A Modern Zoroastrian

by S. Laing

The great advantage which Christianity possesses over most other religions is that it is based to a much greater extent on the solid foundation of an elevated morality. The creeds of ancient Egypt, of Buddhism, and of Confucianism contain many excellent moral precepts; and the injunctions to ‘do unto others as you would be done by,’ and to ‘love your neighbour as yourself,’ are to be found long before the Sermon on the Mount. But these religions in the main followed other lines of development, and branched off either into metaphysical conceptions or into formal rites and ceremonies. With the exception of Judaism, of which Christianity is the lineal descendant, no religion has ever to the same extent become to the great mass of its adherents a rule of conduct and an incentive, strengthened by divine sanction, to lead pure and upright lives. This is the sense in which Christianity has always been understood by the vast majority of Christians, and its corruptions have come much more from above than from below; from theologians, priests, and politicians, than from the instincts of the millions; and this it is which enables it to retain such a wonderful vitality even in modern times, when faith in dogmas and miracles has been so greatly weakened. In order to appreciate the solidity of this basis it is necessary to understand the origin of morals, and to see that the fundamental precepts of moral law are not mere chance inventions of a few exceptional minds, or the teachings of doubtful revelations, but are the necessary growth and products of human nature, in the course of the evolution of society from rude beginnings to a high civilisation. This gives them a certainty and sanction which could be derived from no other source, and makes them what in fact they have become—almost primary instincts of the natural and normal mind in civilised communities. I proceed, therefore, to endeavour to trace shortly the process by which moral laws have originated and grown up to their present certainty and cogency in the course of evolution.

As I have already said, the element of morality is one of the latest to be developed in religious conceptions. The first impressions of savage races reflect the feelings of vague superstitious terror with which they regard unknown phenomena and powers. They are afraid of ghosts and afraid of thunder, long before they rise to a belief in a future state of rewards and punishments, or to the notion of an almighty Being acting by natural laws. In a higher state of development they personify natural powers in gods, who have no more idea of morality than if they were so many parallels of latitude or degrees of longitude; and they invent tribal gods, who are simply great chiefs, bound by no laws, but granting favours when appeased and inflicting injuries when angry. By slow degrees, as civilisation advances, moral ideas are evolved, and the more enlightened minds begin to attribute moral attributes to their deities. Earnest men, prophets, and reformers take up these ideas and preach them to the world, and, if circumstances are favourable and the soil prepared, they take root and become popular convictions, surviving in the struggle for life, and becoming stronger from generation to generation.

This evolution of moral ideas is most clearly traced in the religious history of the Jews. In their earlier conceptions Jehovah is represented with all the traits of a jealous and capricious Oriental sultan. The one virtue in his eyes is implicit obedience; the one unpardonable crime, anything that looks like disrespect. David is the man after God’s own heart, though he commits crimes of the foulest description, and treats as nullities the moral commandments against adultery and murder. But when he takes a census of his people Jehovah is offended, and, with a total disregard of justice, visits his anger, not on the offender, but on the innocent people whom he decimates by a pestilence. In like manner, Abraham is favoured because he is ready to obey the inhuman command to sacrifice his son; while Saul loses Jehovah’s favour because he hesitates to massacre his captives in cold blood. The first ideas of a higher moral sense appear with the prophets in the troubled times of the later kings—when poor little Palestine was being ground between the upper millstone of Assyria and the nether one of Egypt. Sufferings and persecutions, anxieties and tribulations, wrought a ferment in the Jewish mind from which new ideas were generated. Sacrifices had been duly offered, and yet the enemies of Jehovah waxed and his chosen people waned. It must be that He was offended with them because He required something better than the blood of bulls—justice and mercy. So taught the popular preachers of the day—men like Isaiah and Amos—and by degrees their words found acceptance. It was not, however, until the Captivity that these ideas of morality were wrought into the Jewish nation so as to become, so to speak, flesh of their flesh and blood of their blood, as they have remained ever since. Whether it was contact with the more advanced moral ideas of religions like those of Buddha and Zoroaster, or, more probably, their sufferings from the cruelty and injustice of their conquerors, the Captivity certainly made them a new nation, attached ardently to morality and monotheism—thus effecting in a few years, and by purely human agencies, what, according to received beliefs, centuries of miraculous dispensation had failed to accomplish. How speedily and how effectually the work was done appears from that most interesting narrative of the domestic life of a middle-class Jew of Nineveh, the Book of Tobit. The simple piety and homely household virtues are almost identically the same as those of many a Jewish family living to-day in London or Frankfort. From that time forward Jewish morality maintains a high level, and in the age immediately preceding Christianity it had attained great purity and spirituality in the school of the early doctors of the Talmud, and of the Jewish colony of Alexandria. The Sermon on the Mount, beautiful as it is, is but an admirable résumé of maxims which are to be found in the works of Philo and other Jewish teachers, and which were current in the synagogues of the day. Hillel, who was president of the Sanhedrin when Christ was born, when asked what was the law, replied, ‘Do not unto another what thou wouldst not have another do unto thee. This is the whole Law, the rest is mere commentary.’ And again, ‘Do not judge thy neighbour until thou hast stood in his place.’

