilege of obeying forever. The payment of his virtue is to be virtuous now and throughout eternity. Whether it be in this life or another, there is no difference; no new principle comes into play; no bribe unsought for here is hoped for there. He says to God: “It is a joy to serve Thee, but infinitely greater is the joy to serve Thee with the assurance that the term of my service will never expire. Precious is the privilege of calling Thee Father. How glad then am I that I shall be a child at Thy feet forever! Lord, I seek no heaven hereafter. I covet no abode of bliss, no outward reward above. To be with Thee is my heaven and my salvation and the only reward I seek. As I abide in Thee now, may I continue to live in Thee, O Father; and to grow in wisdom and love and purity and joy in Thee, time without end.”[4]

Surely, it is altogether absurd to speak of this religion as involving any, even the very slightest shade of interestedness or detraction from the highest conceivable type of human virtue. If it deserve such a condemnation, then must likewise stand condemned the most pure and exalted human love which friend has ever felt for friend,—for this also, by its very nature, seeks to serve for love’s sake, to arrive at perfect harmony, to dwell with the beloved in unbroken and everlasting union.

Turn we now to the other side of the subject. Theism has been, I hope, vindicated from the charge of interestedness. What shall we say to the general ethical aspect of Agnosticism, which assumes to be the nobler system? Admitting the blameless conduct and the high aspirations of some of its professors, what value shall we attach to their claim to be the heralds of a higher morality?

If I may, without offence, condense their lessons in a very obvious parallel, they amount to this “symbol”: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he cease to believe either in one God or in three; and that he be fully assured that those who have done good and those who have done evil shall alike go into everlasting nothingness.” This creed piously accepted, he will advance to perfection and outrun in two ways any excellence which has been hitherto attained.

1st. While recognizing that, so far as he himself is concerned, death means the annihilation of consciousness, he will act throughout his life with a deep and conscientious concern for the consequences of his actions to those who come after him or, as Mr. Frederick Harrison expresses it, to his own posthumous activity.

2d. By welcoming the conclusions of Atheism, and especially the doctrine of the annihilation of consciousness at death, not as a sorrowful truth, but as the latest and brightest gospel of good tidings; and proclaiming, on all suitable occasions, that they afford a better stand-point and outlook for humanity than any faith or hope which has been hitherto entertained.

The first of these doctrines was set forth, a few years ago, in two eloquent and affecting papers, by Mr. Frederick Harrison, in the Nineteenth Century. How much sympathy I feel with a great deal which is said in these papers,[5] how sincerely I respect Mr. Harrison’s noble conception of the aim of life, even where I most completely misdoubt the validity of the method he proposes for attaining it, there is scarcely need to say. It is precisely because such Positivists as he and Mr. Morley and the late George Eliot, and such Agnostics as many I could name, assume such really high ground in their teaching, and appeal (though, as I think, in a fallacious way) to our very noblest sympathies and aspirations, that I feel urged to raise my feeble voice and call in question their guidance. There, in truth, stand, as they point to them, the snowy summits of purity and goodness. But by what path would they guide us to ascend them? Even if their own strong souls may climb those arid crags, can they be in any possible sense a better way than that by which millions of believers in God and immortality have gone up on high?

Let us take Mr. Harrison’s doctrine of the “Posthumous Activities” of the soul, and endeavor to estimate how far it is calculated to act as an efficient motive of virtue on ordinarily constituted, well-intentioned men and women. We must bear in mind that it is formally proposed as a substitute for the old belief in the immortality of the individual,—that is (according to the Theist creed), in the immortality of the virtue of the individual. While a Theist believes that, having lighted that sacred torch, he shall be permitted to bear it onward, burning more purely and brightly forever, the Comtist thinks he must lay down his at the side of his grave, though other men may ignite their own from it, and so carry on its light from age to age.

In the first place, I must remark that, like the promise on which such stress is laid in Dr. Bridge’s General View of Positivism, that attached husbands and wives may be solemnly interred side by side, there is nothing new in these anticipations. We have always known that we might be buried in the same vault with our next friend, as we have always known that our actions would continue to bear fruit after our departure. We entertained the first hope (so far as such a pitiful matter as the future position of our deaf and blind decaying dust deserves to be considered a hope), and we were aware of the responsibility,—plus the belief that we ourselves should enjoy free converse with the spirit of our friend, and afford to smile together on our poor mouldering garments laid up side by side in the tomb,—and plus the belief that we might ourselves be cognizant of our posthumous activities. There is nothing in the fact that both the hope and the sense of responsibility must now stand by themselves for what they are worth, to give them (so far as I can see) any fresh leverage as motives of conduct. People who did not love each other better while they expected to be at liberty to spend eternity in conscious communion, as well as to be buried in the same grave, certainly will not love each other better when their future prospects are limited to the family vault. And people who have not regulated their conduct with a view to their post-mortem influence while they anticipated to be living somewhere to know, or, at all events, to be obliged to think about it, are very little likely to regulate it the better when they are convinced that, if they leave the deluge behind them, they will neither know nor care one iota. As to the good man, he will, under the old creed and under the new alike (and neither more nor less, so far as I can perceive), entertain a solemn sense of a responsibility to do all the good and refrain from every evil in his power during his threescore years and ten,—not first, or chiefly, for the sake of consequences near or remote to himself or other people in this world or another, but because goodness, truth, courage, justice, and generosity are good in themselves, lovable in his eyes and in the eyes of God, and falsehood, impurity, cruelty, and treachery are bad and despicable, hateful to him and to his Maker. Afterward, and as a reinforcement of his choice of Scipio, he will reflect that every good act entails good consequences in widening circles of loving-kindness, honor, and honesty, and every bad one the reverse; and he will hope in dying to reflect that the sum of the influence he leaves to work after him will be wholly on the side of truth, justice, and love. It is monstrous for Mr. Harrison to say that “the difference between our (Positivist) faith and that of the orthodox is this. We look to the permanence of the activities which give others happiness. They look to the permanence of the consciousness which can enjoy happiness.” Why should looking to the permanence of consciousness and happiness make a man care less for the activities “which give others happiness”? Does A care less for B’s welfare because he would like to be alive to see it, or even alive at the antipodes at the same time?

