What is left, when religion is gone, to give to the personal virtues of purity (of thought as well as of act), of truth, temperance, and contentment, the high status they ought to hold? These virtues, in the history of the moral development of mankind, are always the last to be recognized. In the earlier ages of morality, nobody asks for more than negative merits,—not to murder or rob or deal treacherously. Then comes the great step, when the rabbinical precept, “Thou shalt not do to another what thou wouldest not he should do to thee,” is exchanged for the positive Christian law, Do to another what thou wouldest he should do to thee. But only very slowly, above and beyond all social duties, the principle, “Be perfect, as thy Father in heaven is perfect,” has dawned on mankind as the aim of life; and how little it is yet the practical rule of conduct there is no need to tell. Let us but let slip our faith in the perfect Father in heaven, and will it not sink again by degrees into oblivion? We shall hear a great deal, doubtless (for a time, at all events), of the duty of “laboring for the cause of humanity,” and be encouraged by promises of “posthumous activity.” But where are the motives for personal and secret virtue to come from,—that inward virtue without which even warm social benevolence soon becomes tainted? It must, it would seem, fall more and more into the background. There is, theoretically, no more reason for placing it forward: there is no more any “end of creation” in contemplation, to which the virtue of each soul, to be wrought out by its own struggles, must contribute its quotum. The intrinsic moral character of each soul will no longer be deemed the concern of any being except the man himself, but only what each is able to achieve in the way of contributing to the welfare of other people. While the lesson of the higher ethics has been, “It is more important to be good than to do good,” that of the new ethics must inevitably be, “It is very important what you do: it is of the smallest possible consequence what you are except in so far as your neighbors may know it and be affected thereby.”
In another way, also, I think morality would be affected enormously, though still indirectly, by the downfall of religion. Many of my readers will recall a very able article on Atheism in the National Review for January, 1856, by Mr. R. H. Hutton, in which it was maintained that “Atheism has no language by which it can express the infinite nature of moral distinctions.... It is not, as has been falsely said, that right and wrong take their distinction from measures of duration, but that faith in infinite personal life, and in communion with or separate from infinite good, is the only articulate utterance which our conscience can find for its sense of the absolutely boundless significance it sees in every moral choice.” Take away this expression of the infinite nature of moral distinctions, and the sense of it will very rapidly dwindle away.
And, after all, can it be said in the same sense, under an Atheistic as under a Theistic creed, that moral distinctions are “infinitely” significant? Is there any “infinite” left for us to talk about, when we have abolished God and immortality? Some few thousands of years ago, on the Atheistic hypothesis, when man was just emerging from apehood, there was no Being anywhere who distinguished right from wrong;[12] and some few thousand years to come, when the final glacial period sets in, there will be nobody left to know anything about it. There is no Being now in whom righteousness is impersonated, nor any world to come wherein the injustices of this will be rectified. From the eternal and immutable law of the universe, the ἄγραπτα κᾀσφαλῆ θεῶν νόμιμα, which Sophocles held it to be, the moral law has sunk to a mere “Rule of Thumb,” whereby certain ephemeral creatures on our small planet find it most beneficial, on the whole, to regulate their behavior. Is it in the nature of things to pay to such a rule the sort of obedience and reverence we have paid to the divine law? And if, with the very highest sanctions which can be conceived, that law has but too often failed to secure our obedience against the temptations of selfishness and passion, does anybody expect that, when it is divested of all those sanctions, it will prevail even so far as it has done hitherto?
These are some of the indirect ways in which mankind must lose beauty and truth and goodness, as it loses faith in God and immortality. But the direct losses inevitably to follow are, if possible, graver still.
