Religion, then, may be ahead of the moral ideal or it may be behind it. The particular type of religion I mean, of course, which is being held at any particular time in the history of the world. But the moral ideal of necessity goes on, keeping step with the social experience of the race.
I must touch briefly now just one other point of practical importance that we need to guard, in order to be tender and true in our dealings with our fellow-men. You will find, if you look over the face of society, that there are two kinds of morality, frequently quite inconsistent with each other; and sometimes the poorer of the two kinds is held in higher esteem than the better. I mean there is conventional morality, and there is real morality.
As a hint of illustration: An American woman goes to Turkey to-day; and she is shocked by the customs of the women and their style of dress. It seems to her that no woman can possibly be moral who, although she covers her head, can appear on the street with feet and ankles bare. But this same Turkish woman is shocked beyond the possibility of utterance to know that in Europe and America women carefully cover their feet, but expose their faces and their shoulders. It seems terrible to her, and she cannot understand how a European or American woman can have any regard for the principles of delicacy and morality.
Do you not see how, in both cases here, it is purely a matter of convention? No real question of morality is touched in either case. I speak of this to prepare you to note how conscience can be as troubled over things which are purely conventional as it can over things which are downright and real. Let me use another illustration, going a little deeper in the matter. Here is a man, for example, who is terribly shocked because his neighbor takes a drive with his family on Sunday afternoon. It seems to him an outrage on all the principles of public and social morality; and he is eager to get up a society to abolish such customs, that seem to him to threaten the prosperity of all that is good in the world. But this same man, perhaps, has been trained in a way of conducting his business that, while legal, is not strictly fair. This man may be hard and cruel towards his employees. He may cherish bitter hatreds towards his rivals. In his heart he may be transgressing the law of vital ethics, while fighting with all the power of his nature for that which does not touch any real question of right or wrong at all.
Or take a woman who, while shocked at the transgression of some social custom in which she has been trained from her childhood, or, for example, has come to think that a certain way of observing Lent, on which we have just entered, is absolutely necessary to the safety of religion and morals both, is yet quite willing, and without a qualm of conscience, on the slightest hint of a suspicion, to tear into tatters the character of one of her neighbors or friends, does not hesitate to slander, perhaps is unjust or cruel to the servants that make the house comfortable and beautiful for her; in other words, transgressing the real laws of right and wrong, she is shocked and troubled over the transgression on the part of others of some purely conventional statute, the keeping or breach of which has no real bearing on the welfare of the world.
A good many of our social judgments are like the case of the old lady pardon me, if it should make you smile, but it illustrates the case who criticised with a great deal of severity a neighbor and friend who wore feathers on her bonnet. Somebody said to her, But the ribbons on your bonnet are quite as expensive as the feathers that you criticise. "Yes," she said, "I know they are; but you have got to draw the line somewhere, and I choose to draw it at feathers." So you find a great many people on every hand in society who are choosing to draw these lines purely artificial, purely conventional in regard to matters of supposed right or wrong, while they are not as careful to look down deeply into the essential principles of that which is inherently right or wrong.
And now at the end I wish to suggest what is a theme large enough for a sermon by itself, and say that these laws of righteousness are so inherent that they are self-executed; and by no possibility did any soul from the beginning of the world ever escape the adequate result of his wrong-doing. The old Hebrews, as manifested in the Book of Job, the Psalms, and all through the Old Testament, taught the idea, which was common at that time in the world, that the favor of God was to be judged by the external prosperity of men and women. The Old Testament promises long life and wealth and all sorts of good things to the people who do right; and I find on every hand in the modern world people who have inherited this way of looking at things. I have heard people say: I have tried to do right, and I am not prosperous. I wonder why I am treated so? I have heard women say, I have tried to be a good mother: why is my child taken away from me? As though there was any sort of relation between the two facts. I hear people say, Don't talk to me about the justice of God, when here is a man, who has been dishonest all his life long, who has prospered, and become rich and lives in a fine house, drives his horses, and owns a yacht. As if there was any sort of connection between the two, as though a man merely because he had a fine house and owned a yacht was escaping the punishment of his unjust and selfish life.
Remember, friends, look a little below the surface. There is no possibility of escape. I break some law of my body; do I escape the result? I break some law of my mind; do I escape the result? I break some law of my affectional nature; is nothing to happen? I break a law of my spiritual nature; does nothing take place as the result of it? You might as well say that the law of gravity can be suspended, that a man can fling himself over the edge of a precipice, and come to no harm. The precipice over the edge of which you fling yourself may be a physical one, may be a mental one, an affectional one, a spiritual one; but the moral gravity of the universe is never mocked, and the man who breaks any of God's laws never goes free. He may discover that he has broken it, be sorry for it, begin to keep it again, and recover himself; but the consequences are sure, inevitable, eternal.
You look at a man who is externally prospering, and because of this you say he is not suffering the result of the evil he has done. Go back with me to Homer's Odyssey at the time when Ulysses and his companions fell into the hands of the sorceress, and his companions were turned into swine. Would you go and look at these swine, and say they are not suffering anything? See how comfortable they are. See with what gusto they eat the food that is cast into their troughs. See how happy they are as swine. They are not suffering anything Is it nothing to become swinish, merely because you have your beautiful pen to live in? Is a not suffering the result of his moral wrong when he debases and degrades and deteriorates his own nature, and becomes less a man, because he is surrounded with all that is glorious and beautiful that art can supply? Look within whatever department of nature where the law has been disobeyed, and there forever and forever read the result, the inevitable law, that the soul that sinneth, in so far as it sinneth, it shall die.