Christian morals : a series of lectures

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Christian Morals

A Series of Lectures

BY

ANDREW P. PEABODY, D.D., LL.D.

EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN MORALS
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

'ufllVEftSITYJ

BOSTON

LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS

No. 10 Milk Street

1887

B7
T

BY THE AUTHOR OF THIS VOLUME

MANUAL OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

A TEXT-BOOK FOR COLLEGES AND HIGH SCHOOLS

225 pp. i2mo. Half leather. Price #1.25

A. S. BARNES & COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND CHICAGO

//^t/60

The Manual of Moral Philosophy, by Tro-

fessor Peahody, is quite largely used as a text-book; and
his new book, Christian MORALS : A Series of Lec-
tures, has been prepared as a treatise of a more advanced
character.

Those who use the "Manual" might like to know what
the authoY has to say on a much wider range of subjects ;
while readers of the ""Christian Morals" might be willing to
adopt as a class-book a book adapted specially and solely
for class use, by the same author.

The volumes are totally unlike. Christian Morals
had for its first title Moral Philosophy, and the change of
title has been made to prevent confusion.

Copyright, 1887, by Lee and Shepard*

*•

*

♦>

PREFACE.

In the preparation of these Lectures I have had
three purposes in view. First, I have designed to
present with scientific accuracy, yet in a popular
form, the fundamental principles of Moral Philosophy.
Secondly, I have sought to show its inseparable alli-
ance, at every point, with religion, and especially with
Christianity, which I regard, not as having had its birth
midway in human history, but as Truth and Right,
co-eternal with God, and revealed and manifested by
and in Jesus Christ. Thirdly, I have wished to illus-
trate the principles of ethical science, as they are
developed in its own and in human history, as they
are involved in questions and subjects of current or
recent interest, and as they are applicable to the con-
cerns of daily life. These three aims have been so
constantly united in my habits of thinking and teach-
ing, that, with me, they are virtually one : it remains
to be seen whether I shall have made them one to my

readers.

ANDREW P. PEABODY.

Cambridge, Jan. 1, 1887.

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2007 with funding from

Microsoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/christianmoralssOOpeabrich

CONTENTS.

LECTURE

I. Human Freedom

II. The Ground of .Rj^ht 28

III. Utilitarianism and Expediency ... 55

IV. Conscience 82

V. Virtue and the Virtues 109

VI. Principles, Rules, and Habits . . . 136

VII. Ethics of the Hebrew Scriptures . . 104

VIII. Christian Ethics 192

IX. Moral Beauty 220

X. Hedonism 249

XI. The Ethics of the Stoic School . . .278
XII. The Influence of Christian Ethics on

Roman Law 305

PAGE
1

' o? TIP! '

WVE&SIT7J
MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

LECTURE I.

HUMAN FREEDOM.

In commencing a course of lectures on moral
philosophy, there is a preliminary question, — Is
there such a science? Is there any essential dif-
ference between human acts and the changes that
occur in the material world, — between the work-
ings of a genial Christian life and those of a vernal
breeze or of fructifying sunbeams, — between a
Nero or a Borgia and a tornado or an earthquake ?
Can man do or have done otherwise than he does
or has done ? It is maintained by some philoso-
phers that the human will is not a will, — that a
series of causes began its course with the begin-
ning of time or in a past eternity ; that every sub-
sequent event has been an effect of one or more
of those causes, itself a cause ; that the effect,
being contained in the cause, can never have been

l

2 BUM AN FREEDOM.

by any possibility other than it actually was, and
that, so far as man is concerned, these causes have
a definite, determinate, and absolute control over
what are called his voluntary powers. By this
theory, motives are forces of a calculable weight
and power ; and the question whether and how far
they will prevail, is closely analogous to the prob-
lem of balls impinging upon one another. Given
a specific human constitution and a specific motive
or combination of motives, the resultant action
is as truly inevitable as the result of a given
mechanical force or combination of forces upon a
mass of known bulk and weight.

Man's acts, then, are not his. If there be a God,
he does all that man seems to do. If he is a
beneficent being, then is the evil which man seems
to do of beneficent influence ; and human scourges
of their race, like the fearful convulsions of
nature, are incidental to the development of a
system of things which has the highest good for
its aim and issue. If there be not a God, then
human conduct has no more of soul or meaning in
it than there is in the vicissitudes of inanimate
nature.

This theory degrades man to the lowest point.
Either by unreasoning nature or by the arbitrary
will of God, he may be made to serve the vilest
uses, — purposes meaner and more loathsome than

THE NECESSARIAN THEORY. 3

are assigned to aught else in the universe, and
that by no fault of his; for he is incapable of
wrong. Nor can good come to the individual man
from the vileness to which he is subjected. He
may be the stepping-stone for good to others ; but
if he has no capacity of being otherwise than he
is, he is none the less trampled upon and trodden
down by them. Nor is there any dignity or merit
in what is called his penitence, which is a mere
change of the forces that work irresistibly upon
him. Nor yet can he hope for any thing better
in another life. He may be immortal ; but if so,
he must be subject in the future to the same con-
ditions of being under which he has lived here.
If there be no God, I know not why the possibili-
ties of atheism should brighten with a change of
sky ; and if there be a God who has lacked either
the power or the love to deal better with his
human creatures — I will not say children — in
this world, how can it be supposed that he will be
able or willing to do better for them in any other
condition of being ? It is only when we consider
the present state of things as a system of moral
discipline, educational in its purpose, and as fitted
for the highest development of the race, while that
of the individual, if postponed, will not be suffered
ultimately to fail, that the actual condition of ag-
gregate humanity can be regarded as otherwise

4 HUMAN FREEDOM.

than unspeakably wretched. But this is no argu-
ment. There is, however, a plausibility in the
theory of philosophical necessity, which sometimes
insnares unwary disciples, who are wholly una-
ware of the debasement and hopeless misery which
it implies.

In the inquiry as to human freedom, it must be
admitted, that, at the first aspect, a very strong
case may be made in behalf of necessity. There
is no uncaused event or phenomenon. Whatever
occurs is an effect, and presupposes a cause. But
whence comes our idea of causation ? Suppose
that precisely the same things that occur were to
take place outside of us, and that we were intelli-
gent beings as now, with full power of perception
and reasoning, yet utterly incapable of doing any
thing, of influencing in the least the course of
things around us, should we have any conception
of cause? Manifestly not. Antecedence and
sequence would be all that we should know. The
idea of causation comes from our own conscious-
ness, — from the fact that we ourselves are causes.
But how are we causes? Not by our limbs alone.
I might use my hands and feet as I use them now,
and they might seem to me merely parts of the
universe around me, and their movements mere
successive events, not my acts. An absolute
idiot has no idea of causation in connection with

CAUSATION. 5

what he does. The first step in the education of
the idiot, as of the infant child, is to make him
connect what he does with its effects, and thus to
bring his acts under the partial control of such
mind as he has. My hand did not write this lec-
ture. Nor did the mechanism of my limbs bring
me hither to deliver it. My hands and my feet
had no other kind of agency than belongs to the
pen, or the locomotive engine, or the carriage.
There was a cause behind my bodily organism
which put it in motion. I am conscious that my
will has a causative power, and I can get no con-
ception of causation except through that con-
sciousness.

Moreover, I can conceive of God as a cause only
because I know that I am a cause. I can, at any
point within the sphere of my action, arrest and
change the normal order of nature, not, indeed,
superseding its laws, but manipulating them as an
organist manipulates the stops and keys of his or-
gan, so that things will take place, which, but for
my will, would not take place. The only reason
why it can enter my mind that there is a causative
power in the action of the moon on the tides, is
that I have causative power over certain portions
of the universe. I know, too, that what causative
power I have is not in my bodily organs, but in a
faculty which controls Jhem, and which, be it what

6 HUMAN FREEDOM.

it may, I call mind, and that apart from mind I
do nothing. I conclude, then, that for me mind is
the only seat of power ; and I rise thence to the
conception of a Supreme Mind as the seat and
source of power in the universe at large, — as the
initiating and controlling cause of all worlds, of
all beings, and of the normal course of nature.
Nor can I account for the existence and order of
the universe, except by assuming the existence
of a Supreme Will-Power of the same type with
that of which I myself am conscious.

Now, is it not evident that the argument against
man's freedom, derived from the supposed series
of causes and inevitable effects, applies to God's
freedom as well as to man's ? If the chain is un-
broken, then God has abdicated his control over
nature, if he ever had any. If no event can take
place without an adequate finite cause, then God
has no more power in the universe than I have ;
and a God who has resigned his power, or never
had any, is no God. If God is, we cannot doubt
his power to arrest or change the course of nature.
Whether he has ever done so, in what we call
miracle, is an open question, even with those who
believe, as I do, in the historical truth of events
commonly termed miraculous.1 But, however this

1 How know we, that, in the very nature of things, a being so
at one with God as Jesus Christ was, has not of necessity an in-

\

MAN, A CAUSE. 7

may be, it is conceivable that in our own time,
and in all time, he may so modify the operation
of natural laws, that their non-miraculous working
shall be otherwise than it would be without his
action upon them ; in fine, that he may exercise
precisely the supernatural power which we are
conscious of exercising. He thus may, at any
moment, without interfering with the laws of na-
ture, indeed by the instrumentality of those laws,
start a new series of finite causes. Now, this is
precisely what we are conscious of doing. I will
an act, and take the requisite measures for its per-
formance. In so doing, I start a series of material
causes and effects which else would not have been
started. I am distinctly conscious of having not
been forced to start this series. I know, so far as
I know any thing, that I could have omitted to do
this, or have done the opposite ; and when I say
that I am thus conscious of freedom, I mean that

tenser, more subtile, and more efficient will-power over nature
than belongs to common men ? On this supposition, what are
called his miracles may have been no less normal and natural
than what we are doing every day. Nor need we ascribe such
power to him alone. Something like it may have been exercised
by those who have approached nearest to him in character, or
by those who have been energized and exalted by the conscious-
ness of a special divine inspiration or mission. It may be, too,
that like superior power over nature will become normal for
renovated man in that remote yet anticipated era when the
brightest pages of prophecy shall be re- written in human history.

8 HUMAN FREEDOM.

I am in my own sphere and measure a first cause,
an originating cause, even as GTod is in his universal
domain.

But we are told by some extreme necessitarians,
that consciousness is liable to mistake, and, there-
fore, not valid evidence ; that the only things of
which we can be certain are things that can be
seen and handled, and taken cognizance of by the
senses. But these are precisely the things which
we do not know. I believe, but do not absolutely
know, that these seats and walls and windows have
an existence outside of my own mind. What I
do know, is that I am conscious of certain images
in my mind which I suppose to have their external
counterparts. Yet to-night I shall, very probably,
dream of this hall, and shall be conscious of pre-
cisely the same images in my mind that are there
now, though they will have in my bedroom no
outside counterparts. Consciousness, so far as we
know, is infallible. Our senses are not so. Jaun-
dice, disease, dream, delirium, may make them false
witnesses. My feelings may be wayward, unrea-
sonable, insane, yet they are real. I am never mis-
taken with regard to them, though I may be wide
of the mark in my notions of persons and objects
associated with them. Then, too, all reasoning
rests on consciousness. If the evidence of con-
sciousness is ruled out, I cannot be sure that even

CONSCIOUSNESS OF FREEDOM. 9

what seem invincible arguments against human
freedom are what they seem. If I cannot trust my
own consciousness, I cannot trust the conclusion of
a seemingly valid syllogism ; for why may not the
premises really authorize a conclusion opposite to
that which to my consciousness is logical and just?

We have a consciousness of freedom, which
shows itself in several different forms. We have
this consciousness at the moment of action. We
have it again, in retrospection, in which our
thoughts take the form, not of self-congratulation
or self-pity, but always of self-approval or self-
blame. Now, if my boots were self-conscious, they
might think themselves happy when I wore them
on a smooth pavement and under a bright sky,
and consider themselves as objects of pity when
I dragged them through miry streets ; but because
they could not move without me, or stay at home
when I wanted to wear them, it is impossible that
they should think well or ill of themselves. But
if I cannot do otherwise than I do, my moral posi-
tion is precisely that of my self-conscious boots,
and it is impossible that I should approve or blame
myself.

Still farther, in our judgment of others we are
distinctly conscious, not only of affection and dis-
like, congratulation and pity, but equally of ap-
proval and blame, — of approval, often, of those

10 HUMAN FREEDOM.

whom we do not like, of blame of those whom we
tenderly love.

But what is to be said of the power of motives ?
Are we conscious of being their slaves, or their
masters ? Are we wholly dependent on them for
action ? Can we in any case act without them ?
We cannot, indeed, initiate action without them ;
for they are what their name means, — motors, mov-
ers. A motive presents itself. It must somehow
be taken cognizance of. We must do something ;
but it may be the refusal to do what the motive
suggests, which, so far as the will is concerned, is
action, — it may be the opposite of what the
motive suggests. The motive is virtually a ques-
tion, " Will you do this, or will you not ? " We
can, as we please, answer Yes or No ; and if we
answer Yes, there remains the choice of methods,
as to which there may be no motive pointing in
one direction rather than in another. The school-
men denied the possibility of action when there
is no determining motive in one way rather than
in another. They said that an ass between two
equal and equidistant bundles of hay would starve
to death, because he would have no reason for
making a choice between the two. How this may
be, I cannot tell ; but men are not asses, and we
all have often made a choice when there was no
reason for the specific choice. I often go from

MOTIVES. 11

Cambridge to Concord. There are two railway
routes, to me equally convenient. I have no
reason whatever for preferring one to the other.
Yet I do not therefore stay at home when I want
to be in Concord. I make an entirely arbitrary
choice, — a choice, too, which in certain contingen-
cies might be fatal, or might be of very important
influence on my coming life, even, especially were
I a young man, on my moral well-being and des-
tiny. We are constantly choosing between two
alternatives without any specific motive. In car-
rying a general purpose into execution, we often
make an entirely unmotived choice among several
ways, or places, or methods, or associates, for nei-
ther of which we have any conscious preference.
We are, at the same time, conscious of power over
motives when they are presented to us. We
make them strong or weak by the element which
our selfhood puts into them ; and this often ren-
ders the motive which is intrinsically the strongest
weak, because of its very strength. Thus, a great
temptation may start into unwonted activity the
moral selfhood of one whose drift has been in the
direction of slight temptations to petty wrongs or
sins, which have found the will-power passive and
sluggish. It is not mere character or the strength
of character that always decides on such occasions,
but there is something like the summoning of

12 HUMAN FREEDOM.

latent interior forces to active duty ; and this we
feel to be a process performed not for us, but by
us, and of our own free choice and effort. We
are thus distinctly conscious that it is our own
selfhood that makes a motive stronger or weaker,
— dominant or powerless.

But is not this selfhood a necessity ? Can we
do otherwise than our aggregate of character
would prompt ? Can we will to act, so to speak,
out of character ? In answering this question, I
will ask your attention to the degree and the
mode in which character affects our volition.
When we perform a specific act or an act of a
specific complexion for the first time, there is
a conscious weighing of motives, and a resultant
choice. Even if the prevailing motive be sud-
denly flashed upon us, and take us by surprise,
still there is a hurried inward parley between op-
posing motives, — a rapid process of comparison,
so rapid, it may be, as to lead to a different course
of conduct from what our deliberate judgment
would prompt. The next time the same, or vir-
tually the same, question is urged upon us with
the same or similar motives, there is a remem-
brance of the previous decision, which is very
likely to preclude careful consideration ; and to
this may be added the satisfaction or pleasure
derived on the former occasion, which is an addi-

COLLECTIVE VOLITIONS. 13

tional reason for not trying the issue again. The
consequence is, that there is less and less thought
with every repetition, till the habit is so formed
that one is no longer conscious of any thought in
connection with it. Thus it is that one is prone
to follow his own example rather than any other.
But there always remains the power of reviewing
the original decision, and discontinuing the habit ;
and the purpose of thus going back upon one's
self may be evolved from within, without external
prompting. Repentance and reformation may be
the result of reflection which one is conscious of
originating by a pure act of the will. Habits are
probably fully as often broken by an unmotived
interior process of reflection as by any outward
inducement ; and as regards an entire change of
character, the only motive-power that can be traced
is often voluntary and prolonged meditation on
one's own past and present selfhood.

In immediate connection with repentance, I
would name what may not unaptly be called com-
plex, or collective, or comprehensive volitions,
which embrace a large number and variety of
separate volitions, and occupy a great part of a
lifetime in their development. To this class
belongs the religious purpose, — the determination
to lead a Christian life, — the resolve to make
duty supreme. This may be momentary, yet may

14 HUMAN FREEDOM.

embrace eternity. It is, no doubt, in most cases,
the result of a train of serious thoughts and devo-
tional exercises, and in that sense it is of gradual
growth. Yet must there not be a moment of con-
summation, when the purpose long conceived is
born, — when the irrevocable position is con-
sciously assumed, — when the soul says, " I will
henceforth will only as God wills " ? Now, this
volition comprehends a vast bundle of individual
volitions, which is untied, and its contents taken
out one by one. The penitence which refers to
the whole past, the reformation which includes
the whole future, belongs to this class of complex
volitions. Such volitions are sometimes made also
with regard to objects of no ethical value, — sel
dom, if ever, with regard to evil as such (for
" Evil, be thou my good," is satanic rather than
human), but not infrequently in the choice of
some supreme end, as gain, or political influence,
or public office, or a specific type of fame, as the
aim to which everything else shall be made sub-
servient.

Now, these volitions which cover the entire lives
of very many persons, and include the greater part
of their voluntary acts, transcend all that can be
imagined of the power of external motives, whose
force would be spent in inducing an individual,
simple volition. The single external motive ade-

REFLECTION. 15

quate to this effect must be strong enough not
only to create a single intense volition, but to
maintain the will-power in tension years and years
after the original motive has become faint in the
recollection, and almost faded out of the life.
Moreover, in many of these cases, there is not the
slightest consciousness or remembrance of any such
motive from without. The impulse is, so far as
the testimony of consciousness can be relied on,
entirely self-born.

This leads me to the mode in which our freedom
is chiefly exercised. It is not at the moment of
action ; and in the phenomena of external activity,
there is much that seems to favor the theory, not
of a necessity from without, but of a necessity
created by our own characters, though the cases
are not infrequent, and probably have fallen within
the experience of all of us, in which we have
adopted a particular course of action for the very
purpose of resisting and thwarting our conscious
bent or bias, thus making it our express aim to
act out of character. But we are the most active
when we seem the "least active. We will the most
resolutely when we have the least consciousness
of willing. Our quiet hours are our busiest. Our
day-dreams, our cherished reveries, our prolonged
musings in listless seasons, on wakeful nights, in
our walks and our journeys, are full of embryo voli-

16 HUMAN FREEDOM.

tions, which come to birth in our active life, but
which are then already fully formed, and awaiting
their birth-hour. It is at such times that we
choose our aims, and plan our life way. Over these
seasons we have control. The spirits come and
go at our bidding. Those that we make welcome
stay or return. Those that we resolutely spurn
cease to seek an entrance. In fine, we exercise
the power of attention, and are as capable of di-
recting our attention at pleasure as we are of
choosing what books we will read. The ultimate
purpose which gives character to action is the
result of prolonged attention, it may be with no
specific purpose at the outset. Thus, a youth may
seek a morbid satisfaction in acting inwardly vi-
cious indulgences of which in the outward man he
deems himself utterly incapable. But from such
meditation the vicious will can hardly fail to shape
itself; and when he yields to seductive evil, the
will so to yield was born in the hours when he
would have deemed such vicious acts impossible.
On the other hand, a youth may, by prolonged
meditation on a high ideal of character, give such
a trend to his volitions, that he shall seem to
embrace spontaneously opportunities for duty and
means of spiritual growth ; while, in fact, these
volitions are the outcome of thoughts, visions,
ambitions, which he invited, recalled, cherished,

ATTENTION. 17

made habitual by his own unmotived choice, when
it was equally in his power to have shut out all
these, and harbored in their stead imaginings and
musings of a directly opposite type. Had the old
prophet been versed in the profoundest specula-
tive philosophy of human action, he could not
have voiced it more aptly than in the simple ex-
hortation, " Consider your ways ; " for this is the
most important thing that we can do, and in this
power of directing our attention lies in great part
our power of giving consistency and a fixed deter-
mination to our course in life, and thus of impart-
ing definite characteristics to our volitions taken
collectively.

As the early formation of character is due, for
the most part, to the tendency to make volitions
habitual by prolonged attention, the ability re-
mains, with the hope that it may be employed, for
one who has taken a wrong course to reconsider his
ways, and thus to retrace his steps. He who feels
himself almost irresistibly the slave of habit, may,
indeed, make spasmodic efforts to escape the bond-
age, and may fall back in utter helplessness; yet he
is still capable of willing profound, earnest, and
prolonged thought upon his moral condition and
habits, and such thought will almost inevitably
give a new trend to the course of his volitions,
and result in a change of life. The reason why

18 HUMAN FREEDOM.

reformation after very early life is so rare, and the
efforts made in that direction are so often made in
vain, is undoubtedly the indisposition to that con-
tinuous thought, in which alone repentance can
have any hopeful birth.

I now ask you to consider the objection to hu-
man freedom grounded on the divine foreknowl-
edge. If God foreknows all events, then, it is
maintained, they must of necessity be so predeter-
mined that man cannot, in any case, do otherwise
than he does.

I would first say, that, if man's freedom and
God's foreknowledge are mutually incompatible,
we still cannot deny man's freedom ; for this is a
truth of consciousness : and to deny the testimony
of consciousness, would land us in universal scep-
ticism. The very arguments by which we might
attempt to prove the incompatibility of freedom
and foreknowledge depend on the testimony of con-
sciousness for their validity and force. If events
contingent on human volition are, in the very na-
ture of things, unknowable, then to deny the di-
vine foreknowledge of them does not derogate
from the perfectness and infinity of the Divine
Being. Omnipotence cannot make two and two
five, or do any thing that is intrinsically impossi-
ble ; and, by parity of reason, omniscience can-
not know what is intrinsically unknowable. Nor

THE DIVINE FOREKNOWLEDGE. 19

need we lose even our faith in God's discretionary
providence in denying his foreknowledge of con-
tingent events. Man is constantly exerting, with
reference to events as they occur, supernatural
power, mind-power, will-power, over external na-
ture by his manipulation of the laws of nature.
God's power can be no less than man's ; and he,
without miracle, may so manipulate the natural
laws which, in the last analysis, are but the
chosen method of his working, as to adapt exter-
nal events to the volitions and acts of human
beings as occasion may require.

But in denying human freedom on the ground
of the divine foreknowledge, we must take a far-
ther step, which would be fatal to our recognition
of a God possessed of the essential attributes of
Godhead. If the divine prescience of man's voli-
tions is inconsistent with his freedom, then is God's
prescience of his own volitions equally inconsist-
ent with his freedom. He, then, is, no less than
man, bound by an invincible necessity ; that is,
he is not the Ruler of the universe, but he and
man are equally under the dominion of an irresist-
ible fate.

But are human freedom and the divine fore-
knowledge really incompatible ? Neither abso-
lutely excludes the other. The divine nature
is incomprehensible by us. Some philosophers

20 HUMAN FREEDOM.

make time merely a category of human thought.
There may be in the Divine Mind what is ascribed
to it in rhetoric and poetry, an " eternal now," —
a simultaneous view of all time, as of all space,
so that the past and the future are present. But
not to dwell on what we cannot understand, we
may derive some suggestions from our own experi-
ence. We frequently have foreknowledge where
we exert neither control nor influence. I know,
with virtually absolute certainty, how my children
or my very intimate friends will act under any
given condition. It is conceivable that he who
foreknows the nature and surroundings of individ-
ual men may know how they will act in any and
every contingency, though they be perfectly free.
The probability that this may be so is enhanced by
what we have known of the marvellous foresight
of prophetic human minds that have mapped oui>
the future of communities and nations, and have
had their predictions literally verified, though,
when they were made, they were received with
scepticism, and even with ridicule.

I hardly need to say that the Christian belief, or
rather, the belief of wise and good men of all ages,
and under every culture, in the divine influence on
the human soul, has no adverse bearing on man's
freedom. Indeed, it is based on the assumption
of his freedom, and is unmeaning and worthless

LIMITS OF FREEDOM. 21

on any other ground. If man's volitions are not
his own, he cannot be benefited by divine aid.
He is at best an automaton, and the Divine Spirit
can make of him nothing more or better. But on
the ground of human freedom, man is a fit subject
for good advice and influence, and is, of necessity,
open to bad advice and influence, adapted, not to
suppress his freedom, but to supply him with rea-
sons for a choice, — reasons which it is competent
for him to admit, or to set aside. If God influ-
ences man, it is in the same way, by inspiring
thoughts which he may either cherish or spurn,
and which differ from human counsel only in their
reaching the soul, not in articulate words or in
recognized personal communication, but through
objects in nature, events in providence, or a direct
action on the mind by avenues which it is hardly
possible that the Creator of the human soul has
not left open to himself.