Moralists and divines of all ages have not overlooked the remoter consequences of our actions in rehearsing the motives in favor of virtue. But it is idle to attach to it, as applied to the bulk of mankind, more practical force than it possesses. In the first place, when such an observer of things as Shakspere could say that

“The evil which men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,”

it is open to us all to doubt whether some of the very noblest achievements of human virtue have left any other mark than on the virtuous souls themselves, which (as we Theists think) enjoy even now in a higher existence their blessed inward consequences. The martyrs who perished unseen and unknown in the loathsome dungeons and amid the protracted tortures of the Inquisition in Spain, where the Reformation they would have established was absolutely extinguished and left no ray of light behind,—could these men cheer themselves under the awful strain of their agonies by a motive of such tenuity as the prospect of their “posthumous activities”?

But admitting, for argument’s sake, that the motive would serve always to support the heroic order of virtues, would it likewise aid the still more important ones of every-day conduct? His own illustrations ought surely to have made Mr. Harrison pause before he assumed it. He speaks of Newton as “no longer destroying his great name by feeble theology or querulous pettiness,” of Shakspere as “the boon companion and retired playwright of Stratford,” of Dante as the “querulous refugee from Florence,” and of Milton as “the blind and stern old malignant of Bunhill Fields.” Now these are his chosen exemplars of the enormous “posthumous activity” which a man may exert, and certainly nobody now living can hope that he shall ever exercise one-tenth as much. But their “pettiness” and “querulousness” and “boon companionship” and “sternness” in their lifetimes did not hinder, or even essentially detract from, their stupendous “posthumous activity.” Why, then, should lesser people have any scruple in being petty, querulous, or stern, or indulging in pot-companionship, or any other faults of temper or habit, on account of their little posthumous activities, whatever they may hope that these may prove?

Obviously, Mr. Harrison has a misgiving as to the force which his argument can be expected to exert on ordinary mortals or for the daily purposes of life. Though he says that the truth he teaches “is not confined to the great,” and adds the beautiful remark that “in some infinitesimal degree the humblest life that ever turned a sod sends a wave—no, more than a wave, a life—through the evergrowing harmony of human society,” yet even while he alleges that a concern for such posthumous activity is “no doubt now in England the great motive of virtue and energy,” and asks, “Can we conceive a more potent stimulus to daily and hourly striving after a true life?”[6] he says in the next page that “it would be an endless inquiry to trace the means whereby this sense of posthumous participation in the life of our fellows can be extended to the mass, as it certainly affects already the thoughtful and refined.” Honestly, he admits that it is “impossible it should become universal and capable of overcoming selfishness” “without an education, a new social opinion without a religion; I mean an organized religion, not a vague metaphysic.” “Make it,” he cries, with almost the enthusiasm of a discoverer, “at once the basis of philosophy, the standard of right and wrong, and the centre of a religion,” and then it may perhaps be achieved.

But, in sober truth, what “education” or “organized religion” (i.e., of course, Comtism) can possibly transform this remote anticipation of the results of our actions after we are dead into a practical lever for daily duty for the great bulk of mankind? It is the specialty of all vice to be selfishly indifferent to the injurious consequences of our actions, even to their immediate and visible consequences, to those nearest to us. Is it not almost ludicrous to think of exhorting the drunkard who sees his wife and children starving round him to-day, or the ill-conducted girl who is breaking her mother’s heart, or the hard task-master or landlord who is grinding the faces of the poor to fill his pocket, to refrain from their misdoings on account of the evil which they will cause fifty years hence to people unborn? Or let us try to apply the principle to that sound mass of every-day English virtue which is, after all, the very air we breathe,—the daily dutifulness, the purity, the truthfulness, the loving-kindness of our homes, the beautiful patience to be witnessed beside a thousand sick-beds. Were we to ask the simple-hearted men and meek women who exemplify these virtues whether they ever think of the excellent “posthumous activities” which they will exert on their surviving acquaintances, would they not be utterly bewildered? The clergyman (or let us have the Comtist philosopher) who will go through a workhouse ward, or round the cottages of a village, and offer such a suggestion as a topic of encouragement, would, I think, effect a very small measure of reformation. Nor do I think it is necessarily a low type of mind which does not project itself much into the future, whether in this world or the next; but which is vividly affected by the idea of a present righteous law claiming immediate obedience, and a present adorable God watching whether that obedience be paid, but which takes in even the idea of immortality more as adding an infinite dignity to moral things and human souls than as a direct motive to moral action. To such a person, the promise of “posthumous activities” is as remote and inoperative a principle as it is possible to propose; and he can scarcely help smiling at it, as he does at the observation of Pliny, that the “happiest of all possible anticipations is the certain expectation of an honorable and undying renown.” Posthumous activity affords a far nobler motive than posthumous fame; but they both appeal to sentiments which have little weight with the majority of minds, and no weight at all with a great number not undeserving of respect.

The truth seems to be that the leading Comtists and Agnostics of the day not only belong to an exceptional type of human nature, little touched by grosser impulses and highly sensitive to the most rarefied order of influences, but are unable to descend from such altitude, and realize what ordinary flesh-and-blood men and women are made of. As Mr. Darwin unconsciously betrayed that he had never once had occasion to repent an act of unkindness, when he theorized about repentance as beginning by a spontaneous reversion to sympathy and good-will to the people we have injured (in bold contradiction to Tacitus’ too true maxim, “Humani generis proprium est odisse quem laeseris”), so the disciples of Comte unwittingly allow us to perceive that they really consider an exalted and far-reaching interest in the welfare of our kind as the sort of motive which is already “now in England the great motive of virtue and energy.”

