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?