We have, then, reason to believe man free. Yet
it must be admitted that the exercise of freedom
is in individual cases more or less narrowed and
limited. A man may have such native proclivities
to evil, or such a constitutional predisposition to
right conduct, as in the former case to render vir-
tuous living intensely difficult, though not impos-
sible, and in the latter case to give a prophecy of
goodness that is seldom belied. Great is the

22 HUMAN FREEDOM.

power of heredity. The sins of the fathers are
visited " to the third and fourth generation ; " and
there is no reason why the heritage of virtue, did
it never intermarry with the seed of the ungodly,
might not so descend as to make the thousands of
generations in the Decalogue no hyperbole. Un-
doubtedly cerebral aptitudes and habitudes pass
from parents to children, from ancestors to pos-
terity. There are in the older parts of this coun-
try representatives of families that crossed the
ocean more than two centuries ago, in whom the
mental and moral traits of their progenitors are to
be still recognized, and this in both extremes of
society ; for while there are names of honor on
which no stain has ever rested, there are pauper
and worthless descendants of ancestors who were
a charge and a burden on the first settlers of our
oldest States.

But there is one fact which shows the possibil-
ity of overcoming the power of heredity ; namely,
that the inheritance of character, in the common
phrase, often skips over one generation, and re-
appears in the next. This phenomenon is easily
accounted for. A shamefully bad man, a drunk-
ard, or a profligate, often has children of superior
excellence, because they are conscious of their evil
heritage, afraid of it, and intensely solicitous that
it should lapse. But their children inherit the

HEREDITY. 23

taint without the shame : the faultlessness of their
parents leaves the alarm unsounded, and they
yield to temptations from without corresponding
to the evil proclivities within. You may see also
striking cases of the reverse of this. A genuinely
and sincerely good man, yet of an austere and
stern temperament and habit, makes his goodness
distasteful by rigid ways, unconciliatory manners,
and over-punctiliousness in domestic discipline,
and his children are, it may be, repelled and driven
into evil by the unlovely aspect of their father's
virtues ; but when this is so, their children are
almost certain to grow up, not only with good
habits, which might be accounted for by disgust
for their father's vices, but with manifestly strong
constitutional tendencies in the right direction.

It may, then, be maintained, that heredity,
though it may have a potent influence on the gen-
eral course of volition, does not destroy freedom,
nor even impair it in any other sense than that in
which it is impaired by the close presence of exam-
ple, or the intense pressure of outside motives. If
like would always mate with like, as may gradu-
ally become the case when the laws of heredity
are better understood, the result might easily be
toward " the survival of the fittest ; " for in the
generations of the ungodly there would be a ten-
dency to die out, while the saints would in due

24 HUMAN FREEDOM.

time " inherit the earth ; " and they, though po-
tentially endowed with full freedom to do evil,
would, in fact, exercise their freedom only in the
broad and ever-broadening range of things ex-
cellent.

We need, in this connection, to take into account
the cases in which a low condition and the utter
lack of culture make men wholly incapable of
moral choice or action, and render abjectness,
squalidness, and vice an absolute necessity. This
is manifestly the case with some entire races or
tribes, especially among the Polynesians, and
equally with the heathen of our great cities, who
have often been found destitute of the most ele-
mentary knowledge of common things, and seem-
ingly devoid of the sense of duty, of right, of
obligation. It is evident that such human beings
are not moral agents. They are in the same cate-
gory with children of tender years. Their acts
are in great part instinctive : and so far as they
are rational, they are so in the same sense in which
those of the dog or the horse are rational ; that is,
they adapt their conduct spontaneously to the cir-
cumstances of the moment, without knowing that
there is a right or a wrong. There are others,
probably not a few entire races, and certainly
many in the lowest ranks of civilized society, that
have only a very restricted knowledge of obliga-

THE UNPRIVILEGED. 25

tions, — a very narrow range of relations and
objects as to which they have a sense or feeling of
right or wrong. Thus, they may have a rude, yet
ardent, patriotism. Or they may recognize the
sacredness of some domestic bond, oftener the
parental than the filial, and under the lowest cul-
ture either of these oftener than the conjugal.
Or they may have a reverence for promises or
oaths, or respect for some description of property,
or a sense of the duties of hospitality and the
rights which it confers. So far as this moral sen-
sitiveness extends, moral freedom is exercised.
There is the manifold temptation to violate the
acknowledged obligation, to disclaim the admitted
right ; and there are occasions when the virtuous
act is one of moral heroism, and when the vicious
act is the result of as severe a conflict as is wa^ed
in the soul of the civilized man when the Right is
almost, but not quite, the conqueror. The story
of Pocahontas, as historians say, is a myth ; but
it is only verisimilitude that makes a myth : and
there are many authentic records of cases in which
a savage, in order to keep his word, or to serve his
tribe, or to perform offices of humanity for some
one cast on his protection, has shown the same
spirit of entire self-sacrifice which has girded the
brows of the Christian martyrs with the aureola of
sainthood. " There is honor among thieves," and

26 HUMAN FREEDOM.

that not without a moral preference for, and choice
of, the right as to their mutual relations ; while
who shall say how far, among those whose train-
ing is in vice, there is a sufficient sense of the
rights of other classes to superfluous property to
make the observance or violation of these rights
a matter of moral choice ? All that we can affirm
(and it is enough) of those who have but a re-
stricted range of moral freedom in this world,
is that they are only in the infancy of their being,
as indeed we all are, and that if in their case such
maturity, at the best immature, as we attain in
the present life be postponed, there are time and
room for it in the life eternal. At the same time,
so far as the exercise of freedom is crippled and
limited, there is a comparatively limited respon-
sibility, and in the same proportion a less deep
stain of guilt on the soul. You or I may do
more harm to our moral nature by a willing
though slight breach of the law of kindness, by
a calumnious utterance, or by a selfish construc-
tion of the right, than is wrought by }Tears of
evil-doing on the part of one "altogether born in
sin.

I have attempted in this lecture to demonstrate
human freedom in the exercise of the will-power,
while admitting that this freedom has its limita-
tions, and that it exists imperfectly at a low stage

THE WILLING OF IDEALS. 27

of development, so that deficient culture may be
tantamount to infancy.

Let me say in conclusion, that the noblest use of
our freedom is in the shaping of ideals which it
shall be the continuous life-aim to realize. There
are those who will only specific acts when there is
occasion for action. There are others, whose
days seem " bound each to each by natural piety."
They determine at the outset what they will be,L
and their whole lifeway is a progress toward that
end. Happy above all is he who wills beyond his
power of earthly attainment, — who sets before
himself a goal which he will not reach till he
reaches heaven. The goal recedes as he ap-
proaches it, and holds a higher place in the firma-
ment as he rises, — always near enough for his
hope, always far enough off to call forth his strenu-
ous endeavor. Such an ideal we have in the
evangelic record, once realized on earth, now and
ever the cynosure of faith and love and moral
enterprise, and urging upon our choice the service
which is perfect freedom, and in which alone
human freedom finds its God-appointed field, mis-
sion, and destiny.

LECTURE II.
THE GROUND OF RIGHT.

Human acts, or I would rather say the free
acts of intelligent beings, are the subject-matter
of Moral Philosophy, — yet not these acts in all
the various aspects in which they may be consid-
ered. As prudent or indiscreet, they are to be
judged by their effects rather than by their mo-
tives; and such character as they have in this
respect may be given to them, not by the volitions
from which they proceed, but by outward circum-
stances. As becoming or unbecoming, they are
to be judged by an aesthetic standard which varies
very widely in different times and nations, and in
different portions of the same community. Moral
Philosophy takes cognizance of human acts as
right or wrong.

But what do we mean by right and wrong? I
hardly need to say that thes-e are figurative terms,
right meaning straight, and tvrong, wrung, dis-
torted, crooked, out of line. The underlying idea
is that of a linear measure, a carpenter's rule.

28

FITNESS, THE GROUND OF BIGHT. 29

The right is that which lies even with the meas-
ure ; the wrong, that which diverges from it.

But what characteristic is it that renders an act
right or wrong? In other words, what is the
ground, or the rule, of right? Were I to say,
" The right is what it is fitting to do ; the wrong,
what it is unfitting to do," I might seem to be
uttering a mere truism ; yet in my belief I should
be announcing the fundamental principle of Moral
Philosophy, — a principle, too, which has by no
means the universal, or even the general, consent
of ethical philosophers.

I regard fitness as the ultimate and sole ground
of right. Every object in existence has its proper
place and its proper uses. There are purposes for
which it is fit ; others, for which it is not fit. It
is either common property, and may thus fitly be
in the hands of any one who can utilize it; or it
is private property, and is therefore fitly in the
hands of its owners, or of those to whom they
grant its use. When we say that an object is in
its right place, put to its rightful use, in the hands
of its rightful owners, what we affirm of it is its
fitness. Its wrong place, its wrong use or abuse,
or its wrong owner, deprives it of the element of
fitness. Now, every object in the universe is at
every moment either in or out of its place, prop-
erly used or misused and abused, in the posses-

30 THE GROUND OF EIGHT.

sion or out of the possession of its rightful owners,
and is therefore in a fit or an unfit condition ; that
is, in a right or wrong condition.

Still further, every object in the universe is at
every moment under the direct control of the
Divine Being or of some created being, and it is
by the agency of that being that it is or is not at
any moment in the ownership, place, and use prop-
erly appertaining to it. As to what is under
God's immediate control, we conceive only of the
fitting, and therefore the right. Whatever is under
the control of irrational beings may or may not be
wrongly held and used, but we cannot regard
their acts as possessing any moral character. As
regards whatever is under the control of intelli-
gent finite beings, if it be by their will kept in
fitting condition, it is the object of right volitions ;
if by their will it be kept in unfitting condition,
it is the object of wrong volitions. We therefore
are doing either right or wrong in whatever we do
writh the external objects under our control.

Yet more, every human being has, by virtue of
his being, his fitting place, relations, office, work,
in the family, the community, the nation, the race,
and with reference to God. There are certain
things which it is fitting for him to be and to do,
because they belong to him, or are incumbent on
him, as a parent, a child, a neighbor, a citizen, a

RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE RIGHT. 31

man, a creature of God. These things are virtu-
ally appurtenances of his selfhood. They fit his
inner man as his clothes, if well made, fit his body.
The omission or the opposite of these things is un-
fitting. Because these offices to the family, the
state, and the commonwealth of God's children
are fitting, they are right; and the omission or
the opposite of them, because unfitting, is wrong.
You will find, that, whenever you use the term
right or wrong, you can substitute for it fitting or
unfitting ; and there are no other single terms, I
think, which you can employ as definitions of right
and wrong.

The fitting is the rule as well as the standard
of right. The questions that we virtually ask as
to the right might resolve themselves into "these :
What is this thing fit for ? What conduct is be-
fitting under these circumstances? What befits
me as standing in my various relations to man and
to God ? The answer to either of these questions
determines what is right, and carries with it a
sense of obligation, or of duty, — duty, that which
is due, or which one owes, ought being but a past
tense of owe. We feel that we owe the fitting
under all circumstances and in all relations.

But here comes an important distinction. Infi-
nite wisdom alone can know all fitnesses with cer-
tainty; men must often make mistakes. I may

32 THE GROUND OF RIGHT.

administer a poison, believing it to be a curative
drug ; I may bestow alms where my gift will do
harm ; I may give my vote or my influence for a
man or a measure under false impressions which I
have no means of correcting; I may bestow my
confidence where it is undeserved, or withhold it
where it is merited. In all these cases I act right-
ly if I have not omitted proper means of knowing
the truth ; but I perform the relative, not the ab-
solute, right. The relative right is what the moral
agent believes to be right. The absolute right is
what is right, not only in the intention of the
agent, but by virtue of its actual fitness. As to
the greater part of the acts of persons of moder-
ate intelligence and culture, the relative and the
absolute right probably coincide. Yet there are
chapters of man's moral history which may well
make us hesitate to pronounce positively as to the
Tightness of some things as to which the best men
of our time have no scruples. John Newton, the
author of some of the sweetest devotional hymns
in our language, was master of a slave-ship; and
though he subsequently took holy orders, he con-
tinued in the slave-trade for some time after he
became earnestly religious, and had daily prayers
on deck with his living freight in the hold of his
vessel. Indeed, there is good reason to believe
that negroes were first brought to America, under

SINS OF IGNORANCE. 33

the auspices of Las Casas, from motives of hu-
manity to the native tribes in the Spanish colonies
that were perishing under enforced labor. I re-
member when there were devout and philanthropic
distillers and venders of intoxicating liquors in
Massachusetts, and when our best churches did
not consider such a calling as a disqualification for
the office of deacon. With such reversals of the
best public opinion as have taken place within
the lapse of a century, who can say that a century
hence the enslaving of domestic animals and the
slaughtering of beasts for food may not be re-
garded on good grounds as unfitting, and, there-
fore, wrong? I do not, indeed, believe this; but
equally little would the best men of the last cen-
tury have believed that the very free sale and
drinking of spirituous liquors would ever be re-
garded as unfitting and wrong.

In this connection I ought to speak of sins of
ignorance, so called. There are none such. The
relative right, however widely diverse from the
absolute right, is not a sin, but a duty. It is my
duty, in every case, to conform my conduct to
what seems to me fitting ;> and, whatever may be
the cause of my ignorance of what is really fitting,
at the moment of action I am bound to act in ac-
cordance with my sincere belief. But while there
are no sins of ignorance, the ignorance itself may

34 THE GROUND OF RIGHT.

be a sin. It is intrinsically fitting, therefore right,
and therefore my duty, to gain all the knowledge
that I can on subjects on which I may be re-
quired to exercise my moral judgment. There are
things which I ought to know, yet may not know ;
and if, with reference to these things, my act, in
accordance with the best of my knowledge, is
absolutely wrong, it yet is relatively right, while
my ignorance is both relatively and absolutely
wrong.

The question of the ground of right lies at the
basis of moral science, and the different answers to
this question impart their specific character to the
various ethical systems of ancient and modern
times. I cannot, within my proposed limits, give
you an account of all these systems ; but it may
be of interest and service to you that you should
have some idea of the ground covered by specula-
tion on this subject, and of the principal systems
that have had currency at different times. I
might divide them into two classes, — those which
assign to the Right a specific character of its own,
and those which define it by its consequences; or,
in other words, those which make virtue to consist
in what it is and deem it worthy to be cherished
for its own sake, and those which make it consist
in what it does or in the good that comes from it.
Each of these classes has several subdivisions.

GOD'S ACTS HIS BECAUSE RIGHT. 35

Among those of the first are the theory which I
have expounded, making the Right to consist in
fitness; that according to which the Right consists
in the divine will or law as such ; that which
makes taste or its aesthetic quality the standard
of the Right; that which assigns this office to sym-
pathy; and those that maintain the existence of
an interior moral sense which instinctively deter-
mines the ethical character of acts. In the latter
class are included all the utilitarian systems, alike
those which make one's own pleasure and happi-
ness, and those which make the greatest good of
the greatest number, the standard of right and the
rule of virtue.

We will first consider the system which makes
the will of God the ground and rule of right. I
might ask, with reference to this theory, What do
we mean when we ascribe moral attributes, such
as justice, holiness, benevolence, to the Supreme
Being? Does not this imply our possession, inde-
pendently of him, of a standard b}r which we can
judge even his dispositions and acts? If we say
that his acts are right, w7e mean that w^e have the
same power of judging them that we have of
judging the character of our own acts. In main-
taining that his acts are right because they are
his, we virtually ascribe to them no moral attri-
butes, but merely apply to the Majesty of Heaven

36 THE GROUND OF RIGHT.

the maxim outgrown on earth, unless at the court
of Ashantee or Dahomey, "The king can do no
wrong." There is nothing in mere omnipotence
that can attach a moral character to the acts
which it performs or requires. We can conceive
of omnipotent malignity, of omnipotent unholi-
ness; but we should have no means of detecting
the malignity or the unholiness if the divine will
is all that constitutes right. The only ground on
which we can affirm moral attributes of God is in
our regarding his decrees and acts as not right
because they are his, but as his because they are
right.

The Greek mythology has a very significant
lesson for us as to this subject. Prometheus was
the benefactor of men, brought fire from heaven
for them, and for his philanthropy incurred the
anger of Zeus, was nailed to a rock by the sea,
and condemned to have his eternally growing
liver eternally gnawed by an immortal vulture.
The sympathy of the ancient world was with
him, and the might of Zeus did not shield him
in epic and in tragedy from the charge of the
most atrocious tyranny and cruelty.

A conception analogous to that of Zeus has
been rife even in New England within my mem-
ory, though now almost obsolete. In some of our
churches it was currently said that the natural

FALSE VIEWS OF GOD. 37

man hates God ; and converted men and women,
in their (so-called) experience-meetings, were wont
to say that they used to hate God. I knew a very
devout schoolmaster who sometimes commenced
his morning prayer by saying, in the name of his
unregenerate pupils, " O God, we hate thee!" I
have no doubt that these statements were true,
and the only change on the part of converted
persons was that they found in Christ a God
whom they could not but love. Theologians of
this type maintained the damnation of the hea-
then, and sometimes, of infants; believed that
God arbitrarily elected certain members of the
human race for salvation, and decreed, from all
eternity, the wickedness of the wicked as well as
their horrible doom ; ascribed to his direct com-
mand the slaughter of the Ganaanites, with their
women and children, and represented his wrath as
unappeasable, except by an innocent being's bear-
ing the full punishment due to the guilty. Men's
natural sense of fitness and of its equivalent, the
Right, recoiled from such a God ; and a great deal
of the infidelity which prevailed two or three gen-
erations ago sprang from the impossibility, on the
part of ingenuous minds, of believing in such a
Governor of the universe, while its better forms
were really more nearly Christian than the type
of Christianity which they replaced.

38 THE GROUND OF RIGHT.

The admission that the will of God is the ulti-
mate standard of right, would open the way for
every form of imposture and fanaticism ; and the
standard could be rendered availing only by an
express revelation so authenticated that there
could be no room for doubt, and so promulgated
that it could be accessible to all men. So long as
there is any thing less than this, the divine com-
mand may be imagined or alleged in behalf of any
act, however foolish or wicked. The poor wretch
in Massachusetts who a few years ago murdered
his child as a religious act, was insane on no other
point, but imagined that God had commanded him
to make this sacrifice. Had he been taught that
God himself cannot alter the qualities of moral
acts so as to make wrong right, he probably would
have been able so to try the spirits as to know
that the murderous impulse could not be from
God.

Of course, the disciples of every religion and of
every Christian sect suppose that they derive their
dogmas from God ; and for whatever there is in
their rules of worship or of fellowship that is less
than generous, kind, and charitable, they allege
religious reasons which resolve themselves virtually
into the divine command. They ought to know,
that were God to issue any command inconsistent
with the precept, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor

POSITIVE DIVINE COMMANDS. 39

as thyself," even he could not give validity to it,
because it would be opposed to the principles of
eternal fitness and everlasting right. Indeed, the
strongest proof that Christianity came from God
is the entire conformity of its teachings and of the
divine life which it portrays with intrinsic fitness,
— a conformity that grows upon us the more
closely we study it, both in its source and in its
issues, so that we get to look upon it, not as born
with Christ, but as coeval with nature, as co-eter-
nal with the Author of nature, and as in Christ
but the revelation of what had always been.

It may here be asked, Is it not conceivable that
God may issue positive commands, which are to
be obeyed as such, without reference to the ques-
tion of fitness? I answer, Yes; but they are to
be obeyed, if not for their intrinsic fitness, on ac-
count of the fitness of obedience as regards the
relation in which we stand to God. Yet were
there any perception of unfitness or any absolute
assurance of non-fitness, this would give us ample
reason for believing that the command in question
could not have come from God, however strong
the external evidence that it came from him.
Thus, religious institutions may be observed as of
divine command, directly or through Jesus Christ,
even though we might not deem them necessary.
But should any such observance prove itself on pro-

40 THE GROUND OF RIGHT.

longed trial utterly harmful to man's religious na-
ture, or absolutely useless, we could not but regard
the record of divine appointment as mythical. The
Eucharist has in all ages been found edifying and
helpful, and all its characteristics are those of fit-
ness for its place in the Christian ritual. We may
therefore well believe that Christ was divinely
moved to ordain this mode of commemorating his
love, though we may not see why some other mode
might not have served the same purpose as well or
better. Some Christian sects have adopted the
washing of the disciples' feet into their ritual, be-
lieving it to have been appointed by Christ in his
words immediately after he had performed this
office of humility and love, — "I have given you
an example, that ye should do as I have done to
you." But it is found not only destitute of edi-
fication, but possessed of a more than negative
unfitness; and it has therefore been generally
dropped from Christian worship, though resting
on the same kind of sanction which we deem ade-
quate for the Eucharist, — indeed, so sanctioned
that every church in Christendom would practise
it, if any good could come from it.

As for express commands from God, our posi-
tion may be best illustrated by what takes place
in a human family. A child worthy of the name
cherishes and practises the virtues belonging to

THE EUCHARIST. 41

early life for their sake and for his own sake,
because he believes and feels their intrinsic fitness.
He also perforins certain services, errands, commis-
sions, for his father, and he may not always know
their meaning; yet, whether he knows it or not,
such offices are intrinsically fitting to the relation
between the father and the son. But should the
father command any thing which the son knows to
be immoral, or perceives to be utterly inane or
foolish, the son is then authorized to decline obe-
dience on the ground of his father's moral or men-
tal incompetency, or on the more respectful, and
perhaps more probable, ground, that he had mis-
heard or misinterpreted his father's command.
The point on which I would lay stress is, that obe-
dience to God's well-ascertained and express com-
mand, in cases where the fitness is not at once
manifest, is still based on fitness as appertaining
to the relation between God and man.

Moreover, even in such cases, we should expect
that the fitness of the command itself would be-
come apparent, and that we should thus have new
and ever growing evidence of its genuineness.
Thus, to recur to the Eucharist, which we do not
err in calling virtually of divine appointment, if
ordained by him on whom rested the Spirit of
God without measure, — this rite has ministered so
largely to Christian edification in its symbolism,

42 THE GROUND OF RIGHT.

is so apt as regards the family of disciples united
at the same table, and has such hallowed associa-
tions accumulated from age to age, that the Church
would continue to observe it for its spiritual worth
and efficacy, even were biblical critics unanimous
in maintaining that Christ never meant to extend
or transmit it beyond the circle of his immediate
followers.

The same thing may be said of baptism. I
think it very questionable whether this rite was,
at the outset, intended to be other than a token of
admission to the Christian Church from heathen-
ism or Judaism, — a rite, indeed, borrowed from
the Hebrew custom of baptizing proselytes and
their families; but its emblematic meaning, its
sacred associations and its religious impressiveness
render me, at least, entirely indifferent to any
critical question as to its original design. It is
altogether too precious for the Church ever to
abandon it.

The observance of Sunday falls, as it seems to
me, under the same category. The Decalogue
constitutes so perfect a code of morals, and, with
the exception of the fourth commandment, is so
entirely ethical, that I am by no means disinclined
to regard it as emanating from Him from whose
bosom came Christ and his gospel. But whether
it be God's express command or not, the law of

DIVINE REVELATION. 43

sabbatical observance is so written on the nature
of man, and of beasts too, and even on some ob-
jects that have neither soul nor life, that it could
be maintained on the ground of intrinsic fitness,
though the Pentateuch were blown to the winds.

Think not that, in denying the validity of the
divine will as the ground of right, I disown or
undervalue revelation. I believe Christianity to
be, not a mere development, but literally a revela-
tion ; that is, an unveiling of eternal truth, law,
and right, which, before and else, man could not
fully comprehend. But Christianity has its evi-
dences, external and internal. The external evi-
dences are all that they can be with reference to a
series of facts that transpired in a land and age so
remote as Palestine and the first Christian century,
but not sufficient to substantiate aught that would
be repudiated by sound sense and right moral feel-
ing. Were the same amount of external evidence
offered in behalf of Epicureanism, it would not
begin to convince me that Epicurus was a Christ,
a divinely anointed, inspired, and endowed mes-
senger'from heaven. It is the internal evidences
of Christianity that turn the scale in its favor;
and these internal evidences all consist in the cor-
respondence of Christ's teachings and life with the
fitnesses of nature and of human life, many of which
fitnesses come to our knowledge through him, but

44 THE GROUND OF RIGHT.

all of which are self-verifying. Now, if we aban-
don our ground of fitness, we have no remaining
test: the internal evidences of Christianity are
neutralized, and there can be no alleged command
of God for which it could be possible to adduce
the least shadow of evidence that it comes from
him. If we are not to trust our natural sense of
the fitness of things, we have no good reason for
doubting that God commanded all the atrocities
and barbarities which the Hebrews committed in
his name. Cudworth, the greatest among modern
ethical philosophers, goes so far as to charge with
atheism those who make the divine will the stand-
ard of right: for, as he says, there is a natural
right which man is capable of understanding and
recognizing ; it exists in the nature of things, inde-
pendently of the Creator; it must exist of neces-
sity, if there be any being; and the God who could
transgress it, and could do or command what is
intrinsically unfitting, would not fill out any ra-
tional conception of God, — would be no God in
the sense which we necessarily attach to that
term.