Let me explain myself. I do not think there is any precept too high to be accepted by the mass of mankind: nay, I think that the higher, nobler, more self-sacrificing the lesson, the warmer response it will draw forth from the heart of humanity. But this is the moral excellence of the precept, the loftiness of the purity, the nobleness of the generosity, the courageousness of the self-devotion, which are demanded. It is quite another thing to choose to present, as the proper motive of daily virtue, an idea requiring a trained intellect to take it in and a vivid imagination to realize it. Every argument for virtue, for sobriety, veracity, and so on, drawn from considerations of future consequences, labors under this irremediable defect: that it appeals least to those whom it is most necessary to influence. When we go further, and place our fulcrum of moral leverage in the period after the death of the man to whom we appeal, and candidly tell him that he will neither enjoy the sight of any good he may have effected, nor suffer from the spectacle of the results of his wrong-doing, we have reached (as it seems to me) the ne plus ultra of impracticability. Woe to human virtue when its advocates are driven to attach primary importance to such an argument, and dream it can be made “the centre of a religion”!

To sum up this subject. To a man of high calibre and gifts, the consideration of “posthumous activities” may act as a spur to doing great actions, but scarcely as a motive to regulate his daily life and temper. He will, perhaps, under its influence reform the prisons of Europe, and at the same time break his wife’s heart; write a great epic poem, and treat his daughters like slaves; paint splendid pictures, and remain a selfish and sordid miser; fight heroically his country’s battles, and lead a life of persistent adultery; be at once a disinterested statesman in a corrupt age, and an habitual drunkard.

As to the mass of mankind, who are endowed neither with any superior gifts to employ, nor vivid imagination to realize the results of their actions hereafter, an appeal to them to act virtuously in consideration of their posthumous activities would draw forth some such reply as this: “Our conduct can, at most, leave after our deaths only very small results on a very few people whom we shall never know. We find it hard enough to make sacrifices for those whom we do know and love, and whose happiness or misery we actually witness. It is asking too much of us that, for remote, contingent, and evanescent benefits to our survivors, we should undergo any pain or labor, or renounce any of the pleasures which in our poor short lives (so soon to end forever in darkness) may fall within our grasp.”

Thus, in its capacity of the Friend of Virtue, it seems that Atheism begins by depriving virtue of some of the strongest, if not the very strongest, motives by which it has hitherto been supported, and offers in their room, as the best substitute for them and the future “centre of religion,” a consideration of Posthumous Activities, whose force is of necessity both partial as to the virtues it inculcates, and extremely limited as to the persons over whom it can exercise any influence. And that force, such as it is, appears to be in no way specially connected with the Atheistic view of human destiny, but belongs to every moral system in the world.

---

Finally, as if to complete the nullity of the motive of Posthumous Activities, there comes a reflection which must take erelong a prominent place in disquisitions of this kind. Comtists talk of the “immortality,” the “eternity,” of a dead man’s influence. But, if each individual human soul is destined to be extinguished at death, then there is nothing wherewith man is concerned which is immortal or eternal. Our race is destined irretrievably to perish as a race, if it perish piecemeal with every soul which drops into the grave. Miss Martineau’s wild talk about “the special destination of my race” being “infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of divine moral government”[7] (an assertion in itself simply absurd, since the believers in a scheme of divine government hold that whatever is noblest is by the hypothesis assuredly our destination), is rendered doubly preposterous when we bear in mind what science teaches regarding the inevitable lapse of this planet within a limited epoch into a condition of uninhabitability. The following observations are made on this subject in a little jeu d’esprit which I may be pardoned for quoting. It assumes to be an extract from a newspaper of the next century, and the men of that period are supposed to look back upon the doctrine of “Posthumous Activities” with very little respect:—

It is needless to repeat that the delusive exhortations of some amiable but short—sighted philosophers of the last century to “labor for the good of Humanity in future generations” (a motive which they supposed would prove a substitute for the old historic religions) have been once and for all answered by the grand discovery of astronomers that our planet cannot long remain the habitation of man (even if it escape any sidereal explosion), since the solar heat is undergoing such rapid exhaustion. When the day comes, as come it must, when the fruits of the earth perish one by one, when the dead and silent woods petrify, and all the races of animals become extinct, when the icy seas flow no longer, and the pallid sun shines dimly over the frozen world, locked, like the moon, in eternal frost and lifelessness,—what in that day, predicted so surely by science, will avail all the works and hopes and martyrdoms of man? All the stores of knowledge which we shall have accumulated will be forever lost. Our discoveries, whereby we have become the lords of creation and wielded the great forces of Nature, will be useless and forgotten. The virtues which have been perfected, the genius which has glorified, the love which has blessed the human race, will all perish along with it. Our libraries of books, our galleries of pictures, our fleets, our railroads, our vast and busy cities, will be desolate and useless forevermore. No intelligent eye will ever behold them, and no eye in the universe will know or remember that there ever existed such a being as man. This is what Science teaches us unerringly to expect, and in view of it who shall talk to us of “laboring for the sake of Humanity”? The enthusiasm which could work disinterestedly for a Progress destined inevitably to end in an eternal Glacial Period must be recognized as a dream, wherein no man in a scientific age can long indulge.[8]

The second counsel of perfection of the Agnostic teachers is, as above said, “to welcome the conclusions of Atheism, and especially the doctrine of annihilation of consciousness at death, not merely as truth, but as the latest gospel of good tidings.”

This lesson, though repeated more or less by nearly all Agnostic and Comtist writers, has been perhaps most prominently brought to the front in the Life of Harriet Martineau. I shall take her observations and example as the text for the remarks I wish to offer upon it, as I have done the papers of Mr. Frederick Harrison for those just made on the doctrine of Posthumous Activities. These are some of her utterances which touch on the matter:—