The Talmud anticipates in a wonderful degree not only the moral precepts of the Gospel, but to a great extent its phraseology and technical terms. ‘Redemption,’ ‘grace,’ ‘faith,’ ‘salvation,’ ‘Son of man,’ ‘Son of God,’ ‘kingdom of heaven,’ were all, as Deutsch shows, not invented by Christianity, but were household words of contemporary Judaism. In one respect only Christianity shows a higher evolution of morality than Judaism—viz. its universality. Pure Judaism hardly rises above the idea of ‘neighbour,’ or those who were of the same race or common faith; while Christianity, as enlarged by St. Paul, embraces all mankind, and may truly say: ‘Humani nihil a me alienum puto.’

The idea that morality and religion are products of a slowly developing evolution is denounced by many as degrading and materialistic. In many the instinct of the ‘good’ is so strong that it seems to them sacrilege to attempt to explain it. They insist that it is either a universal instinct implanted from the first in all mankind, or else that it has been so implanted by a divine revelation. They forget that, to use the vigorous phraseology of Carlyle, ‘It matters not whether you call a thing pan-theism or pot-theism; what really concerns us is to know whether it is true.’ Now it admits of no question that, whether we like it or not, the evolutionist theory of morality is the true one. Take an extreme instance, that of murder. We feel an instinctive horror at the idea, and even a brutal ruffian like Bill Sikes becomes an accursed thing to himself and his companions when he has transgressed the commandment ‘Thou shalt do no murder.’ But is it so everywhere, and was it so always? By no means; the Fiji islander kills and eats a stranger or enemy without scruple; the Red Indian and the Dyak are not accounted men until they have murdered some one and brought home his scalp or his head as a trophy. Even at a late period among ourselves murder was considered to be rather as a civil injury, to be met by compensation, than as a crime; and a regular tariff was established of the amount to be paid according as the victim was a slave or a freeman.

The origin and progress of the idea that murder is a crime can almost be traced step by step. The wife of a rude savage does something which offends him; a violent perception of anger flashes from the visual organ to the perceptive area of the brain, and a reflex action flashes from it along the motor nerve to the muscles of the arm. He strikes and kills her, almost as unconsciously and instinctively as he walks or breathes. But other perceptions follow on the act. He finds next day that he has no one to cook his food; the image of her dying face photographed on his brain is an unpleasant one; and thus by degrees a series of secondary perceptions get attached to the primary one of striking when he feels angry. If he gets another wife who again provokes him, the primary perception calls up the secondary ones, and the nerve-centres of his brain, instead of being solicited only in one direction, are acted on in opposite ways by conflicting impressions. He hesitates, and, as the primary impulse of passion is probably the more evanescent, the restraining impulses prevail, and every time they prevail they acquire more strength. Gradually they extend to a conviction that it is both inconvenient and disagreeable to kill any one with whom he is closely related either by family or tribal ties, and that, in a word, murder does not pay, and is wrong, unless practised on an enemy. This idea accumulates by heredity, and evidently those tribes or races in whom it is strongest will have an advantage in the struggle for life and be most likely to survive.