It follows from what I have said in comparing
these two alleged grounds of right, that morality
exists, in a certain sense and measure, independ-
ently of religion. That they are most intimately
and helpfully allied, I hope to show you in a subse-

ADAM SMITH'S THEORY. 45

qnent lecture. If they were identical, as they are
sometimes affirmed to be, they could not be allied;
for alliance implies duality. I may perceive un-
numbered fitnesses of things without worshiping
or owning Him through whose providence it is, as
I believe, that "all things are double, one against
another," so that " one thing establisheth the good
of another." I may observe these fitnesses in my
conduct without being a religious man. An athe-
ist may be a rigidly moral man in the entire sphere
of his earthly relations ; for there is no reason why
he may not discern their fitnesses, and he is capable
of governing his conduct by them, though, in his
destitution of the highest and strongest motives
for their observance, he is in such imminent danger
of ignoring them, that, while there have been in-
dividual atheists of blameless lives, there never
has been an extended ascendency of atheism in
any nation, community, or class of men, without
its being accompanied by a corresponding decline
of goodness, and growth of vice and crime.

I would next speak of Adam . Smith's theory of
morals. He maintains that sympathy is the sole
ground, standard, and criterion of the Right. The
trait of another's character or the act or conduct
of another which commands our entire sympathy
is virtuous ; that which repels sympathy, and pro-
vokes antipathy, is vicious. The trait in our own

46 THE GROUND OF RIGHT.

character, or the act or mode of conduct, in which
we feel sure of the sympathy of those around us,
is virtuous ; that in which we know that we have
not their sympathy is vicious. The degree of sym-
pathy or of antipathy in each case measures the
degree of excellence or of turpitude.

The most obvious criticism on this system is, that
it makes our sense of right a superficial organ, like
the stomach in some classes of zoophytes. We
must resort to society to know whether our acts
are right. In practice, however, the test would
be purely subjective ; for, while we might measure
the acts of all others by our own sympathy, for
ourselves we should look far for sympathy if we
could not find it near, and to coming time if we
could not find it in our own time. This Smith
virtually admits ; for he says that we should some-
times have to resort for our imaginary spectators
to remote posterity. But it is certain, that, though
men in advance of their time often thus appeal to
the better judgment of a more enlightened future,
they do not dive at the outset into the future, to
take counsel of the unborn as to what they shall
do, or dare, or suffer. If sympathy be really the
ground of right, it must be an active, real, present,
audible sympathy ; and were this the criterion of
virtue, I know not how there could be any prog-
ress in goodness, or any instances of advanced,

SYMPATHY, AN UNSAFE STANDARD. 47

heroic virtue. Wilberforce found no sympathy at
the outset of his assault on the slave-trade, but
only the antipathy of the best men in Church and
State. Had actual sympathy been the sole crite-
rion of right, slavery would have been perpetual ;
for there have been periods when universal opinion
and feeling have been in its favor. This was the
case at the Christian era ; but Christian sentiment
became enlisted against it, and it gradually
declined, till in what seemed the depth of the
(so-called) dark ages — during which, however,
there were intense day-beams from the Sun of
righteousness, though the light of classic civiliza-
tion had been quenched — there came a time when
there was not a domestic slave in Christendom.
But the discovery of America gave slavery a new,
lease of life ; and in the middle of the last century
it again had universal opinion in its favor, so that
Wilberforce, when he started on his career,' knew
not that he had any sympathy this side of heaven.
But were we to admit that sympathy is a safe
and sufficient moral standard, what authority has
it ? It is but one of human instincts, perhaps not
the noblest. There is no reason why one instinct
should have supremacy over the rest. They are,
all of them, parts of human nature, all of them
legitimate within fit restraint and in clue equilib-
rium ; and because they are "instincts, they all need

48 THE GROUND OF BIGHT.

control, sympathy no less than the rest. Indeed,
there are communities and conditions of society,
in which sympathy is the most prolific source of
moral depravity. I doubt whether sympathy could
have been a safe criterion in Sodom ; and it may
help to explain the moral derelictions of Lot, who
seems, in the scriptural story, to have brought
away from the doomed city very little of the
heritage of patriarchal virtue and piety that he
carried to it.

It should be remarked here, that Smith urges as
an argument for his theory, that, in point of fact,
men do normally sympathize with all that is good,
and are normally in antipathy against all that is
evil. But were this true absolutely and univer-
sally, would not this very fact imply some other
and higher criterion of right? It is merely a
senseless truism, to say that whatever commands
sympathy is right, and whatever is right com-
mands sympathy.

There are some systems that virtually annul
moral obligation. This, as I showed you in my
last lecture, is the case with necessarianism. It is
equally so with mysticism, which, as it has borne
so large a part in the history of religion, may
merit special consideration in its ethical bearings.
Mysticism rests on two principles, one an indubit-
able truth, the other a baseless assumption. The

MYSTICISM. 49

truth is one which is a prophecy of immortality,
namely, that man is conscious of fitnesses for an
immeasurably higher destiny than he can attain
in this world, — a consciousness common to all men
of lofty aims, and growing upon them faster than
they can grow, so that it is the greatest minds and
the noblest characters that feel the farthest from
their ultimate perfection. This consciousness is a
tonic to the moral nature, energizes and intensifies
every power and faculty, and urges one on in
every way of duty, selfward, manward, Godward.
But to this has been added by mystics the delu-
sive assumption, that what little can be attained,
what small amount of good can be secured, in this
earthly life, can be the result only of concentrated
devotion, — of a mind secluded from all earthly
cares and interests, and wholly absorbed in the
contemplation of divine and heavenly things.
God is the supreme good, heaven is the soul's
only fitting home ; and all earthly duty divides
the soul from God, and shuts out heaven from the
thoughts. The error consists in forgetting that
there may be a latent sense of the divine pres-
ence, even though the thought be not expressly
formulated at every moment, as there is on the
part of the little child a latent consciousness of
his mother's shielding presence, as real and vital
when he is busy with his picture-book or his toys

)

50 TEE GROUND OF EIGHT.

as when he nestles in her arms ; and that one may
approach nearer heaven when breathing its spirit
in faithful duty and in diffusive charity than
when he is musing, or talking, or singing about
heaven.

Mysticism, of course, throws all active duty
into the background, and disclaims all sense of
obligation with regard to it. It takes two direc-
tions. It has for the most part led to a life
sheltered from the world's life, and divorced from
its responsibilities, fervently devout, and in a neg-
ative aspect severely virtuous. The extremists
of fanatical devotion, such as the pillar-saints and
the monks of the Thebaid, come under this
description ; and probably there are still members
of monastic orders, especially nuns of the more
rigid disciplines, who are sincere and devout
mystics.

But there have been periods, as at the era of the
Protestant Reformation, when mysticism by a de-
praved logic has developed itself in revolting types
of immorality, especially in unrestrained sensual
indulgence. The reasoning has been in this wise.
It is so little that we can do for ourselves in this
world, that it is no matter what we do. What we
call good acts are so defaced by indwelling sin,
and so far beneath the standard of the divine
approval, that they differ only infinitesimally from

TWO CLASSES OF MYSTICS. 51

what are termed immoral acts. If, then, we can
do nothing here to win heaven, there can be no
need of our bridling our appetites or our lusts.
It will be all the same with us in the sight of God.
Spiritually we can meditate and pray so long as
the mind can bear the strain ; and when the over-
bent bow must relax, let the string be untied, and
let us yield ourselves to whatever our natural
desires may prompt.

Historically, mysticism has given the world
some of the loftiest types of piety and devotion :
from the pens of mystics such as Thomas & Kem-
pis, Tauler, Fenelon, Madame de Guion, we have
had manuals of contemplative religion and of the
interior life of faith and love, by the loss of which
the world's religious literature would be sadly im-
poverished ; and yet even in their writings, there
are marvellous deficiencies. Thus, you might read
through "The Imitation of Christ" by Thomas a
Kempis, without learning from it that there is such
an institution as the home or the family, or such a
relation as that of husband and wife, parent and
child, brother and sister ; 'while yet the book bears
the name of Him whose divine humanity gave a
special sanction and blessing to home-life, nay, to
whom we owe the home worthy of the name. On
the other hand, there were sects of mystics, like
the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and some bodies

52 THE GROUND OF RIGHT.

of antinomian Anabaptists, whose immoral ex-
cesses were too loathsome for recital.

Another system, religious in form, which leaves
morality without being and the Right without a
ground, is pantheism. The pantheist denies the
separate, detached existence of any being or object.
Nature and man are, physically, manifestations of
God in space ; man is, mentally and spiritually,
the thought of God. As the one blast of the
organ-bellows may fill a thousand unlike pipes,
and pour itself out in a thousand tones of every
variety of compass and quality, so does the all-
pervading Spirit become multiform in the vast
diversity of outward objects which have their be-
ing in him alone, and many-voiced in the unnum-
bered modes of mental and moral activity which
he inspires. All that is being literally but " the
varied God," there can be nothing, whether of out-
ward nature or of humanity, which is not good
with reference to its place and purpose in the
divine totality. What seems evil seems so only
because we, being ourselves but parts of God, can
see but in part, and cannot discern the relations
which each part bears to the whole. As a sink or
a drain viewed by itself is unsightly and noisome,
while in a sumptuous palace in which cleanliness
and salubrity are essential it has its full part in
the perfectness and beauty of the edifice, so does

PANTHEISM. 53

the character or the deed which seems to us most
foul and detestable because we cannot see it in
all its relations and fitnesses, bear an essential part
in the totality of divine manifestation and expres-
sion, and as such ceases to be evil, or to merit
reproach or reprehension.

Pantheism has two widely opposite types. One
we might call hypertheism ; the other is little more
than a euphemistic term for atheism. The former
represents God as, in essence, a spirit eternal, all-
wise, almighty, who clothes himself in the forms
of nature, and enshrines himself in all intelligent
souls, those forms being but the outraying of his
omnipresence, those souls but receptacles of his
thought. This was the conception of Spinoza,
who was almost a mystic in the intensity of his
devotion, and whose philosophy is the outcome of
a mind so filled with the thought of God, that it
could not conceive of being except as identical
with God. Schleiermacher, though a devout Chris-
tian, was a pantheist of this type. Indeed, mys-
ticism always tends to run into pantheism. In
fact, they are each other's feeders.

The other type of pantheism resolves the con-
ception of God into that of a material universe,
self-endowed with tendencies which evolved from
chaos, successively, form, order, organism, life,
soul, thought, aspiration. This universe in the

54 THE GROUND OF EIG11T.

beginning possessed mere automatic force, an on-
ward and upward nisus, a dumb yearning, an un-
conscious striving for an ever fuller and higher
development. In man it first attained self-con-
sciousness, multiform and nowhere concentrated,
in its totality pure and perfect, though in its parts,
taken by themselves, imperfect, and because of
this imperfection presenting the phenomena which
we term wrong and evil. This is the type of pan-
theism which has been most extensive and prev-
alent in the German philosophy.

Pantheism in either form involves necessarian-
ism, and manifestly furnishes no ground of right,
and thus no hold for moral obligation.

LECTURE III.

UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

I propose to-day to discuss the several forms
of utilitarianism, and the ethical position which
rightfully belongs to expediency or utility. There
might seem at first thought a wide distinction be-
tween the merely selfish and the more broadly util-
itarian theory, — between that which makes one's
interest, pleasure, or happiness his sole standard
of right, and that which assumes for its standard
the greatest happiness of the greatest number ;
but we shall find that they rest on the same foun-
dation, — that the utilitarian regards general be-
neficence as the dictate and the outcome of an
enlightened self-love.

We will consider, first, the purely selfish theory.
According to this, the desire of pleasure, of happi-
ness, of well-being, is inherent in and inseparable
from human nature, and must lie at the basis of
every volition. Will is but desire made active,
and desire implies a conception of something by
which one's pleasure or happiness may be iu-

55

56 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

creased. A desire which means less or other than
this is inconceivable. If I am seemingly benefi-
cent to my own injury, it is because I expect
greater pleasure from the exercise of sympathy,
or from the gratitude of the person benefited, or
from a reputation for generosity, than I lose by de-
nying myself what I bestow. If I die for the True
and the Right, it is because I anticipate in heaven
a recompense far exceeding the earthly good that
I shall forego. Disinterested action is utterly im-
possible ; for one cannot cease to be his own well*
wisher, still less can he be his own ill-wisher,
which he must be if he willingly diminishes his
own sum of happiness or well-being. What, then,
is virtue, according to this theory ? It is simply
prudence, — a clear-seeing, deep-seeing, judicious
self-interest, — the choice of that which will con-
fer pleasure or happiness, the largest in quantity,
the best in quality, and the most enduring, — the
readiness to give up less pleasure for more, lower
for higher, shorter for longer.

What obligation is there, under this system, to
the practice of virtue ? None whatever, except
that under which a man is bound to eat his
dinner, to quench his thirst, to cure his head-
ache, — an obligation beginning, centring, and
ending in himself, — an obligation in which he is
both debtor and creditor, and from which he cer-

INSTINCTIVE TENDENCIES. 57

tainly has the same right to release himself that
he lias to stay away from an entertainment which
he would enjoy if he is too lazy to go to it,
or to omit some coveted indulgence because he
grudges the cost. If my happiness is my standard
of right, I am certainly entitled to make at my
pleasure a selection from the various means of
happiness ; and if I make a bad choice, I am ac-
countable to myself alone. Indeed, by this theory
I cannot make a bad choice ; for my desire is my
only law, and I cannot choose what I do not de-
sire.

The first thing to be said as to this theory is
that volition is not always desire, — that it fre-
quently has no reference whatever to the future,
and therefore no reference to pain to be avoided,
or pleasure to be obtained. The instinctive ten-
dencies prompt the greater part of the volitions,
and thus of the voluntary acts of children, and of
men and women of a low mental and moral type,
and a very large part of the volitions and volun-
tary acts of all of us. Now, in gratifying these
tendencies we do not cater for the future : we
merely yield, of our own accord, to an impelling
force which we are consciously able to resist. I
do not eat because I expect to feel the better for
it an hour or a day hence, but because I have an
appetite now ; and very probably, if I am a con-

58 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

firmed dyspeptic, and know that I am going to
suffer pain much more severe than hunger in con-
sequence of my eating the food before me, I shall
eat all the same. These instinctive tendencies
may be best understood by comparing them with
a scourge. Let a scourge be laid severely on a
man's shoulders, he is able to stand still ; but he
will probably choose to run, though he knows
that the man who is whipping him can run as fast
as he can. Men are perpetually willing under
strong impulse, while they know that they are
capable of willing otherwise, and that what they
will is to their misery, their harm, their peril, per-
haps their ruin.

Then, at the other extremity of the scale, there
are nobler impulses, instincts of a higher order,
which one obeys without counting the cost, and
which one never would obey did he stop to count
the cost. It is not in character for a good man to
say to himself when he performs a worthy deed,
" This is going to accrue to my profit," nor yet for
him, in forming some habit of virtuous conduct, to
say to himself, " This habit is going to contribute
essentially to my ease, or gain, or popularity.1' It
was not from any calculation or expectation of
happiness on earth or in heaven that Howard
spent what would have been the sunny days of an
affluent life in prisons and pest-houses. Epictetus

SELF-INTEREST. 59

did not even believe in immortality ; but no one
can doubt that if he, being the man that he was,
had had his choice between loyalty to the Right
and death on the one side, and a life full of all
things desirable, with a single falsehood or fraud or
impurity, on the other, he would have chosen the
former, and thus in his own belief have leaped
out of being, and so out of all possibility of pleas-
ure, happiness, or good. But this certainly would
not be the dictate of self-interest rightly under-
stood, which has its most authentic utterance in
those words in the Book of Ecclesiastes : " Be not
righteous over-much ; why shouldest thou destroy
thyself?" while it would undoubtedly add, as re-
gards any excess in sensual pleasure, " Be not
wicked over-much ; why shouldest thou die before
thy time ? " In fine, the truly virtuous man
does not, any more than the angry man or the
drunkard, look carefully into his own future be-
fore he wills each separate act, nor yet is it in this
way that he forms virtuous habits ; for it is noto-
riously true, that a man who begins in his youth to
calculate the recompense of the good he does, and
to look out for his wages, whether in gain, pleas-
ure, or praise, before he performs a right act,
never becomes greatty guod, hardly ever, even
moderately good ; and I have known not a few of
these self-seeking youths, who in the judgment

60 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

of others, though not in mine, promised fair be-
cause they behaved so well, who have quite early
deserted to the opposite camp where the pay
seemed better because it came sooner. Longfel-
low's ballad of "Excelsior," which has been so
foully bespattered by parodies and travesties as to
make the very word almost laughable, yet which
is really one of the grandest poems ever written, is
a summary of the true philosophy of virtuous ac-
tion. It symbolizes the life-path of the genuinely
good man, who pursues his way, not for the joys
of the way, but because it is the way, and it is not
in him to halt on it, or to turn aside from it.

I would, in the next place, maintain that on the
selfish theory virtue is not even a distinct and
definite quality of -character. It is maintained
that every man, by his every volition, seeks to
better himself, — to promote his own pleasure,
happiness, or well-being. A does this by getting
drunk; B, by breasting cold and storm on some
philanthropic errand. Each, according to the the-
ory, supposes that he is doing the best thing
possible for himself; and I know not why the one
is in the least a better man than the other. The
difference is not of motive or of principle, but
merely of knowledge, judgment, wisdom. If B
were no wiser than A, yet without being a worse
man, he would stay at home, and drink himself

THE SELFISH THEORY. 61

into a fatuous slumber. If A were as wise as B,
yet without being a better man than he is, he
would start off in the cold to carry comfort to
some home of sickness or poverty. By this the-
ory, virtue is a matter of necessity, not of choice.
A man cannot but consult his own happiness and
well-being to the best of his knowledge. He has
no choice. His belief for the time being deter-
mines his action. He is at no moment free to
elect one of two courses.

On the other hand, if fitness be the standard of
right, a man has the power of choice. That which
accords with the fitness of tilings may be opposed
to his interest, so far as he can see or know, — as
in the case of the martyr for principle who lacks
clear and full assurance of immortality, and who,
therefore, is conscious only of loss and sacrifice,
and equally, as I trust we all know from experi-
ence, in cases in which we have done what
seemed fitting and therefore right with the dis-
tinct consciousness of self-denial.

Still further, the selfish theory precludes the
possibility of merit for a good act, and leaves a
bad act without any liability to blame. If the
best thing that a man can do is to consult his own
happiness, can there be any thing blameworthy in
the inevitable ignorance which leads a man to
seek happiness in a wrong way? If self-interest

62 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

be the essence of virtue, is not he who caters fur
his own happiness in the best way he knows,
though it be a sordid and squalid way, virtuous
to the full extent of his ability ? and would he not
forsake the only virtue attainable by him, if he
practised temperance, honesty, or beneficence, with
a consciousness of sacrifice ? I cannot escape these
conclusions from the selfish theory ; and were not
men wont to have a heart-faith better than their
professed belief, I could have no more confidence
in the moral purity or integrity of a man who
held this theory than in that of a notorious de-
bauchee, swindler, or liar.

Epicurus gave his name to this system as it was
maintained in classic times. He flourished about
three centuries before the Christian era. He was
himself a man of simple tastes and virtuous life,
and so were many of his disciples ; while his was
the favorite philosophy of men of loose principles
and profligate lives, until the old civilization was
entirely submerged by the in-rush of Northern
barbarians. The licentious poems of Horace and
Ovid are in entire harmony, if not with the original
intent, with the inevitable trend of Epicureanism.
According to Epicurus, there is no essential differ-
ence in acts, which would make one sort of acts
preferable to their opposites. Their pleasure-yield-
ing capacity furnishes the only standard by which

HOBBES. 63

they are to be estimated. If unrestrained sensual
indulgence would yield the maximum of pleasure,
it would be virtue and duty. The only reason
for moderating one's appetites is, that the pleasure
derived from them will thus last the longer. Epi-
curus distinguishes between active and passive
pleasure. Action has its re-action. The sense of
satiety is a painful offset to free indulgence. But
rest does not cloy. Repose always satisfies. There-
fore the acme of practical wisdom, and thus of
virtue, is attained by him who floats on the current
of life with the least possible disturbance, without
thought for others, with personal habits that in-
volve the minimum of effort, and expose him to
the minimum of disappointment and annoyance.

In modern times, Hobbes, the earliest English
ethical writer of any celebrity, in the seven-
teenth century, revived the philosophy of Epicu-
rus, though in an altered and a very peculiar
form. He was a stanch royalist, and had the
utmost horror of republicanism and puritanism,
having lived through the period of the Common-
wealth, and having had an eye only for its repulsive
aspects. His philosophy is a blending of absolut-
ism in politics with selfishness in morals. Accord-
ing to him, all men are by nature and of necessity
supremely selfish. In the ignorant infancy of
society, men naturally prey upon one another, and

64 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

promiscuous internecine war is the inevitable
consequence. The first practical truth that they
learn is, that under this condition of things no
man can secure to himself the well-being which
is every man's legitimate aim. Submission to the
most powerful is the next step. But power is
most forceful when concentrated. Hence absolute
monarchy is by common consent made the refuge
from intolerable anarchy. Passive obedience be-
comes the interest, and therefore the duty, of the
individual subject, — an obedience extending to
whatever the supreme power may enact or com-
mand. As religion, with its supernatural sanc-
tions, is an efficient instrument in preserving the
peace and order of society, — yet this, only if
there be uniformity of belief and practice, without
which religion is an element of discord, — con-
formity with the sovereign's religion is for every
man's interest, and is therefore every man's duty.
This system, you will perceive, while retaining
the name, eliminates the reality of duty ; for if a
man is to obejr the king and conform to him solely
for his own interest, it cannot be his duty any
longer than he believes it to be for his interest.
But he cannot control his opinions. He may
regard revolt, rebellion, revolution, as for his in-
terest, and in that case it must be his duty ; for
the general order, peace, security, is not his con-

PALEY. m • 65

cern, — he has only himself to care for. Virtue
is also eliminated. For the loyal subject all duty is
comprehended in obedience. What is commanded
is virtue ; what is forbidden is vice. Virtue, then,
has no fixed definition, no uniform characteristics.
What is virtue in one country is vice in another.
Polygamy is as virtuous in Turkey as monogamy
in England ; and as for Utah, the moral character
of the cherished domestic institution of the Mor-
mons is a question between the national authority
and Territorial rights. The system, in fine, merits
this passing notice, only because Hobbes is a great
name in English literature and philosophy, and
one deservedly honored for affluent learning, cogent
reasoning (for it is his premises, never his conclu-
sions, that are at fault), and evident honesty and
integrity of purpose.

From Hobbes to Paley we pass over an interval
of a century and a half, and find the selfish theory
in a greatly modified form, and with what seems
to be, though put on in perfect good faith, a very
thin veneering of Christianity. Paley's ethical
philosophy is all comprised in his definition of
virtue, — " The doing good to mankind, in obe-
dience to the will of God, for the sake of ever-
lasting happiness." This definition in its first
part seems like the broader type of utilitarianism ;
but the last clause brings it down to pure selfish-

66 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

ness. We are to do good to others, not for their
sake, but for our own. All that I have said about
Hobbes applies here, with very slight modification.
If I am to do good for the promotion of my own
happiness, I certainly have the right to refrain
horn doing good if I do not expect to be the hap-
pier for it, and I have a right to do whatever I
honestly believe to be conducive to my happiness.

All parts of this definition are faulty. " The
doing good to mankind " is indeed virtue, but not
the whole of virtue. Temperance and veracity
are equally virtues, though no one be benefited by
them. It is not surprising to find Paley very
loose as to his notions of veracity where falsehood
does no harm ; and as to the Thirty-nine Articles,
he says that they can be honestly subscribed by
a man who does not believe them, unless he belong
to one of the classes of people which the parlia-
ment that enacted the subscription meant to shut
out from the Church, namely, Papists, Anabaptists,
and Puritans.

" Obedience to the will of God " is an inci-
dental, not an essential, part of virtue. God's
will is in accordance with the fitness of things;
otherwise it would be of no obligation. In the
Greek myth, already referred to, it was virtue in
Prometheus not to obey Zeus.

