Buddha, as he lived 700 years before Christ, can hardly be said to have drawn his morality from that of Jesus or even to have derived any indirect benefit from Christian teaching, and yet I have been gravely told by a Church of England clergyman—who ought to have known better—that forgiveness of injuries and charity were purely Christian virtues. This heathen Buddha, lighted only by natural reason and a pure heart, teaches: "a man who foolishly does me wrong I will return to him the protection of my ungrudging love; the more evil comes from him the more good shall go from me;" among principal virtues are: "to repress lust and banish desire; to be strong without being rash; to bear insult without anger; to move in the world without setting the heart on it; to investigate a matter to the very bottom; to save men by converting them; to be the same in heart and life." "Let a man overcome evil by good, anger by love, the greedy by liberality, the liar by truth. For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love; this is an old rule." He inculcates purity, charity, self-sacrifice, courtesy, and earnestly recommends personal search after truth: "do not believe in guesses"—in assuming something at hap-hazard as a starting-point—reckoning your two and your three and your four before you have fixed your number one. Do not believe in the truth of that to which you have become attached by habit, as every nation believes in the superiority of its own dress and ornaments and language. Do not believe merely because you have heard, but when of your own consciousness you know a thing to be evil abstain from it. Methinks these sayings of Buddha are unsurpassed by any revealed teaching, and contain quite as noble and lofty a morality as the Sermon on the Mount, "natural" as they are.
Plato, also, teaches a noble morality and soars into ideas about the Divine Nature as pure and elevated as any which are to be found in the Bible. The summary of his teaching, quoted by Mr. Lake in a pamphlet of Mr. Scott's series, is a glorious testimony to the worth of natural religion. "It is better to die than to sin. It is better to suffer wrong than to do it. The true happiness of man consists in being united to God, and his only misery in being separated from Him. There is one God, and we ought to love and serve Him, and to endeavour to resemble Him in holiness and righteousness." Plato saw also the great truth that suffering is not the result of an evil power, but is a necessary training to good, and he anticipates the very words of Paul—if indeed Paul does not quote from Plato—that "to the just man all things work together for good, whether in life or death." Plato lived 400 years before Christ, and yet in the face of such teaching as his and Buddha's,—and they are only two out of many—Christians fling at us the taunt that we, rejectors of the Bible, draw all our morality from it, and that without this one revelation the world would lie in moral darkness, ignorant of truth and righteousness and God. But the light of God's revealing shines still upon the world, even as the sunlight streams upon it steadfastly as of old; "it is not given to a few men in the infancy of mankind to monopolise inspiration and to bar God out of the soul.... Wherever a heart beats with love, where Faith and Reason utter their oracles, there also is God, as formerly in the heart of seers and prophets."*
* Theodore Tarker.
It is a favourite threat of the priesthood to any inquiring spirit: "If you give up Christianity you give up all certainty; rationalism speaks with no certain sound; no two rationalists think alike; the word rationalism covers everything outside Christianity, from Unitarianism to the blankest atheism;" and many a timid soul starts back, feeling that if this is true it is better to rest where it is, and inquire no more. To such—and I meet many such—I would suggest one very simple thought: does "Christianity" give any more certainty than rationalism? Just try asking your mentor, "whose Christianity am I to accept?" He will stammer out, "Oh, the teaching of the Bible, of course." But persevere: "As explained by whom? for all claim to found their Christianity on the Bible: am I to accept the defined logical Christianity of Pius IX., defiant of history, of science, of common sense, or shall I sit under Spurgeon, the denunciator, and flee from the scarlet woman and the cup of her fascinations: shall I believe the Christianity of Dean Stanley, instinct with his own gracious, kindly spirit, cultured and polished, pure and loving, or shall I fly from it as a sweet but insidious poison, as I am exhorted to do by Dr. Pusey, who rails at his 'variegated language which destroys all definiteness of meaning.' For pity's sake, good father, label for me the various bottles of Christian medicine, that I may know which is healing to the soul, which may be touched with caution, as for external application, and which are rank poison." All the priest will find to answer is, that "under sad diversities of opinion there are certain saving truths common to all forms of Christianity," but he will object to particularise what they are, and at this stage will wax angry and refuse to argue with anyone who shows a spirit so carping and so conceited. There is the same diversity in rationalism as in Christianity, because human nature is diverse, but there is also one bond between all freethinkers, one "great saving truth" of rationalism, one article of faith, and that is, that "free inquiry is the right of every human soul;" diverse in much, we all agree in this, and so strong is this bond that we readily welcome any thinker, however we disagree with his thoughts, provided only that he think them honestly and allow to all the liberty of holding their own opinions also. We are bound together in one common hatred of Dogmatism, one common love of liberty of thought and speech.