I soon found myself quite outside of my old world of thought and speculation, under a new heaven and a new earth, disembarrassed of a load of selfish cares and troubles.... Hence it followed that the conceptions of a God with any human attributes whatever, of a principle or practice of design, of an administration of the affairs of the world by the principles of human morals, must be mere visions, necessary and useful in their day, but not philosophically or permanently true.... The reality that philosophy founded upon science is the one thing needful, the source and the vital principle of all morality and all peace to individuals and good-will among men, had become the crown of my experience and the joy of my life.... My comrade (Mr. Atkinson) and I were both pioneers of truth. We both care for our kind, and we could not see them suffering as we had suffered without imparting to them our consolation and our joy. Having found, as my friend said, a spring in the desert, should we see the multitude wandering in desolation, and not show them our refreshment?... Then (in younger days) I believed in a Protector, who ordered my work and would sustain me under it; and, however I may now despise that sort of support, I had it then, and have none of that sort now. I have all that I want, ... and I would not exchange my present views, imperfect and doubtful as they are,—I had better say I would not exchange my freedom from old superstition,—if I were to be burned at the stake next month, for all the peace and quiet of Orthodoxy. Nor would I for my exemption give up the blessing of the power of appeal to thoughtful minds.... When I experienced the still new joy of feeling myself to be a portion of the universe, resting on the security of its everlasting laws, certain that its Cause was wholly out of the sphere of human attributes, and that the special destiny of my race is infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of “divine moral government,” how could it matter to me that the adherents of a decaying mythology were still clinging to their Man-God?... Under this close experience (of illness), I find death in prospect the simplest thing in the world,—a thing not to be feared or regretted or to get excited about in any way. I attribute this very much to the nature of my views of death.... Now, the release is an inexpressible comfort. I see that the dying naturally and regularly, unless disturbed, desire and sink into death as into sleep.... I feel no solicitude about a parting which will bring no pain.... Under the eternal laws of the universe I came into being, and under them I have lived a life so full that its fulness is equivalent to length: thus there is much in my life that I am glad to have enjoyed, and much that generates a mood of contentment at its close. Besides that, I never dream of wishing that anything were otherwise than as it is; and I am frankly satisfied to have done with life. I have had a noble share of it, and I desire no more. I neither wish to live longer here nor to find life again elsewhere. It seems to me simply absurd to expect it.[9]

It is no part of the purpose of this article to discuss the truth of the doctrine that there is no God, and that death terminates human consciousness. Nor yet do I question whether a high sense of loyalty to what is understood to be truth may not make it appear to any one holding such doctrines that he is under the obligation to publish them frankly to the world. Many a man who is an Atheist as regards God holds (what many believers in Him lack) a noble faith in Truth as Truth, a firm conviction that nothing can be better than Truth, and that, as Carlyle said, “To nothing but error can any truth be dangerous.” It is not, then, the holding of such views as those above quoted, nor yet their frank publication and defence, wherewith we are now concerned; but with the tone of exultation with which they are announced, the disregard and contempt which are manifested for the dearest hopes, the purest aspirations, of the great mass of mankind.

Magnanimity has two phases. We may be magnanimous on our own account,—brave, calm, and self-reliant in the face of things which appall feebler souls. Of this sort of personal magnanimity, this remarkable woman has given a very fine example. Here are the words she wrote twenty years after the foregoing pages, in her last letter to her friend:

I cannot think of any future as at all probable except the annihilation from which some people recoil with so much horror.... For my part, I have no objection to such an extinction. I well remember the passion wherewith W. E. Forster said to me, “I had rather be damned than annihilated.”... I have no wish for any further experience, nor have I any fear of it.[10]...

These words have in them a calmness, simplicity, and courage which demand our honor, written as they were by an aged woman (as she herself describes them a few lines further) “under the clear knowledge of death being so near at hand.” The old vulgar theory, so frequently harped upon in the last generation, that the right place to judge a man’s religious views is his death-bed, and that, while orthodox believers alone can die bravely, sceptics must needs expire in anguish and alarm, with “a certain fearful looking-for of judgment,” has been thoroughly exploded by the now numberless instances of perfect courage exhibited by dying men and women who had long before abandoned the hopes of a happy futurity which revealed or natural religion has to offer. Harriet Martineau’s serene self-resignation into eternal nothingness ought, if any further evidence were wanting, to suffice to set the matter finally at rest; and it may be cited very properly by disbelievers in immortality, as exhibiting what they deem to be the fitting and dignified tone of a philosophical mind drawing near to the horizon beneath which it will presently disappear forever. No one can help respecting courage, under whatever form or circumstances it is manifested; and, if a man think that he is on the verge of annihilation, it is truly dignified and praiseworthy to approach it with unflinching eye and unblenched cheek. This is so far as the individual is concerned. But is there not another and larger side of the question, which the very noblest man ought to feel as awful and heart-rending,—nay, must feel to be so, in proportion to his nobleness and his power to extend his view beyond his own petty personality?

True magnanimity, it seems to me, must look far outside of a man’s own lot, of his past share of life’s feast, and his readiness now to rise from it satisfied, and must take a wide survey of the lives (so far as they can be known or guessed) of all other men,—of the poverty-stricken, the savage, the ignorant, the diseased, the enslaved, the sin-degraded,—and attain the conclusion that for these also, as well as for himself, life on earth has been sufficient good, and none other need be asked or desired before he can complacently speak of the joy of abandoning faith in God and immortality. “I have had a noble share of life, and I desire no more,” is an expression of personal sentiment which may or may not be right and fitting on the assumed hypothesis. But to join to such expression of individual contentment no word of regret for the closing in of all hope to the suffering millions of our race who have not had “noble” shares of life, and who do, with yearning hunger, desire more than has ever fallen to their lot,—this is, as it seems to me, the reverse of magnanimity. This is littleness and selfishness almost as bad as that of the bigots whom these Atheists abhor, who rejoice to expect heaven for themselves, while leaving thousands of their brethren to perdition. It might be pardonable in one brought up to believe in hell, and who hurriedly leaped to the doctrine of annihilation from that intolerable yoke, and cried, “Let us all perish together rather than that hideous doom overtake a single creature!” Such a choice would be generous and worthy. But when a woman who probably never, at any period of her life, believed in the eternal perdition of a soul, proclaims herself enraptured at the joy of finding out that there is neither a God to protect the weak, nor, finally, any holiness or happiness beyond the grave,—then, I repeat, this is not magnanimity, but gigantic selfishness.

Let us think a little what it would signify to mankind to give up God and heaven,—that is, the belief in God and heaven; for—God be praised!—it rests with no philosophic school to put out the sun or prevent the morning from breaking, but only to blind our eyes to them.