" For the sake of everlasting happiness " is the

VIRTUE, NOT SELFISH. 67

most objectionable clause of all. It bears a close
kindred to the sordid notions that used to prevail
very largely in the Christian Church about salva-
tion, which was regarded as exemption from hell,
not as deliverance from sin. Men used to inquire
diligently how little of Christian duty, and how late,
would suffice for their salvation ; and multitudes,
whose orthodoxy was unimpeached, postponed the
question — as some of the early (so-called) Chris-
tian emperors postponed baptism — till it became
very certain that there remained for them in this
world no more u pleasurable sin." If the win-
ning of heaven be the sole motive for doing good
to men, might there not often be a close calcu-
lation as to the amount of beneficence that would
suffice to win heaven ? Would not Howard, had
this been his motive, have considered the opportuni-
ties of beneficence open to a rich English country
gentleman enough to serve his turn? Then, too,
what room for virtue is there for those who,
unhappily, do not believe in heaven, or for those
who, more happily, believe that the mercies of
heaven are broad enough to take in those who
have done nothing to deserve it? Paley has been
commonly classed as of the utilitarian rather than
of the purely selfish school ; but the most that
we can say of him is, that his philosophy marks a
transition epoch.

68 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

Bentham may be taken as the best representa-
tive of pure utilitarianism. He assumes utility
as the sole ground of right, and defines utility as
" the propsrty of any act to increase the amount
of happiness, or to diminish the amount of misery,
in the individual, or the body of individuals, acted
upon." He starts with the selfish axiom that " it
is the interest, and therefore the duty, of every
individual to seek the maximum of happiness ; "
and then, having been no logician, he passes on,
without any intermediate reasoning, to state " the
greatest happiness of the greatest number " as
the sole standard and test of right, and the sover-
eign rule for individual conduct. It subsequently
appears that he reasoned in this wise. Each
individual's means of well-being are limited, lia-
ble to be exhausted, liable to be interfered with
by others. But if all the members of the com-
munity consult the good of all, the aggregate
means of well-being constitute a common stock
from which each is sure to receive his own proper
dividend. Selfishness is thus made the motive,
nay, the ultimate ground, of right. The indi-
vidual is to contribute to the common good for
the sake of his own share.

Were this principle fully acted upon, it would
create a veritable Utopia ; but it has no motive
power. It depends on selfishness, and selfishness

EXPEDIENCY, NO SAFE STANDARD. 69

can always find a cheaper way to its end than
working for the general good. All systems of
communism have been based on this principle ; and
the defect in their working has been that individ-
uals, having a right to their share of the proceeds
of the common labor, have taken the liberty to
be idle, or to be remiss in their industry. Even
among the elect souls that established Brook
Farm, there were not a few hard thoughts about
those who ate their full share, but were slow to
earn it. Such experiments have succeeded only
under two conditions ; namely, when the govern-
ing power of the institution has been a busy
espionage and an exacting tyranny, and when re-
ligious fanaticism has been the inspiration of the
community ; and they have been successful with-
out drawback for a long series of years, only when,
as among the Shakers, these two conditions have
been united.

We thus see that the utilitarian and the selfish
s}'stem are equally devoid of any real ground of
right. But it may be asked, Is there any practi-
cal objection to deriving duty from considerations
of expediency ? Must not the right and the ex-
pedient always coincide ? They must, indeed,
under the righteous government of the universe.
But the question of expediency often requires for
its answer a deeper insight, a broader view, a

70 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

longer foresight, than man possesses. What seems
expedient now may be in time to come of harmful
influence. What is expedient for you and me
may be of mischief for others. What as an iso-
lated act might be expedient, is liable to be made
a bad precedent, and may do an unspeakable
amount of injury. Above all, what may be ex-
pedient for us as mere citizens of this world may
be of detriment to us as immortal beings, even as
we have reason to believe that God, in his provi-
dence, is training us for immortality in a very dif-
ferent way from that in which he would train us
for an eternal slumber in the grave. Then, too,
our appetites, passions, prejudices, in fine, what-
ever forms a part of our present selves, must of
necessity bias more or less our judgment of expe-
diency in our own case ; and there are for the vir-
tuously disposed man occasions when against the
impulse of strong feeling he yields to his sense of
the fitting and the right, while motives of expedi-
ency, if obeyed, would have led to conduct which
would have given him only unavailing regret
when the stress of feeling had subsided. It should
be added, that, in the case of others, we are less
likely to be good judges of expediency than in our
own case ; for no man can so put himself into an-
other's place as to see what is best for him.

To test expediency as a rule of action, we will

LIES OF BENEVOLENCE. 71

try it under the head of veracity. There is, con-
fessedly, a manifest fitness in making our speech
always conform to the fact, our fulfilment to the
promise. We feel that speaking the truth, and
keeping a promise, are intrinsically right. But
there are many occasions on which it does not
seem that falsehood can do harm, many on which
it would minister to the innocent amusement or
entertainment of the listener, some certainly on
which its immediate effect would be beneficial.
We will take a case in which kindness would be
the only possible motive for falsehood, — the giv-
ing false hopes to a person dangerously ill, or de-
ceiving him by too favorable accounts of some one
about whom he is solicitous. If this is to be justi-
fied once on the ground of expediency, it is to be
justified always. If it is proper to resort to it in a
single instance, it is proper to resort to it in all sim-
ilar instances. It is, then, to be generally under-
stood, that persons who are very ill are not to have
the truth told to them. Conversely, every one
knows that if he is very ill the truth will be hidden
from him ; and this established custom will make
every person who is seriously ill suspicious of what
is said to him, disposed to fear the worst when the
worst is far from the truth, and in utter and dis-
tressing doubt as to the actual facts concerning
himself, or concerning the objects of his solicitude.

72 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

Thus, the resort to falsehood could be of any effi-
cacy only on account of its rareness ; while, if
really expedient in itself, it would be so common
as to be utterly useless.

Again, is a falsehood to be told when it will
save us from great peril or loss, without injuring
any other person? This seems expedient. But
how great must be the harm or loss to justify a
lie? Can you fix any limit? If for a cause of
a certain magnitude, why not for a slightly less
cause ? and if for that, why not for one still less ?
We could not \'&y down any arbitrary rule which
should determine where falsehood should cease and
truth begin. The result would be, that we should
deem it justifiable to lie whenever we could derive
the slightest benefit from it without doing injury
to another; and the reciprocal consequence would
be, that faith in one another's veracity would be
utterly destroyed, and no one's word as such
would be believed.

The question has been raised whether a ransom
promised to a bandit should be paid, — a question
which in Greece and in Italy has till of late been
a practical one, and has not yet ceased to be so in
Sicily. Here at first thought the breaking of the
promise might seem justifiable. But if I promise
a ransom for my life, it is because I really regard
my life as worth more than the money that I

TRUTH IN EXTREME CASES. 73

promise to pay for it: had I the money on the spot,
I would readily give it ; so that I can make the
promise in all good faith, and the bad character
of the promisee cannot make it void. Other lives
than my own, and worth as much as mine, will be
in like jeopardy ; and if I break my promise, those
lives may be forfeited without being permitted
the alternative of ransom, — so that in this, one of
the strongest of cases, the plea of expediency fails.
But if 1 know that by falsehood I can prevent
a great crime, perhaps save an innocent life, shall
not expediency prevail over the rigid rule of right?
I have lived a great many years, and never knew
or heard of such a case as actually occurring,
though the imaginary case has always been dis-
cussed. I doubt the wisdom of legislating on the
case beforehand. Should it occur, a good man will
know at the moment what he ought to do ; and
should he utter a falsehood under so sore a stress,
the emergency would be one that would suggest
and justify its own law, without throwing any
mantle of amnesty or license over departure from
the truth in cases of less imminent urgency or peril.
As a teacher of morals, I would prefer waiting for
the occurrence of such a case before establishing
any rule of expediency which, once laid down,
would only be continually warped and stretched
to suit cases of greater doubt and less peril.

74 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

The Right, as I showed you in my last lecture,
is that which is according to rule ; and moral rules
clo not admit of exceptions, because they are
founded on known fitnesses. - It is admitted that
these rules apply to the instances in which it is
urged on the ground of expediency that they be set
aside, — only it is claimed that in this and that in-
stance they should be ignored because they bear
hardly on individual cases. But they cannot be set
aside in these cases without creating precedents
which will be urged, adopted, followed, strained,
applied to cases more or less analogous, till the
exceptions overlap and merge the rule, and tend
toward a state of things in which adherence to the
rule will be the exception, while the rule still
retains its reasonableness, its accordance with fit-
ness, its rightful authority. We Christians derive
our rules of right, mediately, from the teachings,
and still more from the life, of Jesus Christ; and
there is not one of these rules, however wide of the
practice of the outside world, that does not justify
itself by its intrinsic fitness. Probably no one who
has governed his life strictly by these rules, and
has had his heart pervaded by their spirit, has ever
found reason for repentance or regret ; while mul-
titudes calling themselves Christians, who have
modified these rules by expediency, have had the
personal discomfort of trying to be in the service

OFFICE OF EXPEDIENCY. 75

of two masters and succeeding in neither, have in-
jured the prestige and impaired the influence of
the religion which they wanted to honor, and have
found that they have done manifest harm where
by departing from the rule they hoped to render
some office of kindness or charity.

What place, then, has expediency? A most
important, though a secondary, place. The word
expediency, in its near kindred to expedite, sug-
gests the idea of the shortest or most direct way
to the attainment of an end. The term relates to
ways and means, not to ends. The fitting, the
Right, must be the uniform characteristic of our
ends, and must at the same time limit our range
of choice as to means. But there may be several
equally right ways for the attainment of a right
end. Among these ways we should endeavor to
choose the most expedient, — that in which we
shall have the least hinderance and the greatest
amount of help or furtherance. Or there may be
several equally right and desirable ends, only one
of which we can pursue. Which of these we
shall choose may be properly made a pure ques-
tion of expediency. Thus, among several local
charities of which my time and means will enable
me to engage actively in but one, I may with en-
tire propriety choose that which will best suit my
convenience. So, too, of different courses of read-

76 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

ing or study, expediency as to my business in life,
my taste, my profession, will be my best guide.
In our social relations, whether of business or of
pleasure, while truth, justice, and kindness are to
be never violated or minimized, there is large room
for expediency as to time, place, and manner.
We are bound to bestow, and have a right to get,
all the pleasure and profit which our social inter-
course will permit us to bestow and to receive ;
and this depends in no small degree on the heed
which we give to matters not of positive obliga-
tion, but properly belonging under the head of
expediency. We have St. Paul's statement that
he " became all things to all men ; " yet with
his sturdy, robust conscientiousness we cannot
suppose that he ever made the slightest compro-
mise of principle. But over and above his spon-
taneous courtesy, he undoubtedly studied, in the
Latin phrase, the mollia tempora fandi, the fit oc-
casions and modes of address, the topics that
might bring him into relation with those under
his wordfall, the ways by which he, for the sake
of his holy cause, might win a favorable reception.
It was a masterly stroke of expediency when,
finding the assembly which he was going to address
divided in opinion, the Pharisees being the major-
ity, he began, " I am a Pharisee, and the son of a
Pharisee ; of the hope and resurrection of the

MODES OF DOING GOOD. 77

dead I am called in question," and thus produced
a strong division in his favor ; — and again, when,
on the Areopagus, he started with the clear and
emphatic statement of the truths which he held in
common with the prevalent schools of philosophy.

I am sorry to find in Renan's autobiography a
confession that he had been wont, all through his
life, to carry expediency of this complaisant type
beyond the bounds of truth, and that, while guilty
of no other falsehood, and in a life of maidenly
gentleness, innocence, and purity, he had never
been able to refrain from such falsehoods as would
please, conciliate, or flatter those with whom he
was brought into friendly intercourse.

The subject of expediency is one of prime im-
portance to the public teachers of religion.1 In
this respect St. Paul is their best model. Their
aim, without which they have no title to their
office, should be to exert the maximum of influ-
ence within their power in behalf of the True and
the Right, and especially in behalf of truth that
is the least welcome, if it be only of vital interest
and worth, — of duties that are the most neg-
lected, if they only form a part of the eternal
right. Now I have seen two extremes among

1 These Lectures were first delivered before the students of a
divinity school. Special reference was therefore made, in two or
three instances, as here, to the clerical profession.

78 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

really good men who wanted to do good. I have
known those who if they had offensive truth to
utter, made it tenfold more offensive b}^ a defiant,
aggressive manner, by assuming an antagonistic
attitude, and by side-thrusts at those who did not
agree with them, showing that they meant war,
and thus awakening hostility, and then handling
their weapons so unskilfully that they did more
harm to themselves by their recoil than they could
do to the falsities assailed. I have known others,
who were so afraid of giving offence that for the
sword of the Spirit they showed only a jewelled
scabbard in which it was supposed to be sheathed.
They diluted the truth as the original disciples of
Hahnemann diluted their drugs, and evidently
supposed, as they did, that dilution conferred
strength. They rejoiced in the quiet assent of
their hearers to unpopular truths so reduced to
unemphatic platitudes as to leave but an infini-
tesimal difference between them and their oppo-
sites. Those who undertake the office of public
teachers are bound to give distinct, unmistakable,
strong utterance to the truth as they believe it,
and especially to point out, with a clearness that
shall give no possibility for mistake, the way of
duty, and to rebuke, not, as is the wont of some,
the sins of other people or other times, but the
sins and evils rife then and there, — calling things

SELF-SEEKING. 79

by their right names, so that men may recognize
their own moral portraiture. But the castigation
must not be administered as if one enjoyed it, and
took credit or pride to himself for it. There
should be a blending of gentleness with firmness,
meekness with courage, modesty on one's own
account with directness and boldness for the sake
of truth and right. One may thus make his way
to the minds and the consciences of men ; while
he who carries the war-spirit into his work is apt
to find those whom he wants to attack defended
by impregnable armor. What I have said is appli-
cable not to the members of one profession alone.
Reformers of every class and description need to
learn what force there is in sweetness, what might
in meekness, what penetrating power in a spirit
no less gentle than resolute.

Permit me to add to what I have said about
selfish morality, that there is still, under the most
rigid rule of right, room for self-seeking, if it
only take, not even the second, but the third
place. The fitting, the Right, is always to be first
considered. Next, where the Right is not compro-
mised, our second thought is to be given to expe-
diency as regards the good of the community, or
that portion of it with which we are connected
by domestic, neighborly, social, or official relations.
Then, as regards our own well-being, present or

80 UTILITARIANISM AND EXPEDIENCY.

future, it is our right, nay our duty, to avail our-
selves of such advantages, helps, benefits, as we
can make ours with no sacrifice of the absolute
right or of usefulness. This is our duty, not to our-
selves alone; for the better our position, the greater
is our power of usefulness. Anthony Trollope
writes (and baldly as he says it, it is not without
truth), " We know that the more a man earns, the
more useful he is to his fellow-men." The essential
element of usefulness is the mass, the quantity of
character. What a man says or does or gives is
a comparatively small multiplicand, of which what
he is, is the much more significant multiplier, and
the product depends mainly on the multiplier.
Nor can the multiplier be increased by any merely
outward advantage. But the multiplicand may be
thus largely increased; for whatever advantage
one gains gives him added occasions and oppor-
tunities for putting what he is to use for the bene-
fit of those around him. Thus, wealth honestly
obtained and generously used, social position
earned by deserving it, or reputation worthily
won, while it does not of itself make the man
better, enables him to employ his selfhood in more
numerous ways and directions, and for the benefit
of a more extended circle of his fellow-men. I
have known cases in which the increased power of
usefulness was the manifest motive for the increase

ONE'S SELF HIS BEST GIFT. 81

of wealth already abnormally large ; but it was
evident in such instances that the noble, generous,
loving selfhood put into the gifts of these men to
the needy, and to public institutions, made their
benefactions much more efficient for good than if
there had been the gift without the giver. There
is a chilliness in a bequest, or in what is given
for show, or in alms doled out from a reluctant
heart ; but the truly generous man will give him-
self in all that he bestows on his fellow-men, or
on any cause of learning, virtue, or piety.

LECTURE IV.

CONSCIENCE.

My subject to-day is Conscience. 1 would give
as a provisional definition of conscience, — It is
the perception or feeling of right and wrong in
voluntary human acts, whether our own or those
of others. It bears a close analogy to what are
called the bodily senses, and may not improperly
be termed a sense. It has, indeed, no specific
bodily organ ; but the senses, commonly so called,
belong no more to the body than the conscience
does. It is not the eye that sees, or the ear that
hears ; but sights and sounds ordinarily reach the
mind through these loopholes in the body, — yet
not alwa}r8 ; for I think that there can be no
doubt that in somnambulism and other abnormal
states objects are perceived without the interven-
tion of these organs, and we certainly can conceive
of perception independently of them in the disem-
bodied spirit. The mind discriminates between
acts as right or wrong in very much the same way
as that in which it discriminates between objects

82

PROVINCE OF CONSCIENCE. 83

as black or white, by immediate and what may not
unfitly be termed intuitive perception. There is
as much reason for believing the one sense as for
believing the other to be innate. Nay, conscience
seems even a more essential part of human nature
than the bodily senses are. We regard a man
born blind or deaf as none the less a man, entitled
to all the rights and privileges of humanity ; but
in the rare cases in which a person is wholly des-
titute of the moral sense, to whom murder seems
as good an act as almsgiving, no matter what his
mental capacity may be, we regard him as less
than human, as not to be treated as a man, as
more nearly allied to beasts than to his human
kindred.

I have said that conscience takes cognizance of
voluntary human acts; but by a human act I
do not mean a mere movement of the body. It is
on the movements of the mind that conscience
passes judgment, and it often suspends judgment
because it does not appear what the bodily act
means. Were I lecturing in a language with
which you were unfamiliar, and were I to employ
vehement gestures expressive of intense indigna-
tion, you would neither approve nor blame me.
But were I in plain English with such gestures to
denounce some form of imposture or some act of
defiant guilt, your consciences would bear me ap-

84 CONSCIENCE.

proving witness, — condemning, if I were thus
giving utterance to wanton petulance or wounded
vanity. Conscience seems to judge of the out-
ward act, merely because in the vast majority of
cases the same act proceeds from the same or a
similar motive. There is indeed some hypocrisy
in seemingly good acts, — some, but not a great
deal. There never can be much ; if there were, it
would cease to deceive. Counterfeits can obtain
currency only when they are issued in very small
proportion to the genuine coin.

Is conscience an active principle? Not in itself
or of necessity. It is the same feeling that judges
of the moral conduct of others and of our own.
But in our own case it prompts to action in a
way analogous to the way in whigh the bodily
senses prompt to action. Sight is not an ac-
tive power. We see unnumbered things that sug-
gest no action. Yet nine-tenths of our acts are
prompted wholly or in >part by what we see.
Hearing is not an active power. We hear a great
many things without doing any thing about them.
But a great deal of what we hear leads to specific
action. Conscience, 'in like manner, passes judg-
ment on what we read and learn of events that
transpired a thousand years ago, and on what is
going on now in the other hemisphere ; yet it
prompts no action about these things : but when

CONSCIENCE, INFALLIBLE. 85

there is a moral choice to be made, conscience
shows us what choice should be made. It is with
conscience as with the sense of sight. I am walk-
ing to this hall, I will suppose, from some spot out
of town. I must plant my next footstep some-
where. Where shall I plant it? My eyes tell
me, — not in that mud-hole, — not on the railway
track, with an approaching train, — not in the
middle of the street where I may be run over,
but on the clean, safe sidewalk. I am on my life-
way. I cannot stop. Somehow or other there are
next steps to be taken. Conscience shows me the
bearing of the several steps which I may take.
This step is unfitting, and therefore wrong, be-
cause it will soil the purity that belongs to an im-
mortal child of God ; this, because it is unsuited
to my condition and circumstances ; this, because
it interferes witli another's rights ; while there yet
remains a step which is fitting so far as I am con-
cerned, and violates no known fitness as regards
any other being or object.

We next ask, Is conscience always to be relied
on ? Is it never liable to be deceived ? I answer,
It is always to be relied on, and always liable to
be deceived. Its judgment is always correct with
reference to our knowledge of the case in hand,
and is therefore our only accessible rule of action ;
but we can never be certain that we have full

86 CONSCIENCE.

knowledge of the case, and thus our right may be
wrong by a perfect standard. Conscience is like a
judge too wise and learned to make any mistake
as to the law, but who may have the case before
him imperfectly or falsely represented by perjured
or incompetent witnesses, and may thus give a
-decision right. in law, but wrong with reference
to the actual facts of the case. I might take- as
an illustrative instance one" which we have consid-
ered in another connection, negro slavery. As to
slavery, both parties had equally conscientious
men in their ranks, and there was relative right
on both sides. Neither party maintained that be-
ings who were equals before God could rightfully
enslave one another. Neither party denied that
it was right to enslave beings of an inferior order,
still more, if they were doomed to slavery by a
special curse of God. Southern divines used to
preach, and the Southern people undoubtedly be-
lieved, that the negroes were of an essentially infe-
rior race; that God had cursed them through Noah,
though Noah was drunk when he pronounced the
curse ; and that all the posterity of his son Ham
were by and in that curse divinely doomed to per-
petual slavery. If I believed this, I would as
readily own a negro as a horse. The abolitionists
believed negroes to be men, with all the rights of
men, our potential equals, and, if now inferior,

EDUCATION OF CONSCIENCE. 87

rendered so by the temporal condition of things
that made negro slavery possible. We now have
no doubt that their relative right was in close ac-
cordance with the absolute right. Their only*
error was that they were slow to believe that
there could be pro-slavery men fully as true to
conscience as they were.

Can conscience be educated ? Yes ; but not in
the sense in which the education of conscience is
commonly spoken of, — not by the increase of
knowledge, but by the careful and faithful use of
conscience itself. If Satan is the real personage
that he is in the popular theology, he has a knowl-
edge of right and wrong hardly less profound than
that of God himself, but not therefore an educated
conscience ; while the most ignorant person living,
if in every daily concern he asks what he ought to
do, and never fails to actualize the answer, has as
well educated a conscience as if he were equally
sage and saint. It is with conscience as with
sight. A man may travel all over the world and
see all its wonders, and yet his vision may be no
more keen or accurate than when he started ;
while the watchmaker, who hardly looks at any
thing but a watch, yet trains himself to detect
therein the slightest misplacing of a pivot or the
minutest particle of dust, has his vision rendered
by exercise to the last degree keen and true.

88 CONSCIENCE.

We need both kinds of education. We need as
large an acquaintance as we can attain with the
nature of things, that we may know their fit-
nesses ; but our consciences are not thereby edu-
cated, nor are we morally any the better. We
need, still more, the habit of looking with the
watchmaker's practised and penetrating vision at
the right and wrong in every thing that apper-
tains to our conduct, and of always embodying in
action what we perceive to be right. Thus only
can we truly educate conscience.

An important discrimination ought here to be
made. What is called the moral improvement of
society is not so much a growth in conscientious-
ness as the inevitable increase of such knowledge
of moral fitnesses as belongs equally to bad men
as to good men, and of which Satan himself might
be the master. I do not believe that we in gen-
eral have as highly trained consciences as the New-
England Puritans had two hundred years ago,
and yet they did from their ignorance of the
nature of things, always under the urgency of an
exacting conscience, some things which we know
to have been very wrong, and other things which
we now see to have been very foolish.

I have said that I regard conscience as innate,
and, if so, as universal. But it is maintained by
not a few writers on moral science, that conscience

CANNIBALISM. 89

is entirely the result of culture ; and in support
of this view, it is alleged that there are savage
tribes that perform acts which it is impossible that
conscience should sanction, even at the lowest
grade at which man can be above the brutes, such
as cannibalism, the murder of infirm parents, the
exposure to certain death of children that are
regarded as superfluous.

There is a mystery about cannibalism. There
is reason to believe that it may have originated in
some superstitious notion about the transfusion
of an enemy's strength or courage into the soul of
the warrior who feeds upon his flesh. There is
some reason, also, for supposing it to have been at
the outset a religious sacrifice, and then a feeding
upon sacrifice. These suppositions do not indeed
make it otherwise than atrocious and revolting to
the last degree ; yet I doubt whether civilized man
is now in a condition to cast reproach upon it.
The day will come, if Christianity be, as I believe
it is, the everlasting gospel, when the nations of
modern Christendom will be classed with the can-
nibal tribes as co-barbarians ; for the bush-fights
between a few scores or hundreds of half-naked
savages, whatever the sequel, can present nothing
so abhorrent to reason or humanity as the slaugh-
ter of hundreds of thousands of men in the late
Franco-Prussian war, in a dispute without merit

90 CONSCIENCE.

and almost without meaning on either side, be-
tween an ambitious statesman and a usurping em-
peror. Yet Prince Bismarck is supposed to have
a conscience, and would claim its enlightenment
by religious faith ; and on the other side we can
hardly believe the Bonaparte family to have been
wholly destitute of the moral faculty, though they
have never made much use of it.

