The power of prediction is, thus, evidently not to be interpreted as if the evolution of morality would go on except through the human will, and through this will in individuals. In any assertion to the contrary, the same old contradictory division is assumed, of nature as active opposed to nature as passive; man is first regarded as a part of nature and then again as outside nature and compelled by it. We divide him into two parts: the one necessarily coincident with the nature in himself, the other antagonistic to it; the one absolutely passive, the other active; and yet these two are the same, and we regard them as the same from other points of view. Nor does prediction impose any "laws" upon the will from without; it is simply inference from the observed relations in the action of individuals: it does not create or alter those relations. It reckons, not from man as compelled by "Necessity," but from man as possessing will and acting from reason. If man is reasonable, he will perceive that it is for the good of himself as well as for that of the rest of his race to attain a state of harmony; as he is reasonable, he will perceive that social progress is for his benefit as well as for that of others. The increasing solidarity of society continually rendering progress desirable, and the line of the fittest, that is, of those who will in a manner that best fits them for social conditions, continually tending to coincidence with the line of moral progress, the final triumph of the moral is assured. It is not in any way denied that man chooses this course of advancement. On the contrary, wherever we begin in our analysis, we come round finally to the variation of reason, emotion, and will.
As above noticed, the false interpretation of the significance of Evolutional Ethics on the subject of man's will in relation to progress sometimes gives rise to the opposite erroneous impression to that just noticed, to the impression, namely, that progress will go on whether men strive for it or not, and that it is of no particular consequence what the individual does, or at least that Evolutional Ethics can furnish nothing but statistics and predictions, never motives to right-doing. This confusion has caused much self-contradiction, has given rise to the most of the discussion on the subject of Absolute and Relative Ethics, and has impelled certain authors to close their books with something very like a half doubt of the efficacy of their own method except as one of observation. But the value of Evolutional Ethics lies not only in the fact that it goes deeper than any other system and analyzes more clearly the ground of moral conduct,—thus removing doubt with those who are open to conviction, and furnishing a less fallible criterion to those who desire to perceive where right lies in order to perform it,—but in that it also renders obvious the fact that conduct opposed to the welfare of society becomes, with time, more and more disadvantageous. The individual may escape punishment for his misdeeds: but the chances against him are greater, the greater these misdeeds and the longer they are persisted in; it is the "average of the line of moral progress" that is favored by natural selection. A system of Ethics is a part of the environment which acts on the individual; its force is no more lost than is that of any other part of the environment, although the result in the particular case will depend, also, on the character of the individual appealed to. But if Evolutional Ethics cannot bring any such force to bear on the individual as will change his character in an instant, rendering him apt and ready to act according to the ideal, whatever may have been his previous character, there is neither any other system of Ethics which can do this, and there has seldom been one so sanguine as to hope to do it. Theological Ethics, or rather, Theology, has asserted the possibility of such instant transformation, and the doctrine of Socrates that the knowledge of right will secure its performance is a much less extreme instance of a similar idea. But Evolutional Ethics, while rendering manifest the necessity of unceasing endeavor, affords us encouragement by its assurance of the possibility of progress, and its demonstration of the fact that the force of endeavor can no more be lost than any other force. It adds dignity to the smallest acts, and lends earnestness and worth to life. It neither contains any excuses for inaction nor leaves any reason open to pessimism except a selfish one; to the man to whom his own selfish gratification is all in all, the knowledge of social evolution is not a matter of encouragement and rejoicing; but to the lover of his kind it must be. Evolutional Ethics admonishes us to labor, yet teaches us the necessity of patience, since, however the individual will, nothing arises all at once, and the evolution of morals in society as a whole must, like all other evolutions, be a gradual, because a many-sided one. It admonishes us, too,—and this is well,—that we cannot sin without leaving ineffaceable stains upon our own character. The past is never dead, either in its results outside ourselves or in our habit; and it is not the drunkard only who one day awakens to find himself irrevocably moulded, by steps of habit so slight as to have been almost imperceptible, to that which he once loathed and detested. "Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never; they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness."[268] We may not be a mere spectator of the struggle for existence even if we will; the dead weight of inaction is itself a force opposed to other force. Willy, nilly, so long as we live we must bear the responsibility of taking a part for or against the progress and welfare of the world.