Dr. James Martineau once made in a sermon the startling remark that, “if it could be known that God was dead, the news would cause but little excitement in the streets of Berlin or Paris.” The observation was doubtless true; for, of direct thought of God, the streets of great cities are probably the emptiest of any places wherein mortals may be found. But there is an enormous share of human ideas and feelings not directly or consciously turned toward God, yet nevertheless colored by the belief that such a Being exists. Perhaps it would be more proper to say that in Christendom every idea and every feeling have imperceptibly been built up on the theory that there is a God. We see everything with Him for a background. Inanimate nature and the lower animals, human history and society, poetry, literature, science, and art,—every one of them has its religious aspect, which can only be excluded by a mental tour de force. Take inanimate nature, for example,—the region where it seems easiest to sever the links of habitual thought, and which the doctrine of Evolution (according to some of its teachers) has already withdrawn from the domain of a Creative Power. We all love this nature; and our hearts are moved to their depths by sympathy with it when we gaze round of a summer morning upon the woods and hills and waters, or, later in the year, upon the “happy autumn fields” of ripened corn, or, on a winter’s night, up into the solemn host of stars. But is it merely the glittering “patines of bright gold,” or fields of yellow wheat, or the block of wood and rock which form the forest or the mountain, which awaken in us such mysterious emotion? Are we not dimly worshipping the soul of nature through earth and sky,—the spirit wherewith our spirits are in ineffable harmony, and of which all the loveliness we behold is but the shadow?

Let some Agnostic disenchanter come to us at such an hour and tell us that, though it takes a man of genius to depict worthily on canvas a corner of this wide field of loveliness, yet that the whole great original had no Painter, no Designer; that the mountains had no Architect, the well-balanced stars no supreme Geometer, but that it all came about as we behold it through the action of forces, unguided by any mind, undirected by any Will,—and what revulsion shall we not experience? Shall we not feel like a man enamoured of a beautiful woman whom he has believed to be good and wise and tender, but, when he comes at last to look close into her face, he finds her to be a soulless idiot, from whose stony and meaningless gaze he turns shuddering away?

Science, again, is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God.[11] In every department of human thought, in short, something—and that something the most beautiful in it—must be lost, some sacred spell must be broken, if we are to think of it as divested from the deeper sense which religion has (all unconsciously to ourselves) given to it,—the thread of purpose running through; the understood promise of justice; the sympathy of an unseen, all-beholding Spectator.

In the same way, all human relationships will be stripped of the majestic mantle under which they have been sheltered. The idea of the common Fatherhood of God, which Paganism in its best days had begun to teach, and which Christ’s lessons have made the familiar thought of every European child, has put a meaning into the phrase of human brotherhood, which it is much to be doubted if the warmest “Enthusiasts of Humanity” would, without such preliminary training, have been able to give to it. The idea (poorly as it has been hitherto recognized) that the most degraded of mankind, those from whom we naturally turn in disgust, have yet the same Creator and the same Judge as ourselves, has, beyond question, an indirect influence of no small force over all our sentiments concerning them. The same reflection has even at last begun to exercise a perceptible influence over our conduct to the brutes. Christians and Theists of every shade may be found impressed with the sense that religion demands the humane treatment of all sentient creatures; and this, whether they take the view of Cardinal Manning, that, “if I owe no moral duties to the lower animals, I owe all the moral duties that are conceivable to the Creator of those animals,—humanity, mercy, and care for them,” or take the simple Theist stand-point, that, as we love Him, so we naturally look with sympathy and tenderness on everything He has made. Of course, this motive of humanity to brutes disappears with the belief in God; and, accordingly, we find, with quite logical fitness, that, while the opposition to brute torture is maintained by men of every varied shade of religion, the majority of the chief vivisectors of Europe are professed Materialists. Vivisection is the logical outcome of Atheism as regards the brutes; and M. Paul Bert and Carl Vogt are only the most candid examples of men who have carried it out.

But it is in the region of the personal virtues—purity, truth, temperance, contentment—that the loss of the belief in God will be most disastrous. I am far from maintaining that, putting religion wholly out of sight, there are not motives of a purely ethical kind left which ought to make men practise the highest inward virtue. But I think it needs only a slight knowledge of human nature to perceive that the shutting up of the window of the soul, through which an awful and most holy Spectator has hitherto been believed to gaze into all its secrets, must leave a great deal in darkness which has been till now illumined with a sin-exposing light. It takes much for a man to say, like the author of In Memoriam,—

“The dead shall look me through and through.”

The idea of any eye perceiving all that is going on in the recesses of the mind,—the double motives, the unfaithfulnesses, the vanities, the memories of old shameful errors,—this is hard enough. But the belief that such introspection is always taking place, and by the Holiest of all beings, is undoubtedly a sort of purification such as no mere solitary process of self-examination can resemble. Even a warm human friendship in youth brings with it always a burst of self-knowledge. We see ourselves quite freshly in our friend’s view of us. But a thousand times greater inevitably is the self-revelation which comes with the realized presence of God in the soul, the flood of sunshine which discloses all the motes which fill the atmosphere of our thoughts. Now, though it is only spiritually-minded men who know this experience in its full intensity, yet every man who believes in God has gleams of it at intervals through life which are never afterward quite forgotten. But, more (and this is a point which concerns the whole Theistic moral argument most importantly), the supreme experience of spiritual men is filtered down through all grades of minds by books and intercourse. The lofty standard of purity which has been revealed to them is partially exhibited by their words and example, and forms a kind of high-water mark for lesser souls. It is an immense gain, even to very poor sinners, that there should be a few rich saints; and every man who has attained a lofty conception of holiness helps to make all the world around him conscious of its unholiness. He is a mirror in a dark place: the ray of light which has fallen on him dispels somewhat of the gloom around.

Thus, if the belief in God be lost to humanity, we shall lose not only the direct, the incalculable effects on individual souls of the belief in a divine Searcher of Hearts, but also the indirect and universal uplifting influence on society of the presence of men who have experienced such effects, and formed their moral standard accordingly. Is it too much to augur that the result will be a depreciation of the common ideal standard, and a consequently still further depression of the practical level of personal virtue?

