The mistaken antithesis between temporal and spiritual things runs into the greatest excess, wherever the inherent pravity of human nature is most exaggerated. There are churches, however,—the Catholic and the Arminian,—in whose doctrines the natural condition of man is painted in colors far removed from the deepest shade; and which deem him not so much incapable of right moral discernment, as weakened for faithful moral execution. In this view, the function of Christianity is not to supersede and cancel, but to supplement and guide, the native energies of the soul; not to raise it from a mad trance, in which all thought and feeling are themselves but a false glare, but to apply a tonic and healing power, enabling it to do the right which it has already light enough to see. Professor Fitzgerald is an adherent to this doctrine, and justly contends that no lower estimate of human nature can consist with responsibility at all.
"I am not to be ranked," he says, "amongst those who assume that human corruption has not affected the natural power of the moral sense. I think it has. No doubt sinful depravity, wherever it is indulged, is, as Aristotle long ago remarked, φθαρτικη των αρχων,—it tends to weaken or deprave the sentiment of moral censure, and to blunt the perception of moral evil.
"An eloquent but superficial French moralist has compared the conscience to a table-rock in the ocean, its surface, just above the ripple, bearing an inscription graven in the stone, which a genius, hovering over it, reads aloud. At times the waves arise and sweep over the tablet, concealing the mystic characters. Then the reader is compelled to pause. But after a while the wind is lulled, the waves sink back to their accustomed level, the inscription stands out clear and legible, and the genius resumes his interrupted task.
"This comparison might gain something in correctness if we imagine the inscription traced upon a softer substance. For the stormy waves of passion not only conceal, while they prevail, the sacred characters of virtue, but, as billow after billow passes over the tablet, they tend to obliterate the lines.
"But in making these large concessions, (which I do very willingly,) I do not feel that I am surrendering the cause. It is one thing to say that the discriminating power of the moral judgment is affected and impaired by human corruption, and quite another to say that it is destroyed. It is one thing to say that it sometimes goes wrong, and another that we can never depend on its decisions. Most men's experience has often brought them acquainted with persons who had impaired, in some way or other, their natural powers of perceiving truth or excellence in some respects, without losing either sound principles of reason or sound principles of honesty in others. And the way to correct such obliquities of intellectual or moral judgment is, not to tell men that they should distrust their natural faculties altogether, but to avail ourselves of so much as remains sound to discover the mistake or imperfection which we seek to remedy or supply. The appeal, in such cases, is from the reason or conscience perverted or impaired, to the same faculties in what physicians would call their normal state. When the effaced portions of the inscription are to be restored, the evidence of the correction results from its harmonizing with the part which has not been obliterated; and an interpolation may be detected by its disturbing the coherence of the context,—an omission by leaving it imperfect or unintelligible."—p. 26.
On this principle alone, unhappily but little congenial with the spirit and traditions of Protestant churches, can Christianity coexist with natural ethics. Faith adopts morals, purifies and sublimes them, and especially changes the character of their force;—for a law of compulsion from below, substituting a love of God above. The enmity ceases between the world and heaven; the physical earth is not more certainly afloat in space, and on the muster-roll of stars, than the present life is plunged in eternity, and not behind its chiefest sanctities. There is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be slurred over as an unmanageable necessity, in the natural constitution and relations of men; whatever acts they prescribe, whatever combinations they require, are within the scope and consecration of religion. The whole compass of the world and its affairs, all the gifts and activities of men, are brought within moral jurisdiction, and included in the embrace of a genial reverence. No narrow interpretation is longer possible of the province of human piety, and the true type of a noble goodness; as though they demanded a definite set of actions, rather than a certain style of soul, and denied a place to any affection or pursuit which can adorn and glorify existence. Divine things are not put away into foreign realms of being, and future reaches of time, attainable by no path of toil, no spring of effort, only by miraculous transport; but are met with every day, shining through the substance of life and hid amid its hours. Whatever original endowments, whatever acquired virtues, enrich and elevate our immediate sphere,—the Thought which finds its truth, the Genius that evolves its beauty, the Honor that guards its nobleness, the Love which lightens the burden of its sorrows,—are not mere temporal embellishments indifferent to its sacredness, but attributes that bring men nearer to the sympathy and similitude of God. Art, literature, politics, employing the highest human activities, and constituting the very