Many, perhaps, will be disposed to deny that we have substituted sentimental for moral culture, and it must be concluded that the didactic lessons given in our schools throughout Christendom, for the most part, remain very much as they have been ever since there was a Christendom, and in general accord with pure Christian ethics. There are few, if any, schools for children and youth, in which the sentimental and humanitarian morality, or rather immorality, is formally taught. But we should remember that the didactic lessons of the school-room do very little toward forming the character of our youth, and that the culture that really forms it is given by the home circle, associations, the spirit and tone of the community in which they are brought up. There is a subtle influence, what the Germans call der Welt-Geist, which pervades the whole community, and affects the faith, the morals, and character of all who grow up in that community without any formal instruction or conscious effort of any one. So far as formal lessons and words go, the culture of our children and youth is, for the most part, Christian; but these lessons and words receive a practical interpretation by der Welt-Geist, what I call s spirit of the age, and should, "the prince of this world," which deprives them of their Christian sense, takes from them all meaning, or gives them an anti-Christian meaning. It is one of the striking peculiarities of the age that it inculcates the baldest infidelity, the grossest immorality in the language of Christian faith and virtue. It is this fact which deceives so many, and that makes the assertion of sentimental for moral culture appear to be a total misstatement, or, at least, a gross exaggeration of the fact.
It will, no doubt, also be said that a decided reaction in our popular literature against sentimentalism has already commenced. The realism of Dickens and the Trollopes is opposed to it, Bulwer Lytton, in his late novels at least, is decidedly hostile to it, and Thackeray unmercifully ridicules it. These and other popular writers have undoubtedly reacted against one form of sentimentalism, the dark and suicidal form placed in vogue by Goethe in his Sorrows of Werter, and now nearly forgotten; but they have not ridiculed or reacted against the form of sentimentalism which substitutes the sentiment of philanthropy for the virtue of charity. They encourage humanitarianism, and make the love of man for woman or woman for man the great agent in developing, enlarging, and strengthening the intellect, the spring of the purest and sublimest morality. The hero of popular literature is now rarely an avowed unbeliever or open scoffer, and in all well-bred novels the heroine says her prayers night and morning, and the author decidedly patronizes Christianity, and says many beautiful and even true things in its favor; but, after all, his religion is based on humanity, is only a charming sentimentalism, embraced for its loveliness, not as duty or the law which it would be sin to neglect; or it is introduced as a foreign and incongruous element, never as the soul or informing spirit of the novel.
The fact is undeniable, whether people are generally conscious of it or not, and we see its malign influence not only on individual character, but on domestic and social life. It has nearly broken up and rendered impossible the Christian family in the easy and educated classes. [{438}] Marriage is, it is said, where and only where there is mutual love, and hence the marriage is in the mutual love, is lawful between any parties who mutually love, unlawful between any who do not. Love is an interior affection of the sensibility, a feeling, and like all the feelings independent of reason and will. All popular literature makes love fatal, something undergone, not given. We love where we must; not where we would nor where we should, but where we are fated to love. It needs not here to speak of infidelity to the marriage vows, which this doctrine justifies to any extent, for those vows are broken when broken from unreasoning passion or lust, not from a theory which justifies it. I speak rather of the misery which it carries into married life, the destruction of domestic peace and happiness it causes. Trained in the sentimentalism of the age, and to regard love as a feeling dependent on causes beyond our control, our young people marry, expecting from marriage what it has not, and cannot give. They expect the feeling which they call love, and which gives a roseate hue to everything they look upon, will continue as fresh, as vivid, and as charming after marriage as before it; but the honeymoon is hardly over, and they begin to settle down in the regular routine of life, before they discover their mistake, the roseate hue has gone, their feelings have undergone a notable change, and they are disappointed in each other, and feel that the happiness they counted on is no longer to be expected. The stronger and more intense the mutual feeling the greater the disappointment, and hence the common saying: Love matches are seldom happy matches. Each party is disappointed in the other, frets against the chain that binds them together, and wishes it broken.
This is only what might have been expected. Nothing is more variable or transitory than our feelings, and nothing that depends on them can be unchanging or lasting. When the feelings of the married couple change toward each other, the marriage bond becomes a galling chain, and is felt to be a serious evil, and divorce is desired and resorted to as a remedy. It is usually no remedy at all, or a remedy worse even than the disease; but it is the only remedy practicable where feeling is substituted for rational affection. Hence, in nearly all modern states, the legislature, in direct conflict with the Christian law, which makes marriage a sacrament and indissoluble, permits divorce, and in some states for causes as frivolous as incompatibility of temper. It is easy to censure the legislature but it must follow and express the morals, manners, sentiments, and demands of the people, and when these are repugnant to the divine law, it cannot in its enactments conform to that law; and if did, it's enactments would be resisted as tyrannical and oppressive, or remained on the statute book a dead letter, as did so much wise and just legislation inspired by the church in the middle ages. The evil lies further back, in the humanitarianism of the age, which reverses the real order, puts the flesh in the place of the spirit, philanthropy in the place of charity, and man in the place of God, and which promotes an excessive culture of the sentiments, at the expense of rational conviction and affection. There is no remedy but in returning to the order we have reversed, to the higher culture of reason and free will, not possible without faith in God and the Christian mysteries.