What is left, when religion is gone, to give to the personal virtues of purity (of thought as well as of act), of truth, temperance, and contentment, the high status they ought to hold? These virtues, in the history of the moral development of mankind, are always the last to be recognized. In the earlier ages of morality, nobody asks for more than negative merits,—not to murder or rob or deal treacherously. Then comes the great step, when the rabbinical precept, “Thou shalt not do to another what thou wouldest not he should do to thee,” is exchanged for the positive Christian law, Do to another what thou wouldest he should do to thee. But only very slowly, above and beyond all social duties, the principle, “Be perfect, as thy Father in heaven is perfect,” has dawned on mankind as the aim of life; and how little it is yet the practical rule of conduct there is no need to tell. Let us but let slip our faith in the perfect Father in heaven, and will it not sink again by degrees into oblivion? We shall hear a great deal, doubtless (for a time, at all events), of the duty of “laboring for the cause of humanity,” and be encouraged by promises of “posthumous activity.” But where are the motives for personal and secret virtue to come from,—that inward virtue without which even warm social benevolence soon becomes tainted? It must, it would seem, fall more and more into the background. There is, theoretically, no more reason for placing it forward: there is no more any “end of creation” in contemplation, to which the virtue of each soul, to be wrought out by its own struggles, must contribute its quotum. The intrinsic moral character of each soul will no longer be deemed the concern of any being except the man himself, but only what each is able to achieve in the way of contributing to the welfare of other people. While the lesson of the higher ethics has been, “It is more important to be good than to do good,” that of the new ethics must inevitably be, “It is very important what you do: it is of the smallest possible consequence what you are except in so far as your neighbors may know it and be affected thereby.”

In another way, also, I think morality would be affected enormously, though still indirectly, by the downfall of religion. Many of my readers will recall a very able article on Atheism in the National Review for January, 1856, by Mr. R. H. Hutton, in which it was maintained that “Atheism has no language by which it can express the infinite nature of moral distinctions.... It is not, as has been falsely said, that right and wrong take their distinction from measures of duration, but that faith in infinite personal life, and in communion with or separate from infinite good, is the only articulate utterance which our conscience can find for its sense of the absolutely boundless significance it sees in every moral choice.” Take away this expression of the infinite nature of moral distinctions, and the sense of it will very rapidly dwindle away.

And, after all, can it be said in the same sense, under an Atheistic as under a Theistic creed, that moral distinctions are “infinitely” significant? Is there any “infinite” left for us to talk about, when we have abolished God and immortality? Some few thousands of years ago, on the Atheistic hypothesis, when man was just emerging from apehood, there was no Being anywhere who distinguished right from wrong;[12] and some few thousand years to come, when the final glacial period sets in, there will be nobody left to know anything about it. There is no Being now in whom righteousness is impersonated, nor any world to come wherein the injustices of this will be rectified. From the eternal and immutable law of the universe, the ἄγραπτα κᾀσφαλῆ θεῶν νόμιμα, which Sophocles held it to be, the moral law has sunk to a mere “Rule of Thumb,” whereby certain ephemeral creatures on our small planet find it most beneficial, on the whole, to regulate their behavior. Is it in the nature of things to pay to such a rule the sort of obedience and reverence we have paid to the divine law? And if, with the very highest sanctions which can be conceived, that law has but too often failed to secure our obedience against the temptations of selfishness and passion, does anybody expect that, when it is divested of all those sanctions, it will prevail even so far as it has done hitherto?

These are some of the indirect ways in which mankind must lose beauty and truth and goodness, as it loses faith in God and immortality. But the direct losses inevitably to follow are, if possible, graver still.

The course of the moral life, after it has been commenced in earnest, probably passes through the same two great phases in almost every man who lives long enough. At first, duty is a hard effort and all effort. A strong hand seems to be laid on the man, urging him up a toilsome road. Every evil tendency of his nature has to be separately fought with and trampled down, every act of self-sacrifice for others to be performed with exertion of his will. The man labors heroically under his stern sense of duty, taking consolation in it as duty, but still looking rather to fulfil his obligation than desirous that the end of each task should be accomplished. If he die at this stage, it is in some sense a release. He has discharged his duty as a soldier, and is glad to lay down his arms. If he be a religious man, he hopes to hear it said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant! enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”

But if a man live many years, striving in earnest, however failingly, to do his duty, there comes by degrees a change in his condition. Old temptations lie down; and, if no new ones arise to give him trouble, the friction of the inner life diminishes so sensibly that he is apt to be alarmed lest he be growing indifferent. As to his positive duties, those which he has been fulfilling merely because he felt it laid upon him to undertake them, by degrees they acquire interest for him for their own sake. He is intensely anxious for the success of his labors, and no longer measures his efforts by what may be considered his moral obligations. He wants such and such aged or suffering persons to be relieved, such sinners to be reclaimed, such children trained to virtue, such truths published, such wrongs redressed, such useful laws or reforms or discoveries introduced. There is no need now for him to spur himself by reflections that it is his duty to work for these ends: the difficulty with him now lies to moderate his work with a view to the preservation of health and strength. It would be cruelty to tell him his task has been honorably fulfilled, though the object of it has failed. He would cry, “Let me be accounted a faithless servant, but let the work be accomplished by another, and I shall be content.” If he die now, he takes very little comfort from thinking he has discharged his duty. The work is not finished, and will miss his hand. He says, as Theodore Parker said to me on his death-bed: “I am not afraid to die, but I wish I might carry on my work. I have only half used the powers God gave me.”

