From the first, Secularism had based its claims to be regarded on the fact that only the rich could afford to be Christians, and the poor must look to other principles for deliverance.
Material means are those which are calculable, which are under the control and command of man, and can be tested by human experience. No definition of Secularism shows its distinctiveness which omits to specify material means as its method of procedure.
But for the theological blasphemy of nature, representing it as the unintelligent tool of God, the Secular would have ennobled common life long ago. Sir Godfrey Kneller said, "He never looked on a bad picture but he carried away in his mind a dirty tint." Secularism would efface the dirty tints of life which Christianity has prayed over, but not removed.
Second Principle: Of the providence of science.—Men are limited in power, and are oft in peril, and those who are taught to trust to supernatural aid are betrayed to their own destruction. We are told we should work as though there were no help in heaven, and pray as though there were no help in ourselves. Since, however, praying saves no ship, arrests no disease, and does not pay the tax-gatherer, it is better to work at once and without the digression of sinking prayer-buckets into empty wells, and spending life in drawing nothing up. The word illuminating secular life is self-help. The Secularist vexes not the ear of heaven by mendicant supplications. His is the only religion that gives heaven no trouble.
Third Principle: Of goodness as fitness for this world or another.—Goodness is the service of others with a view to their advantage. There is no higher human merit. Human welfare is the sanction of morality. The measure of a good action is its conducive-ness to progress. The utilitarian test of generous rightness in motive may be open to objection,—there is no test which is not,—but the utilitarian rule is one comprehensible by every mind. It is the only rule which makes knowledge necessary, and becomes more luminous as knowledge increases. A fool may be a believer,* but not a utilitarian who seeks his ground of action in the largest field of relevant facts his mind is able to survey.
* The Guardian told as about 1887 that the Bishop of Exeter
confirmed five idiots.
Utility in morals is measuring the good of one by its agreement with the good of many. Large ideas are when a man measures the good of his parish by the good of the town, the good of the town by the good of the county, the good of the county by the good of the country, the good of the country by the good of the continent, the good of the continent by the cosmopolitanism of the world.
Truth and solicitude for the social welfare of others are the proper concern of a soul worth saving. Only minds with goodness in them have the desert of future existence. Minds without veracity and generosity die. The elements of death are in the selfish already. They could not live in a better world if they were admitted.
In a noble passage in his sermon on "Citizenship" the Rev. Stopford Brooks said: "There are thousands of my fellow-citizens, men, and women, and children, who are living in conditions in which they have no true means of becoming healthy in body, trained in mind, or comforted by beauty. Life is as hard for them as it is easy for me. I cannot help them by giving them money, one by one, but I can help them by making the condition of their life easier by a good government of the city in which they live. And even if the charge on my property for this purpose increases for a time, year by year, till the work is done, that charge I will gladly pay. It shall be my ethics, my religion, my patriotism, my citizenship to do it."* The great preacher whose words are here cited, like Theodore Parker, the Jupiter of the pulpit in his day, as Wendell Phillips described him to me, is not a Secularist; but he expresses here the religion of the Secularist, if such a person can be supposed to have a religion.
* Preached in reference to the London County Council
election, March, 1892.