But there is, as I have said, a system which asserts the possibility of instant entire change of character, as well as of the forgiveness and obliteration of past sins. What manner of obliteration is this? Not the obliteration of the consequences of the acts, since that is impossible, but an obliteration of responsibility for them such that the doer may erase them from his conscience. The innocent on whom the evil results fall are, then, according to this view, the only ones who shall suffer for them. The doctrine of the Atonement takes away that sense of personal responsibility which is most essential to morality, and this removal of responsibility explains the ease with which Christians of all ages have combined a fervid religiosity with vice and crime. Christian theories of morals of the present day forbid the issue of indulgences; but the consciousness that full and free forgiveness is always waiting to receive the offender whenever he gets ready to repent, even if it is not until his death-bed, is most pernicious in its results. So we learn, for instance, that the "Mollie Maguires," a league formed in the mines of Pennsylvania a few years ago, for the express purpose of murder by coöperation, were in the habit of opening their meetings with prayer, and of withdrawing regularly from the society, for one quarter of the year, to attend church, in order then to murder with an easy conscience for the other three quarters. The senior member of Conan Doyle's "Firm of Girdlestone" is no mere fiction of the imagination. I have no desire to join with those who pronounce all Christians, or everything in Christian doctrine, morally unsound; I only maintain that the doctrine of the Atonement is in itself pernicious, and is shown to be so by its easy reconciliation with evil action.
Theological Ethics is defective in other respects also. A system which represents God as accomplishing his own will in the world in "mysterious ways," to question which is sacrilege, has necessarily led to the excusing of much evil as punishment or discipline, and so to inaction against it. "Men can do so little themselves to make the world better," said a fervent Christian to me not long since; "we must leave these things to God." So, poverty has been held to be a mysterious dispensation of Providence which it was not necessary to do away with even if its abolishment were possible, but the slight alleviation of which was counted among the means of atonement for other sin. Thus it has been in other ways than in itself a curse to mankind, furnishing a sort of indulgence for the immoralities of the rich. Poverty has even been represented as a blessing, since it was to be compensated with double joy in the hereafter. The Christian, pointing the miserable and starving to Heaven as a recompense for pain, experienced, without largely inconveniencing himself, a sense of his own piety and desert, and exerting himself to no radical cure but only to a meagre dole of charity, shifted all responsibility of the cure or its omission, by prayer, to God. So Salter is led to exclaim: "If we must pray, let us pray to men; for there all the trouble lies. Could you, O churches, but open the hearts of your worshippers as you seek to move the heart of God, the need for all other prayer would soon be gone."[269]
Again, Theology has continually taught that man's first duty was to save his own soul from hell, and in this doctrine, ideas of repentance and redemption, faith and worship, have played a larger part than "mere morality." The tendency has, therefore, been towards an "other-worldliness," an egoism of the Hereafter, rather than a fulfilment of the commandment of love. Faith has been exalted above love of Truth, and blind obedience above reasoning morality. Thus it was that Christians entered, with such zeal, into the persecution of heretics. Had the commandment of justice: "do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you," been followed, the Inquisition could never have taken place. But Christians forget, when they point to this commandment in evidence of the superiority of Christian Ethics, that it is not the only command or doctrine that the Bible contains. Nor is this conception of love to others, which Christians have continually cited as testimony of the divine origin of their religion, confined to Christianity or even original with it. Many other religions contain it. The Buddhist religion enjoins towards all creatures such love as that with which a mother "watches over her own child, her only child."
