[Footnote 155: History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne. By William Edward Hartpoole Lecky, M.A. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1869. 2 vols. 8vo.]
Mr. Lecky divides his work into five chapters. The first chapter is preliminary, and discusses "the nature and foundations of morals," its obligation and motives; the second treats of the morals of the pagan empire; the third gives the author's view of the causes of the conversion of Rome and the triumph of Christianity in the empire; the fourth the progress and deterioration of European morals from Constantine to Charlemagne; and the fifth the changes effected from time to time in the position of women. The author does not confine himself strictly within the period named, but, in order to make his account intelligible, gives us the history of what preceded and what has followed it; so that his book gives one, from his point of view, the philosophy and the entire history of European morals from the earliest times down to the present.
The subject of this work is one of great importance in the general history of the race, and of deep interest to all who are not incapable of serious and sustained thought. Mr. Lecky is a man of some ability, of considerable first or second hand learning, and has evidently devoted both time and study to his subject. His style is clear, animated, vigorous, and dignified; but his work lacks condensation and true perspective. He dwells too long on points comparatively unimportant, and repeats the same things over and over again, and brings proofs after proofs to establish what is mere commonplace to the scholar, till he becomes not a little tedious. He seems to write under the impression that the public he is addressing knows nothing of his subject, and is slow of understanding. He evidently supposes that he is writing something very important, and quite new to the whole reading world. Yet we have found nothing new in his work, either in substance or in presentation, nothing—not even an error or a sophism—that had not been said, and as well said, a hundred times before him; we cannot discover a single new fact, or a single new view of a fact, that can throw any additional light on European morals in any period of European history. Yet we may say Mr. Lecky, though not an original or a profound thinker, is above the average of English Protestant writers, and compiles with passable taste, skill, and judgment.
We know little of the author, except as the author of the book before us, and of a previous work, on Rationalism in Europe, and we have no vehement desire to know anything more of him. He belongs, with some shades of difference, to a class represented, in England, by Buckle, J. Stuart Mill, Frank Newman, and James Martineau; and of which the Westminster Review is the organ; in France, by M. Vacherot, Jules Simon, and Ernest Renan; and, in this country, by Professor Draper, of this city, and a host of inferior writers. They are not Christians, and yet would not like to be called anti-Christians; they are judges, not advocates, and, seated on the high judicial bench, they pronounce, as they flatter themselves, an impartial and final judgment on all moral, religious, and philosophical codes, and assign to each its part of good, and its part of evil. They aim to hold an even balance between the church and the sects, between Christian morals and pagan morals, and between the several pagan religions and the Christian religion, all of which they look upon as dead and gone, except with the ignorant, the stupid, and the superstitious. Of this class Mr. Lecky is a distinguished member, though less brilliant as a writer than Renan, and less pleasing as well as less scientific than our own Draper.
The writers of this class do not profess to break with Christian civilization, or to reject religion or morals, but strive to assert a morality without God, and a Christianity without Christ. They deny in words neither God nor Christ, but they find no use for either. They deny neither the possibility nor the fact of the supernatural, but find no need of it and no place for it. They concede providence, but resolve it into a fixed natural law, and are what we would call naturalists, if naturalism had not received so many diverse meanings. In their own estimation, they are not philosophers, moralists, or divines, but really gods, who know, of themselves, good and evil, right and wrong, truth and error, and whose prerogative it is to judge all men and ages, all moralities, philosophies, and religions, by the infallible standard which each one of them is, or has in himself. They are the fulfilment of the promise of Satan to our mother Eve, "Ye shall be as gods."
Mr. Lecky, in his preliminary chapter, on the nature and foundation of morals, refutes even ably and conclusively the utilitarian school of morals, and defends what he calls the "intuitive" school. He contends that it is impossible to found morals on the conception of the useful, or on fears of punishment and hopes of reward; and argues well, after Henry More, Cudworth, Clark, and Butler, that all morality involves the idea of obligation, and is based on the intuition of right or duty; or, in other words, on the principle of human nature called conscience. But this, after all, is no solution of the problem raised. There is, certainly, a great difference between doing a thing because it is useful, and doing it because it is right; but there is a still greater difference between the intuitive perception of right and the obligation to do it. The perception or intuition of an act as obligatory, or as duty, but is not that which makes it duty or obligatory. The obligation is objective, the perception is subjective. The perception or intuition apprehends the obligation, but is not it, and does not impose it. The intuitive moralists are better than the utilitarians, in the respect that they assert a right and a wrong independent of the fact that it is useful, or injurious, to the actor. But they are equally far from asserting the real foundation of morals; because, though they assert intuition or immediate perception of duty, they do not assert or set forth the ground of duty or obligation. Duty is debt, is an obligation; but whence the debt? whence the obligation? We do not ask why the duty obliges, for the assertion of an act as duty is its assertion as obligatory; but why does the right oblige? or, in other words, why am I bound to do right? or any one thing rather than another?
