But what is the content of the two terms right and wrong, what actual action shall be called right and what wrong on any given occasion, may vary easily according to circumstances, according to the degree of social development and the like. There is conduct which is right at one stage of society and wrong at another, precisely because at one stage it tends to the health of society, while at another it will be bad for the health of society; just as there are ways in which it is good from time to time to train children in which it would not be well to train grown-up people; and there is conduct which is appropriate to earlier stages of society, because beneficial to society, which becomes inappropriate and harmful at any other stage. What is right and what is wrong may depend very largely upon circumstances, stage of development, spiritual receptiveness, and a host of other things; but the distinction between right and wrong itself remains unaffected by all these, and absolutely fundamental and invariable.
Now, how is it that in society progress is actually made in morals? The appeal to authority can always be made in two ways. It can be made in the most obvious form in the interest of mere stagnation, by saying, "What was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us," a thing nobody ever does say; or by saying, "What is good enough for us is good enough for our children," a thing which numbers of people say. While the first form may be some safeguard against wild experiments—and wild experiments in morals are more dangerous than wild experiments anywhere else in life, for a reason I will mention in a moment—yet the tendency of this appeal is to pure stagnation. But the right appeal is to ask, not what the great men of the past actually did, but what were the principles upon which they acted. What we want to be doing with the prophets of the last generation is not saying again, like parrots, just what they said, but finding out the principles and spirit of their life and applying that same spirit to circumstances which are changed just because those prophets lived and wrought. They would not have been prophets, they would not have been great men, if they had not changed in some degree the world they lived in. Then just because they have changed the world their action may no longer be appropriate; it is not the action which they themselves would now take if they were still alive and retained their power of development. What we do then is to appeal, not to their conduct but to the principle of their conduct. So when Wilberforce started the campaign against slavery what he did was to appeal from the conduct of the Church to the principle of that conduct which it professed and admitted. In other spheres it admitted the sanctity of human personality; but it had never applied this principle to the particular problem of slavery.
In this way the appeal to authority is both just, safe, and progressive. It is only a fool who will throw away all that the experience of the ages has built up. But the wisest man of all is surely he who, rejoicing in that great inheritance, can still appeal not to its outward form, but to its indwelling, living spirit, and carry forward the work which the past has done. The ages in the past that we value are not those in which people were mainly concerned to praise their predecessors, but those in which men were agreed to press forward to whatever new life God has in store. So it must be here: if we would be true to the great men of the past, to the authority of those who have built up our moral life, it will not be by standing still, but by moving on in the direction to which they point.
The appeal to authority, then, will not be an appeal to practice, but always an appeal to principle; and so we shall be saved from that danger of moral experiment, a danger that is so immensely great because the individual who has made the experiment has thereby very often spoilt himself. One cannot experiment in the moral life with the detachment that we use in science. I may try mixing a couple of fluids together to see what happens, and I can regard the result quite accurately; but I cannot try the experiment of stealing, or of murder, in order to see what the real moral value of the thing is, because in the process of doing the act I shall vitiate my own soul; here the material in which we experiment is itself the instrument by which we have to judge; and the man who has once done an evil thing himself, very seldom has the same clearness of vision concerning its good and evil as the man who has kept true to some lofty purpose. The mere experiment, the mere trying what it feels like to be a murderer—not that anyone would take so extreme an instance as that—is always a method condemned in advance to futility, because in the process of making the experiment we destroy our power of judging the result. We want therefore to rely upon some authority; being unable to experiment for ourselves, we must follow the general rule that I have stated; the authority to which we appeal must be an authority of principle and not of practice.
But what of the authority of our Lord Himself? To us who have accepted it, or who are trying to accept it, it is final; yet still, surely, in the spirit rather than in the letter. Why did He teach by a series of amazing paradoxes if it was not to prevent us setting up a code of rules as His legislation, if it was not to force us back upon the spirit of His teaching, behind the detailed regulations in which that spirit was embodied? Even here it is still true that the appeal is to the authority of His Spirit and not to that of detailed action or individual precept.
And beyond all this, it is certain that He Himself wins His authority by first submitting Himself to the moral judgment of His people. He rejects, in the second and third of the Messianic temptations after His baptism, the method of coercion. He rejects this, and stands before men submitting Himself to their moral judgment, to their conscience, to their capacity to understand pure goodness and love, as that capacity has grown through the civilisation which God Himself had guided as the preparation for His final revelation in His Son. So He submits Himself first of all to our moral judgment; and thus our conscience, coming down to us, as it does, out of the Divinely-guided history of the past, is the supreme authority; if we choose Him to be the Guide of our life it is because our conscience has first pronounced Him to be the highest and the holiest, which we must needs love when we see it.
APPENDIX III
ON JUSTICE AND EDUCATION
As long as there are great numbers of citizens whose faculties are undeveloped it is impossible for society to be justly ordered. The democracies of the world have been curiously blind to this truth, as they have to the parallel truth that education is essential to true liberty.
As long as there is a vast difference between a man's actual worth to society and his potential worth, there will be two just claims concerning him, and no possibility of adjudicating between them. To treat a man who is in fact useless as though he were useful, is to injure the community by encouraging a parasite; to treat him as useless, when only lack of opportunity has prevented his becoming useful, is to injure him. A vast amount of the existing social order is an attempt to compromise between these two injuries, by inflicting a little of both. The only real solution is to be found in a complete educational system which will raise the actual worth of every man to the level of his potential work precisely by enabling him to realise his potentialities.