From this point the idea may be traced historically, deepening and widening from generation to generation as civilisation advances, until in the higher races it assumes the form of an instinctive abhorrence of murder in the abstract, as we find it at the present day.

It is a mistake to suppose that the foundations of morality are in any way weakened by thus tracing them up to their first origins. On the contrary, if we consider the matter rightly, they are placed on a much more solid and unassailable basis. If we say that moral laws depend on a universal instinct implanted in all mankind, faith in them is shaken whenever we read in history, or hear from the report of travellers, of whole nations, constituting from first to last the immense majority of the human race, who had none of those ideas which we now consider fundamental. If, again, we base them on divine precepts miraculously conveyed, every discovery of science and development of thought which weakens faith in miracles impairs the basis of morals. And on this theory, hopeless contradictions arise within the sphere of those very moral laws which we seek to establish; as in reconciling the justice and mercy of the Creator in revealing this inspired code only to limited portions of the human race, and under conditions which leave large scope for legitimate doubt, and which, in point of fact, failed to ensure recognition for its moral precepts among His own chosen people for a long period after its promulgation.

But on the scientific theory of the evolution of morality by natural laws it stands on an impregnable footing. No one can deny that, as a matter of fact, such instincts do prevail, and have become part of the nature of all the best men and best races, and that each successive generation tends to fix them more firmly. Mathematical laws are not the less certain because they can be traced back to counting on the fingers, and moral laws will continue to have a certainty and cogency, scarcely inferior to the axioms of mathematics, although we can trace them back to origins as rude as the attempts of the Australian savage to extend his perceptions of number beyond ‘one, two, and a great many.’

The real difficulty is not in tracing the origin of these instincts of morality, but in that fundamental difficulty which underlies all theories of reconciling the consciousness of free-will with the material attributes with which it is indissolubly associated. Without freedom of will there can be no conscience, no right or wrong in acting in accordance or otherwise with the instincts of moral law, however those instincts may have been derived. Now it is certain that the will, like life, memory, consciousness, and other mental functions, is, so far as human knowledge extends, indissolubly connected with matter and natural laws, in the form of certain motions of the cells which form the grey substance of the nerves and of the nervous ganglia of which the cortex of the brain is the most considerable. This is conclusively proved by experiment. We know that, by removing certain portions of the brain of a dog or of a pigeon, we can destroy the power of motion while preserving the will, and by removing certain other portions we can destroy the will while preserving the powers of motion. Take away a certain portion of the brain of a pigeon, and although it retains the power of taking food, it has so totally lost the will to exercise this power that it will starve in the midst of abundance, though it can be kept alive by placing the food in its mouth. In like manner, in the human brain there are certain portions which, if destroyed by injury or disease, will paralyse the power of giving effect to the will by muscular movements, while the destruction of other portions will paralyse the will which originates such movements. Numerous cases are recorded in medical treatises in which the will is completely paralysed for the performance of certain functions, and in such cases the anatomist can lay his finger on the spot where the brain is affected, and when the brain is dissected after the death of the patient, it will be found that his prediction is verified, and that this region of the brain really was diseased. In sleep also, and in abnormal states of the brain such as somnambulism, and mesmerism or hypnotism, the action of the will is suspended. Hypnotism affords the most remarkable instances, for here the will seems to be transferred from the Ego or individuality of the patient to that of the operator, and the currents of nervous energy which induce motion in A are set going by impulses in the mind of A, not caused by his own will, but by that of B, conveyed by words, gestures, or other subtle indications. A ludicrous instance of this is recorded by Dr. Braid, in which an old lady, who had a true puritanical abhorrence of dancing as sinful, being hypnotised, began capering about the room when a waltz tune was struck up, on being told to do so by the operators.