Philanthropy, according to the etymology of the word, is simply the love of man; charity, according to Christian theology, is the love of God, and of man in God. Philanthropy is simply a natural human sentiment; charity is a virtue, a supernatural virtue, not possible without the assistance of grace—the highest virtue, the sum and perfection of all the virtues, the fulfilment of the whole law, the bond of perfectness which likens and unites us to God; for God is charity, Deus est caritas. It does not exclude but includes the love of man, our neighbor or our brother; "for if any man say, I love God and hateth his brother, he is a liar. For if he loveth not his brother, whom he seeth, how can he love God, whom he seeth not?" Whoever loves God must necessarily love his brother, for his brother is included in God, as the effect in the cause, and he who loveth not his brother proves clearly thereby that he doth not love God. But charity, though it includes philanthropy, is as much superior to it as God is to man.
The natural sentiments are all good in their origin and design, as much so since as before the fall; and man would be worthless without them; would be a monster, not a man. But in themselves they are blind. Each one tends, when left to itself, to become exclusive and excessive, and hence comes that internal disorder, anarchy, or war of conflicting sentiments of which we are all more or less conscious, and in which originate all life's tragedies. Even when developed, restrained, and directed by the understanding, as they all need to be, they are not even then moral virtues, meriting praise. Moral virtue is a rational act, an act of free will, done for the sake of the end prescribed by the law of God; but in the sentiments there is no free will, except in restraining and directing them, and man acts in them only as the sun shines, the rain falls, the winds blow, or the lightnings flash. There may the beauty and goodness in them, as in the objects of nature, but there is no virtue, because the spring of all sentimental action is the indulgence or gratification of the sentiment itself, not the will to do our duty, or to obey the law by which we are morally bound.
Indeed, what most offends this age—perhaps all ages—and for which it has the greatest horror, is duty or obedience; for duty implies that we are not our own, and, therefore, are not free to dispose of ourselves as we please; and obedience implies a superior, a lord and master, who has the right to order us. It, therefore, sets its wits to work and racks its brains to invent a morality that excludes duty, and exacts no such hateful same as obedience. It has found all that it is far nobler to act from love than from duty, and to do a thing because we are prompted to do it by our hearts, then because God, in his law, commands it. [{435}] In other words, it is nobler, more moral, to act to please ourselves, than it is to act to please God. This passes for excellent philosophy, and you may hear it in conversation of many young misses just from boarding-school, read it in most popular novels and magazines, and be edified by it from the pulpit of more than one professedly Christian denomination.
This philosophy sets the so-called heart above the head, that is, it distinguishes the heart from the understanding and will, and places it, as so distinguished, above them. Hence we find the tendency is to treat faith, considered as an intellectual act, and consequently the Christian dogmas, with great indifference; and to say, if the heart is right, it is no matter what one believes, and, it may be added, no matter what one does. What one does is of little consequence, if one only has fine sentiments, warm and gushing feelings. Jack Scapegrace is hard drinking a gambler, a liar, a rake, and seldom goes near a church; but for all that he is a right down good fellow—has a warm heart. He gives liberally to the missionary society, and makes large purchases at charity fairs. Hence a good heart, which at best means only quick sensibilities, and which is perfectly compatible with the grossest self-indulgence, and the most degrading and ruinous vices, constitutes the sum and substance of religion and morality, atones for the violation of every precept of the Decalogue, and supplies the absence of faith and Christian virtue.
All errors are half truths. Certainly, love is the fulfilling of the law, and the heart is all that God requires. "My son, give me thy heart." But the "heart" in the scriptural sense is reason, the intellect, and the will; and the love that fulfils the law is not a sentiment, but a free act of the rational soul, and, therefore, a love which it is within our power to give or withhold. It is a free, voluntary love, yielded by intelligence and will. In this sense, love cannot be contrasted with duty; for it is duty, or its fulfilment, and indistinguishable from it; the heart cannot be contrasted with the head, in the scriptural or Christian sense of the word; for in that sense it includes the head, and stands for the whole rational soul—the mistress of her own acts. To act from the promptings of one's own heart, in this sense, is all right, for it is to act from a sense of duty, from reason and will, or intelligence and free volition. In souls well constituted and trained, or long exercised in the practice of virtue, no long process of reasoning or deliberation ever takes place, and the decision and execution are simultaneous, and apparently instantaneous, but the act is none the less an act of deliberate reason or free will.