The course of the moral life, after it has been commenced in earnest, probably passes through the same two great phases in almost every man who lives long enough. At first, duty is a hard effort and all effort. A strong hand seems to be laid on the man, urging him up a toilsome road. Every evil tendency of his nature has to be separately fought with and trampled down, every act of self-sacrifice for others to be performed with exertion of his will. The man labors heroically under his stern sense of duty, taking consolation in it as duty, but still looking rather to fulfil his obligation than desirous that the end of each task should be accomplished. If he die at this stage, it is in some sense a release. He has discharged his duty as a soldier, and is glad to lay down his arms. If he be a religious man, he hopes to hear it said to him, “Well done, good and faithful servant! enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”
But if a man live many years, striving in earnest, however failingly, to do his duty, there comes by degrees a change in his condition. Old temptations lie down; and, if no new ones arise to give him trouble, the friction of the inner life diminishes so sensibly that he is apt to be alarmed lest he be growing indifferent. As to his positive duties, those which he has been fulfilling merely because he felt it laid upon him to undertake them, by degrees they acquire interest for him for their own sake. He is intensely anxious for the success of his labors, and no longer measures his efforts by what may be considered his moral obligations. He wants such and such aged or suffering persons to be relieved, such sinners to be reclaimed, such children trained to virtue, such truths published, such wrongs redressed, such useful laws or reforms or discoveries introduced. There is no need now for him to spur himself by reflections that it is his duty to work for these ends: the difficulty with him now lies to moderate his work with a view to the preservation of health and strength. It would be cruelty to tell him his task has been honorably fulfilled, though the object of it has failed. He would cry, “Let me be accounted a faithless servant, but let the work be accomplished by another, and I shall be content.” If he die now, he takes very little comfort from thinking he has discharged his duty. The work is not finished, and will miss his hand. He says, as Theodore Parker said to me on his death-bed: “I am not afraid to die, but I wish I might carry on my work. I have only half used the powers God gave me.”
Now, in all this history of the moral life, it appears that no ostensible difference need exist between the sentiments of an Atheist and a Theist, provided we can carry the Atheist safely to the second stage of progress. Once there, it is evident that no change in his opinions about God or loss of hope of heaven will practically affect his conduct. The habits of self-control whereby he has ruled his passions will not be lost, the interest he has taken in unselfish objects will not dwindle. He will go on to the end, laboring for the good of his kind, and regret his own death mainly because it will stop those labors. But how are ordinary men, of no specially elevated moral fibre, to be carried up to that turning-point where Law is superseded by love? I am far from thinking that men may not and do not often begin their self-reformation when they are (so far as their own consciousness goes) quite alienated from God or disbelieving his existence. I know, on the contrary, that it is no uncommon experience that this should be so. But, in the ordinary history of the soul, the resolute effort to obey conscience after a very little time brings with it a sense, first dim, then shining more to the perfect day, that there is (as Mr. Matthew Arnold says) “a Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness”; or, in plainer revelation, that God watches and helps the soul which strives to do right. Henceforth, the mechanical moral effort is aided by the electric force of religion, burning away the dross of sin in the fire of a divine Presence, and making self-sacrifice sweet as an offering of love. But if this normal process, whereby morality leads up to religion and becomes thereby aided through all future effort, is to be rigidly prohibited by reason, if we are to starve out the religious sentiment as a passion not to be indulged by a rational being, then, I ask, how many are the men and women who, after their first good resolutions, will persist in the course of arduous moral effort long enough to reach that stage when duty becomes comparatively easy? Where are the aids to come from to keep them from self-indulgence? We have seen that the moral law itself is to be represented to them as merely an hereditary set of the brain; that they are not to dream there is any Holy Eye looking at them, any strong Hand ready to aid their feeble steps, any Infinite Love drawing them to itself, any Life beyond the grave where the imperfect virtue of earth shall grow and blossom in eternal beauty. All these ideas are to be resolutely dismissed. The habit of prayer (irreparable, immeasurable loss) is to be discarded. Nothing is to be left save only the one motive of the Enthusiasm of Humanity, which is to replace God and conscience and heaven. Let me speak out concerning this much-boasted modern sentiment.
I have heard a good man, one of the best men I know, preaching on this subject, and saying: “Do you ask why should you love your neighbor? Because you cannot help it!” Now, as I listened to that genuine philanthropist’s utterance, my heart smote me, and I said to myself: “But I could help it, and only too easily! It comes to him spontaneously, I have no doubt, to love his neighbors; but I have been trying to do it for many years, and have very imperfectly succeeded. Instead of beginning with love, and going on to duty toward them as the result of love, I have had to begin with duty, and, only with many a self-reproach for hardness of spirit, learned at last to feel love—for some of them!”
I do not think my experience is exceptional. I think the people who can and do love spontaneously that terribly large section of our race who are commonplace, narrow-minded, and small of heart, are the exceptions, and that, if we are to have no benevolence except from born philanthropists like the good man I have named, we shall see very little in future of the Enthusiasm of Humanity.
No! It takes, for most of us, all the help to loving our brother which comes from believing that we have a common Father and a common home,—all the help which comes to the heart in answer to the prayer that God would melt its stoniness, and make it blossom into tenderness and sympathy,—to enable us to attain the love which is not the spring of social duty, but its climax,—the “fulfilling of the law.”