Our Unitarian Gospel

by Minot J. Savage

And there is another illustration of it that has recently occurred here in our country, which is sadder still to me. Only a little while ago a postmaster in the South was shot by a mob. The mob surrounds his house, murders him and his child, wounds other members of the family, burns down his home; and why? Under no impulse whatever except that of pure and simple race prejudice, the utter inability of a white man to put himself in the position of a black to such an extent as to recognize, plead for, or defend his inherent rights as a man.

I am not casting any aspersion on the South in what I am saying, none whatever. Were the conditions reversed, perhaps we should be no better. It is not a practical problem with us. If there were two or three times as many colored men in the State of New York as there are white men, then we might understand the question. Let us not mentally cast any stones at the people across the line. I point it out simply as illustrating the difficulty that we have in recognizing the rights, the moral rights, of people beyond the limits of that sympathy to which we have been accustomed and for a long period trained.

I believe the day will come when we shall be as jealous of the right of a man as we are now of the right of an American. We are not yet. There have been foregleams and prophecies of it in the past. Long ago a Latin writer said, I am a man, and whatever is human is not foreign to me. But think what a lone and isolated utterance that has been for hundreds of years. Jesus taught us to pray, not my Father, but our Father, and we do pray it every day in the-year; but how many are the people in any of the churches that dream of living it? A hundred years ago that heretic, who is still looked upon as the bugaboo of all that is fine and good, Thomas Paine, wrote, "The world is my country, and to do good is my religion," a sentence so fine that it has been carved on the base of the statue of William Lloyd Garrison on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, as being a fitting symbol of his own philanthropic life.

How many of us have risen to the idea of making these grand sentiments the ruling principles of our lives? But along the lines of moral growth it is to come. The day will be when, as I said, we shall feel as keenly whatever touches the right of any man as to-day we feel that which touches the right of one of our own people; and the moral growth of the world will reach beyond that. I love to dream of a day when men will no longer forget the inherent rights of any inhabitant of the air or of the waters or of the woods or any of the domesticated animals that we have come to associate with our lives.

We feel towards them to-day as in the old days a man felt towards another man who was his slave, that he had a right to abuse, to maltreat, even to kill, if he pleased. We have not yet become civilized enough, so that we feel it incumbent upon us to recognize the fact that animals can suffer pain, that animals can enjoy the air or the sunshine, and that they have a right to each when they do not trespass upon the larger rights of humanity. I was something of a boy when it first came over me that it was not as amusing to animals to be shot and killed as it was to me to shoot and kill them. From the time I was able to lift a gun I had always carried one; but I soon learned that for me there was no pleasure in taking needlessly the life of anything that lived. We are only partially civilized as yet in the treatment of our domesticated animals. How many people think of the torture of the curb bit, of the check, of neglect in the case of cold, of thirst, of hunger? How many people, I say, civilized and in our best society, are careful yet as to the comfort, the rights, of those that serve them in these humble capacities?

The time will come when our moral sympathetic sense shall widen its boundaries even farther yet, and shall take in the trees and the shrubs, the waters, the hills, all the natural and beautiful features of the world. I believe that by and by it will be regarded as immoral, as unmanly, to deface, to mar, that which God has made so glorious and so beautiful. As soon as man develops, then, his power of sympathy, so that it can take the world in its arms, so soon he will have grown to the stature of the Divine in the unfolding of his moral nature.

I wish now to raise the question, for a moment, as to what is to be our guide in regard to moral facts and moral actions. I was trained, and perhaps most of you were, to believe that I was unquestioningly to follow my conscience, that whatever conscience told me to do was necessarily right. The conscience has been spoken of as though it were a sort of little deity set to rule man's nature, this little kingdom of thought and feeling and action. But conscience is nothing of the kind. Half of the consciences of the world to-day are all wrong.

Let me hint by way of illustration what I mean: Calvin was just as conscientious in burning Servetus as Servetus was in pursuing that course of action which led him to the stake. One of them was wrong in following his conscience, then. You take it to-day: some people will tell you there is a certain day in the week that you must observe as sacred. Your conscience tells you there is another day in the week that you must observe as sacred. Can both be right? Many of the greatest tragedies of the world have come about through these controversies and confusions of conscience. The Quaker in old Boston went at the cart's tail, in disgrace, because he followed his conscience; and the Puritan put him there because he followed his conscience. Were both of them right? The inquisitor in Spain put to death hundreds and thousands of people conscientiously; and the hundreds and thousands of people conscientiously went to their deaths.

What is conscience, then? Conscience is not a moral guide. It is simply that monitor within that reiterates to us forever and forever and forever, Do right. But conscience does not tell us what is right. We must decide those questions as a matter of calm study and judgment in the light of human experience. It is the judgment that should tell us whether a thing is right or wrong. And how shall we know whether it is right or wrong? Simply by the consequences. That which helps, that which lifts man up, that which adds to the happiness and the well-being of the world, as the result of human experience, is right. That which hurts, that which injures men and women, that which takes away from their welfare and happiness, that is wrong. All these things, as we shall see before I get through, are inherent in the nature of things, not created by statute, not the result of the moral teaching of anybody.

This leads me to extend this idea a little farther, and to raise the question as to what is the standard by which you are to judge moral action. If you will think it out with a little care, you will find that the standard of all moral action may be summed up in the one word "life." Life, first, as continuance; second, to use a philosophical term, content, that which it includes. Life, this is the standard of right and wrong.