Christianity has raised the world from barbarism to civilization. Its influence has, in the course of centuries, abolished slavery, ennobled work, emancipated women, and revealed eternity. But was it dogma that brought these blessings? It is possible to avoid misunderstandings with regard to all subjects except those which transcend human conception, and these are the very subjects over which men have fought and desolated the world for the last eighteen hundred years, from the extermination of the Arians, on through the Thirty Years' War, to the scaffold of the Inquisition, and what is the result of all this fighting? The same differences of opinion as ever.
We may accept the doctrines of religion, as we accept the assurance of a trusty friend, without examination, but the kernel of all religions is the morality they teach, of which the Christian is the purest and most far-reaching.
And yet men speak slightingly of a barren morality, and place the form in which religion is presented before everything else. I fear it is the pulpit zealot, who tries to persuade where he cannot convince, that empties the church with his sermons.
After all, why should not every pious prayer, whether addressed to Buddha, to Allah, or to Jehovah, be heard by the same God, beside whom there is none other? Does not the mother hear her child's petition in whatever language it lisps her name?
Reason is nowhere in conflict with morality, for the good is always finally identical with the rational; but whether our actions shall or shall not correspond with the good, reason cannot decide. Here the ruling part of the soul is supreme, the soul which feels, acts, and wills. To her alone, not to her two vassals, has God entrusted the two-edged sword of freewill, that gift which, as Scripture tells us, may be our salvation or our perdition.
But, more than this, a trusty councillor has been assigned us, who is independent of our wills, and bears credentials from God Himself. Conscience is an incorruptible and infallible judge, whom, if we will, we may hear pronounce sentence every moment, and whose voice at last reaches even those who most obstinately refuse to listen.
The laws which human society has imposed upon itself can take account of actions only in their tribunals, and not of thoughts and feelings. Even the various religions make different demands among the different peoples. Here they require the Sunday to be kept holy, here the Saturday or Friday. One allows pleasures which another forbids. Even apart from these differences there is always a wide neutral ground between what is allowed and what is forbidden; and it is here that conscience, with her subtler discrimination, raises her voice. She tells us that every day should be kept sacred to the Lord, that even permitted interest becomes unjust when exacted from the needy; in a word, she preaches morality in the bosom of Christian and Jew, of heathen and savage. For even among uncivilized races which have not the light of Christianity there is an agreement as to the fundamental conceptions of good and evil. They, too, recognize the breaking of promises, lying, treachery, and ingratitude as evil; they, too, hold as sacred the bond between parents, children, and kinsmen. It is hard to believe in the universal corruption of mankind, for, however obscured by savagery and superstition, there lies dormant in every human breast that feeling for the noble and the beautiful which is the seed of virtue, and a conscience which points out the right path. Can there be a more convincing proof of God's existence than this universal sense of right and wrong, this unanimous recognition of one law, alike in the physical and in the moral world, except that nature obeys this law with a full and absolute obedience, while man, who is free, has the power of violating it?
The body and the reason serve the ruling part of the soul, but they put forward claims of their own, they have their own share of power, and thus man's life is a perpetual conflict with self. If in this conflict the soul, hard-pressed from within and without, does not always end by obeying the voice of conscience, let us hope that He who created us imperfect will not require perfection from us.
For consider to what violent storms man is exposed in the voyage of life, what variety there is in his natural endowments, what incongruity between education and position in life. It is easy for the favorite of fortune to keep in the right path; temptation, at any rate to crime, hardly reaches him; how hard, on the other hand, is it for the hungry, the uneducated, the passionate man to refrain from evil. To all this due weight will be given in the last judgment, when guilt and innocence are put in the balance, and thus mercy will become justice, two conceptions which generally exclude one another.
It is harder to think of nothing than of something; when the something is once given, harder to imagine cessation than continuance. This earthly life cannot possibly be an end in itself. We did not ask for it; it was given to us, imposed upon us. We must be destined to something higher than a perpetual repetition of the sad experiences of this life. Shall those enigmas which surround us on all sides, and for a solution of which the best of mankind have sought their whole life long, never be made plain? What purpose is served by the thousand ties of love and friendship which bind past and present together, if there is no future, if death ends all?