"It may be so," said I; "but it is a tendency against which we should guard. It would lead us, like him of Athens, to ostracize Aristides: we should be weary of hearing him continually called 'The Just.'"
"However." rejoined Fellowes, "I am weary of hearing Christ so perpetually called our example. As Mr. Newman says, he cannot, except in a very modified sense, be such. 'His garments will not fit us.'"
"Did you ever hear," said I. "that fathers and mothers ought to set an example to their children?"
"Certainly."
"Yet surely not in all things can they be such. Their garments surely will not fit their children."
"No." said Harrington; "those of the father at all events will not, if they are girls, nor of the mother, if they are boys. Fellowes, I think you had better say nothing on this subject. If men of fifty can, in all essential points, be beautiful examples to girls of ten,—in gentleness, in patience, in humility, in kindness, and so forth,—and all the more impressively for the wide interval between them, why, I suppose Jesus Christ may be as much to his disciples."
"But, again," urged Fellowes to me, "you, like so many men, seem to lay such stress on the superiority of the morality of the New Testament. I cannot see it. I confess, with Mr. Foxton and many more, that it seems to me that it has not such a very great advantage over that of many heathen moralists who have said the same things,—Plato, for example."
I replied, that, of course, it would be of no avail to affirm in general (what I was yet convinced was true), that the New Testament inculcated a system of ethics much more just and comprehensive than any other volume in the world. I told him, however, that I thought he would not deny that its manner of conveying ethical truth was unique; that it not only contained more admirable and varied summaries of duty than any other book whatever, but that we should seek in vain in any other for such a profusion of just maxims and weighty sentiments, expressed with such comprehensive brevity, or illustrated with so much beauty and pathos. I remarked that, if he would be pleased to do as I had once done,—compile a selection of the principal precepts and maxims from the most admirable ethical works of antiquity (those of Aristotle, for example), and compare them with two or three of the summaries of similar precepts in the New Testament,—he would at once feel how much more vivid, touching, animated, and even comprehensive, was the Scriptural expression of the same truths. But I further observed, that, even to obtain the means of such comparison, he must reject from Plato or the Stagyrite twenty times the bulk of questionable speculations, and dreary subtilties, which separate by long intervals those gems of moral truth, which everywhere sparkle on the pages of the New Testament.
I told him I could not help laying great stress on the degree and manner in which this element enters into the composition of the New Testament; that ethical truths are there expressed in every variety of form which can fix them upon the imagination and the heart, with an entire absence of those prolix discussions and metaphysical refinements which form so large a portion of Aristotle and Plato. If we find in these writers a moral truth expressed with something approaching the comprehensive beauty and simplicity of the Gospels, we are filled with surprise and rapture, and dig out with joy the glittering fragment from the mass of earthy matter,—oppressive disquisitions about "ideas" and "essences," "energies" and "entelechies," and so forth, in which it is sure to be imbedded. I promised, if health and life were given, to exhibit some day these gems, with a sufficient portion of the surrounding earth still attached to them, and to contrast them with those of the New Testament. "In this strange volume," I continued, "the most beautiful ethical maxims exist in unexampled profusion. After reading Aristotle's ethics, I feel, when I turn to the New Testament, as Linnaeus is said to have felt when he first saw growing wild the masses of blooming gorse, which he had never seen in his cold North, except as a sheltered exotic. Whether it was likely that contemporaries of the Pharisees, who were sunk in formalism, and who had glossed away every moral and spiritual the Law, could reach and maintain such elevation of tone, I leave you to judge." But though I felt this, I acknowledged that it was difficult to express it; and said that perhaps the best way to compare the morality of the New Testament with the ethical system of any philosopher, or the code of any legislator, would be to imagine them all universally adopted, and see how much would have to be objected to,—how much "brick" was mingled with the "porphyry." "If, for example," said I, "Plato, who, I admit, so flashes upon us the sublimest and most comprehensive principles of morals, and whose ethical system you say is identical with that of Christianity, had the forming of a republic, you would have community of women property, —women trained to war,—-infanticide certain circumstances,—young children led to battle (though at a safe distance), that 'the young might early scent carnage, and be inured to slaughter! Both with him and Aristotle slavery would be a regularly sanctioned and perfectly natural institution. Not only did they entertain very lax notions of the relation of the sexes, but the tone in which they speak of most abominable corruptions—I do not except cannibalism—to which humanity has ever degraded implied that they regarded such things as comparatively venial. I know no greater single names than these, and I presume that these points you would find so, difficulty in digesting." He admitted it.
I told him I supposed he would take equal objections to the Gentoo, or the Roman, or the Spartan code, as also to the Koran. He admitted all this too.