'Above all things, my brethren, swear not.' If, as is generally assumed, this refers to the custom of using profane oaths in common conversation, how remote from modern ideas is the place assigned to this vice, which perhaps affects human happiness as little as any other that can be mentioned, in the scale of criminality, and how curiously characteristic is the fact that the vice to which this supremacy of enormity is attributed continued to be prevalent during the ages when theological influences were most powerful, and has in all good society faded away in simple obedience to a turn of fashion which proscribes it as ungentlemanly! For a long period Acts condemning it were read at stated periods in the churches,[20] and one of these described it as likely, by provoking God's wrath, to 'increase the many calamities these nations now labour under.' How curiously characteristic is the restriction in common usage of the term 'immoral' to a single vice, so that a man who is untruthful, selfish, cruel, or intemperate might still be said to have led 'a moral life' because he was blameless in the relations of the sexes! In the estimates of the character of public men the same disproportionate judgment may be constantly found in the comparative stress placed upon private faults and the most gigantic public crimes. Errors of judgment are not errors of morals, but any public man who, through selfish, ambitious, or party motives, plunges or helps to plunge his country into an unrighteous or unnecessary war, subordinates public interest to his personal ambition, employs himself in stimulating class, national, or provincial hatreds, lowers the moral standard of public life, or supports a legislation which he knows to tend to or facilitate dishonesty, is committing a crime before which, if it be measured by its consequences, the gravest acts of mere private immorality dwindle into insignificance. Yet how differently in the case of brilliant and successful politicians are such things treated in the judgment of contemporaries, and sometimes even in the judgments of history!
It is, I think, a peculiarity of modern times that the chief moral influences are much more various and complex than in the past. There is no such absolute empire as that which was exercised over character by the State in some periods of Pagan antiquity and by the Church during the Middle Ages. Our civilisation is more than anything else an industrial civilisation, and industrial habits are probably the strongest in forming the moral type to which public opinion aspires. Slavery, which threw a deep discredit on industry and on the qualities it fosters, has passed away. The feudal system, which placed industry in an inferior position, has been abolished, and the strong modern tendency to diminish both the privileges and the exclusiveness of rank and to increase the importance of wealth is in the same direction. An industrial society has its special vices and failings, but it naturally brings into the boldest relief the moral qualities which industry is most fitted to foster and on which it most largely depends, and it also gives the whole tone of moral thinking a utilitarian character. It is not Christianity but Industrialism that has brought into the world that strong sense of the moral value of thrift, steady industry, punctuality in observing engagements, constant forethought with a view to providing for the contingencies of the future, which is now so characteristic of the moral type of the most civilised nations.
Many other influences, however, have contributed to intensify, qualify, or impair the industrial type. Protestantism has disengaged primitive Christian ethics from a crowd of superstitious and artificial duties which had overlaid them, and a similar process has been going on in Catholic countries under the influence of the rationalising and sceptical spirit. The influence of dogmatic theology on Morals has declined. Out of the vast and complex religious systems of the past, an eclectic spirit is bringing into special and ever-increasing prominence those Christian virtues which are most manifestly in accordance with natural religion and most clearly conducive to the well-being of men upon the earth. Philanthropy or charity, which forms the centre of the system, has also been immensely intensified by increased knowledge and realisation of the wants and sorrows of others; by the sensitiveness to pain, by the softening of manners and the more humane and refined tastes and habits which a highly elaborated intellectual civilisation naturally produces. The sense of duty plays a great part in modern philanthropy, and lower motives of ostentation or custom mingle largely with the genuine kindliness of feeling that inspires it; but on the whole it is probable that men in our day, in doing good to others, look much more exclusively than in the past to the benefit of the recipient and much less to some reward for their acts in a future world. As long, too, as this benefit is attained, they will gladly diminish as much as possible the self-sacrifice it entails. An eminently characteristic feature of modern philanthropy is its close connection with amusements. There was a time when a great philanthropic work would be naturally supported by an issue of indulgences promising specific advantages in another world to all who took part in it. In our own generation balls, bazaars, theatrical or other amusements given for the benefit of the charity, occupy an almost corresponding place.
At the same time increasing knowledge, and especially the kind of knowledge which science gives, has in other ways largely affected our judgments of right and wrong. The mental discipline, the habits of sound and accurate reasoning, the distrust of mere authority and of untested assertions and traditions that science tends to produce, all stimulate the intellectual virtues, and science has done much to rectify the chart of life, pointing out more clearly the true conditions of human well-being and disclosing much baselessness and many errors in the teaching of the past. It cannot, however, be said that the civic or the military influences have declined. If the State does not hold altogether the same place as in Pagan antiquity, it is at least certain that in a democratic age public interests are enormously prominent in the lives of men, and there is a growing and dangerous tendency to aggrandise the influence of the State over the individual, while modern militarism is drawing the flower of Continental Europe into its circle and making military education one of the most powerful influences in the formation of characters and ideals.
I do not believe that the world will ever greatly differ about the essential elements of right and wrong. These things lie deep in human nature and in the fundamental conditions of human life. The changes that are taking place, and which seem likely to strengthen in the future, lie chiefly in the importance attached to different qualities.