As for the barbarous treatment of old people
and children, I can easily conceive that it may
have had its source in humane feeling. In the
lowest savage state, especially in roving tribes,
with perpetual exposure to the elements, with
dangers from wild beasts and from enemies hardly
less brutal, and with the most precarious supply
of food, life at its best estate must seem hardly
worth living ; it cannot be looked upon as desira-
ble for children, unless of the most robust and vig-
orous constitution and promise ; and it is not
inconceivable that for those who have reached a
helpless senility, the certainty of want and suffer-
ing without any possible relief or offset may have
led to the slaying of aged parents, if that has ever
been practised, — which may be doubted, for there
is much less than assured authenticity in the re-
ports of it that have been transmitted to us.

In the question of the universality of conscience
a low state of morals does not prove that there is

AFRICAN TRIBES. 91

no sense of wrong connected with immoral acts.
In civilized life there are, besides moral principle,
a thousand restraints preventive of crime. Were
not certain tempting forms of immorality sure to
destroy one's social standing, is it certain that all
who now abstain from them would remain innocent
of them? But in savage life there is no privileged
social position which one forfeits by gross immoral-
ity. Theft has been thought very common among
uncivilized races, and there is no doubt that sav-
ages will generally steal whenever they can from
travellers and from ships. But the}r have the
temptation of rare and novel articles of ornament
and use, and they have, too, the disposition common
to almost all nations out of Christendom, ancient
and modern — typified in the double sense of the
Latin hostis — to identify strangers and enemies.
But Mungo Park, writing of a certain African
tribe that stole from him every thing that they
could get hold of, says, " They themselves regard
theft as a crime, and they are not in the habit of
stealing from one another." He at the same time
speaks of certain noble and delicate traits of char-
acter among the lowest of the African races, — of
gratitude for kindness, loyal affection for their
benefactors, and fidelity in keeping and restoring
objects intrusted to their care. He says that he
never, in his many years of sojourn in Africa, wit-

92 CONSCIENCE.

nessed a single instance of hardheartedness in a
woman, or a single breach of motherly kindness
or of filial reverence. Livingstone says substan-
tially the same, and sums up his account of one
of the tribes in which he had witnessed instances
both of heroic virtue and of almost incredible cru-
elty, by saying, "After long observation I have
come to the conclusion that there is in them the
same strange mixture of good and evil that we
find in mankind generally."

The Australians are undoubtedly at a still
greater remove from civilization than even the
rudest African tribes. They have been described
at their worst mainly in the interest and through
the reports of those who would gladly see them
exterminated; but whenever one who cared for
them has given any account of them, they have
been represented as sensitive to moral distinctions
within their very narrow range of knowledge, and
as capable of gratitude and of fidelity.

To recur to a distinction at which T gave a
cursory glance in speaking of the education of
conscience, the phrase " improved condition of
society " which we see and hear used with regard
to the morality of the present time as compared
with the past more or less remote, has two mean-
ings, one of which may be, and, as I fear, is, false.
From my definition of the Right as that which is

THE IMPROVED CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 93

intrinsically fit, society must of necessity be con-
tinually improving in its knowledge of the Right,
and therefore in its practical science of morals.
You cannot name an item of knowledge which
may not have its moral relations or attachments.
There is not an invention, or a product of art, or
a useful or usable commodity, which is not sus-
ceptible in some way of misuse or abuse, and with
reference to which there may not be a crisis in-
volving some grave moral question. One of the
most laborious achievements of legal genius and
science combined has been the application of the
principles of the common law to questions that
are arising in connection with steamboats, rail-
ways, telegraphs, and telephones. In like manner,
the practical moralist has new questions to settle
with regard to every fresh form of industry and
aspect of social life, each having its own peculiar
moral relations, its own specific right and wrong.
Now, an all-knowing age like ours cannot but have
a clear and what seems a full knowledge of right
and wrong; for a knowledge of the relations of
persons and things to one another comprises all of
moral knowledge that there is. An age like ours,
then, may criticise all earlier ages and lower con-
ditions of society as morally deficient, while the
deficiency may be in knowledge alone, and may
be due to no moral cause. But it may be fairly

94 CONSCIENCE.

questioned whether our superior knowledge is
conjoined with a superior quickness and tender-
ness of conscience as regards the contents of that
knowledge, — whether its mechanical and econom-
ical relations are not throwing its morality into
the background, — whether for instance, the pains-
taking and often painful industry with which our
ancestors applied themselves to seek out and ex-
tirpate imaginary crimes, such as witchcraft and
sorcery, does not indicate a higher type of moral
character than the readiness with which we con-
done swindling, bribery, and corruption, when the
perpetrators can break the meshes of the law. I
have no doubt that the whole enlarged field of our
knowledge is to be ultimately conquered and gov-
erned by conscience. But we are now too busy in
taking possession of our new domain to provide
for its government. " First that which is natural,
and afterward that which is spiritual."

I have spoken of the general increase of knowl-
edge as providing materials which equally crave
and direct the activity of conscience, and thus in
the popular, though not in the true, sense of the
terms, contribute to the education of conscience.
In this sense I now ask you to consider the office
of law as an educator. Law has the fitting or
right for its basis. The only object of honest
legislation — and there is little of actual legis-

LAW, AN EDUCATOR. 95

lation or law-making that is not honest, the greater
part of the work of our legislators relating not to
law proper, that is, to rules for the government of
life, but to local and personal interests in which
there is full play for lobbying and intrigue — the
only object of honest legislation is the framing of
portions of the Right into rules to be observed
under penalty for their violation. The laws ex-
press the average knowledge and moral feeling of
the community, not the moral convictions of the
best and most enlightened few ; for what they know
the many do not believe, — not those of persons
of a very low moral grade ; for mediocrity in
morals is less patient of what falls below its own
standard than is that superior excellence, of which
forbearance and hopefulness for what is beneath
itself^ are essential traits. There is in law some-
thing below what ought to be in men's minds.
Its standard is beneath what zealous purists would
have it ; but it is all the better for this. Laws
too nearly perfect would be constantly evaded
and violated, would fall into disesteem, and would
not even need formal repeal to be practically set
aside ; so that the friends of good morals ought
to be as much afraid of too good laws as of bad
laws.

The laws, such as they are, have a most im-
portant educational influence, and they probably

96 CONSCIENCE.

in this way supersede the possibility of a great
deal more of crime and wrong than they prevent
or punish. A great many people, instead of look-
ing for themselves into the nature of human acts,
take precisely the estimate of their moral worth
or demerit that is given them by the laws. They
regard as intrinsically vile and disgraceful the acts
which the law visits with ignominious punish-
ment ; as very much less shameful those that are
punished only by a fine ; and, too often, as not
deserving any severe moral animadversion such
bad acts as the law does not or can not reach.
Children grow up into this moral estimate ; aud
you would find, in our public schools for instance,
that the average boy or girl has very much the
same tariff of moral demerit and shame as that
which would be derived from a superficial knowl-
edge of the law of the land.

In this estimate there have been some marvel-
lous changes within my remembrance. Let me
cite a case in which a grievous wrong in one
direction has lapsed into one of an opposite char-
acter still more grievous. I remember when
imprisonment for debt was the law and the prac-
tice, and it was possible for a man honest, but
unfortunate, to be shut up with the worst of
felons for a month at least, till certain tedious
formalities for his release could be completed, and

DEBT AND BANKRUPTCY. 97

often for many months, or even years, if there
were an alleged flaw in these formalities, or an
alleged but unproved suspicion of concealed prop-
ert}~. In that condition of the law, public opinion
bore very hardly on an insolvent debtor. His
known blamelessness of character in previous
years did not suffice to ward off disesteem and
obloquy. Failures in business were rare, and the
bankrupt was treated with the utmost severity.
Every thing not absolutely necessary was taken
from him, carpets were stripped from his floors,
superfluous beds, blankets, and crockery were
confiscated, and he and his entire family were
obliged almost to sit in ashes, and made to feel the
ban of the whole community, — all this because
its relation to the jail made insolvency disgrace-
ful. Now that legislation is largely in the hands
of the debtor classes, and the law uses no severe
measures to enforce the payment of debts, but on
the other hand gives the bankrupt every facility
for liquidating his debts without paying them,
a bankrupt incurs no reproach, though he makes
not the slightest retrenchment in his expenses,
nor even if he seems as rich after his failure as
before, and a man may hold his position in re-
spectable society when it is perfectly well known
that he never pays a debt which he can postpone
or evade. On this whole matter of pecuniary

98 CONSCIENCE.

obligation the law has created a loose tone of
feeling, and is undoubtedly answerable for many
really callous consciences.

Another subject on which law has done and
is doing an incalculable amount of mischief to the
general conscience, is the sale and use of intoxi-
cating liquors. The brunt of legislation is di-
rected against the sale of such liquors, while a
drunkard does not come anyhow under the cogni-
zance of the law until he has reached the most
squalid condition. The consequence is, that the
moral feeling of the community takes the trend
of the law, and holds the vender of strong drink
as worthy of execration, — the drunkard as an
object of pity, to be cosseted rather than con-
demned, and, if he suspends drinking for a while,
to be wreathed with the aureola of sainthood, and
welcomed as a public teacher on the platform or
in the pulpit. Now, I have no apology to offer,
either for the seller or for the drunkard. But the
drunkard is the principal; the seller, the acces-
sory. Moreover, the drunkard necessitates the
seller. Demand will somehow create a supply,
if not by legal, by illegal means, — if not openly,
still worse, clandestinely. The law, so far as it
makes the business infamous, puts it into worse
and more dangerous hands, but does not and can
not destroy it. What is needed is to attach to

ETHICAL VALUE OF LAW. 99

drunkenness itself the most disgraceful stigma
with which the law can hrand it. Let the law
treat the drunkard with as little mercy as it shows
to the pickpocket, and society will follow the lead
of the law, and put the drunkard under its ban ;
and the aim of parents and householders thence-
forward will be to exclude from their tables, their
houses, and their use, save in the stress of need,
that which might bring "shades of the prison-
house " on their homes, and place their children in
the same category with thieves and vagabonds.

The law also mis-educates conscience in its
attaching greater ignominy to crimes of violence
than to those of lust. I am by no means clear in
the conviction that capital punishment is neces-
sary ; but if it be so, I know not why seduction
should not be thus punished, and so made infamous
in the last degree : and short of hanging, there are
no penalties that would more than express the
righteous indignation with which this whole class
of crimes ought to be regarded, and with which
they will be regarded whenever the average opin-
ion shall bring the law up to its proper standard ;
while till then debauchees, because they can
escape the prison, will still hold their unchal-
lenged place in what calls, but for that very rea-
son miscalls, itself respectable society.

But whatever its shortcomings, the law is of

100 CONSCIENCE.

unspeakable worth in furnishing the consciences
of those who can not or will not think for them-
selves an approximate standard of right. While
it remains stationary, it is raising the mass of the
community toward its own level ; and as fast as it
does this, it is lifting the average opinion and feel-
ing above that level, and thus insuring and effect-
ing its own improvement.

The efficacy of law in giving conscience its
standard may be seen in the case of sins which
from their very nature it cannot reach. Take for
instance such sins as slander and calumny, whether
in conversation which, instead of "grace seasoned
with salt," as St. Paul recommends, is all salt and
no grace, or through the press in such guise as just
to evade prosecution for libel. It is hard to over-
estimate the foulness and vileness of this form of
guilt ; and yet because the law cannot reach it,
one's reputation is not sensibly damaged by it.
The tale-bearer, whose tongue is more poisonous
than the fangs of a rattlesnake, may be a welcome
visitor, and even a favored associate, with persons
who would shrink from the companionship of a
much less dishonest and less harmful offender on
whom the law had laid its hands. The editor,
too, or the newspaper correspondent, whose words
sting like an adder, and who is aware that his
victim's only demerit is that of not belonging to

BORROWED CONSCIENCE. 101

his own party, may be a public favorite, while
guilt of a far less culpable grade, yet punishable
by law, would bring upon him social ostracism.
The very fact that inactive conscience leaves
uncondemned so much which the law cannot
reach is a strong attestation of the educational
power of the law ; while it may well serve as an
admonition against implicit reliance on any stand-
ard other than our own unbiassed sense of fit-
ness and right. It indicates also the direction in
which men need moral enlightenment. There is
no necessity of inveighing against offences on
which the law lays its grasp. If men commit
them, it is with open eyes, and with an entire
willingness to do wrong. The field for moral
teaching is the broad ground that lies between
legal Tightness and faultless excellence, — between
the ethics of the statute-book and the ethics of the
Sermon on the Mount.

Permit me now to show you what conscience is
not ; for it has not a few counterfeits that usurp
its name and cast reproach upon it. It is no un-
common thing for men to think and profess that
they are acting conscientiously when they are
really obeying some fetich of their own making,
which they have enthroned in the place of con-
science.

Thus, it is very common for persons to substi-

102 CONSCIENCE.

tute the conscience of others for their own, and
to call it their own. They go into the street, or
on 'Change, or to the church, or the public meet-
ing, or they resort to the daily press, with the cry,
" Men and brethren, what shall I do ? " and when
they get the answer, they call it the voice of con-
science. Most of the really right-meaning pro-
slavery people in the Northern States before the
war of the Rebellion, consulted instead of their
own consciences a public, national conscience,
largely formed by slaveholders and their inter-
ested abettors; and in every reform-movement a
great part of the opposition comes from those
whose own consciences would be on the right
side, but who have more confidence in the general
voice than in such decisions as they would reach
by their own serious thought. Now, there is so
much that is individual and peculiar in every life,
that He alone who knows the heart, and whose
voice the loyal conscience is, can be a safe coun-
sellor. The testimony of every faithful soul is,
u I have trodden the wine-press alone, and of the
people there was none with me." Nehemiah, next
to Moses the greatest personage in Hebrew his-
tory, who did hardly any thing in which he had
human countenance or sympathy, and who in his
holy and patriotic enterprise gives us as close a
blending of the hero and the saint as we have on

ACTING IN CHARACTER. 103

record, says, "I consulted with myself, and I
rebuked the nobles and the rulers," who seemed
his natural advisers, but whom if he had consulted,
the walls of Jerusalem would never have been
rebuilt.

In the next place, we are very apt to take
strong feeling, especially if it seems justified, for
conscience. Thus, resentment, when we regard it
as righteous, often usurps the office of conscience,
and acts in its name. We think that we "do
well to be angry." Perhaps we are right. But
indignation has for its due objects, not persons,
but deeds ; and when it extends to persons, there
is always room to question its dictates.

We are liable also to let our tastes, our likings,
our prejudices, assume the place of conscience, —
to imagine every act or utterance that is genuine,
honest, sincere, in the common phrase, "in charac-
ter," to be conscientious, though in the particular
concerned our character may be precisely what it
ought not to be. No man was ever more thor-
oughly honest, or acted more entirely " in charac-
ter," than St. Paul when he assisted at the execu-
tion of Stephen, and started on his sanguinary
mission against all the Christians that he could
find. But it is wrong to say that he was conscien-
tious in so doing, nor did he in his subsequent life
justify himself on that ground. Had he looked

104 CONSCIENCE.

deep enough into his own heart, he would have
found there, bearing the Creator's imprint, laws
of truth, justice, and love, against which he was
sinning most atrociously while he thought that he
was doing God service.

In St. Paul's case it was loyalty to Judaism
that took the place of conscience, and there is no
pseudo-conscience to which good men are so apt
to render their allegiance as zeal for their reli-
gious sect or party. The harsh and bitter stress
laid by some religionists on metaphysical dogmas,
by others on posture and millinery, by others, still,
on organization, making kind and brotherly treat-
ment contingent on them, is, I have no doubt,
genuinely sincere and honest, yet not therefore
conscientious ; for it involves the violation of jus-
tice and love, which are the only standard that
conscience recognizes between man and man. I
read not long ago the Life of an eminent dignitary
in the English Church, who evidently thought
himself among the foremost Christians of his
time, but whose conscience, it seemed to me, had
lain from the day of his ordination in a Rip Van
Winkle sleep, and what he called " church princi-
ples " had taken its place. In his correspondence
he never speaks of dissenters without expressions
of contempt, hatred, or both; evangelical members
of his own church he treats with still greater

105

severity, as, not deeming them beneath ridicule,
he blends for them ridicule with hatred and con-
tempt ; with the Romeward-leaning among his own
high-church party he deals more leniently, and yet
still with distrust of their motives and character ;
and he leaves the reader with the impression that
the proportion of really wise and good men among
English Christians is hardly as great as would
have sufficed to save Sodom from destruction. It
is no uncommon thing to find fully as harsh judg-
ments, with less of bitterness it may be, but with
more of supercilious scorn, among persons who
pride themselves on their broad liberality, and
who seem able to tolerate every thing except seri-
ous, definite, and earnest religious convictions.
Such censoriousness in its several forms, however
sincere and honest, has no claim to be considered
as conscientious, its judgments being shaped by
the standard of personal feeling, and not by that
of the fitting and the Right.

Another way in which conscience is liable to be
betrayed is by substituting reasoning for feeling.
A striking instance occurred not man}*- years ago
in the vote of the large majority of the English
bishops in the House of Lords in favor of the
needless and aggressive Afghan war. One of the
sacred college wrote a labored argument in justi-
fication of his conduct and that of his colleagues.

106 CONSCIENCE.

His reasoning was in this wise. Pure Christianity
ought to be maintained in the ascendant in the
East. England is the sole fountain and represen-
tative of pure Christianity. English supremacy
in the East must be maintained, else Christianity
will lose its hold on the Asiatic races. Therefore
this war, which is for supremacy, and especially
to ward off the incursion of Russia and the Greek
Church, should be supported by the votes and
influence of all Christian men. Now, had that
prelate only placed side by side the Afghan war
and the fundamental principles of human brother-
hood which every enlightened Christian must rec-
ognize, he would as soon have recommended a
general massacre of dissenters or agnostics in the
British Empire as have expressed approval of a
war so abhorrent to humane sentiment and unso-
phisticated Christian feeling. I apprehend that we
are all liable, though it may be in less atrocious
forms, to similar sophistry. If a cause or interest
approves itself to conscience as intrinsically
worthy, we are over-prone to adopt or sanction
methods of supporting or advocating it which
conscience would not authorize, especially if such
modes are the most direct, the most practicable,
or seemingly the most efficient.

Let me say in conclusion, A genuine conscience
is a growing conscience, — one that is perpetual] y

GROWTH OF CHARACTER, 107

becoming more prompt, more keen, more tender.
It is in this mainly that the growth of character
consists. But even in good men I apprehend that
the growth of character too often bears a very
close analogy to that of the body. During the
early years of life more food is taken than is neces-
sary to maintain the body in its present state, and
there is a constant increase. But when adult
years have been reached, nutrition no more than
replaces the normal waste of tissue, and growth
ceases. In like mariner, character often appears
to grow, up to a certain point; then there seems
to supervene what I might call the consciousness
of an adult state ; and then growth ceases, though
at a stage far below the measure of perfection
attainable in this world. From that stage, also,
there not infrequently seems to be an unconscious
decline. Indeed, where there is no increase of
moral excellence, there is always danger of de-
crease. Conscience without fresh stimulants is
prone to grow inert, and this the rather as the life
becomes less diversified and more a routine. But
there is always room for growth in the prin-
ciples by which conscience forms its verdicts. In
purity, there may be an ever more lofty and
delicate type, from the cleanness of heart with-
out which no man can gain a glimpse of divine
realities to that heavenly frame of spirit which

108 CONSCIENCE.

is the mirror of God, — in truth, from the mere
absence of falsity to that perfect fairness, candor,
integrity of thought, which more and more ex-
cludes all coloring of prejudice, and has pure,
white light for its only medium of vision, — in
love, from that lower yet essential form which
works and wills no ill to its neighbor to that dis-
fusive philanthropy which holds every human
interest dear, and emulates Him of whom the most
divine trait on record is, that He "went about
doing good." By thus cultivating our moral
nature and capacity, we are constantly bringing
conscience into ever more entire supremacy. Its
judgments, as I have said, are always true ; but at
the lower stages of moral progress we are over-
prone to substitute other standards for the Right,
as clearly perceived and felt by our own minds and
hearts. With every stage of progress onward
and upward, conscience becomes more and more
the sole and sovereign arbiter, not of word and
deed alone, but primarily of thought and feeling,
whence word and deed must flow.

LECTURE V.

VIRTUE AND THE VIRTUES.

Virtue literally means manliness. It is de-
rived from the Latin vir, which differs from homo,
the latter denoting man as distinguished from
woman ; the former implying man with the char-
acteristics of mind and soul that ought to belong
to him. There is the same difference in the Greek
between avrjp and avOpw-n-os ; and avrjp, the old gram-
marians say, is closely allied to *Aprjs, the god of
war, from whose name is derived aperrj, the Greek
synonyme of the Latin virtus. The word virtus
has passed into the languages of Southern Europe
derived from the Latin, and, probably through the
Norman-French route, into the English. In each
language it denotes the attributes that are re-
garded as the most manly. There is one seeming
exception, which yet is no exception. In the Ital-
ian, virtu is employed to denote taste; and though
virtuoso may mean a virtuous man, it oftener des-
ignates a man of taste. In this latter sense we
have borrowed the word, as virtu also, objects of

109

110 VIRTUE AND THE VIRTUES.

virtu being sometimes spoken of. Words not
only tell history, but there are many words that
hold a deeper history than they can tell, being
themselves history. There was a time when polit-
ical and pontifical oppression had crushed out of
the heart of the Italian people all the elements
of manliness, and left refined and exquisite artisti-
cal taste as the only attribute on which they could
base any feeling of self-respect ; while in this
they were as far in advance of the other civilized
nations as they were behind them in all the hardier
elements of character. This, then, became their
manhood, till they had strength to throw off their
double yoke ; and its record remains indelible in
their language.

Virtus, that is, virtue, in the earlier time,
meant courage in war. As philosophy gradually
made men understand and feel the room and de-
mand for prowess in the warfare within, in the
conflict with appetite and passion, in the unceas-
ing contest between the flesh and the spirit, the
word took on a moral signification. We accord-
ingly find it used in both senses in the Roman
classics, and it is sometimes difficult to determine
in which sense it is used. In the English lan-
guage, virtue, so far as I can trace it back, has
always had a moral signification when applied
to men, though it means force or efficacy when

VIRTUE, ONE IN ITS ESSENCE. Ill

applied to things, as "the virtue of this medi-
cine," or "by virtue of that recommendation."
Early English writers were wont to use the word
with special reference to militant goodness, — to
the strength of the inner man in the conflict with
evil. It has of late, however, been employed to
denote moral goodness, without reference to the
trials encountered, the obstacles surmounted, or
the difficulties overcome. Yet we do not use the
word where wrong-doing is impossible. We call
a little child, not virtuous, but innocent. We do
not call God virtuous; yet why should we not?
If he is omnipotent, evil is within his power: he
freely chooses the right, and it is on that ground
alone that we call him good, just, and holy, — on
no other ground can we affirm moral attributes of
him. In his own eternally righteous will he is
himself the supreme exemplar of virtue for the
whole moral universe, thus enabling men in their
right-doing to be, in St. Paul's intensely signifi-
cant words, " followers of God as dear children."
The best definition of virtue, in the present use of
the term, is conduct in conformity with the right,
or, more briefly, Tightness, or righteousness.

Rightness is one as to intent and purpose.
There may be degrees of virtue, various types of
virtue, as men differ in capacity or proclivity, or
as they have been for a longer or a shorter time in

112 VIRTUE AND TEE VIRTUES.

the practice of virtue. There are too, undoubtedly,
persons of blameless lives who are not virtuous,
and persons of very faulty lives who are virtuous.
But every person either is or is not virtuous ; that
is, has or has not the predominant, prevailing,
pervading intention or purpose to conform his
conduct to the right. There is profound ethical
truth in St. James's sajdng, " Whosoever shall
keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point,
is guilty of all ; " that is, if a man voluntarily
yields to temptation at one point, voluntarily re-
leases himself from one duty or class of duties,
without any doubt that it is morally incumbent
upon him, because his vicious inclinations tend
in that direction, he shows as much contempt
for the Right as such, as unright, as unvirtuous, a
frame of mind and soul, as if he sinned along the
whole line of the commandments. Moreover, he
makes it certain, that, whenever equally strong
temptations present themselves in any other direc-
tion, he will yield to them also. Thus, a man will-
ingly vicious in any one direction cannot be trusted
at any point. The debauchee may seem honest,
yet I should not dare to leave a large sum of
money with him over night. The man who cheats
me may seem chaste or temperate, yet it will re-
quire no great stress of temptation to make him
as vile as he is dishonest.

THE DIVISION OF VIRTUE. 113

Virtue, then, is one, and, so far as motive and
principle are concerned, it is indivisible. But in
practice it is divisible, and the occasions for its
exercise must determine how it shall be divided
1? he Right toward God and toward man, toward a
father and toward an enemy, with reference to
inevitable calamity and with reference to strong
drink, is one and the same right, but with widely
different manifestations. " Cardinal virtues " is an
old term in ethics, — cardinal, from cardo, a hinge,
— the essential virtues, those on which the charac-
ter hinges, or turns. Thus, honesty must be either
the whole or a part of a cardinal virtue, as with-
out it one cannot be a virtuous man ; while gentle-
ness, precious and lovely as it is, is not a cardinal
virtue, there having been virtuous and even
saintly men who were ungentle.

