A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
The enemies of Nature have for ages based the favorite arguments of their creed on the doctrine of Natural Depravity. According to the theories of that tenet the natural instincts of the human heart are wholly evil, and its every nobler impulse is due to the redeeming influence of theological education. The baseness of the “unregenerate soul” is their favorite antithesis of “holiness by grace;” and the best test of that dogma would be a comparison of the moral characteristics of a young child of Nature with the moral results of theological training. We need not adduce the extreme case of a child like Kaspar Hauser or the ape-nursed foundling of Baroda, whose propensities had been modeled in communion with solitude or the dumb denizens of the wilderness. For, even in the midst of “Christian civilization,” thousands of peasants and mechanics are practically pure Agnostics, and ignore the absurdities of the New Testament as persistently as their deer-hunting ancestors ignored the absurdities [[149]]of pagan mythology. At the end of his sixth or seventh year the offspring of such parents would still represent a fair specimen-child of unregenerate Nature, and the normal bias of that Nature is revealed in the honesty, the trusting innocence, the purity, and the cheerfulness of the young Agnostic, and the absence of every appreciable germ of the secret vices, the rancorous spites, and the joy-hating bigotries of the representative Christian convent-slave.
But the most characteristic features of that contrast would perhaps be the double-tongued hypocrisy of the old Jesuit and the artless candor of the young peasant boy. The truthfulness of young children antedates all moral instruction. Its motives are wholly independent of theological, or even abstract-ethical, influences, and are based merely on a natural preference for the simplest way of dealing with the problems of intellectual communication. Truth is uniform, falsehood is complex. Truth is persistent and safe; falsehood is unstable, fragile, and precarious. Children instinctively recognize the difficulties of plausibly maintaining the fictions of deceit, and dread the risk of incurring the suspicion of habitual insincerity. Hence their uncompromising loyalty to facts; their innocence of artifice and mental reservation; hence also their extreme reluctance in conforming to the conventional customs of social hypocrisy and polite prevarication.
“Are you not glad Mrs. D. is gone?” Master Frank once asked his mother in my presence. “Well, yes, I am.” “Then what’s the use asking her to call [[150]]again and stay for supper? She could not help seeing that we were tired of her gabble.” “Well, it wouldn’t do to insult her, you know.” “Oh, no, but what’s the use telling her something she cannot believe?”
That last remark, especially, recurs to my memory whenever the expedience of hypocrisy is defended by the conventional sophisms of Christian civilization. That prevarications are unprofitable as well as unpardonable is a truth which Jesuitry has shrouded with a veil of its choicest cant, but the clear vision of childhood penetrates that cant, and the “natural depravity” of unregenerate souls may reach the degree of doubting the merit of simulation even in the interest of an orthodox creed, as the reverend dogmatist might ascertain by happening to overhear the recess comments of our American Sabbath-school youngsters.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The Utilitarians hold that motives of enlightened self-interest would be sufficient to make a man perfectly virtuous. With the conventional definition of “virtue,” that tenet might require certain qualifications; but it is more than probable that perfect prudence would insure a voluntary devotion to perfect truthfulness. In its most aggressive form the hatred of falsehood may imperil the temporary interests of the aggressor, but in every other sense the path of truth is the path of safety. All the ultimate tendencies of the moral and physical universe conspire to vindicate truth and discredit fraud. [[151]]
Assertions based on fact stand erect, upheld by the evidence of experience as an upright building by the law of gravity; deception, with all its props of plausible sophisms, is tottering like a wall out of plumb, or a rotten tree upheld by artificial supports which in their turn must yield to the test of time.