Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook: Ten Lectures on Social Subjects

by Laurence Housman

(1915)

Discreditable conduct, according to its right derivation, is conduct provocative of disbelief. It is that kind of conduct which makes us doubt the professions of its agents, because it is practically inconsistent with the things that they preach.

Many things are done in this world which are very reprehensible, vindictive, cruel, narrow-minded—I might go through a whole catalogue of the vices; but they are not therefore “discreditable.” A man who has gone about the world expressing his undying hatred for another man, and then ends by killing him, has done nothing discreditable from his own standard. He has not made you believe less in his professions, but more; for he actually did mean what he said, and has become by his act a creditable witness to the faith that was in him—the dark gospel of hatred. But if, while nourishing a personal hatred, he was at the same time laying it down as the duty of all men to love their enemies, then we have not to wait for the murder in order to look upon him as a tainted and a discredited witness. It is not so much the blood upon his hands as the hatred within his heart which has discredited him as a preacher to others.

Or, put the case otherwise; without pretending to such a counsel of perfection as that he can love his enemies, a man may yet assert that human life is sacred, and that he has no right to take the life of his fellow. Having done so he begins to set up exceptions: “Though I may not do it at my own,” he says, “I may do it at the bidding of others.” And this not by orders that he is compelled into on pain of death or torture (when he might plead a natural human infirmity as his excuse for wrongdoing) but by voluntary enlistment in an army, or by voluntary acceptance of the post of public hangman, or of a judgeship, or of service upon a jury in cases involving the death-penalty.

Now, it may be very commendable to take human life at the bidding of others; but it is not consistent with the unqualified statement that “all human life is sacred.” The one proposition—it is not my concern here to defend or attack either of them—becomes discredited by the other. The advocate of the judicial extinction of life under the institution of capital punishment, or of wholesale extinction under the institution of war—if he wishes to be heard as a credible witness, and to avoid the imputation of discreditable conduct when he gives a hand to it—must reshape his statement something after this manner: “Human life is so important a thing that one man must not take it on his own responsibility; but Society may.” And then he will have to make up his mind what he means by Society, and why he thinks Society is more to be trusted than himself. And if he finds himself in a community which permits or even inculcates moral evils which he individually cannot tolerate, then he must puzzle out for himself why he will trust such a community with the power to kill, when he sees it make so vile and miserable a misuse of the power to keep alive—or to keep from life in any form that is worth having—so many millions of his fellow-creatures. And he will find presently that his assertion that human life is sacred must—if it is to mean anything—extend from the comparatively easy and simple problem of the death-penalty to those far greater problems, which lie all around him, of the cruel life-penalties tolerated or exacted by Society.

So before long what he will find himself up against is this—the necessity of being a creditable or a discreditable witness to the value of Society itself—of that thing to whose apron-strings he has tied his conscience. For you cannot assert that it is right for Society to unmake human life unless you also assert that Society is making human life in a form that is worth having, in a form, too, that would be imperilled were its power of judicial murder to be taken from it.

But the point of departure I have wished to bring you to is this: man did not begin to doubt his own moral right to kill other men until there entered into his being an idea of something better able than himself to judge, to control, and to provide. And so long as he believed in that idea as protective of a morality superior to his own, and productive of the fruits of life in better quality, he could without discredit put into its hands powers which he dared not himself exercise.

But when, on the contrary, a man comes to the conclusion that the products of Society as constituted have in them more of evil than of good, he may quite creditably, in a strict sense of the word, start an attack upon Society, or upon great social institutions, and seek to bring them to dissolution. Such a course of action may be arrogant, or may have an insufficient basis of fact, but it is not discreditable. Rather does it prove the man’s faith in his professions. History gives record of many such characters, and posterity has approved of deeds which in their own day were regarded as violent, arrogant, and unjustifiable.

Martin Luther attacked a far greater social institution of his own day than was comprised under any single form of government. He attacked something much bigger than the English or the American Constitution. In deciding to attack it he was more arrogant (if single unorganised action against large and organised numbers be the proof of arrogance) than you or I could be if we attacked any institution to-day that you like to name, even the institution of war. Now, the result of that great attack was that it succeeded—not unconditionally, not universally, but (broadly speaking) racially and territorially. About one-third of Europe was conquered by it; and about two-thirds remain to this day—not indeed unaffected, but certainly not conquered by Lutheranism. If you are to judge of sacred causes by mere numbers, there are still more nominal Catholics than nominal Protestants in the world; and, therefore, by numbers, up to date Luther is condemned.