Different writers vary greatly in their lists of
cardinal virtues, and I might fill the hour with an
enumeration of their respective lists and the rea-
sons for them. But they are, most of them, to me
unsatisfying, because they are not exhaustive.
We want a division of virtue which shall include
all the essential forms of goodness, — a list of the
virtues all of which shall be found" in a really good
character, and the absence of any one of which
would be incompatible with a virtuous character.
Of coarse, under whatever division we make, there

114 VIRTUE AND THE VIRTUES.

must be subdivisions. Let us now see if we can-
not map out the whole ground of the Right.

In the first place, there is a right as regards our-
selves, body, mind, and soul. We may take for
this the name of prudence, which is broad enough
to include all the care that we ought to take of
ourselves, and all that we ought to do for our-
selves. There is also a right with regard to our
fellow-beings, God, man, and even beings of races
inferior to our own. This we may term justice ;
for justice implies the rendering to others their
due, what we owe them, and we owe to God piety
and its observances, — we owe to man charity and
kindness no less than veracity and honesty. Then,
as to outward events and impersonal objects, a
part of these are beyond our control. What we
need with reference to events and objects of this
class is, that we keep our own manhood uncor-
rupted by prosperity, unscathed by adversity.
This we may call fortitude, which literally means
strength, and is most appropriately applied to
the inward might by which a man holds his own
against the outside world, whether in resisting the
enervating influence of wealth, success, or human
favor, in withstanding peril, in submitting to dis-
appointment, or in enduring loss, pain, or grief.
Then, finally, there are outward objects which are
under our control, and our dealing with which

THE CARDINAL VIRTUES. 115

makes a large part of our lives. As to these
objects, duty suggests such questions as, When ?
Where? How? How much? Time, place, man-
ner, and measure may all be comprehended under
the head of order.

Prudence, justice, fortitude, and order, thus
defined, make up the entire duty of man, — the
entire right. They are all cardinal virtues, nor
can either exist without the others. No man can
be true to himself, without piety, justice, and kind-
ness, without the ability to hold his own against
the outside world, or without making a fitting
disposal and use of the objects under his com-
mand. No one can do his duty to God or man
who does not make the most of himself that he
can make, who suffers either prosperity or adver-
sity to throw him off his balance, or who misuses
the objects of use and enjoyment. No man can
meet the events and changes of life as he ought,
without due self-culture, without the consciousness
of right relations toward God and man, or without
the habits of self-command that are implied in the
virtue of order. At the same time, order, with
the numerous sub-virtues which it includes, can
hardly be expected of one who is not self-gov-
erned, who has not a due sense of the rights of
others, or who is liable to be unmanned by either
prosperous or adverse fortune. We thus see how

116 VIRTUE AND THE VIRTUES.

the cardinal virtues hinge into one another, and
mutually sustain and subsidize one another, each
rendering every other easy of cultivation and
practice. Let us now consider these virtues sep-
arately.

We first have prudence, or duty, that is, what
is due, to one's self. How can I owe myself any
thing which I have not a right to remit? Surely
I, the creditor, can absolve me, the debtor, from
any debt. If I see fit to stint myself in mental or
moral culture, and to lead a lazy, self-indulgent
life, so long as I do no harm to others, whose con-
cern is it? May I not do what I will with my
own? I should not know how to answer these
questions on any other ground than that of intrin-
sic fitness as the basis of right. But on this
ground we may, in the first place, consider our
several native powers, faculties, capacities, and
affections as objects which have their respective
fitnesses. Every property of my nature is a fit-
ness. Indeed, this is what the word property
means, — that which is appropriate, or fit for. My
several powers of body are fitted for specific uses,
either to myself or to my fellow-beings, and by ex-
cess or neglect or abuse with regard to any one
of them I thwart this fitness, — I do what is anal-
ogous to my treating carelessly, or employing for
mean purposes, implements or utensils of the

SELF-CULTURE. 117

finest temper or the most costly material. Unfit-
ting tells the whole story as to all bodily wrong-
doing; and by the fitting use of every member,
appetite, and faculty of the body we incarnate in
this mortal flesh the full meaning of St. Paul, who
used no words without meaning, when he bids his
readers glorify God with their bodies, and present
their bodies a living sacrifice, and reminds them
that their bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit.

In like manner every mental faculty is fitted
for some specific use, in our own culture or in our
life-work. The faculty which we cramp, or starve,
or gorge, or overwork, fails of its fitting uses.
The mind can be kept in working order only by
the symmetrical and proportionate exercise of all
its powers. Excess in any one of them may be
fully as harmful as under-culture. Take the
memory, for instance. Its office is to treasure up
and to keep within reach materials on which the
reasoning and the reproductive powers may work.
He who is too lazy to memorize principles, general
laws, salient facts, the elements of science and of
knowledge, may condemn the more active powers
of the mind, if they work at all, to work as a mill
might with nothing to grind; and we certainly
have read, or have refused to read, writers, and
have heard preachers and lecturers, who ground
very well, while the vessels into which the meal

118 VIRTUE AND THE VIRTUES.

or flour should have fallen were in chronic emp-
tiness. The words were well chosen and beau-
tiful, if they had only meant any thing. On the
other hand, I have known men who so over-
loaded the memory that the other powers had
ceased to work. They could quote, but had lost
the capacity of reasoning. Such men have re-
minded me of the little coasting-vessels that in
the Atlantic States used to carry freight before
the time of railways. I have seen these vessels
not only with holds crammed full, but with loose
freight lying round on the deck, on the cabin-
stairs, in the gangwa}rs, and wherever foot could
want to tread, so that it was a mystery to me how
the sailors could so thread their way about as to
work the vessel. This example may illustrate the
necessity of giving to every power of the mind
its proportionate culture and exercise, so that each
may fully do its fitting work.

The affections also have their fitting objects.
This is true even of what are called the malevo-
lent affections, which are malevolent only when
cherished to excess and misdirected, and much
more, of the benevolent affections, one or another
of which is adapted to keep us in our fit relation
toward every being in the universe.

These powers, all cultivated as so many proper-
ties or fitnesses, each applied and kept to the

JUSTICE. 119

work for which it is fitted, make up a selfhood,
human, yet in the image of the divine, mortal, yet
bearing the signature of immortality.

Then, too, my will-power enables me to regard
and treat objectively this aggregate selfhood.
My selfhood as a whole has its fitnesses, — its re-
lations, which are themselves full of fitnesses, to
God, to my family, to my friends, to the commu-
nity, to mankind. Unless I do the best that I can
for myself, and make the most that I can of my-
self, I forfeit my fitness for and in some or all of
these relations. Considering myself as a part of
the machinery of the universe — no matter how
large or small a part I am destined to be, whether
a driving-wheel or a mere pivot — I am essential
to and in my place (for even the least members
are necessary), and it is my duty to keep myself,
body, mind, and soul, in fit working order. Thus
we see that our first cardinal virtue comprehends
every form of self-care, self-government, and self-
culture. All this the truly prudent man must do
for himself.

It is only he who is thus prudent in the broad-
est sense of the word, that is fully prepared to
actualize the second of the cardinal virtues, jus-
tice, which is the rendering of their due to all
beings in the universe, — to God and to all his
children and creatures. He who believes in God

120 VIRTUE AND THE VIRTUES.

cannot but regard him, not only as the ultimate
Cause, but as in plan and purpose the Giver of
whatever life has of enjoyment, of happiness, of
blessedness. Much of it, indeed, comes through
intermediate agencies, yet they can be only of his
appointment. We can hardly call love and grati-
tude duties ; for the affections are not directly
under our command. But prolonged and reiter-
ated thought on the relation in which God's bene-
factions place us to him is so manifestly our duty,
that the opposite would be in the last degree un-
fitting; and there can be no doubt that such
thought will awaken profound feeling, will spon-
taneously rise in thanksgiving, and make itself
permanent in love. The obligation which thus
lays claim upon our thought, and through thought
on feeling, is intensified by God's manifestation in
and revelation through Jesus Christ, inasmuch as
through him we are endowed with the power to
perfect this earthly life after a type which only
the example of a divine humanity could fitly
frame, and only an assured hope of immortality
could energize. Our relation to God, I hardly
need say, implies the obligation of ascertaining
his will for us to the best of our possible knowl-
edge, and actualizing it to the best of our ability.
As to the relations of the family, they contain
in themselves their respective laws and measures

DIVORCE IN ROME. 121

of fitness and obligation, and I need not enlarge
upon them. Yet under this head there is one sub-
ject on which, as I think, public feeling in our
country is retrograde and dangerous. I refer to
the growing facility of divorce. Manifestly the
chief office of the family is the care, nurture, and
education of children ; and it is absolutely cer-
tain that under any other social organism, this
great interest of each successive generation must
suffer detriment. The father and the mother are
both needed for this office. Those bereaved of
both parents are looked upon with universal com-
miseration, and the loss of either can be in some
measure supplied only by the capacity and willing-
ness of the surviving parent to perform in very
large part double duty. It is an office which can
be fitly performed only when it is a labor of love,
which it may, indeed, be with step-parents, but
only when there are no associations with that rela-
tion to make it offensive or odious. The successor
of a deceased wife or husband may be specially
chosen for the children's sake, or may for love of
the parent grow into love for the children. But
not so the husband or wife who replaces the
divorced parent. The children are regarded with
aversion, as tokens and reminders of a relation to
be as far as possible forgotten or ignored.

In the best days of ancient Rome, divorce was

122 VIRTUE AND THE VIRTUES.

hardly known. The subsequent freedom of di-
vorce, while in part the effect, was still more
a cumulative and accelerating cause, of the moral
corruption that made Clodius and Catiline, Cali-
gula and Nero, possible. The term noverca, step-
mother, came to be regarded as a name of reproach,
and suggestive of neglect, cruelty, poisoning ; and
even now, so prone are we to retain obsolete
meanings of words, the adjective " step-motherly "
is seldom used in other than a bad sense. But
such associations are due solely to the fact that
the Roman step-mother almost always succeeded
a divorced mother, whom she had superseded by
her intrigues, and whose children were to her
offensive and hateful. The consequence was,
that in later Roman history we no longer read of
Cornelias showing their children as their jewels,
but only of children educated almost wholly by
slaves, who, though often more intelligent than
their masters, had like vices, only of a coarser
type.

The plea currently urged for divorce is incom-
patibility of temper; but the very possibility of
severing the connection is undoubtedly the most
frequent cause of the genuineness and urgency of
this plea. The incompatibility, perhaps, exists at
the outset in the majority of cases, and in none
more than where mutual love is the strongest. If

EVILS OF DIVORCE. 123

compatibility were the ground of choice, which it
seldom is, the acquaintance before marriage can
hardly ever be intimate enough to give assurance
on this point. But if two persons of good char-
acter love each other well enough to marry, and
expect to live together always, the process of mu-
tual accommodation, nay, of assimilation, goes on
rapidly, and in nineteen cases out of twenty, before
there is time for the growth of mutual dissatis-
faction, they will attain to so entire harmony in
tastes, dispositions, and habits, that they will even
outgrow the remembrance of such divergence as
there once was. On the other hand, the possi-
bility of parting will be as a hammer on a wedge,
constantly widening any discrepancy that there
may be in taste or temper, till reconciliation is no
longer possible. In France, where divdce is dif-
ficult, with those who have not broken with the
Church impossible save for the gravest cause, and
with all infrequent, there is probably more of
domestic harmony, happiness, and mutual help-
fulness in the respectable middle classes than
anywhere else in the civilized world.

But in this matter I would plead mainly for the
children ; and in domestic life there is nothing
more atrociously unfitting or glaringly un right
than that children should be bereaved of their
parents, except by the providence of God, or by

124 VIRTUE AND THE VIRTUES.

such gross criminality as ought to put any parent
out of office.

Under the head of justice come, of course,
veracity and honesty. Veracity must be defended,
as I said in a former lecture, not on the ground of
expediency, which would leave so many openings
for falsehood that truth-telling would become only
a contingent, not an absolute, duty ; but there is an
intrinsic fitness in the correspondence of what one
says, or writes, or in any way intimates, with
things as they actually are. The obligation of
uniform and unfailing veracity is impaired in the
general mind by oaths, which create two classes
of assertions, assign to what is sanctioned by a
special appeal to God the sacredness which fit-
tingly belongs to all affirmations and promises,
and thus trains men to imagine that there is a
lower degree of binding force where the solem-
nity of an oath is wanting. There can be no
doubt that false testimony in a court of justice
ought to be punished with unsparing severity ;
but it is the opinion of not a few of our wisest
jurists, and those of the largest experience, that
the interest of truth and justice would be better
served were credence given to testimony on the
ground of the witness's character rather than on
that of his oath.

The duty of honesty cannot need special expo-

BENEFICENCE. 125

sition. But though it be beyond the province of
a scientific lecture, I will give in passing a word
of counsel, which business men may think super-
fluous, but which probably many persons not in
the habit of keeping accounts, and certainly many
in my profession, need. I have known several,
I can almost say, in my long life, many, instances
in which persons whom I believe to have been
honest as the day have incurred blame, sometimes
suspicion, by carelessness in their accounts of trust-
funds, charity-funds, and the like. As for clergy-
men, if one becomes unpopular, and is vulnerable
at this point, he is sure to be attacked. Now,
whether a man keeps his personal accounts more
or less accurately, or not at all, is his own affair ;
but for every cent of money that is not his own,
he ought to keep, and to be able to show, as fair
an account as a trained book-keeper could exhibit.
Beneficence is a part of justice. The Hebrew
Psalmist understood this when he wrote, " The
righteous showeth mercy, and giveth." Other-
wise he would not be righteous. The needy, dis-
tressed, and helpless are as truly our creditors in
the sight of God as is the man who has our note of
hand. But it is not mere alms that constitute
beneficence. They are often given to get rid of
an applicant, or to preclude an uneasy feeling in
case of refusal. Such gifts, though they may

126 VIRTUE AND THE VIRTUES.

warm and feed the body, freeze and starve the
soul, dispirit the receiver, and, when continued,
permanently pauperize him. Nor is this the worst
of it : for pauperism is hereditary ; and, as I said
in a former lecture, there are old towns in which
it has descended to a later than the third or fourth
generation. Public alms have always a depress-
ing and debasing influence. It is commonly said
that the poor are ungrateful for what is by a
strange misnomer called public charity. I have
no doubt that they are so ; if not, they ought to
be ; for there is no heart in such enforced gifts,
grudged as they are by the givers. It is only kind-
ness, that is, a recognition of one's kind, a manifes-
tation of kindred, that wins gratitude, and only
the charity with which the heart goes and in
which the heart shows itself, that can be of any
enduring value. The Hebrew prophet understood
this when he added to his description of alms-
doing, "That thou hide not thyself from thine
own flesh." This was the way of Jesus Christ.
He did not stand afar off, and utter the healing
word, — he touched the leper, loathsome as he
was ; and I know of nothing that at the present
moment gives such assurance that his spirit is not
utterly whelmed by the rampant earth-spirits of
our time as the lar^e number of refined and deli-
cate women from affluent homes, who all over

FORTITUDE. 127

Christendom are devoting themselves to the lowli-
est offices of charity, and shrink no more than did
their Master from the touch of disease and suffer-
ing in their direst forms.

It must be borne in mind that the duty of bene-
ficence is not limited as to its objects to our own
race, but extends to all forms of sentient being, to
every living thing that can enjoy or suffer. "The
whole creation groans and travails" for redemption
from man's abused lordship over this lower world,
from his wanton indifference to suffering, from his
selfish pleasure pursued at the cost of life which
is of right no more his to take away than it is his
to give. Nor can I think it without meaning that
in the prophetic pictures of a regenerated world
man's humbler co-tenants always bear their part
in the universal peace and gladness. Still more,
while in these same pictures all the trees of the
wood rejoice, the desert blossoms, and sheaves of
grain ripen upon the mountain-top, I cannot but
read in them a stern rebuke of the coarse Vandal-
ism which can deface and destroy to no profit
those forms of life in tree, branch, leaf, and flower,
though unconscious, still sentient, that seem to
woo the kind forbearance with which their grace
and beauty are in such sweet accord.

The third of the cardinal virtues, fortitude, con-
cerns those outward objects and events which are

128 VIRTUE AND THE VIRTUES.

not under our own control. To use the world
and not abuse it, would perhaps be the best sum-
mary of what this duty requires. There is no
condition of things which may not be tributary to
our growth in the quantity of being, in mind and
soul ; there is none which may not harm us ; and
the alternative lies within our own choice. Pros-
perity, never unwelcome, is perhaps more perilous
than adversity ; and when it does not make a man
better, it is sure to make him worse. What one
needs is to keep his external condition outside of
him, instead of making it a part of himself. The
man of large wealth whose perpetual self con-
sciousness is that of a rich man as contradistin-
guished from those who are not rich, has but
a mean, poor spirit. On the other hand, he whose
self-consciousness is that of a man having outside
of himself large ability to be generous and helpful,
but not therefore any more of a man, maintains
the separation which it is fit for a human soul to
maintain from its outward belongings and hav-
ings, and he makes of himself more of a man, not
by having wealth, but by so using it as to have
less of it.

Among adverse outward circumstances, or rath-
er among those commonly so regarded, are obsta-
cles in the way of our plans and our endeavors.
They are adverse if we make them so, not other-

COURAGE. 129

wise. If we let them stop our way, or go out of
our way to avoid them, or meanly crawl round
them, they retard, and hinder, and dishearten us.
But obstacle is a figurative word that is full of
meaning, and so is surmount, the verb which we are
wont to apply to it. An obstacle is a stumbling-
block, and to surmount it is to mount upon it, and
thus to rise into a clearer air, with a vigor made
elastic by climbing. It has been no uncommon
thing for a man to look back upon the obstacles
that he has surmounted as the most efficient fac-
tors of his character and of his success in life.
This is the case with almost all of those who are
termed self-made men. Obstacles have borne a
very large part in the making of them.

Then, there are perils to be encountered on our
lifeway ; and these must be met, not with the reck-
less bravery called physical courage, which is the
result of animal spirits, not of virtue, but with
the profound and ever-active feeling that no cause
of alarm, not even death itself, can impair the
soul's true life. There is, too, a moral courage,
which physically brave men have often lacked;
for men have often thrown away their lives be-
cause they were afraid to do right. Thus, among
those who have fallen in duels, there have been
not a few who have regarded duelling as morally
wrong, but who dared not to face the shame of

130 VIRTUE AND THE VIRTUES.

refusing a challenge. At transition-epochs in po-
litical life, at times of religious persecution, and in
the progress of great moral reforms, men have
often suffered worse than death, in the sacrifice of
a good name on earth for a "name written in
heaven," in the desertion of friends, in the scorn
and hatred of those whose esteem they would
have most prized, and not infrequently in making
enemies in their own families.

Then, again, there are disappointments which
sometimes involve a change of the entire life way,
or the failure of plans reaching very far .on into
the future. Here we need to feel that the life,
that is, the inward life, is the one momentous inter-
est, and that its way, the way to its consumma-
tion, is a matter of entirely secondary concern,
inasmuch as the life can always light and smooth
and gladden the way.

There is also the demand for patience under
sickness, infirmity, suffering, privation, bereave-
ment,— burdens, not infrequently, from which
there is no possible relief in this world. The
inner life, as we have all seen, may be made not
only serene, but radiantly happy, under the most
adverse outward conditions, and there is often
under their pressure a growth of character so
rapid as to indicate their special adaptation to the
culture of the highest spiritual graces. In many

ORDER. 131

years of experience in ministering to the afflicted,
a service in which I have often been conscious of
receiving in mind and heart much more than I
could give, I have found patience sustained, first,
by faith, confirmed by experience, in the benefi-
cent design of an afflictive Providence ; secondly,
by the example of Him who, as the Scriptures
say, was "made perfect through sufferings;" and
thirdly, by an assured hope of immortality, so that
one co.uld look beyond earthly endurance to the
full enjoyment of its revenue where there will be
no grief or pain.

The fourth cardinal virtue, order, embraces a
large portion of the conduct of daily life. It
comprehends the fit division of time. A vast
deal of time is wasted from not being properly
laid out. He who is irregular in his industry is
often at a loss what to do next, and forfeits also
the unconscious preparation in thought and feel-
ing which one can hardly fail to make for what he
knows that he is going to do. Procrastination is,
of course, to be shunned ; and it would be super-
fluous to lay stress on the trite rule, " Never put
off till to-morrow what ought to be done to-day."
But I attach almost equal importance to a rule by
no means trite, " Never do to-day the work that
belongs to the morrow." The work done too soon
is apt to be hurried, to lack due preparation, and

132 VIRTUE AND TUE VIRTUES.

to put what belongs to the passing day. out of
place.

Punctuality in one's engagements is to be re-
garded as an essential part of honesty. What
right have I to steal other men's time that is often
worth more than money, which would not permit
me to steal their money too ? Yet having myself
been trained and accustomed to exactness in keep-
ing appointments, I have been restrained only by
my respect for rhythm from substituting punctual-
ity for the word which Young employs in that so
often quoted verse, " Procrastination is the thief

Of time."

Order in place helps order in time ; for he who
does not put things where they ought to be, wastes
time in endeavoring to find them. Order in place,
too, has a deeper moral significance and value.
It is essential to neatness, in person, and in the
apartments where one works or lives; and in the
absence of neatness, there can be no attractive
power. The unneat home repels its inmates; and
many a dangerous place of resort owes its throngs
of customers to the slatternliness which super-
sedes the quiet and comfort that befit the domes-
tic hearth, and in which, if one sought repose, he
would be, to borrow a scriptural figure, like him
" that lieth on the top of a mast."

Under the head of order comes the question,

TEMPERANCE. 133

How much ? which is to be asked especially with
regard to every thing appertaining to the indul-
gence of the appetites and the festive side of life.
With reference to all these things, the question is
between excess, temperance, and abstinence. I am
speaking now, not particularly of strong drink,
but, in general, of all objects of desire and modes
of enjoyment. As to what is injurious in itself,
or necessarily of bad example, there can be no
question that abstinence is a duty, and it is on one
or the other of these grounds that rests such obli-
gation as there may be to shun entirely the use of
distilled or fermented liquors. Whether wine
comes under this category, it will be time enough
to say when we have wine to dispute about. In
this country we have little pure wine in our mar-
ket, even from California. A very large pro-
portion of what is offered for sale as wine is of
home manufacture ; and much of the rest is so
adulterated that the vine, were it self-conscious,
would never recognize its own pretended prod-
uct. But with regard to objects of desire in
general, luxuries, amusements, recreations, I need
not condemn excess, — no one pleads for it ;
but I will say that excess in food, though less
discreditable, is hardly less blameworthy, than
excess in drink, nor yet less injurious, though
it is stupefying rather than maddening, and is,

134 VIRTUE AND THE VIRTUES.

of course, less dangerous to the peace of the com-
munity.

Abstinence, on the other hand, has nothing to
commend it. It grew from the Oriental dualism,
according to which Satan made men's bodies and
the outward world, while God made the soul ; and
Satan therefore was most effectually defied and af-
fronted by abstinence. Hence the origin of fast-
ing as a religious observance. The Jews had no
fasts till they learned to fast religiously in Baby-
lon. Their law has no fast-days. Jesus Christ
evidently thought very little of fasting, and we
have no tokens of the practice in the primitive
Church. The Christian Lent was at the outset a
dietetic practice. The principal animal food in
the East was obtained from the young of domestic
beasts ; and Lent came at a time when they were
too immature for use, while the spring vegetables
were in their prime of succulence and flavor. In
our climate it comes too early. For all things not
bad in themselves, or of bad example, temperance,
not abstinence, should be the rule. Were the
necessaries of life alone used, half the world
would be idle. It is by the manufacture and sale
of superfluities that the majority of mankind sup-
ply the needs and comforts of daily life. Taste
and refinement would perish were abstinence the
rule. They are educated and satisfied almost

GOOD MANNERS. 135

wholly by luxuries, gratifications, and amuse-
ments which a rigid ascetic would spurn. More-
over, there must always be in every community
the young and the gay, who cannot be bound by
any rule of abstinence, but who by wise counsel
and example may in their recreations be guided in
choice, and restrained in measure, if those of ma-
turer wisdom and ripe moral discernment will
show and lead the way. The less of asceticism
there is among the older and more serious mem-
bers of a community, the less tendency is there to
excess and dissipation on the part of those who
might be easily tempted to evil.

I ought to add, though in the fewest words pos-
sible, that under the head of order, and under the
question How? good manners form an essential
part of good morals. " The Christian is the high-
est style of man," says the poet, and I would turn
the line into prose by making the affirmation of
the Christian gentleman ; for he, whatever his
religious profession or seeming, is not half regen-
erated, and needs to be born again, whose soul is
not penetrated through and through, and his
whole life irradiated, by the gentleness, meekness,
courtesy, sweetness, kindness, inseparable from a
mature Christian character.