What seems to be useless self-sacrifice and unnecessary suffering is as much as possible avoided. The strain of sentiment which valued suffering in itself as an expiatory thing, as a mode of following the Man of Sorrows, as a thing to be for its own sake embraced and dwelt upon, and prolonged, bears a very great part in some of the most beautiful Christian lives, and especially in those which were formed under the influence of the Catholic Church. An old legend tells how Christ once appeared as a Man of Sorrows to a Catholic Saint, and asked him what boon he would most desire. 'Lord,' was the reply, 'that I might suffer most.' This strain runs deeply through the whole ascetic literature and the whole monastic system of Catholicism, and outside Catholicism it has been sometimes shown by a reluctance to accept the aid of anæsthetics, which partially or wholly removed suffering supposed to have been sent by Providence. The history of the use of chloroform furnishes striking illustrations of this. Many of my readers may remember the French monks who devoted themselves to cultivating one of the most pestilential spots in the Roman Campagna, which was associated with an ecclesiastical legend, and who quite unnecessarily insisted on remaining there during the season when such a residence meant little less than a slow suicide. They had, as they were accustomed to say, their purgatory upon earth, and they remained till their constitutions were hopelessly shattered and they were sent to die in their own land. Touching examples might be found in modern times of men who, in the last extremes of disease or suffering, scrupled, through religious motives, about availing themselves of the simplest alleviations,[21] and something of the same feeling is shown in the desire to prolong to the last possible moment hopeless and agonising disease. All this is manifestly and rapidly disappearing. To endure with patience and resignation inevitable suffering; to encounter courageously dangers and suffering for some worthy and useful end, ranks, indeed, as high as it ever did in the ethics of the century, but suffering for its own sake is no longer valued, and it is deemed one of the first objects of a wise life to restrict and diminish it.
No one, I think, has seen more clearly or described more vividly than Goethe the direction in which in modern times the current of morals is flowing. His philosophy is a terrestrial philosophy, and the old theologians would have said that it allowed the second Table of the Law altogether to supersede or eclipse the first. It was said of him with much truth that 'repugnance to the supernatural was an inherent part of his mind.' To turn away from useless and barren speculations; to persistently withdraw our thoughts from the unknowable, the inevitable, and the irreparable; to concentrate them on the immediate present and on the nearest duty; to waste no moral energy on excessive introspection or self-abasement or self-reproach, but to make the cultivation and the wise use of all our powers the supreme ideal and end of our lives; to oppose labour and study to affliction and regret; to keep at a distance gloomy thoughts and exaggerated anxieties; 'to see the individual in connection and co-operation with the whole,' and to look upon effort and action as the main elements both of duty and happiness, was the lesson which he continually taught. 'The mind endowed with active powers, and keeping with a practical object to the task that lies nearest, is the worthiest there is on earth.' 'Character consists in a man steadily pursuing the things of which he feels himself capable.' 'Try to do your duty and you will know what you are worth.' 'Piety is not an end but a means; a means of attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquillity of soul.' 'We are not born to solve the problems of the world, but to find out where the problem begins and then to keep within the limits of what we can grasp.'
To cultivate sincere love of truth and clear and definite conceptions, and divest ourselves as much as possible from prejudices, fanaticisms, superstitions, and exaggeration; to take wide, sound, tolerant, many-sided views of life, stands in his eyes in the forefront of ethics. 'Let it be your earnest endeavour to use words coinciding as closely as possible with what we feel, see, think, experience, imagine, and reason;' 'remove by plain and honest purpose false, irrelevant and futile ideas.' 'The truest liberality is appreciation.' 'Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in everything.'[22]
In the eyes of this school of thought one of the great vices of the old theological type of ethics was that it was unduly negative. It thought much more of the avoidance of sin than of the performance of duty. The more we advance in knowledge the more we shall come to judge men in the spirit of the parable of the talents; that is by the net result of their lives, by their essential unselfishness, by the degree in which they employ and the objects to which they direct their capacities and opportunities. The staple of moral life becomes much less a matter of small scruples, of minute self-examination, of extreme stress laid upon flaws of character and conduct that have little or no bearing upon active life. A life of idleness will be regarded with much less tolerance than at present. Men will grow less introspective and more objective, and useful action will become more and more the guiding principle of morals.
In theory this will probably be readily admitted, but every good observer will find that it involves a considerable change in the point of view. A life of habitual languor and idleness, with no faculties really cultivated, and with no result that makes a man missed when he has passed away, may be spent without any act which the world calls vicious, and is quite compatible with much charm of temper and demeanour and with a complete freedom from violent and aggressive selfishness. Such a life, in the eyes of many moralists, would rank much higher than a life of constant, honourable self-sacrificing labour for the good of others which was at the same time flawed by some positive vice. Yet the life which seems to be comparatively blameless has in truth wholly missed, while the other life, in spite of all its defects, has largely attained what should be the main object of a human life, the full development and useful employment of whatever powers we possess. There are men, indeed, in whom an over-sensitive conscience is even a paralysing thing, which by suggesting constant petty and ingenious scruples holds them back from useful action. It is a moral infirmity corresponding to that exaggerated intellectual fastidiousness which so often makes an intellectual life almost wholly barren, or to that excessive tendency to look on all sides of a question and to realise the dangers and drawbacks of any course which not unfrequently in moments of difficulty paralyses the actions of public men. Sometimes, under the strange and subtle bias of the will, this excessive conscientiousness will be unconsciously fostered in inert and sluggish natures which are constitutionally disinclined to effort. The main lines of duty in the great relations of life are sufficiently obvious, and the casuistry which multiplies cases of conscience and invents unreal and factitious duties is apt to be rather an impediment than a furtherance to a noble life.