It is true that the majority of the objectionable points of Christian Ethics are found in the Old Testament. This testament is, however, accepted as the exponent of divine truth, though the authority it now possesses is slight in comparison with that which it formerly held. Yet Christ himself says: "Think not I am come to destroy the Law (i.e., the Pentateuch),[270] or the Prophets, I come not to destroy, but to fulfil. For, verily, I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law till all be fulfilled. Whosoever, therefore, shall break one of these least commandments and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven; but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." Repeatedly, Christ shows himself a strict conformant to the Jewish code. But if we examine the Pentateuch, the Jewish Law, we shall easily find on what grounds the burning of heretics and witches, and all the other cruelties of the Middle Ages were committed in the name of Christianity. Lubbock writes, for instance:[271] "Among the Jews, we find a system of animal sacrifice on a great scale, and symbols of human sacrifice which can, I think, only be understood on the hypothesis that the latter were once usual. The case of Jephthah's daughter is generally looked upon as exceptional; but the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth verses of the twenty-seventh chapter of Leviticus appear to indicate that human sacrifices were at one time habitual, among the Jews." See also 2 Sam. xxi. 1, 5-9, 14. In Lev. xx. 27; Ex. xxii. 18, the stoning of witches is commanded. In Ex. xxii. 20; Deut. xiii. 1-5, 6-10, 14, 15; xvii. 1-5; xviii. 20, it was commanded that men be put to death for idolatry or heresy or for "dreaming dreams" in the service of another god, and that idolatrous cities should be utterly destroyed even to the cattle within them. Superstition and insanity must have fared ill among the Jews. Ex. xxxi. 14, 15; xxxv. 2, 3; sentence of death is pronounced on any who shall perform even so much labor as the kindling of a fire on the Sabbath; and Num. xv. 32-36, describe how a man was put to death, by God's command to Moses, for gathering sticks on that day. Death was also commanded for murmuring and for all sorts of ceremonial offences; see, for instance, Ex. xii. 15, 19; xxx. 33-38; Lev. vii. 20-27; xvii. 8-10, 13-16; xix. 5-8; xxiii. 29, 30; xxiv. 10-16, 23; Num. i. 51; iii. 10, 38; iv. 15, 18-20; xi. 1; xvii. 13; xviii. 3, 7, 22; see also especially Deut. xxviii. 15-68; xxxii. 22-42. Command of subjection to the priesthood on pain of death is found in Deut. xvii. 8-12, and examples of fearful punishment for protest against its supremacy are given in Num. xvi. 3-15, 20, 21, 26-35, 41-47, 49. It may be noticed, that here the children are represented as perishing with the parents by God's express command and miracle. Many instances of the stoning and putting to death of whole families for the sins of some member or members of the family are recorded in the Old Testament, and prove that the expression "visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation," is not to be interpreted as a mere reference to heredity, as many have endeavored to prove it to be. See on this point Is. xiv. 21; also Ps. cix. 7-20; cxxxvii. 9. The origin of ordeals may be traced to Num. v. 11-31.
The Old Testament also sanctions slavery, and makes no protest against the selling of children into slavery; see Ex. xxi. 2-6, 7; Lev. xxv. 44-47; although the Israelites were to treat slaves and servants of their own nation with much greater kindness than that used towards those of other nations. Ex. xxi. 20, 21, prescribes that a man shall not be punished for beating his servant to death, provided the servant does not die directly under his hand, but linger a day or two; "for he is his money." Christians have often protested that their religion cannot be held responsible for the sins of the prophets,—for David's murder of Uriah in order to obtain the wife with whom he had already committed adultery; for his torture of the Ammonites with saws and axes and harrows and fire, and his houghing of the horses of a thousand Moabitish chariots; for Solomon's concubinage and his slaughter of Joab according to David's last orders; for Elijah's wholesale slaughter of the priests of Baal; or for the thousand other vices, crimes, and atrocities described in the Old Testament as committed by God's chosen men, generally without punishment or protest from him. However, the case is not so easily dismissed when we find just as great cruelties and atrocities directly ascribed to God's express command or miraculous interposition. A large number of such are included in the passages already noticed; and we further find descriptions of a destruction from God for the crime of census-taking[272]—1 Chron. xxi. 1, 11-15—for touching the ark in the endeavor to save it from a fall—2 Sam. vi. 6, 7,—and for many other trifling offences. God is always represented as favoring the Israelites in their wars and massacres, and often as commanding the slaughter of thousands; so that we can easily understand how it happened that the cowardly murderers of the Duke of Gloucester, in the time of Richard II., swore "upon the Body of Christ before a certain chaplain of St. George in the church of Our Lady of Calais, that they would not disclose the murder they were about to perpetrate,"[273] as also, on what precedent Russia, at the present day, has her war-engines blessed by priests of the "God of Battles." Deut. xx. 10-15, commands the slaughter of males captured in a siege, but the sparing alive of women and children as booty; and Num. xxxi. describes a case in which the command was carried out, with the reservation of a certain portion of young girls for the priests. See also Deut. xxi. 10-14. Furthermore, a religion that makes man absolute ruler of the earth and all living things, and sanctions animal sacrifice, cannot conduce to a sense of the duty of self-restraint towards other species, and is, in fact, often used as an excuse for the autocracy and cruelty of man.