LECTURE VI.

PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

Principle means a beginning, — that which is
taken first. In every science, the principles are
the ultimate truths, behind which one cannot go,
from which all other truths may be inferred, and
by which all alleged truths may be tested. It is
the property of a principle that it cannot be de-
fined, or reduced to any thing more simple than
itself. Thus, in geometry the few self-evident
axioms are the principles of the science, and all
the complex and intricate theorems about cones,
pyramids, and spheres are derived from those
principles. In conduct, principles are ultimate
laws, self-justifying, not to be reasoned about, but
containing their own reason, — laws from which all
right rules of conduct must be derived, and to
which all right conduct must be conformed.

This is not the way in which the word is com-
monly used. How often do you hear a man
speaking of something as against his principles!
as if he had a certain set of principles as his own

136

PURITY. 137

private property, which authorize for him a course
of conduct that would not be required of any
other man under like circumstances. I can have
no principles but those which you and all man-
kind have, or ought to have. If I have any thing
else which I call by that name, my calling it so
cannot make it so ; and if I refuse to perform an
act of justice or of kindness, or perform an act of
an opposite complexion, on the plea of principle,
I am doubly guilty, for the specific act, and for the
alleged principle which is nothing else than a con-
tinuous and chronic sin.

Principles in morals have the force of reasons.
The ultimate laws of conduct must contain the
reasons why I should do, or not do. The cardinal
virtues define what I ought to do ; moral princi-
ples contain the reasons for those virtues. These
reasons must be founded on my own nature, such
as I can discern intuitively and feel spontaneously,
without needing to arrive at them by a process of
argument.

I think that we can reduce the fundamental prin-
ciples of human duty to three, — purity, growth,
and love. These principles run along the whole
line of the virtues, comprehend them all, sanction
them all, and can sanction nothing that is outside
of them or inconsistent with them.

Purity, as a principle of conduct, is a necessar;

UfflVEE

138 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

and self-evident inference from the dual nature
of man and the universe, from the juxtaposition
of soul and body, of flesh and spirit. I have no
doubt of the reality of this distinction as a physi-
ological fact; but even if mind or soul be but a de-
velopment or a modification of matter, it yet, in all
that appertains to human character and conduct,
is a distinct entity. There is a selfhood, a char-
acter, endowed with such properties as mere mat-
ter, or mere body, cannot have ; and there are
ways in which this selfhood is impaired, coars-
ened, degraded, by material associations. There
is a cleanness of soul, which the developed soul
knows intuitively to be its right and its duty.
There are bodily conditions and acts which inev-
itably make the soul impure, — which equally pro-
ceed from and inspire thoughts and feelings that
are to the soul what mire is to the hands or feet,
or bilge-water to the nostrils. There are human
associations which, unless one enters into them
with the purpose, energ}^, and zeal of an antago-
nist and a reformer, are necessarily defiling. There
are uses of outward objects, apart from their
employment for the gratification of the appetites,
which adulterate the spiritual nature. Thus, ava-
rice, or the over-earnest pursuit of wealth, intro-
duces into the interior life elements essentially
mean and base, justifying the apostle's phrase

GROWTH. 139

"filthy lucre," and making the term "vile,"
which we sometimes apply to pecuniary trans-
actions, not metaphorical, but literally true. Too
close dependence, even on the legitimate comforts
and luxuries of life, materializes the soul, blends
with its life elements that do not properly belong
to it, and thus makes it less than pure.

All the duties under the head of fortitude are
demanded by purity as a principle. Fortitude
consists in warding off the outside world from the
soul, — in not suffering either prosperous or ad-
verse events so to mix themselves with it as to
impair its integrity. The soul's life ought to
flow on through the world like a river which takes
no soil from its banks, but draws into itself only
pure rills and brooks that swell its volume, and
speed its course. Thus, by means of the virtues
comprehended under the title of fortitude, the
soul, in passing through its various fortunes, takes
into its bosom nothing that can befoul it, but only
those influences through which, under the alchemy
of God's spiritual providence, all things work
together for its good.

This leads me to the next principle, — growth.
The very capacity of growth makes it a funda-
mental law of our being. We cannot say why ;
we cannot go behind this law to justify it ; there-
fore it is a principle. We instinctively feel that

140 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

a stationary human mind and soul would be an
absurdity, an unseemly excrescence on human
society, a being wholly out of place, and this,
even for the few years of our earthly being, im-
measurably more so, when we consider man as
endowed with the power of an endless life.

This principle finds expression in all four of the
cardinal virtues. The chief parts of prudence
are self-government, which prevents the soul from
becoming less, and self-culture, whose office is to
make it more. Fortitude, as I have said, extracts
from both sides of human experience all that can
minister to the soul's increase, while it rejects
whatever they have of the earthy element that
can obstruct its growth. In our intercourse with
our fellow-beings, if it be just and kind, we are
receiving while we give, and are the more richly
receivers the more freely and disinterestedly we
give ; while in rendering to all, to God and man,
their due, there are some of these dues which are
directly and intensely helpful to the growth of
those who render them, — as when we offer to
God the tribute of praise and prayer and loving
contemplation, and when we enter into the rela-
tions which love and reverence demand with our
superiors in wisdom and goodness. Then, again,
all of order that we' establish and maintain in the
microcosm under our immediate control, is of

RULES, FOUNDED ON PRINCIPLES. 141

essential service in our self-discipline, — in the
order and harmony which ought to reign in and
among our appetites, desires, affections, and active
powers, and without which there can be no healthy
growth.

In the third place, love toward all our fellow-
beings is a principle. Why should we not love
them ? Who can say ? Equally little can we say
why we should love them. All that we can say
is, that we feel that we ought to love them. Love,
then, is an intuitive principle. It inspires equally
piety, what is commonly called justice, and benefi-
cence, thus embracing the negative of all that is
unfair and unkind (for " love worketh no ill to its
neighbor"), and the positive discharge of the entire
round of relative duties.

All right rules, as I have said, must be con-
formed to principles. It is so in the mathematical
and physical sciences. In these the rules are but
the application of principles; and as they often
save time, strength, and labor, they are of vast
practical benefit. Thus, in arithmetic, the old
" rule of three " — I do not know whether it is in
the school arithmetics now : if it is not, it ought
to be — was founded on the eternal principle that
ill a proportion the product of the means is equal
to that of the extremes, and it solved an ordinary
arithmetical problem in half the time that it

142 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

would have taken to examine the principle afresh,
and to start from it anew. So in moral conduct,
it is an economy of time and thought, as to a
question or a class of questions that is likely to
recur often, to have a fixed rule by which to
determine action in each particular instance.

Then, too, there are occasions when strong and
not very wrong feeling might lead us to a wrong
or dangerous act, but for a rule which would pre-
clude it. Let me illustrate what I mean by a
very simple case, the like of which may occur in
any young man's experience. A student, very
fond of whist, on entering college, laid down for
himself as a rule, that he would, on no account
whatever, play for money. On one occasion he
found himself in the company of men considera-
bly his seniors, one of them a graduate, who
needed him to make a complement for a couple
of whist-tables. He took his seat, and found that
a small stake was to be played for. The men
were not gamblers. The stake was little more
than nominal. He rose from the table, declined
playing even for the smallest stake, and was at first
laughed at for his scruples ; but as he was needed
for the game, they yielded to him, and he kept his
rule inviolate. Had it not been for his rule, he
would undoubtedly have surrendered his prefer-
ence in that one instance, have had no scruples of

RULES, FOR OURSELVES ALONE. 143

the kind afterward, and might not improbably,
with his love of the game, have become a gam-
bler. Who can say how many, there are whom
such rules have kept, and how many more they
would have kept, from that neutral border-ground
on the confines of the Right and the Wrong,
which is Satan's chief hunting-ground?

Under the head of purity, our rules will be, for
the most part, exclusive rather than permissive.
Whatever we suppose to be of harmful, or even
doubtful, influence, demands not to be temporized
with, but to be utterly renounced. If there is any
recreation, pursuit, indulgence, association, by
which our tone of feeling is lowered, and our bet-
ter nature worsened, total abstinence should be
the imperative rule.

But in all matters of this sort as to which, on
general grounds, there is room for question, we
should make rules for ourselves alone, instead of
attempting to force them on others, or blaming
others for non-compliance with them. Thus, he
who regards wine-drinking, however moderate, as
perilous for himself, is bound in duty to abstain
entirely from it ; but it is not his duty to speak or
think ill of his really worthy and temperate neigh-
bor who holds a different opinion. If I think
that I should be a worse man for frequenting the
theatre, nothing ought ever to tempt me to go ;

144 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

but T have no right to blame my friend who sa}rs
that he has found the theatre a school of good
morals. Constitutions of soul vary no less widely
than those of body, and there are few specific
rules that will apply equally to all. There are
many strange idiosyncrasies of soul. One of the
most devout men and impressive preachers in the
ministry of the last generation was a devourer of
good novels, and professed to be nourished by
them in mind and soul, and often to find in them
the best preparation for the pulpit. It was a
unique case, like that of the Bavarian peasants
who thrive on arsenic. But as a prudent man
knows and shuns the food that is wont to hurt
him, and would deem himself weak and foolish
were he ever to touch it, so, as moral and spiritual
beings, we should take distinct cognizance of the
things that do us harm, and not indulge in them
occasionally and moderately, but forsake and re-
nounce them absolutely and utterly ; and we do
this the more easily if we lay down for ourselves
imperative rules concerning them.

There is one thing to be borne in mind with
regard to these rules. If they are adopted for the
sake of the character, they are not to yield to any
alteration in our outward circumstances. Right
and wrong are not affected by change of latitude.
If for my own sake I avoid a recreation, or amuse-

EXCLUSIVE RULES. 145

ment, or indulgence in my present place of resi-
dence where it is neither prevalent nor fashion-
able, my relation to it will not be changed if I go
to live where it is both prevalent and fashionable.
It can be no more salutary to me in one place
than in another. Conformity in mere matters of
taste and custom is always graceful ; but where
moral well-being is concerned, one should carry
his soil with him when he transplants himself.

I doubt whether there will ever be any actual
need of our repealing the class of rules of which
I am speaking, — exclusive rules, rules for abstain-
ing. It is hardly possible that any thing which
we forbid to ourselves as injurious to our well-
being can become of essential benefit to us. The
only justifying reason for repealing a rule once
established is a change, not in our own social
medium, but in the nature of what we thought it
good to abstain from. For instance, when I was
a young man, the theatre in Boston, and probably
elsewhere, had, and undoubtedly deserved, so low
a moral reputation that a soberly trained youth,
who cared for his own moral well-being, was
bound in duty not to frequent it, and it would
have been better for him not to go to it at all ;
and there are probably among my surviving
coevals those who have adhered to the rule against
theatre-going which it was fitting for them as

146 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

young men to form. But so great a change has
taken place in the theatre, its actors, and its fre-
quenters, that a young man of excellent aim and
purpose might now see no good reason for forbid-
ding himself occasional attendance.

As regards growth, there are abundant reason
and scope for rules as to times and ways. There
must be methods and fixed seasons for study, in
order to any adequate progress in knowledge or
in the capacity of utilizing what we know. As to
the exercises of devotion, there is no little reason
for system in the fact that a very great part of our
e very-day life, while it makes large drafts on reli-
gious feeling, does not directly feed it. In not a
few of our ordinary and necessary pursuits, the
fire on the heart-altar, if kept alive, must be sus-
tained by such fuel as we carry with us, not by
what we find. Hence the fitness of stated times
when we can lay in such fuel. Of Sundaj^-
keeping I shall speak in another connection. I
would now simply suggest the intrinsic fitness of
the seasons for self-recollection, devout thought,
and communion with the Supremely Good, com-
mended from earliest time by saintly precept and
example, before the beginning and at the close of
each day's active life. He who should make this
the rule, with exceptions only when they were of
absolute necessity, would find the aroma of the

COMPREHENSIVE RULES. 117

morning incense lingering in the soul till mid-day,
and the smoke of the evening sacrifice beginning
to rise when the shadows turn. Still further, as at
once hallowing and sweetening home-life, I attach
no little importance to the old and obsolescent
rule and practice of family worship ; and for him
or her who exercises this home-priesthood, the ser-
vice must be of hardly less worth than the more
private exercises of devotion.

Under the head of purity, I have said that our
rules should be rules of exclusion : under that of
love, they should be rules, never of exclusion, al-
ways of the widest comprehension. No matter
how just an exclusive rule under this head may
seem, and how just it may really be in nine cases
out of ten, if there can possibly be a tenth case
in which it will be unfair or unkind, the rule is an
immoral one. Some man may say to you, with a
self-righteous air, as if claiming superlative credit
for practical wisdom, " I make it a rule never to
give any thing to a beggar at my door," or, " My
rule is never to look at a subscription-paper," or,
" It is my invariable rule never to give any thing
to an able-bodied man." Yet in all probability
this person will now and then dismiss unaided
some worthy applicant. On the other hand, the
man or woman, who in a place small enough
to render this possible, should frame the rule,

148 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

" Whenever a person living here applies to me for
alms, I will look into the case, and act as may
seem best : " or, if one will make the more general
rule, " Whenever I am asked for alms, I will in-
quire into the case so far as I am able, and act
according to my best discretion," such a rule in
its comprehensiveness is in harmony with the
principle of love, aside from which any special
rules of conduct that we may shape are merely
selfishness systematized. In fine, under the head
of love, no rules can be self-justifying that leave
out of their scope any human being that has a
right to our sympathy and our charity.

Rules, of course, create habits; and without
express rules, habits are continually in the process
of formation in the earlier years of life, and have
largely the control of its later years. I know
nothing more closely applicable to an extensive
class of habits than Christ's words to Peter : —
" When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself,
and walkedst whither thou wouldest : but when
thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy
hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee
whither thou wouldest not." How many there are
who are either the slaves of habit, or have been
emancipated only by what seemed a life-and-death
struggle ! Yet this represents only one side. In
other aspects, the capacity of forming habits is of

WORTH OF HABITS. 149

inestimable value ; and there are two classes of
habits of which this is true. There are, in the
first place, habits which have in themselves no
moral character, yet have a large moral value in
facilitating the movements of daily life, and in
smoothing and sweetening the intercourse of home
and of society. In business of every kind, fixed
ways of doing things not only give the minimum
of personal trouble and vexation to the individual
man, but are of hardly less advantage to partners,
helpers, and all who transact business with him.
In home-life, regular habits not only oil the wheels
of the domestic economy, but they are threads
around which crystals form. They furnish points
of support for those attentions and endearments
which keep the domestic bond as close as it is
tender. The details may seem of small moment
taken one by one ; but could you gauge the joys
— slender individually, vast in their aggregate —
of a normal family, with wife and children, you
would find an immense difference between that
of a man whose goings and comings can be fore-
known, prepared for and waited for, whose move-
ments are time-marks on the dial-plate of daily
life, and that of the man, in all essentials of con-
duct blameless, yet erratic and incalculable, so
that the order of the household must be either
perpetually deranged on his account, or maintained

150 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

independently of him. The same difference may-
be traced, in a marked though varying degree, in
the entire circle of one's relations in business and
in society. Prime value is, of course, to be at-
tached to a pure and upright life ; but in addition
to this, fixed habits have their highly important
office in conciliating intimate regard and unre-
served confidence.

There are yet other habits of thought, speech,
and action, which have in themselves a transcen-
dent moral value. We speak of forming good
habits ; and the very word u forming " implies
some kind and degree of labor, of mind-work,
heart-work, or both, in their formation, — work
which is not required for their continuance. It is
the nature of habit, that, when started, it will run
of itself. Whatever good habits we have, once
cost us toil, self-inspection, vigilance, and, it may
be, repeated failures : they now seem spontaneous,
instinctive. Thus, I have known persons who by
intensely hard labor with and upon themselves
have reversed unfortunate tendencies in speech
and manner, and, undoubtedly, in thought and
feeling also, and substituted for them habits of
gentleness, amenity, and grace, indicative of care-
ful Christian self-discipline. The toil and strain
have now ceased. What was once arduous task-
work has become a second nature. Now, suppose

HABIT, A LABOR-SAVER. 151

that, in order to maintain this better frame and
habit of soul, lifelong endeavor and unceasing toil
were necessary, I know not what time or capacity
there could be for further improvement. If only
continuous effort could sustain good habits, their
number would be very small ; the men who had not
glaring moral deficiencies would be very few, ahd
the foremost saints would have but a piebald and
meagre type of goodness. Habit is of unspeakable
worth in a way which I can best illustrate by what
takes place in manufacture. The value of a labor-
saving machine consists in releasing for other in-
dustries a large portion of the strength and skill
thus superseded, so that more work is done, and
the variety and fulness of the stock of objects of
desire and use are largely increased. Habit per-
forms an analogous office for the spiritual nature.
It is a labor-saver. When a good habit is formed,
a certain amount of moral and spiritual force em-
ployed in forming it is released for other service.
It may be, and probably will be, employed in form-
ing additional good habits ; and if the whole out-
ward life be at length conformed to the soul's
ideal, and the habitual course of thought and feel-
ing be brought up to the same standard, there are
the more delicate traits of high spirituality, of an
interior life shaped after the divine pattern, which
may be the object of ever more successful en-

152 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

deavor. These more recondite graces of character
multiply to the thought, become more distinct to
the view, and present a stronger attraction, as one
grows in goodness, so that while this mortal life
lasts, and how much longer we cannot say, habit
may succeed habit, the series beginning as ever-
brightening steps on the earthly lifeway, and grad-
ually rising into rungs of the ladder from earth to
heaven.

When we speak of habits, we generally refer to
speech and conduct. Still more important are
those of thought and feeling from which the
speech and the life flow ; and these, as I said in a
previous lecture, are best formed in early life, and
are really formed in the process of castle-building
(so called), which is often regarded as merely per-
mitting idle day-dreams to flit through the mind,
but in which the boy or girl may build " a house
not made with hands," which shall be " eternal in
the heavens," or which the first breath of heaven
would dissolve into empty air. Accordingly as
these castles are built low, mean, and shabby, or of
fair yet earthly proportions, or roofless, with spires
and turrets pointing heavenward, the life-habits
will be sordid and vicious, decently selfish, or
thoroughly noble and generous.

Society has habits, or customs as we more com-
monly call them ; every age, every community,

PERSISTENCY OF CUSTOMS. 153

every class and circle of society, has its own cus-
toms ; and it may be well for us to consider their
ethical relations and character. Like laws, they
can never represent either the lowest or the high-
est tone of opinion and feeling. They may be
fairly assumed to be on a level with the conscience
and culture of the majority. They cannot be in
any respect below this standard ; for in that case
the dissenters would be too numerous for the cus-
tom to retain the general respect. They cannot
be much above this standard ; if they were so,
conformity would be hypocrisy on the part of the
greater number, and hypocrisy is too unnatural
ever to become the habit of an age or a commu-
nity. Moreover, were it general, it would lose its
efficacy, and would no longer deceive.

Customs have a strong vis inertice. They are
changed only very gradually and with great diffi-
culty ; or if under some strong excitement a sud-
den change is made, it is very soon unmade, and
the old customs are re-instated. Thus, reformers
sometimes think their work done, and live to see
it undone, for the simple reason that no permanent
reform can be made in the customs of a community,
unless it be wrought in the sincere conviction and
profound feeling of the people, — a process like
the working of leaven in a mass of dough, and in
which it is sometimes forgotten, but needs to be

154 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

borne in mind, that the leaven works by being
kneaded into the dough, not by being thrown at
it. The reformers who fail, and those who suc-
ceed, may be equally worthy of success. The dif-
ference is, that the latter are the product, while
the exponents, of advancing public sentiment;
the former, a sporadic growth, out of season, be-
fore their time.

With reference to the temperance reform, I have
witnessed, as I think, both permanent success and
temporary failure. In my early boyhood the
drinking habits of New England were such as
would seem fabulous now. The old Puritans
drank largely and solemnly. It was their only
recreation. All others they renounced and de-
nounced. They, however, limited their potations
to what was reputed to be temperance, giving
to the word, indeed, a somewhat latitudinarian
meaning. The disorders coincident with, and
consequent upon, the war of the Revolution, to-
gether with the exposures and temptations of camp
life, intensified the sober drinking of the fathers
into habits which kept a large portion of the peo-
ple on the brink of inebriation, with many con-
stantly falling over the brink, till^it length the
most solemn occasions — funerals, ordinations, even
meetings of the clergy — presented scenes of shame-
ful excess. I remember in my boyhood having

THE TEMPERANCE REFORM. 155

been taken to a town-meeting, at which a man of
high standing and character moved the abolition
of the daily ration of strong drink for men who
worked on the highways, and substituting its value
in money, and he was almost hooted down, a man of
similar position in the community anathematizing
him for attempting to grind the faces of the poor.
The habit of social drinking on all occasions when
men came together was so universal, that at the
earlier meetings of the Massachusetts Society for
the Suppression of Intemperance, the oldest tem-
perance society in the world, there was the usual
array of decanters, and the members prepared
themselves for their discussion, as the mediaeval
knights prepared for the conflict in their tourna-
ments, by friendly conference with the enemy with
whom they were going to fight. But one of their
number, at whose house a meeting was to be held,
after spreading in array brandy, rum, and gin, at
the last moment, moved by a sudden inspiration,
took them from the sideboard, put them under
lock and ke}r, and reported to his associates what
he had done. They at once started on a vigorous
warfare against the established drinking-customs
of (so called) respectable society, having previ-
ously directed their attention chiefly to the more
vulgar forms of excess. They found their world
ready for them ; large numbers of right-thinking

156 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

and right-feeling people had in their hearts been
long rebelling against customs with which they
dared not break ; and in a marvellously short pe-
riod the habitual use of distilled liquors in good
society, and on various occasions on which it had
been regarded as essential, was discontinued, and
observances that had been held as almost sacred,
became utterly disreputable.

That those who have attempted to banish fer-
mented liquors from general use, have not had
permanent success, is not their fault. They have
been earnest, faithful, self-sacrificing. Their in-
tense zeal and untiring effort have had paroxysms
of seeming success, which have been of more value
than they think; for in each of them individual
salvations have been multiplied: and they are all
the while doing their part in educating society up
to their standard. But they have failed of general
and lasting success, simplj- because public senti-
ment is slow of change. It had changed when
the old Massachusetts Society began its work, and
its members were but the mouthpieces of a waiting
public. It has not yet undergone the farther
change, of which the more zealous reformers of the
present day are the forerunners, not the exponents.

The slowness of change, or, in other words,
the permanence of customs and habits, is regarded
with impatience by reformers, but wrongly. The

THE PROGRESS OF SOCIETY. 157

tyranny of custom has its good side, its beneficent
influence. It excludes a large amount of evil, and
effectually stops out evils that have once been
outgrown and repudiated. Those who are the
most pertinaciously attached to existing customs,
are the most ready to condemn and to keep at a
distance all that made the past worse than the
present. Custom, while it gives a longer life than
might be desired to the evil which it tolerates, is
equally inexorable in adhering to the good which
it recognizes, and thus fastens down and secures
against retrogression the successive moral gains
and advances of society. On one of those almost
vertical railwa}Ts on which tourists now ascend
Mount Washington or Vesuvius, there are mor-
tises that stop the cogs of the wheels, so that there
can be no retrograde movement ; and the rapidity
of the ascent is of small importance compared
with the means employed to prevent an abnormal
descent. Customs are mortises in the upward
movements of human society, and it is to the last
degree undesirable that the wheels should revolve
so fast as for the cogs to miss the mortises.

In taking a view of society at remote intervals,
it is impossible not to mark stages of progress
from which there has been no retrogression. Thus,
in the Hebrew history, if you will inspect the
record even of court-manners in the times of Saul

158 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

and of David, and compare them with Jewish life
as it was in Judaea at the Christian era, you will
see that the world was growing through those
centuries. You cannot conceive of a Peter, or
a John, or a Paul, having been prepared to be a
potential minister of the gospel of Christ in the
" school of the prophets," or minstrels, which Saul,
in his frenzy, stripped off his clothes to join. The
type of society which we see among the fishermen
of Galilee had in it a refinement, a susceptibility
of culture, a capacity of moral discernment and
impression, of which we discover no traces in the
best men under the Hebrew monarchy. The Jew-
ish civilization, in its moral tone, in the thorough-
ness with which it permeated the whole body of
the people, in its tendency to level upward, repre-
sented the highest social condition that man had
attained at the Christian era. It did not really
perish, but became so decentralized and dispersed
that we can catch but rare glimpses of its survi-
val and continued advancement ; while it left the
Roman civilization morally at an immeasurable
distance beneath it, as the starting-point for post-
Christian history. Of this we are the inheritors,
or rather the continuators ; for it never died. Its
metropolis was removed to Constantinople ; but it
lingered in Rome, moulded the conquerors of the
Western empire, transfused itself through the

LINES OF PROGRESS. 159

European nations, and has had a continuous
existence till now.