blossom and fruit of all our culture, are recognized as having an earnest root, and not being the light growth of secular gayety and selfishness. We have no sympathy with the sentimental and immoral propensity, which corrupts the newest Continental philosophy, to recognize whatever comes into existence as ipso facto divine. But we do believe that the great change for which the secret religiousness of this age pines, and which it is sorely straitened till it can accomplish, is the deliberate adoption into "heavenly places" of this world, its faculties and affairs, just as God has made them, and man's unfaithfulness has not yet spoiled them. The products of human baseness, hypocrisy, and ambition,—let them remain hateful, eternally contrary to God, things scarce safe to pity; but believe not that they have got this planet entirely to themselves, and have snatched it as their peculium quite out of the Supreme Hand. Men are tired of straining their thought along the diameter of the universe to seek for a Holy of Holies in whatever is opposite to their life; they find a worship possible, even irresistible, at home, and on the road-side a place as fit to kneel as on the pavement of the Milky Way. The old antagonism between the world that now is, and any other that has been or is to come, has been modified for them, or has even entirely ceased. The earth is no place of diabolic exile, which the "prince of the power of the air" ever fans and darkens with his wing; and were it even, as was once believed, appointed to perish, this would be not because its failure was complete, but because its task was done. No vengeance burns in the sunshine which mellows its fruits and paints its grass; no threatenings flash from the starry eyes that watch over it by night. It is not only the home of each man's personal affections, but the native country of his very soul; where first he found in what a life he lives, and to what heaven he tends; where he has met the touch of spirits higher than his own, and of Him that is highest of all. It is the abode of every ennobling relation, the scene of every worthy toil;—the altar of his vows, the observatory of his knowledge, the temple of his worship. Whatever succeeds to it will be its sequel, not its opposite, will resume the tale wherever silence overtakes it, and be blended into one life by sameness of persons and continuity of plan. He is set here to live, not as an alien, passing in disguise through an enemy's camp, where no allegiance is due, and no worthy love is possible, but as a citizen fixed on an historic soil, pledged by honorable memories to nurse yet nobler hopes. Here is the spot, now is the time, for the most devoted service of God. No strains of heaven will wake him into prayer, if the common music of humanity stirs him not. The saintly company of spirits will throng around him in vain, if he finds no angels of duty and affection in his children, neighbors, and friends. If no heavenly voices wander around him in the present, the future will be but the dumb change of the shadow on the dial. In short, higher stages of existence are not the refuge from this, but the complement to it; and it is the proper wisdom of the affections, not to escape the one in order to seek the other, but to flow forth in purifying copiousness on both.
We have said that men are tired of having their earthly and their heavenly relations set up in sharp opposition to each other, and are eager to live here in a consecrated world. This tendency has already found expression in two remarkable and apparently dissimilar phenomena,—the partial success of the Anglican and Catholic reaction, and the vast influence on English society of the late Dr. Arnold's character. Both were virtual protests against that removal of God out of the common human life, that unreconciled condition of Law and Gospel, which had made the evangelical theology sickening and unreal. A path had to be opened for the re-introduction of a divine presence into the sphere of temporal things. Newman resorted to the supernatural channel of Church miracle; Arnold to the natural course of human affairs, and the permanent sacredness of human obligation. Both restored to us a solemn mystery of immediate Incarnation; the one putting life, in order to its consecration, into contact with the sacraments; the other spreading a sacramental veneration over the whole of life. Arnold, especially, saw the great moral evils which have arisen from the evangelical depreciation of the "profane" world. The secular, he was well aware, has become too secular, the spiritual too merely spiritual. Human nature is permitted to have play with unchecked wilfulness in the one, and is allowed no place at all in the other. The obligations of natural law are held in light esteem, as if, in being social, they fell short of being sacred. The exercises of intellect, in the survey of nature or the interpretation of history, are often stigmatized as a mere earthly curiosity, permissible to reason, but neutral to the soul. The worst of it is, that these notions, once become habitual, fulfil their own predictions. As there is nothing which the heart cannot sanctify, so is there nothing which it may not secularize. Tell men that in their natural affections there is nothing holy, and their homes will soon be nests of common instinct. Assure them that in their business it is the unregenerate will, and the animal necessity, that labor for the bread which perisheth, and soon enough will an irreverent greediness and a cankered anxiety usurp the place. Persuade them that to study