Toward men, it hardly needs to be said that justice (in the limited and ordinary acceptation of the word) has the precedence of charity. Indeed, were it not for the prevalence of injustice—individual, social, and civic—there would hardly be any scope for the active exercise of charity. Want comes almost wholly from wrong. Were justice universal, that is, were the rights and privileges which fitly belong to men as men, extended to and made available by all classes and conditions of men, there would still be great inequalities of wealth and of social condition; but abject and squalid poverty could hardly exist. In almost every individual instance, the withholding or delay of justice tends more or less directly toward the creation of the very evils which charity relieves. No amount of generosity, then, can palliate injustice, or stand as a substitute for justice.
As regards the persons to whom we owe offices of kindness or charity, it is obvious that those related to us by consanguinity or affinity have the first [pg 193] claim. These relations have all the elements of a natural alliance for mutual defence and help; and it is impossible that their essential duties should be faithfully discharged and their fitnesses duly observed, without creating sympathies that in stress of need will find expression in active charity. In the next rank we may fittingly place our benefactors, if their condition be such as to demand a return for their kind offices in our behalf. Nearness in place may be next considered; for the very fact that the needs of our neighbors are or may be within our cognizance, commends them especially to our charity, and enables us to be the more judicious and effective in their relief. Indeed, in smaller communities, where the dwellings of the rich and of the poor are interspersed, a general recognition of the claims of neighborhood on charity would cover the field of active beneficence with an efficiency attainable in no other way, and at a greatly diminished cost of time and substance. There is yet another type of neighborhood, consecrated to our reverent observance by the parable of the Good Samaritan. There are from time to time cases of want and suffering brought, without our seeking, under our immediate regard,—cast, as it were, directly upon our kind offices. The person thus commended to us is, for the time, our nearest neighbor, nay, our nearest kinsman, and the very circumstances which have placed him in this relation to us, make him fittingly the foremost object of our charity.
The question sometimes presents itself whether [pg 194] we shall bestow an immediate, yet transient benefit, or a more remote, but permanent good. If the two are incompatible, and the former is not a matter of absolute necessity, the latter is to be preferred. Thus remunerative employment is much more beneficial than alms to an able-bodied man, and it is better that he suffer some degree of straitness till he can earn a more comfortable condition, than that he be first made to feel the dependence of pauperism. Yet if his want be entire and urgent, the delay of immediate relief is the part of cruelty. On similar grounds, beneficence which embraces a class of cases or persons is to be preferred to particular acts of kindness to individuals. Thus it seems harsh to refuse alms to an unknown street beggar; but as such relief gives shelter to a vast amount of fraud, idleness, and vice, it is much better that we should sustain, by contributions proportioned to our ability, some system by which cases of actual need, and such only, can be promptly and adequately cared for, and that we then—however reluctantly—refuse our alms to applicants of doubtful merit.
Chapter XIV.
Ancient History Of Moral Philosophy.
The numerous ethical systems that have had currency in earlier or later times, may be divided into two classes,—the one embracing those which make virtue a means; the other, those which make it an end. According to the former, virtue is to be practised for the good that will come of it; according to the latter, for its own sake, for its intrinsic excellence. These classes have obvious subdivisions. The former includes both the selfish and the utilitarian theory; while the latter embraces a wide diversity of views as to the nature, the standard, and the criterion of virtue, according as it is believed to consist in conformity to the fitness of things, in harmony with an unsophisticated taste, in accordance with the interior moral sense, or in obedience to the will of God. There are, also, border theories, which blend, or rather force into juxtaposition, the ideas that underlie the two classes respectively.
It is proposed, in the present chapter, to give an outline of the history of ethical philosophy in Greece and Rome, or rather, in Greece; for Rome had no philosophy that was not born in Greece.
Socrates was less a moral philosopher than a [pg 196] preacher of virtue. Self-ordained as a censor and reformer, he directed his invective and irony principally against the Sophists, whose chief characteristic as to philosophy seems to have been the denial of objective truth, and thus, of absolute and determinate right. Socrates, in contrast with them, seeks to elicit duty from the occasions for its exercise, making his collocutors define right and obligation from the nature of things as presented to their own consciousness and reflection. Plato represents him, whenever a moral question is under discussion, as probing the very heart of the case, and drawing thence the response as from a divine oracle.