History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

At different stages of our study we have noted how the classifications and arrangements of the invisible world are the work of the moral faculty, and how the developing moral feelings of the historic peoples have, with the lapse of time, ever modified anew the topography and moralized afresh the government of the world of spirits.[749]

Now one of the most important modifications ever effected in man’s conceptions of the other world was brought about by the Protestant Reformation. The reformers abolished purgatory, and thus left only two separate realms, heaven and hell, in the world of souls. But in abolishing purgatory and thereby making all suffering in the hereafter punitive and eternal, and in failing to recognize gradations of guilt in human sin by consigning all evildoers, unbelievers, and misbelievers to the same awful and everlasting torments, the reformers made still more unethical the government which the popular medieval imagination had created for the unseen world.

The gradual clarification and growing sensitiveness of the moral feelings could not long leave unchallenged such a grossly immoral notion of the divine government. During the last two generations a notable change has passed over men’s conceptions of the netherworld of spirits. The hell of the reformers’ imagination has become, like much else in the Augustinian theology, “the supreme incredibility.” The blurring of that awful vision is one of the most significant changes which, during the Christian era, have passed over that world which is at once the creation and the creator of human morality.

Exchange in rank of the theological and the natural Gospel virtues

The advance in religious ethics during the last few decades is registered again in the exchange in rank of the theological and the natural gospel virtues in the moral ideal of Protestant Christendom. During this period there has taken place here a genuine “transvaluation of moral values.” Many representative religious teachers have come to assign a dominant place in the ethical standard to the natural social virtues, and have relegated to a lower place the purely theological virtues, such as right religious belief and ritual observances. In the case of many the rejection of that part of the moral code resting upon theological dogmas is as complete as was the rejection by Christianity of the morality based on the ceremonial laws of the Jews. With these the saving virtue is no longer acceptance of a prescribed creed, but loving, self-denying service of humanity.[750]

This transvaluation of moral values within the Church itself is one of the most important movements going on in the moral life of the modern world.

Extension to theological ethics of the principle of individual responsibility

Further illustration of progress in Church ethics in recent times is found in the extension of the principle of individual responsibility to the domain of religion.[751] It will be recalled how completely the law of collective responsibility dominates the morality of primitive peoples.[752] With the growth and clearing of the moral sense the injustice of this is perceived, and the principle of individual responsibility comes to be established.

This moral movement is consummated earlier in the civil than in the religious domain; that is, the civil-law codes are first modified in accordance with the demands of the truer ethical feeling, and not until later does the religious code, more conservative, undergo a like change. Thus gradually during the medieval time the civil law of the more advanced nations of Western Christendom abrogated the principle of collective responsibility, while the ecclesiastical code retained it far into the nineteenth century. During the last fifty years, however, the best conscience of the Church has rejected the principle as the embodiment of a gross inequity. The doctrine that all the generations of men sinned in the first parent and justly suffer for his transgression has been repudiated by the modern instructed conscience as incredible, untrue, and immoral.

This repudiation of the principle of collective responsibility by the ethics of religion harmonizes in this respect Church morality with the morality of the civil codes of the civilized world, and marks the consummation of an ethical evolution which, commencing in the dawn of civilization, covers all the millenniums of human history.