It is, indeed, strange to see civilized peoples of the nineteenth century proclaiming the divine origin of laws and beliefs like these—laws and beliefs at least as barbarous as those of the Greeks and Romans whose gods the Christians deride, and far behind the Ethics of some philosophical systems produced among those "heathen" peoples. As has been said, various attempts have been made to explain away these barbarities, or to withdraw all responsibility for them from God, to whom the Old Testament often directly ascribes them. But in the light of what we know of other primitive peoples the customs of the Jews are only too easily comprehensible; the same barbarities of human and animal sacrifice, slavery, murder without pity, and unscrupulous cruelty of every sort, were to be found, as we have seen, among many other ancient peoples. As for withdrawing the responsibility from the God of the Jews, Christians forget that, in denying the divine origin of the cruel, brutal, and obscene laws ascribed to God together with other laws of less barbarity but of organic growth with these, they are forever destroying the grounds of belief in any assertion of divine supervision, and throwing doubt, by implication, on the New Testament as well, since Christ and his followers were believers in the Law and the Prophets, and often refer to their assertions and accounts of divine direction. But most religions have claimed, and do claim, the divine origin and ratification of their laws, as a means of enforcing them.
The God of the Jews, Jehovah, was originally a nature-god, the god of the heavens, like Zeus, Jupiter, and many other of the greatest gods of other peoples. Science has exploded ancient ideas of the sky; but the Christians still cling to the old terms brought into use at a time when men believed in a flat earth and a region of spirits above floored by an opaque heaven. The God of the Jews was, like the gods of all primitive peoples, a "jealous" and revengeful god, rather to be "feared" than loved; for to such peoples, possessing few resources against the powers of nature and ignorant of their character, the destructive forces of the elements appeared at first rather evil than good, and therefore to be conciliated and appeased; the gods take on their friendly character only as man comes to learn how the forces of nature may be employed for his benefit, and as he slowly attains, in himself, to sympathetic and moral feeling. Accordingly, the Jews were continually occupied with all manner of propitiatory offerings of their most valuable possessions—their herds and the fruits of the earth; and these were burnt under the impression common to nearly all primitive and savage tribes, that they suffered by fire a sort of death and entered the spiritual world. Gradually, the Jews became more civilized, and took on the higher ideals of Eastern religions with which they came in contact; but even to very recent date, the "fear" of God was regarded as the chief essential emotion on the part of the worshipper. Of late, as social ideals have become higher, and sympathy more general, the idea of love, lost for a time through the mixture of Eastern peoples with more barbaric ones, has come to the fore. That a doctrine of polytheism is clearly taught in Gen. iii. 22; vi. 1-4, Christians do not generally even notice. The idea of demigods, found in the latter verse, is called by them, when they meet with it in the Greek or Roman religion, a "myth"; and the idea of sexual intercourse between men and gods, also taught in these verses, is held worthy of all abhorrence, when these "heathen" religions are under consideration. The fact is, that exegesis, forced to advance by progressing civilization, has left far behind the simple original meaning of bible-texts,—such obvious meaning as Christians find in the Buddhist, Persian, or Egyptian Scriptures, when they peruse them. This is true of the New Testament as well as of the Old. The Christian religion has indeed developed into a system of Christian philosophy as different from the Christianity warranted by the Old and New Testaments as were the later Buddhist philosophies from original Buddhism.
When Christ conferred upon his Apostles the power to forgive sins, he laid the foundation for papal authority, and confirmed the ancient authority of the priesthood, preparing the way for that organization of priestcraft which figured so prominently in all the sorrowful history of the Middle Ages. Moreover, the vein of sadness and the subordination of natural modes of life which mark his teaching as they mark only in a greater degree those of the Buddha, easily led to the celibacy and mortification of the flesh which so long condemned the most aspiring from a moral point of view, the most gentle and conscientious, to a life of loneliness, and peopled the world with the progeny of the less moral. Indeed, if we read Matt. xix. 12 correctly, Christ distinctly taught emasculation as a high religious virtue.