the order of creation or the records of past ages is but a "carnal" pursuit, and the student's prayer for light will become a mere ambition for distinction, the meditations of wonder be stifled in the dust of mental day-labor, and the tears of admiration drop no more on the page of ancient wisdom. This was what Arnold could not abide; to see religion flying off on wings of pompous pretence to other worlds, and leaving no heavenly glory upon the earth, but letting her very fields be paved into a street. There was no attempt to save a spot for any earnest reality, except the poor little enclosure behind the altar rail. The Church will consecrate a graveyard for the dead, but leaves the market of the living still unblessed: you may dissolve away in benediction, when your years are over of toil and sweat beneath the curse. To one who acknowledges a natural conscience and a natural element in faith, there is a religion in little in every part of life; it gives at least a note in the chords and melody of worship. Hence Arnold's curious doctrine of the Church as covering all human relations whatsoever, and including the whole organism of the State. He would have nothing which the laws of this universe imposed on the will of man done without a clear and pious recognition; it was not to be illicitly smuggled in, as if run ashore in a gale of confusion that could not be helped, but must be steadily accounted for and stored in open day. Ethically, this doctrine, though, from its adaptation to a permanent world, it is the least Apostolic in appearance, is, of all interpretations of Christianity, the most true; and if it were not for clinging ideas of extra-moral dogma and special priesthood, as limiting the conception of "the Church," would go far to repeat for our age the work of Socrates for his, and bring down our divine philosophy from heaven to earth. It gets rid entirely of the false spiritualism which has either withheld religious men from political affairs, or induced them to urge on statesmen rules applicable only where government can be dispensed with altogether. It rescues Christianity from the degradation of being hypocritically flattered as the great persuasive to peace by rulers whom it does not restrain from going to war, and relieves it of an oppressive weight of false expectation, as though it broke its promise to the world every time a new case of strife appeared. Nothing can well be more damaging to a religion, than to commit it to unqualified disapprobation of anything which must exist while human nature lasts, and to set it frowning with ineffectual sublimity on the passions and events which determine the whole course of history. The amiable enthusiasts who propose to conduct the affairs of nations on principles of brotherly love, and who, till that consummation is reached, can only stand by and protest, do but weaken their country for purposes of justice and bring their faith into merited commiseration. It is commonly said that they are a harmless class, who may even form a useful counterpoise to the warlike susceptibilities of less scrupulous men. We have no belief, however, in the efficacy of falsehood and exaggeration, or in the attainment of truth and moderation by the neutralizing action of opposite extravagances. The reverence for human life is carried to an immoral idolatry, when it is held more sacred than justice and right, and when the spectacle of blood becomes more horrible than the sight of desolating tyrannies and triumphant hypocrisies. Life, indeed, is just the one thing—the reserved capital, the rest, the ultimate security—on whose disposability in the last resort, and on the free control over which, the very existence of society depends. The first and highest social bond is no doubt to be found in a religious sentiment, a common veneration for the same things as right and intrinsically binding on men that live side by side; and the worship, with its institutions, of every community, is its instinctive attempt to get these things spontaneously done by the force of reverence. Could this point be really carried, nothing would remain to be accomplished; religion would complete and perfect the incorporation of mutual loyalty which it had begun. But there are some in whom the sentiment of common reverence fails, and for whose fidelity to the moral ends of the social union there is therefore no natural guaranty. To reach these cases, society has no resource but coercive methods, actual or threatened; the threat is Law; the actuality is Punishment; the power to which both are committed is a Government; the commonwealth on whose behalf they exist is a State. The very constitution of a state thus presupposes the possible violation of moral right, the partial failure of religion to secure its observance, and the determination to enforce on the reluctant an obedience refused of free will. Force, however, is applicable only to men's bodies; it is a restraint and pressure on the functions of their life; and if that life be sacred from infringement, the political existence of nations is itself an offence against the law of God. All law, all polity, is a proclamation that justice is better than life, and, if need be, shall override it and all the possessions it includes; and nothing can be weaker or more suicidal than for men who are citizens of a commonwealth to announce, that, for their part, they mean to hold life in higher esteem than justice. Moreover, there is a low-minded egotism often disguised in this doctrine of passive meekness. As an inducement to quiet endurance of wrong, we are