Now, in all this history of the moral life, it appears that no ostensible difference need exist between the sentiments of an Atheist and a Theist, provided we can carry the Atheist safely to the second stage of progress. Once there, it is evident that no change in his opinions about God or loss of hope of heaven will practically affect his conduct. The habits of self-control whereby he has ruled his passions will not be lost, the interest he has taken in unselfish objects will not dwindle. He will go on to the end, laboring for the good of his kind, and regret his own death mainly because it will stop those labors. But how are ordinary men, of no specially elevated moral fibre, to be carried up to that turning-point where Law is superseded by love? I am far from thinking that men may not and do not often begin their self-reformation when they are (so far as their own consciousness goes) quite alienated from God or disbelieving his existence. I know, on the contrary, that it is no uncommon experience that this should be so. But, in the ordinary history of the soul, the resolute effort to obey conscience after a very little time brings with it a sense, first dim, then shining more to the perfect day, that there is (as Mr. Matthew Arnold says) “a Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness”; or, in plainer revelation, that God watches and helps the soul which strives to do right. Henceforth, the mechanical moral effort is aided by the electric force of religion, burning away the dross of sin in the fire of a divine Presence, and making self-sacrifice sweet as an offering of love. But if this normal process, whereby morality leads up to religion and becomes thereby aided through all future effort, is to be rigidly prohibited by reason, if we are to starve out the religious sentiment as a passion not to be indulged by a rational being, then, I ask, how many are the men and women who, after their first good resolutions, will persist in the course of arduous moral effort long enough to reach that stage when duty becomes comparatively easy? Where are the aids to come from to keep them from self-indulgence? We have seen that the moral law itself is to be represented to them as merely an hereditary set of the brain; that they are not to dream there is any Holy Eye looking at them, any strong Hand ready to aid their feeble steps, any Infinite Love drawing them to itself, any Life beyond the grave where the imperfect virtue of earth shall grow and blossom in eternal beauty. All these ideas are to be resolutely dismissed. The habit of prayer (irreparable, immeasurable loss) is to be discarded. Nothing is to be left save only the one motive of the Enthusiasm of Humanity, which is to replace God and conscience and heaven. Let me speak out concerning this much-boasted modern sentiment.

I have heard a good man, one of the best men I know, preaching on this subject, and saying: “Do you ask why should you love your neighbor? Because you cannot help it!” Now, as I listened to that genuine philanthropist’s utterance, my heart smote me, and I said to myself: “But I could help it, and only too easily! It comes to him spontaneously, I have no doubt, to love his neighbors; but I have been trying to do it for many years, and have very imperfectly succeeded. Instead of beginning with love, and going on to duty toward them as the result of love, I have had to begin with duty, and, only with many a self-reproach for hardness of spirit, learned at last to feel love—for some of them!”

I do not think my experience is exceptional. I think the people who can and do love spontaneously that terribly large section of our race who are commonplace, narrow-minded, and small of heart, are the exceptions, and that, if we are to have no benevolence except from born philanthropists like the good man I have named, we shall see very little in future of the Enthusiasm of Humanity.

No! It takes, for most of us, all the help to loving our brother which comes from believing that we have a common Father and a common home,—all the help which comes to the heart in answer to the prayer that God would melt its stoniness, and make it blossom into tenderness and sympathy,—to enable us to attain the love which is not the spring of social duty, but its climax,—the “fulfilling of the law.”

I honestly think that the process of making Atheists, trained as such, into philanthropists, will be but rarely achieved. And I venture to propound the question to those who point to admirable living examples of Atheistic or Comtist philanthropy,—How many of these have passed through the earlier stage of morality as believers in God, and with all the aid which prayer and faith and hope could give them? That they remain actively benevolent, having advanced so far, is (as I have shown above) readily to be anticipated. But will their children stand where they stand now? We are yet obeying the great impetus of religion, and running along the rails laid down by our forefathers. Shall we continue in the same course when that impetus has stopped, and we have left the rails altogether? I fear me not.

In brief, I think the outlook of Atheism, as a moral educator, as black as need be. Viewed with the utmost candor, and admitting all the excellence of many of its disciples, I think Atheism must deduct from morality the priceless training to reverence afforded by religion; the illuminating consciousness of an unseen Searcher of hearts; the invigorating confidence in an Almighty Helper; the vivifying influence of divine love; and, finally, the immeasurable, inestimable benefits derivable from that practice of prayer which is God’s own education of the soul.

But, whatever may be its results as a system of moral training, Atheism, in its ultimate aspect, must be, to every religious man and woman who is driven to adopt it in later life, the setting of the sun which has warmed and brightened existence. We may live in the twilight; but that which gave to prosperity its joy, to grief its comfort, to duty its delight, to love its sweetness, to solitude its charm, to all life its meaning and purpose, and to death its perfect consolation and support, is lost forever. There are no words to tell what that loss must be,—worst of all to those who are least conscious of it, and who have therefore lost with their faith in God those spiritual faculties in the exercise of which man has his higher being, and of which the pains are better worth than all the pleasures of earth.

Atheism involves a far worse loss to humanity than the exclusion of the belief in a Life after Death; but we can form no fair estimate of the deduction which our complacent Agnostics are prepared to make from the sum of human virtue and happiness, if we do not thoroughly realize what it is they are talking of when they tell us so cheerfully to abandon the hope of Immortality, as well as the belief in God, and that they are quite satisfied to do both.

As far as each individual is personally concerned, such Hope is of course a very variable sentiment. There are those who say (as Miss Martineau mentions Mr. W. E. Forster saying to her), “I would rather be damned than annihilated.” And there are others who say, as she does herself, “I have had a very noble share of life, and I do not ask any more.” With the latter feeling per se, no one has a right to quarrel. To many, no doubt, especially persons of feeble bodily health or overstrained conscientiousness, the notion of final repose is more grateful than that of an immortality of activity. They feel in our day, as it would seem almost everybody did in more trying times, that it was the “rest which remaineth for the people of God,” beyond the storms of the world,—the “everlasting beds of rest” on which the weary may lie,—rather than our more modern notion of a Heaven of Progress, to which they aspire. There are Buddhists of the West as of the East, to whom, by some natural or acquired habit of mind, existence itself seems a burden; and they extend the taedium vitae which they feel here by anticipation to any future state to which they could be transferred. With such persons as these, as I have just said, we have no claim to contend, even though we may think, with Tennyson, that, if they knew themselves better, they would recognize that, even in uttermost lassitude,

“’Tis life of which our veins are scant;
O Life, not Death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller, that we want.”

