The Hearts of Men

by H. Fielding

There are scientific men who tell us that our consciences are the result of experience, partly our own, but principally inherited. That if conscience warns us against any course of action it is because that has been experienced to result in misfortune. It is an unconscious memory of past experiences. Conscience is instinctive, and not affected by teaching to any great extent; and that conscience is the main guide of life no one will deny.

But do the voices of conscience and of God, as stated in the sacred books, agree?

When the savage sees a god in the precipice and is afraid of him, there is no question of right or wrong. Not that the savage has no code of morals. He has a very elaborate one. But it is usually distinct from his religion. What virtue did Odin teach? None but courage in war. Yet the Northmen had codes of conduct fitted to their stage of civilisation. The Greeks had many gods. They had also codes of morals and an extensive philosophy, but practically there was no connection. In fact, the gods were examples not of morality but of immorality. It was the same with the Latins and with all the Celts. Their religions were emotional religions, their codes of conduct were apart, although even here you see now and then an attempt to connect them. And when the Latin people took Christianity and formed it, they put into their creeds no question of conduct. You believed, and therefore you were a Christian. The results of bad conduct would be annulled by confession, and the sinner would receive absolution. To a Latin Christian a righteous unbeliever who had never done anything but good would in the end be damned, whereas the murderer who repented at the last would be saved. "There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance."

Is the inference that the Latin peoples were wickeder than others? I doubt it. They initiated all European civilisation, and trade and commerce, and law and justice. Probably the highest examples of conduct the world has known have been Latins. They had and have the instinct of conduct, they had and have consciences as good as other people, but only they do not so much connect conduct and religion. You can be saved without conduct.

The Jews, on the contrary, had no instinct of conduct apart from religion. In the Ten Commandments conduct, if it have the second place, has yet the larger share. Righteousness was the keynote of their belief, and if the only righteousness they knew was little better than a noble savagery, it was the best they could do. They included every form of conduct in their religion—sanitary matters, caste observances, and business rules. The Hindu goes even further in the same line. Everything in life is included in his religion.

When in the Reformation the Teutonic people threw off the yoke of Rome, a yoke which was not only religious but political and social, one of their principal arguments against Roman Catholicism was the abominations that had crept in. I think it would be difficult to assert that the people who revolted were in morals generally any better than those they seceded from. Good men in the Latin Church saw equally the necessity for reformation. But bad morals did not seem to them so destructive to faith as it did to the Teutons. There was this difference, that whereas the Latin could and did conceive of religion apart from conduct, the Teuton, like the Jew, could not do so. With the Latin they were distinct emotions, with the Teuton they were connected. One of the principal aspects of the Reformation is the restoration of morality to religion, the abolition of indulgences, of confession and absolution, the insistence on conduct in religious teachers.

The morality of Christ?

The remarkable fact is that it was not the morality of Christ at all. The Reformation was never in any way a revival of the code of the Sermon on the Mount or the imitation of Christ. To a certain extent it went further away from Christ than the Latins. For instance, the Latin priests imitate Christ in being unmarried, the Protestant pastors married. When Calvin burnt Servetus he was not returning to the tenets of the New Testament, and what thought had the Puritans or the French Huguenots, the most masterful of men, of turning the other cheek?

Protestantism was a return of conduct to religion, but it was not Christ's conduct. It was rather the Old Testament code softened by civilised influence that was revived. It was a revolt against excessive emotionalism, and was, in fact, a combination of two creeds tempered as to conduct by the conduct of the day.

So it continues to-day. The Latin's idea of religious conduct is the imitation of Christ, and when a Latin cultivates religious conduct that is what he does. He becomes a priest or monk, poor, celibate, self-denying and unworldly. But conduct to him is not the great part of religion that it is to a Teuton. With us conduct is the greatest part; the mystical and ceremonious part has decreased, in certain sects almost disappeared. Confession disappeared, and with it absolution from priests. Conduct is part of religion, and the code of conduct to be followed is that which conscience bids, and the code of conscience is, scientific men tell us, the result of experience, personal and inherited. Practically, what conscience tells us to do is what suits the circumstances of the day.