But passing over the effects of sentimental morality on individual character, the private virtues, and domestic happiness, we find it no less hostile to social ameliorations and reforms in the state. The age is philanthropic, and wages war with every form of vice, poverty, and suffering, and is greatly shocked at the evils it finds past ages tolerated without ever making an effort to remove them, hardly even to mitigate them. [{439}] This is well as far as it goes; but in an age when the sensitive nature is chiefly cultivated, when physical pain is counted the chief evil, and sensible pleasures held to be the chief good, practically, if not theoretically, many things will be regarded as evils which, in a more robust and manly age, were unheeded, or not counted as evils at all. Many things in our day need changing, simply because other things having been changed, they have become anomalous and are out of place. What in one state of society is simple poverty, is really distress in another; and poverty, which in itself is no evil, becomes a great evil in a community where wealth is regarded as the supreme good, and the poor have wants, habits, and tastes which only wealth an satisfy. The poorer classes of today in civilized nations would suffer intensely if thrown back into the condition they were in under the feudal régime, but it may be doubted if they do not really suffer as much now as they did then. Perhaps such wants as they then had were more readily met and supplied than are those which they now have. In point of fact, Christian charity did infinitely more for the poor and to solace suffering in all its forms, even in the feudal ages, than philanthopy does now; and we find the greatest amount of squalid wretchedness now precisely in those nations in which philanthopy has been most successful in supplanting charity.
Philanthropy effects nothing except in so far as it copies or imitates Christian Charity, and its attempted imitations are rarely successful. It has for years been very active and hard at work in imitation of charity; but what has it effected? what suffering has it solaced? what crime has it diminished? what vice has it corrected? what social evil has it removed? It has tried its hand against licentiousness, and licentiousness is more rife and shameless than ever. It has made repeated onslaughts on the ruinous vice of intemperance, and yet drunkenness increases instead of diminishing, and has become the disgrace of the country-. It has professed great regard for the poor, but does more to remove them out of sight than to relieve them. It treats poverty as a vice or a crime, looks on it as a disgrace, a thing to be fled from with all speed possible, and makes the poor feel that wealth is virtue, honor, nobility, the greatest good, and thus destroys their self respect, aggravates their discontent, and indirectly provokes the crimes against property become so general and so appalling. What a moral New York reads us in the fact that she makes her commissioners of "Public Charities" also commissioners of "Public Corrections!" Philanthropy rarely fails to aggravate the evil she attempts to cure, or to cure one evil by introducing another and a greater evil. Her remedies are usually worse than the disease.
Owen, Fourier, Cabet, and other philanthropists have made serious efforts to reorganize society so as to remove the inequalities or the evils of the inequalities of wealth and social position; but have all failed, because they needed, in order to succeed, the habits, character, and virtues which, on their own theories, can be obtained only from success. As a rule, philanthropy must succeed in order to be able to succeed.
Philanthropy—humanitarianism—has been shocked at slavery, and in our country as well as in some others it formed associations for its abolition. In the West India Islands, belonging to Great Britain, it succeeded in abolishing it, to the ruin of the planters and very little benefit to the slave. In this country, if slavery is abolished, it has not been done by philanthropy, which served only to set the North and the South by the ears, but by the military authority as a war measure, necessary, or judged to be necessary, to save the Union and to guard against future attempts to dissolve it. Philanthropy is hard at work to make abolition a blessing to the freedmen. It talks, sputters, [{440}] clamors, legislates, but it can effect nothing; and unless Christian charity takes the matter in hand, it is very evident that, however much emancipation may benefit the white race, it can prove of little benefit to the emancipated, who will be emancipated in name, but not in reality.
The great difficulty with philanthropy is, that she acts from feeling and not reason, and uses reason only as the slave or instrument of feeling. Wherever she sees an evil she rushes headlong to its removal, blind to the injury she may do to rights, principles, and institutions essential to liberty and the very existence of society. Hence she usually in going to her end tramples down more good by the way than she can obtain in gaining it. She has no respect for vested rights, regards no geographical lines, and laughs at the constitutions of states, if they stand in her way. Liberty with us was more interested in maintaining inviolate the constitution of the Union and the local rights of the several states, than it was even in abolishing negro slavery, and hence many wise and good men, who had no interest in retaining slavery, and who detested it as an outrage upon humanity, did not and could not act or sympathize with the abolitionists. They yield in nothing to them in the earnest desire to abolish slavery, but they would abolish it by legal and peaceful means—means that would not weaken the hold of the constitution and civil law on conscience, and destroy the safeguards of liberty. The abolitionists did not err in being opposed to slavery, but in the principles on which they sought its abolition. Adam did not sin in aspiring to be God; for that, in a certain sense, he was destined, through the incarnation, one day to become. His sin was in aspiring to be God without the incarnation, in his own personal right and might, and in violation of the divine command, or by other means than those prescribed by his Creator and Lawgiver, the only possible means of attaining the end sought.
Philanthropy commits the same error whatever the good work she attempts, and especially in all her attempts at political reforms. She finds herself "cabined, cribbed, confined" by old political institutions, and cries out, Down with them. She demands for the people a liberty which she sees they have not and cannot have under the existing political order, and so proceeds at once to conspire against it, to revolutionize the state, deluges the land in blood, and gets anarchy, the Reign of Terror, or military despotism for its pains. Never were there more sincere or earnest philanthropists than the authors of the old French Revolution. The violent revolutions attempted in modern Europe in the name of humanity, have done more harm to society by unsettling the bases of society and effacing in men's minds and hearts the traditional respect for law and order, than any good they could have done by sweeping away the social and political abuses they warred against. The French are not politically or individually freer to-day than they were under Louis Quatorze.