Plato speaks of a love which is not an affection of the sensibility, and which is one of the wings of the soul on which she soars to the Empyreum; but I can understand no love that contrasts with duty, except it be an affection of the sensitive nature, what the Scriptures call "the flesh," which is averted by the fall from God, and, as the Council of Trent defines, "inclines to sin"—"the carnal mind," which, St. Paul tells us, is at enmity with God, is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. Christianity recognizes an antagonism between the flesh and the spirit, between the law in our members and the Law of the mind, but none between the love she approves and the duty she enjoins, or between the heart which God demands and the head or the understanding. Love by the Christian law is demanded as a duty, as that which is due from us to God. We are required to love God with our whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves. This is our duty, and therefore the love must be an act of free will—a love which we are free to yield or to withhold, for our duty can never exceed our liberty. The Christian loves duty, loves self-denial and sacrifice, loves the law, and delights in it after [{436}] the inner man; but in loving the law he acts freely from his own reason and will, and he obeys it not for the sake of the delight he takes in it, but because it is God's law; otherwise he would act to please himself, not to please God, and his act would be simply an act of self-indulgence.
The age, in its efforts to construct a morality which excludes duty and obedience, tends to resolve the love which Christianity demands into an affection of the sensibility, and thence very logically opposes love to duty, and holds it nobler to act from inclination than from duty, to follow the law in our members than the law of the mind. It may then substitute, with perfect consistency, the transcendentalist maxim, Obey thyself, for the Christian maxim. Deny thyself!
But this is not all. The age, or what is usually called the age, not only resolves virtue, which old-fashioned ethics held to be an act of free will done in obedience to the Divine law, into a sentiment, or interior affection, of the sensibility, but it goes further and resolves God into man, and maintains that the real sense of the mystery of the Incarnation, of the Word made flesh, is that man is the only actual and living God, and that beyond humanity there is only infinite possibility, which humanity in its infinite progress and evolution and absorption of individual life is continually actualizing, or filling up. So virtually teaches Hegel, inconsiderately followed by Cousin, in teaching that das reine Seyn, or simply possible being, arrives at self-consciousness first in man. So teach the Saint Simonians, Enfantin, Bazard, Carnot, and Pierre Leroux; and so hold the school or sect of the Positivists, followers of Auguste Comte, who have actually instituted un culte or service in honor of humanity. The Positivists are too modest to claim to be themselves each individually God, but they make no bones of calling humanity, or the great collective man, God, and offering him, as such, a suitable worship. This is taught and done in France, the most lettered nation in Europe; and the principle that justifies it pervades not a little of the popular literature of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States.
If man or humanity is God, of course the highest virtue is and must be philanthropy, the love of all men in general, and of no one in particular. Resolve now God into man, and philanthropy or the love of man into an affection of the sensibility or sensitive nature, and you have in a nutshell the theology, religion, and morality to which the age tens, which the bulk of our popular literature favors, which our sons and daughters inhale with the very atmosphere they breathe, and which explains the effeminacy and sentimentalism of modern society. It is but a logical sequence that the age, since women are ordinarily narily more sentimental than men, places woman at the head of the race, and holds woman—if young, beautiful amiable, sentimental, and rich—to be the most perfect and adorable embodiment of the divinity. The highest form of philanthropy is the love of woman. I would say, philogyny, only that might be taken to imply that the highest virtue is the love of one's wife, or wifehood, which is to old-fashioned, unless by wife is meant the wife of one's neighbor. But, my dear young lady, be not too vain of the homage you receive; it will be withheld with the first appearance of the first wrinkle or the first gray hair. It is better to be honored as a true woman than to be worshipped as a goddess or even as an angel.
The sentimental worship of humanity, or the reduction of the virtue of charity to the sentiment of philanthropy, necessarily weaken and debases the character; and whatever we may say under various aspects and praise of our age, and however strong our confidence that God in his providence will turn even its evil tendencies to good, we cannot deny its moral weakness; and it is doubtful if [{437}] the debasement of individual character was greater, even in the Lower Empire, or that men were more dishonest or fraudulent, more sordid or venal. Other ages have been marked, perhaps, by less refinement of manners, more violent crimes, and great criminals, but few are found less capable either of great virtues or great expiations. This need not surprise us, for it is only the natural effect of substituting sentiment for virtue, and sentimental for moral culture, which we are constantly doing.