The dreams of men as to what they desire beyond the grave are infinitely varied, from Nirvana to Valhalla; and nothing is to be said, so far as he himself is concerned, respecting a man who wishes it to be written on his tombstone that he

“From Nature’s temperate feast rose satisfied,
Thanked Heaven that he had lived and that he died,”

except this,—that his choice of eternal sleep betrays the fact that there is no one in this world or the next whom he loves well enough to wish to be awakened to meet him again. Of course, a man may have abundance of kindly and dutiful sentiments for his relatives and friends, and yet (thinking they will do well enough without him) be satisfied to quit them for ever. But I cannot believe that any one who has ever lost the object of the higher and more absorbing human affection, or who leaves behind him in dying one united to him by such transcendent love, can fail passionately to desire immortality. He may resign himself through philosophy or religion (if his religion take the strange and rare form of belief in God and disbelief in a life to come) to see his beloved one no more. But not to desire to meet, at any cost of unwelcome ages of life, the being we profess to love supremely, seems to be a contradiction in terms. Were there to loom before us worlds to climb, and centuries of labor, we would surely thankfully go through them all to reach the hour when we shall say,

“Soul of my soul, I shall meet thee again!
And with God be the rest.”

But because a loveless man may, without blame, be content to let death drop a final curtain on his consciousness, it is quite another matter for him to be equally placidly resigned to the extinction of the hopes of others, who have had no such feast of life as he, or who yearn for the renewal of affection hereafter. As I have elsewhere attempted to show, in a little parable, such resignation on behalf of other people is very much like that of Dives,[13] who, having fared sumptuously, should be contented to let Lazarus starve.

Nor is it only the comfort of expecting to see our beloved ones again which we shall lose with the hope of a future life. I am persuaded that a great deal of the higher part of love itself will fade out of human existence altogether, if that hope be generally abandoned. Every one knows how friendship and marriage are hallowed by the thought of their perpetuity even in this world, and how a union is debased if it be, consciously to those who make it, temporary and transitory. Hitherto, we have loved one another as immortal beings, as creatures whose affections belonged to the exalted order of eternal things. When that ennobling and sanctifying element evaporates, when Love, like everything else, is reduced to a question of days and months and years, will it not undergo somewhat of the degradation which now belongs to the brief contracts of passion? Even those who might still be able to feel all the holiness of love would, when they learned it was destined to end in the agony of eternal separation, check themselves from indulging a sentiment leading up inevitably to such a termination, just as a man would turn from a path ending in a precipice.

Thus, I believe, the affections must irretrievably suffer from the loss of the hope of immortality. So must, in a measure, the intellect and the imagination, driven from the wider expanse back on that poor fleshly life which is to be the end-all of man, and which must be destined to assume an importance it has never possessed since our race emerged from its brute and barbarian origin. Nor would our moral life fail to suffer also very grievously, though in another way from that which has been alleged. I think we can scarcely now estimate the minifying consequences of closing all outlook beyond this world, and shutting up morality within the narrow sphere of mortal life. As I have said in my Hopes of the Human Race, it is not possible we should continue to attach to virtue and vice the same profound significance, when we believe their scope to reach no further than our brief span, and justice to be a dream of our puny race never to be realized throughout the eternal ages. In theory, right and wrong must come to be regarded as of comparatively trivial importance; and, practically, the virtue destined shortly to be extinguished forever must seem to the tempted soul scarcely deserving of an effort. Life, after we have passed its meridian, must become in our eyes more and more like an autumn garden, wherein it would be vain to plant seeds of good which can never bloom before the frosts of death, and useless to eradicate weeds which must be killed erelong without our labor. Needless to add that of that dismal spot it may soon be said,—

“Between the time of the wind and the snow,
All loathsome things began to grow”;

and, when the winter comes at last, none will regret the white shroud it throws over corruption and decay.

But it is when we come to think of humanity as a whole that the prospect of final extinction appears so unutterably deplorable, so lame and impotent a conclusion for all the struggles, the martyrdoms, and the prayers of a hundred generations who have gone to the grave in hope and faith, and perished there. We English men and women have been wont to think proudly of the vast geographical extension of our country’s dominion, the grandeur of the Empire on which the sun never sets; and the remark has often been made that there is not a petty corporation or board in the kingdom whose proceedings are not, in a degree, dignified by the sense of England’s greatness. The politicians who have expressed a readiness to give up our Colonies have been taunted, and justly, with lack of the nobler patriotism which regards not only financial and administrative details, but the larger interests and glory of what we have delighted to call our Imperial Race. But what would be the loss to the prestige of England of the severance of Australia and Canada and India, compared to the loss to mankind of that glorious empery of Immortality in which it has prided itself since the beginning of history? Everything we have achieved and thought—our literature, art, laws, kingdoms, churches—has all been wrought and built up in this faith, which has given value to the soul of the humblest child, and added grandeur to the most splendid deeds of the hero and the martyr. With that hope disappears not only the consolation of all bereaved hearts, but the very crown upon the head of humanity.

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It is no argument for the truth of any opinion that the disclosure of its falsehood may have disastrous consequences. Nothing that has been advanced in this paper proves, or has been offered as proof, that there is a God or a life to come. The foundations for those beliefs belong to a different order of considerations. But I think thus much may be presumed to have resulted from our inquiry; namely, that their value to the virtue and the happiness of mankind is so incalculably vast that the work of demolishing them ought to be carried on, by men professing to love their kind, in a very different spirit from that which is generally exhibited by Agnostics. Even if their position be true, and if they be morally bound to make known to the world that such is the case, and to put an end to the baseless dream which has deluded our race for so many thousand years,—even granting this, I think it remains clear that their task is one to be undertaken only under the sternest sense of duty, and with immeasurable mournfulness and regret. I think that, instead of rejoicing over the discovery of “a spring in the desert,” it behooves them to weep tears, bitter as ever fell from human eyes, over the grave wherein they bury the Divine Love and the Immortal Hope of our miserable race.