Mr. Lecky labors hard to find the ground of the obligation in some principle or law of human nature, which he calls conscience. But conscience is the recognition of the obligation, and the mind's own judgment of what is or is not obligatory; it is not the obligation nor its creator. This mistake proceeds from his attempt to found morals on human nature as supreme law-giver, and is common to all moralists who seek to erect a system of morals independent of theology. Dr. Ward, in his work on Nature and Grace, commits the same mistake in his effort to find a solid foundation in nature of duty, without rising to the Creator. All these moralists really hold, as true, the falsehood told by Satan to our first parents, "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil;" that is, in order to know good or evil ye shall not need to look beyond your own nature, nor to recognize yourselves as subject to, or dependent on, any authority above or distinct from it. It is the one fundamental error that meets us in all Gentile philosophy, and all modern philosophy and science, speculative, ethical, or political, that holds itself independent of God. The schoolmen understood by morals, when the term means duty, or anything more than manners and customs, what is called Moral Theology, or the practical application of speculative and dogmatic theology to the offices of life, individual, domestic, and social or political. Natural morality meant that portion of man's whole duty which is prescribed by the natural law and promulgated by reason, as distinguished from revelation. They based all morals on the great principle of theology, and therefore they called theology the queen of the sciences. We have made no advance on them.
In morals, three things—first, the obligation; second, the regula or rule; third, the end—are essential, and must be carefully distinguished. Why am I bound to do one thing rather than another? that is, why am I bound at all? What am I bound to do, or to avoid? For what end? These three questions are fundamental and exhaustive. The intuitionists hold that all morals involve the idea or conception of duty; but they omit to present the reason or ground of duty or obligation, and therefore erect their moral fabric without any foundation, and make it a mere castle in the air. They confound conscience with obligation, and the rule or law with the reason or motive for observing it. Suppose we find in human nature the rule or law; we cannot find in it either the obligation or the motive, for the simple reason that human nature is not independent, is not sufficient for itself, does not belong to itself, and has in itself neither its origin nor its end, neither its first nor its final cause. The rule—regula—is the law, and the law prescribes what is to be done and what is to be avoided; but it does not create the obligation nor furnish the motive of obedience. Mr. Lecky himself maintains that it does not, and is very severe upon those who make an arbitrary law the ground of moral distinctions, or the reason of duty. The law does not make the right or the wrong. The act is not right because commanded, nor wrong because prohibited; but it is commanded because it is right, and prohibited because it is wrong. Whence then the obligation? or, what is it that transforms the right into duty? This is the question that the independent or non-theological moralists, no matter of what school, do not and cannot answer.
There is no answer, unless we give up the godship of man, give Satan the lie, and understand that man is a dependent existence; for an independent being cannot be bound or placed under the obligation of duty, either by his own act or by the act of another. If man is dependent, he is created, and, if created, he belongs to his Creator; for the maker has a sovereign right to that which he makes. It is his act, and nothing is or can be more one's own, than one's own act. Man, then, does not own himself; he owes himself, all he is, and all he has, to his Creator. As it has pleased his Creator to make him a free moral agent, capable of acting from choice, and with reference to a moral end, he is bound to give himself, by his own free will, to God to whom he belongs; for his free will, his free choice, belongs to God, is his due; and the principle of justice requires us to give to every one his due, or what is his own.
Here, then, in man's relation to God as his creator, is the ground of his duty or obligation. It grows out of the divine creative act. Deny the being of God, deny the creative act, deny man is the creature of God, and you deny all obligation, all duty, and therefore, according to Mr. Lecky's own doctrine, all morals.