That was the best thing I myself ever got out of egg-boxes—that picture of a deceitful son stealthily washing himself upon the floor behind the bed, trembling at every footstep lest it might be the “old boy” coming to the door.
One wonders whether the Ten Commandments are so all-sufficient as we good folk deem them—whether the eleventh is not worth the whole pack of them: “that ye love one another” with just a common-place, human, practical love. Could not the other ten be comfortably stowed away into a corner of that! One is inclined, in one’s anarchic moments, to agree with Louis Stevenson, that to be amiable and cheerful is a good religion for a work-a-day world. We are so busy not killing, not stealing, not coveting our neighbour’s wife, we have not time to be even just to one another for the little while we are together here. Need we be so cocksure that our present list of virtues and vices is the only possibly correct and complete one? Is the kind, unselfish man necessarily a villain because he does not always succeed in suppressing his natural instincts? Is the narrow-hearted, sour-souled man, incapable of a generous thought or act, necessarily a saint because he has none? Have we not—we unco guid—arrived at a wrong method of estimating our frailer brothers and sisters? We judge them, as critics judge books, not by the good that is in them, but by their faults. Poor King David! What would the local Vigilance Society have had to say to him? Noah, according to our plan, would be denounced from every teetotal platform in the country, and Ham would head the Local Vestry poll as a reward for having exposed him. And St. Peter! weak, frail St. Peter, how lucky for him that his fellow-disciples and their Master were not as strict in their notions of virtue as are we to-day.
Have we not forgotten the meaning of the word “virtue”? Once it stood for the good that was in a man, irrespective of the evil that might lie there also, as tares among the wheat. We have abolished virtue, and for it substituted virtues. Not the hero—he was too full of faults—but the blameless valet; not the man who does any good, but the man who has not been found out in any evil, is our modern ideal. The most virtuous thing in nature, according to this new theory, should be the oyster. He is always at home, and always sober. He is not noisy. He gives no trouble to the police. I cannot think of a single one of the Ten Commandments that he ever breaks. He never enjoys himself, and he never, so long as he lives, gives a moment’s pleasure to any other living thing.
I can imagine the oyster lecturing a lion on the subject of morality.
“You never hear me,” the oyster might say, “howling round camps and villages, making night hideous, frightening quiet folk out of their lives. Why don’t you go to bed early, as I do? I never prowl round the oyster-bed, fighting other gentlemen oysters, making love to lady oysters already married. I never kill antelopes or missionaries. Why can’t you live as I do on salt water and germs, or whatever it is that I do live on? Why don’t you try to be more like me?”
An oyster has no evil passions, therefore we say he is a virtuous fish. We never ask ourselves—“Has he any good passions?” A lion’s behaviour is often such as no just man could condone. Has he not his good points also?
Will the fat, sleek, “virtuous” man be as Welcome at the gate of heaven as he supposes?
“Well,” St. Peter may say to him, opening the door a little way and looking him up and down, “what is it now?”
“It’s me,” the virtuous man will reply, with an oily, self-satisfied smile; “I should say, I—I’ve come.”
“Yes, I see you have come; but what is your claim to admittance? What have you done with your three score years and ten?”