It is probably a puzzle to good and unlearned Christians whence men, unenlightened by revelation, drew and still draw their morality. We answer, "from mere Nature, and that because Nature and not revelation is the true basis of all morality." We have seen the untrustworthiness of all so-called revelations; but when we fall back on Nature we are on firm ground. Theists start in their search after God from their well-known axiom: "If there be a God at all He must be at least as good as His highest creature;" and they argue that what is highest and noblest and most lovable in man must be below, but cannot be above, the height and the nobleness and the loveableness of God. "Of all impossible thing, the most impossible must surely be that a man should dream something of the Good and the Noble, and that it should prove at last that his Creator was less good and less noble than he had dreamed."* "The ground on which our belief in God rests is Man. Man, parent of Bibles and Churches, inspirer of all good thoughts and good deeds. Man, the master-piece of God's work on earth. Man, the text-book of all spiritual knowledge. Neither miraculous or infallible, Man is nevertheless the only trustworthy record of the Divine mind in things pertaining to God. Man's reason, conscience, and affections are the only true revelation of his Maker,"** And as we believe that we may glean some hints of the Glory and Beauty of our Creator from the glory and beauty of human excellence, so we believe that to each man, as he lives up to the highest he can perceive, will surely be unveiled fresh heights of righteousness, fresh possibilities of moral growth.
* Frances Power Cobbe.
** Rev. Charles Voysey.
To all men alike, good and evil, is laid open Nature's revelation of morality, as exemplified in the highest human lives; and these noble lives receive ever the heavenly hall-mark by the instinctive response from every human breast that they "are very good." To those only who live up to the good they see, does God give the further inner revelation, which leads them higher and higher in morality, quickening their moral faculties, and making more sensitive and delicate their moral susceptibilities. We cannot, as revelationists do, chalk out all the whole range of moral perfection: we "walk by faith and not by sight:" step by step only is the path unveiled to us, and only as we surmount one peak do we gain sight of the peak beyond: the distant prospect is shrouded from our gaze, and we are too fully occupied in doing the work which is given us to do in this world, to be for ever peering into and brooding over the world beyond the grave. We have light enough to do our Father's work here; when he calls us yonder it will be time enough to ask Him to unveil our new sphere of labour and to cause His sun to rise on it. Wayward children fret after some fancied happiness and miss the work and the pleasure lying at their feet, and so petulant men and women cry out that "man that is born of woman... is full of misery," and wail for a revelation to ensure some happier life: they seem to forget that if this world is full of misery they are put here to mend it and not to cry over it, and that it is our shame and our condemnation that in God's fair world so much sin and unhappiness are found. If men would try to read nature instead of revelation, if they would study natural laws and leave revealed laws, if they would follow human morality instead of ecclesiastical morality, then there might be some chance of real improvement for the race, and some hope that the Divine Voice in Nature might be heard above the babble of the Churches.
And Nature is enough for us, gives us all the light we want and all that we, as yet, are fitted to receive. Were it possible that God should now reveal Himself to us as He is, the Being of Whose Nature we can form no conception, I believe that we should remain as ignorant as we are at present, from the want of faculties to receive that revelation: the Divine language might sound in our ears, but it would be as unintelligible as the roar of the thunder-clap, or the moan of the earthquake, or the whisper of the wind to the leaves of the cedar-tree. God is slowly revealing Himself by His works, by the course of events, by the progress of Humanity: if He has never spoken from Heaven in human language, He is daily speaking in the world around us to all who have ears to hear, and as Nature in its varied forms is His only revelation of Himself, so the mind and the heart alone can perceive His presence and catch the whispers ot His mysterious voice.
Never yet has been broken
The silence eternal:
Never yet has been spoken
In accents supernal
God's Thought of Himself.
We are groping in blindness
Who yearn to behold Him:
But in wisdom and kindness
In darkness He folds Him
Till the soul learns to see.
So the veil is unriven
That hides the All-Holy,
And no token is given
That satisfies wholly
The cravings of man.
But, unhasting, advances
The march of the ages,
To truth-seekers' glances
Unrolling the pages
Of God's revelation.
Impatience unheeding,
Time, slowly revolving;
Unresting, unspeeding,
Is ever evolving
Fresh truths about God.
Human speech has not broken
The stillness supernal:
Yet ever is spoken
Through silence eternal,
With growing distinctness
God's Thought of Himself.