reminded of the duty of "mutual forgiveness." Is all the wickedness, then, that I am doomed to witness, nothing but a personal affront? When a rascal threatens to blow out my neighbor's brains, or to blast his character by infamous accusations, am I in a position to forbear and pardon? Must I not own myself under a solemn trust, to see the right done and the guilty punished? Nay, would not the injured man himself greatly mistake the nature of the crime, and measure it by a paltry standard, if he took it for a mere private offence which it was his prerogative to punish or to overlook? "Who is this that forgiveth sins also?" The eternal laws of justice are not of our enacting; and no will of ours has title to suspend or to repeal them. The real and only demand of Christian magnanimity is, that we visit them with no vengeance, but merely with moral retribution;—that is, with no more severity when directed against ourselves, than when we see them at an impersonal distance. But to regard and treat the guilty as if he were an innocent,—that is given to no man, and is even inconceivable of God. Rulers, at all events, as trustees of rights other than their own,—and each generation of a people, as charged with the interests of successors in perpetuity,—have but a limited privilege of forbearance; the meekness of the saint would in them be treason to the world. Even in international disputes, where each party may have a conviction of right, the controversy, but for the possibility of force, could have no end. It is a delusion to rely on courts as a substitute for armies, and to suppose that judicial decision can supersede military. The judge would be of small avail without the constable; and the arbitrator between nations would need a European army to enforce his decrees. Where the stake is large and the feeling strong, it is notorious that the private disputant rarely acquiesces in an arbitration that goes against him; but carries his case to the last appeal, where it is stopped by a barrier of impassable force. You might as well pull down your jails in preparation for the assizes, as destroy your fleets and arsenals in quest of international arbitration. We speak only of the ultimate theory of this matter, and simply affirm, that wherever law and government exist, somewhere in the background force must lurk. It may, no doubt, be provided in excess, and paraded without need; and with the progress of a civilized order, the circle may be ever widened within which the idea of coercion, with the habits it creates, may be substituted for the obtrusive reality; till possibly a family of nations may be gathered, like a group of counties, into a common jurisdiction. But this only shifts the camp without disbanding it; and, after all, the tipstaffs of your supreme court could be no other than the legions of a grand army. We have, therefore, no more doubt that a war may be right, than that a policeman may be a security for justice, and we object to a fortress as little as to a handcuff. A religion which does not include the whole moral law; a moral law which does not embrace all the problems of a commonwealth; a commonwealth which regards the life of man more than the equities of God,—appear to us unfaithful to their functions, and unworthy interpreters of the divine scheme of the world. Quaker histories, written with omission of all the wars, are not less morbid as moral mistakes, than a doctrine of Providence, leaving out the whole realm of heathendom, is narrow as a religious theory; and the misuse of Scripture which has led to both, is most dangerous to its authority in an age remarkable for the breadth of its historical survey and the variety of its ethnological sympathies.
In other ways than those which we have indicated has a mischievous direction been given to modern thought and feeling, by perverting the accidental and transient form of the primitive Christianity into essential and permanent doctrine. But our exposition must proceed no further. The alternation of ascetic spiritualism and worldly laxity, the indifference to natural affections and relations, the exclusiveness at once devout and selfish, the jealous denial of their rights to intellect and art, the false apprehension of the true dignity of law and true life of states, have been the more earnestly dwelt upon from the conviction that these ethical infirmities are producing a perilous reaction,—a distrust of all ethical laws whatsoever, a disposition to hold everything divine that finds strength to realize itself,—a worship of what is, in place of an aspiration to what ought to be. To this we cannot consent. We cannot look on all forms of human life and character with the neutral eye of an equal admiration, as alike suitable products of formative nature. We cannot forego the right of judgment,—of embracing with reverence or spurning with abhorrence; or part with the ideal type of a perfect soul, to which all others rise as they approach. Neither do we believe with Luther, that human nature is a mere devilish anarchy, reducible only by supernatural irruption; nor with the newest school, that it is a divine anarchy, equally uncontrollable from within, and to be accepted as a wild fact; but that it is a hierarchy of powers, each having and knowing its rightful place, and appealing to us to maintain it there. To listen to that appeal, and, in answer to it, strive to harmonize the de facto with the de jure administration of the soul, destroying the usurpation of mean errors, and restoring the sway of kingly truth, is the aim of morals in action and in philosophy.