But with what immense improvements! The
rudeness of the Middle Ages had none of the
nameless vices of which in Rome's palmy days
no one was ashamed ; and its coarse festivities
lacked revolting features which almost sicken the
reader in some classic pages. The moral habits
of the Stuart dynasty would have been disgraceful
under the Georges ; and at the present day, Eng-
land looks back upon the Georgian period as scan-
dalously loose and low in its morality. We see
and feel the defects in our own ethical standard ;
but when we look at the somewhat remote past,
we may well take to ourselves the scriptural ex-
hortation, u Say not thou, What is the cause that
the former days were better than these ? for thou
dost not inquire wisely concerning this."

The progress that has been made has been in
the direction of each of the fundamental prin-
ciples of moral action. As regards all that apper-
tains to purity, in the broad sense of the word,
there has been a gain that can be measured only
by a series of comparisons, whose coarser terms
would be any thing but savory. As to growth,
all the habits of society favor intellectual culture
to a degree beyond the most sanguine expecta-
tions of those who gave the earlier impulses to

1G0 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

such progress. As regards spiritual culture, too,
I cannot but think that the habits of society,
while less favorable to mere religiousness as di-
vorced from duty, are better adapted to cherish
a piety active both Godvvard and manward. As
to love, in all forms of philanthropic interest and
action, and especially in the mutual sympathies
which transcend dividing lines of class, race, and
color, the advancement of society has been sure
and rapid ; and that, all over the civilized world.

We now ask, in conclusion, What are the ethical
relations of the individual to social customs and
habits ? How far is he bound to conformity ?
When and how is he to assume a protestant atti-
tude ? In the first place, as regards customs in all
respects blameless, conformity is more than per-
missible. It is obligatory. Social customs have a
unifying power in society. They render inter-
course harmonious and easy. They are a con-
ventional sign-language by which a great deal of
kind feeling is interchanged. He who sees fit to
transgress them, and to lead an eccentric life, not
only loses much that society might give him, but
withholds much which he might give. If he has
any social work to do, he does it at a disadvan-
tage. If he has a reform to advocate, he forfeits
the leverage which would be given him by rela-
tions, at other points, of unrestrained fellowship.

CUSTOMS. 161

His word has less weight ; his example, less influ-
ence. The narrative of the life of Jesus Christ
would lead us to believe that he conformed gen-
ially with the customs of the society in which he
was for the time being. Apart from the interest
that was felt in his work as a teacher and a re-
former, we see numerous tokens of strong personal
attachment to him, which could hardly have been
manifested had he not borne his full and friendly
part in the common life around him.

There are, in the next place, customs perfectly
right in themselves ; if wrong, wrong only in de-
gree. Here he who feels the wrong is, of course,
bound to avoid all blameworthy excess for himself
and for those immediately under his control ; but
if lie wants to extend his influence to a larger
circle, he must be careful not to swing to the
opposite extreme. I know little of the matters
involved in the (so called) dress-reform. It re-
lates to mysteries which the uninitiated dare not
penetrate. But I do know that the cause has
been thwarted by the hideous guise in which its
advocates have attired themselves. It is a matter
in which I believe that sacred interests, even the
solvency and honesty of many heads of families
of moderate means, yet in what calls itself society,
are involved ; but those who would use their ex-
ample and influence in behalf of the economy so

162 PRINCIPLES, RULES, AND HABITS.

sorely needed, should do so, as I know that they
can, in careful harmony with decency, comeliness,
and good taste. In like manner, as to whatever is
excessive in social customs, he who feels the ex-
cess as a wrong that ought to be remedied, should
be especially careful not to offend, in his personal
reform, the aesthetic feeling of the community.
In this way, if he can do no good, he at least
does no harm. But the aesthetic element enters
so largely — and by good right — into social cus-
toms, that no essential reform can be made in
defiance of it.

As to customs wrong in themselves, or wrong
in our honest and deliberate opinion, protest, open,
strong, and earnest, is our duty even more than
our right. No matter how hopeless the case may
seem. No matter if, so far as we know, we stand
alone. This we can never know. The utterance
that we make, others may be on the point of mak-
ing, and waiting only till they know that they
will meet with sympathy. At any rate, numbers,
majorities, are formed one by one. Moreover,
the question of numbers can affect no one person's
duty or responsibility. I am answerable for my
own position and action if I am alone: I have
neither less nor more responsibility if I am one of
thousands. There is an old parable, that all the
inhabitants of the earth once agreed to raise a

INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY. 163

simultaneous shout, that the people in the moon
might hear ; and when the moment arrived, every
man, woman, and child, except a man in China
who was stone-deaf, stood silent, with suspended
breath, in a listening attitude. Just so, on matters
of intensest moral interest and moment, men and
women who see and feel the right, and are ready
to join in the outcry if it be raised, wait to hear
when they ought to speak. Were it only the habit
of society for one to utter on matters of moral
right and obligation what he believes and feels,
all other reformation would have free and speedy
course toward a happy issue.

LECTURE VII.

ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

There are various theories with regard to the
date and the authorship of the Pentateuch ; but
into these it is not my purpose to enter, nor yet
into any questions as to what is technically called
inspiration. The divine inspiration, as the source
of whatever in ethics or theology so far tran-
scends its time as by no possibility to have been a
natural development, if in any respect an error, is
so because it is held in too narrow a sense, and
applied only to the great teachers in the line of
descent from Abraham. The Christian Fathers,
especially those of the Alexandrian school, ap-
plied it equally to Socrates, Plato, and all the
chief luminaries of the heathen world, whom they
regarded as holding by divine ordination the same
office with reference to the Gentile races that was
held by Moses and the prophets in the Hebrew
commonwealth. This I believe. At the same
time, I have not found adequate reason to deny
the great antiquity of large portions of the Penta-

164

THE DECALOGUE. 165

teuch, or the general authenticity of the Old-
Testament history, though it is not without the
legendary additions, the confusion of names, dates,
and numbers, and the duplication of narratives
with variance of details, which occur in all ancient
history, and are, indeed, indelible time-marks of
an authorship in the remote past.

It is generally admitted, even by those who as-
sign the latest date to the compilation of the Pen-
tateuch, that the Decalogue, in substance, was
first promulgated at the time of the exodus, and
was thenceforward regarded b}r the Hebrews as
their fundamental moral law. Now, when we con-
sider what the people were at that time, a horde
of fugitive slaves, with so little of religious knowl-
edge, faith, and culture, that the second man in
their company made an image of a calf for their
worship, and the whole people danced round it in
a vulgar paroxysm of fanatical idolatry, — a peo-
ple, too, ready for centuries to adopt the gods of
whatever tribe happened to have the ascendency
over them, we cannot suppose that this sublime
ethical compend was developed from the heart of
such a nation, or even of their leader, who had
not been guiltless of deeds of violence which this
code condemns. I cannot read those ten com-
mandments, and assign to them their due place in
the early history of the Hebrews, without giving

166 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

my full assent to the prefatory statement in the
narrative, " God spake all these words, and said."
To my mind they are equally his words, whether
he spake them in the thunders of Sinai, or through
the lips of the great law-giver, or, if the latter,
whether with his distinct consciousness of special
inspiration, or through that unconscious influence
by which in all time the men whom God chooses
are inspired and empowered for their life-work.

Among all compends of moral duty, the Deca-
logue holds by far the pre-eminence ; and of all
ethical systems, that which it embodies yields
place only to the Christian. Yet in saying this, I
ought not to forget that the Mosaic Decalogue
stands not alone. Brahmanism, too, has its deca-
logue, covering almost the same ground with the
Hebrew, but less completely. Buddhism abounds
in precepts enjoining purity of life and the passive
virtues. Confucius left maxims full of practical
wisdom. In fine, all the sacred books of the
Eastern World have an ethical value, which we
Christians, so far from underrating it, ought to
recognize with gratitude as showing us that God
has never "left himself without witness."

But the Decalogue is complete in this sense, —
that its prohibitions comprehend all the great sins
and vices that prey upon human society, that en-
tire obedience to it would imply a thoroughly

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT. 167

blameless and exemplary life, and that it would be
impossible to add an eleventh commandment on
the same plane with the ten. The eleventh com-
mandment, if we had it, would either belong to
that interior life beneath whose surface the Deca-
logue does not pretend to go, or else it would ap-
pertain to details of conduct under some one of
the great heads which give title to the ten com-
mandments. The precepts are in form precisely
adapted to a people still rude in culture, yet there
is not one of them that can ever grow obsolete in
this world ; and they are all so perfectly in accord-
ance with the needs of every grade of society,
that we can fully sympathize with the sanction
given to them by the Author of our religion, and
can feel that they are not inaptly used in Chris-
tian worship, and are by no means out of place in
an ante-communion service. At the same time,
there underlie some of these precepts, in their
present, which may or may not be their original,
form, certain great principles, which anticipated
extra-scriptural philosophy by many centuries, and
into the recognition of which the civilized world
has hardly yet grown. Let us consider these pre-
cepts one by one.

The first commandment prescribes as the funda-
mental principle of all dut}T, the recognition of
the one Supreme God, Law-giver, Witness, Judge.

1G8 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

"• Thou shalt have no other gods (or god) before
me." This commandment does not imply, as it is
sometimes said to imply, the existence of other
gods, who are not to be preferred to, or placed be-
fore, Jehovah. The Hebrew words mean, »* in my
face," in my presence, that is, in defiance of me.

The second commandment was necessary to in-
sure the keeping of the first. If primeval man
was a monotheist, he undoubtedly ceased to be
so by making visible symbols or remembrancers
of his God, and first worshipping him in them,
afterward them instead of him. At any rate, as
the Hebrews were surrounded by idol-worshippers,
there was imminent danger of their beguiling
themselves into like worship by persuading them-
selves that they were but worshipping their own
God in a new way and in a visible form. We see
what the process has been in the Romish Church.
Images and pictures were at first, and in the
minds of intelligent persons are now, mere helps
to worship ; but there can be no doubt that they
are really worshipped by the more ignorant.

This commandment is sanctioned by a truth
which has been regarded as a scientific discovery
of our own time, — "Visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation, and showing mercy unto thousands
[that is, of generations] of them that love me, and

THE LAW OF HEREDITY. 169

keep my commandments." The Christian Church
long merged this truth in the dogma of original
sin as a taint transmitted from Adam's first trans-
gression to all his posterity; and in the protest
against this absurd and cruel dogma, the more
liberal theologians were wont with equal unreason
to scout the notion of hereditary depravity. But
we have now learned that man acts not for him-
self alone, that his sins die not with him, that the
baleful heritage passes on, gradually expending
itself, indeed, yet inevitably showing its virus, if
not in actual guilt, in evil proclivity, down to the
third or fourth generation ; while, as I said in a
former lecture, a God-loving and commandment-
keeping race holds its own, sometimes through a
long series of generations, till the entail is docked
by a fatal intermarriage, thus rendering it possible,
that, if men so chose, the heritage might be passed
on to the end of time, and, moreover, giving us
hope in the law of heredity as the ultimate means
of purifying and beatifying the whole human fam-
ily. At the same time, we have here the strongest
possible dissuasive against the indulgence of evil
appetite and passion, in the assurance that the
parent thus brings an inevitable blight and an
intense probability of shame and moral ruin on
the very beings that are dear to him as his own
soul. The law of heredity seems to me ineffa-

170 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

bly beneficent in its designed and ultimate work-
ing. But, be it beneficent or not, it is not a little
remarkable, on any theory save that of divine in-
spiration, that it should have been so clearly an-
nounced in the world's rude infancy, and then lost
from sight and thought for so many subsequent
ages.

The third commandment still further guards the
worship of God by prohibiting the irreverent use
of his name, which, when it does not flow from
impiety, cannot fail to generate impiety.

Then comes the fourth commandment, that of
the sabbath, which has been too generally regarded
as a ritual observance, Hebrew in its origin and
purpose, binding on Christians only as a matter of
expediency, and fastening upon the entire Deca-
logue the stamp of Judaism. On the other hand,
I believe that this commandment is here, because,
like each of the others, it prescribes a duty of uni-
versal validity and obligation, or I would rather
say, puts into the form of a precept an inevitable
law of nature. If the narrative in the Book of
Exodus be authentic, the sabbath was not a new
institution when the Decalogue was given. We
have traces of it in other ancient nations, and
probably references to it in Homer and Hesiocl.
The law of the sabbath appertains to natural re-
ligion, or, rather, to the physiology of man at least,

USES OF THE SABBATH. 171

if of nothing else in the universe. Man cannot
bear a perpetual strain of continuous labor, whether
of body or of mind. The maximum of work is
accomplished, only if there be a periodical season
for rest, or for change of work. Wherever there
has been no regular sabbatical rest, its purpose
has been served, though imperfectly, by Saturnalia
feast-days and public games. The beasts that aid
man in his work are equally unable to bear the
strain of labor without intermission. Nor are there
wanting instances in which even inanimate indus-
trial agencies have seemed to manifest a like neces-
sity. Physiologically, the one day's rest in seven
has shown itself to be, for man, neither too much
nor too little ; and it is of no small significance,
that when, in the climax of anti-religion in the
French Revolution, one day of rest in ten was sub-
stituted for one in seven, the peasantry in some of
the rural districts resumed the old order of the
week, saying that their cattle could not bear nine
days' continuous labor. On the other hand, the
multiplication of holy days, which have every-
where become holidays, has been prejudicial to the
habit and the results of industry, and is one of
the most obvious causes of the lack of diligence
and thrift in some of the Roman-Catholic coun-
tries of Continental Europe.

For worship and religious culture, the sabbath

172 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

is equally essential. Public worship would be im-
possible, were there not set seasons for it ; and for
individuals, the rush of business and the pressure
of care, if never arrested and relieved, would pre-
clude continuous thought on the highest themes of
thought, and whatever of devout feeling there
might be would be frittered away by the perpet-
ual friction of uncongenial scenes and occupations.
The weekly rest is also of untold service to home-
life, especially in our busy age, when the members
of a family have, each with all, and all with each,
only the most hurried intercourse at uncertain
intervals. The interposing of a frequent day of
rest tends, too, to allay the vehemence of political
excitement and party strife, and to remind those
who feel very far apart of the higher obligations
and interests that overlap and overtop their dif-
ferences.

Nor let this commandment be complicated in
thought with the austerities and the penal sanc-
tions of the Hebrew sabbath. These form no part
of the Decalogue. They are entirely Jewish. If
they ever had any worth, they lost their value
many centuries ago ; and as adopted by the English
and Scotch Puritans, they have only served to
bring sabbatical observance into discredit, and to
produce the re-action toward the opposite extreme
which we witness now. The Decalogue prescribes

THE COSMOGONY OF GENESIS. 173

for the sabbath, rest and worship, — of course, by
any reasonable interpretation, rest from needless
labor, and such exercises of private and public
worship as may edify without wearying ; for we do
not obey this commandment if we let even devo-
tion deprive the day of its restful uses. The com-
mandment may be observed in its true sense, yet so
as to make the day the happiest as well as the best
of the week, while its rest shall lighten the toil,
and its devotion hallow the mirth, of the six fol-
lowing days. Let me be distinctly understood.
I do not regard the law of the sabbath as any
more a Jewish law than the laws against theft and
murder, but as a law of nature so far as man's
needs are concerned, and its observance as the
dictate of natural piety. I hardly need to say
that the controversy about the seventh and the
first day of the week is utterly idle and inane ; and
}'et we have a pretty numerous sect of Seventh-
Day Baptists, who do not think it so. The worth
of the commandment is in the proportion of time
that it assigns for rest and worship ; and I cannot
but think that those who are compelled by profes-
sional duty to work for others, and can do but
little for themselves, on Sunday, may do well to
take Monday for a sabbath day in both senses and
for both uses.

If you will pardon a slight digression, I am in-

174 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

clined to believe that we owe to the established
order of the week, the mould in which the narra-
tive of the creation in Genesis is cast. I do not
suppose that the author of that sublime epic (for
such it really is) had any more intention of writ-
ing literal history than we have of belief that we
are reading it. His purpose was a religious one.
He wanted to exclude the possibilities of false
worship, by enumerating as the works of God the
whole range of the objects that were worshipped
by surrounding nations. With this design he cast
the drama of creation into six acts, with the divine
sabbath at the close, as an aid to the memory and
the devout thought of his readers, when meditat-
ing, as the commandment bade them, on the glory
of God in the creation. Very probably the form
of the commandment in Exodus, differing from
that in Deuteronomy, may be due to the author
of the first chapters of Genesis.

The fifth commandment is of special interest
for the reason annexed to it, " That thy days may
be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth
thee." This is evidently not a promise of long
life to the dutiful child. The commandments are
addressed to the nation collectively. " Hear, O
Israel," are the prefatory words. " In the land
which the Lord thy God giveth thee," was certainly
not addressed to the individual child ; for in what

FILIAL REVERENCE. 175

other land could he expect a long or a short life ?
It was the nation whose permanent abode in the
land was to be contingent on the exercise of filial
piety. It was time that they ceased to dwell in
it, when even their most religious men had reached
the point of making a fictitious dedication of their
property to the temple-service in order to absolve
themselves from the obligation of supporting their
aged parents. Many centuries after the promul-
gation of the Decalogue, Aristotle based his sys-
tem of polity on the family as the norm of the
state, as the sole nursery of civic virtue, and as
the little commonwealth on which the well-being
of the nation must be wholly dependent. This
doctrine of his has been regarded in modern times
with unbounded admiration, as a marvellous dis-
covery for so early an age. How much more sur-
prising is it, that, in the dim dawn of civilization,
from the heart of this semi-barbarous people, un-
less indeed " God spake all these words," there
should have come this maxim of the profoundest
wisdom ! It must be ever true, that what the
families of a nation are, the state will be. The
family must be the nursery of public virtue, and
wise family discipline alone can give the state
good citizens. The decline of domestic order, 6~f
parental authority, of filial obedience, must of
necessity train those who issue from their native

176 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

homes to form homes of their own, to be factious,
turbulent, reckless citizens; and the state in whose
families parents obey their children, and the elder
serve the younger, must be given over to dema-
gogism, anarchy, or despotism, and, not improbably,
to all three in succession.

Next comes the law against murder, essential,
of course, in every state, and requiring no special
comment.

Nor need we pause on the essential law for the
preservation of chastity, — a law the violation of
which among the Hebrews was not only liable to
the severest punishment, but was regarded all
along the Hebrew history with detestation, while
in other ancient nations, the early Romans alone
excepted, very slight account was made of sius
against chastity.

We have next the law against theft, which suffi-
ciently explains and justifies itself.

The ninth commandment, condemning false tes-
timony, though in form limited to legal transac-
tions, in its spirit applies, of course, to all that
one can say of his neighbor.

The tenth commandment on its face relates not
to outward conduct, but to the movements of the
soul that may issue in sin, — "Thou shalt not
covet," which, if obeyed, would supersede " Thou
shalt not steal." Deep into the heart as this

MORALITY OF THE HEBREWS. 177

commandment seems to reach, I am inclined to
think, that, like the rest of the code, it applied
primarily to conduct. Stealing must have been
very easy, especially the stealing of cattle ; for
there were probably neither enclosures, nor brands
of ownership. As for the neighbor's wife, too,
certainly while they lived in tents, and hardly less
when they began to rear their first rude, dwellings,
there could have been little of the privacy and
defence for female virtue which a civilized home
affords. Both these kinds of vice referred to in
the commandment were facilitated by the un-
settled condition of the people and the time ; and
he who meant to be honest and chaste, with such
opportunities for sinning as he could not but have,
needed to keep his heart with all diligence, and to
abstain from coveting what, if coveted, he could
so easily obtain or attain.

Such was the fundamental moral law of the
Hebrew people, and we have reason to believe that
it insured a higher standard of practical morality
than we can trace in the history of any other
ancient nation. At the Christian era, corrupting
influences had entered largel}T into Jerusalem and
Judaea proper. The reign of the Herods was as
depraving as it was tyrannical and cruel. The
court of the Roman procurator was not a school
of good morals. The Pharisees furnished exposi-

178 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

tors of the law, who were more skilful in showing
how it might be evaded than solicitous to incul-
cate its due observance. But in Galilee, where
these malign influences were weakened by remote-
ness, and where Pharisaism never had its strong
hold till it was driven from Jerusalem and puri-
fied by its expulsion, we have reason to believe
that the people retained no little of the real right-
eousness of their law. They were despised in
aristocratic circles, not for moral delinquency or
deficiency, but because Galilee, until it became
the cradle of Christianity, produced few or no
eminent men.

But we have not done with Hebrew ethics.
The poor-laws of the Hebrews transcend those of
all other nations in humanity, and in wise econ-
omy no less ; for they are as well adapted to pre-
clude as to relieve want : and there is, in the whole
of Hebrew history, even to the present day, after
so many centuries of denationalization and disper-
sion, no token of the prevalence of abject pov-
erty, while the spirit of this humane legislation
is still surviving and efficient among the Jews
throughout the world. Of course, it is impossible
to determine the precise date of these laws in
their present form, unless we can fix beyond dis-
pute the date of the several portions of the Pen-
tateuch. But if, in the form in which we have

THE HEBREW POOR-LAWS. 179

them now, they were reduced to writing in Heze-
kiah's, or Josiah's, or Ezra's, time, they were al-
ready parts of the law of the land, and must have
been of earlier origin. Moreover, there is much
in their phraseology which indicates with cer-
tainty a very early date, such as references to
the Egyptian bondage, to a condition of things be-
longing to a country recently settled, and to the
government by kings as not yet begun.

I know of no other laws which are of special
interest for their language alone ; but these blend
with the precision of statutes the tenderness and
sympathy which are worth immeasurably more to
the poor than the most liberal almsgiving where
the heart goes not with the hand. Let me cite a
few specimens. " When thou cuttest down thine
harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the
field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it. . . .
When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not
go over the boughs again. . . . When thou gath-
erest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not
glean it afterward : it shall be for the stranger, for
the fatherless, and for the widow. And thou shalt
remember that thou wast a bondman in the land
of Egypt." " If thy brother be waxen poor, and
fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve
him : }-ea, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner.
. . . Take thou no usury of him, or increase/' "If

180 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

thou at all take thy neighbor's raiment [that is,
his tunic or outside garment, used as a covering
by night] to pledge," "thou shalt deliver him the
pledge again when the sun goeth down, that he
may sleep in his own raiment, and bless thee."
" Thou shalt not . . . take a widow's raiment to
pledge." " No man shall take the upper or the
nether millstone to pledge [that is, of the domes-
tic mill to grind the corn for daily use] ; for he
taketh a man's life to pledge." "Thou shalt not
oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy,
whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers
that are in thy land within thy gates : at his day
thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun
go down upon it, . . . lest he cry against thee
unto the Lord, and it be sin unto thee." " If a
stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall
not vex him. But the stranger that dwelleth with
you shall be unto you as one born among you, and
thou shalt love him as thyself ; for ye were stran-
gers in the land of Egypt."

In addition to, these humane provisions, there
was a law preventing the permanent alienation of
farms and family homesteads. Every fiftieth year
there was a general release of mortgaged property,
except of houses in towns. This law served the
double purpose of diminishing the capacity of in-
curring debts, and saving the owner or his family

HUMANITY OF THE HEBREW LAW. 181

from losing hold on an inherited estate. Of course,
the amount that one could borrow on the security
of his farm depended on the number of years for
which the mortgage could run. This law pre-
vented also the growing up of large estates in
land, secured the continuance of the greater part
of the farm-land in the ownership of small propri-
etors, and thus tended to check pauperism. Then,
too, if a man or woman incurred servitude for
debt, or voluntarily on account of poverty, the
time of service could last only six years ; and it
was enacted, " When thou sendest him out from
thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty. Thou
shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and
out of thy floor, and out of thy wine-press. Of
that wherewith the Lord thy God hath blessed
thee, thou shalt give unto him." If a servant thus
released chose to remain in service for love of his
master's family, it was permitted as a privilege.

I have not done this subject justice. I never
open my Bible in Exodus, Leviticus, or Deuteron-
omy, without alighting upon some token of the
benignant spirit which pervades these else dry
records. All along, alternating with the obsolete
details of rite and sacrifice, are these sentiments
glowing with the richest inspiration of Him whose
tender mercies are over all His children. The
precepts of Christ, indeed, prescribe even more

182 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

than those of the Hebrew law ; but if, copying
from the fathers of Connecticut Avho voted to
govern themselves by the laws of Moses till they
could make better, Christians would adopt the
poor-laws of Leviticus till they can fully drink in
the spirit of Christ, we should have a far better and
happier world than we are likely to see till the
dawn of the millennium.

The Hebrews had slaves, as all nations of the
Old World had. They were chiefly captives of
war; and it must be borne in mind that this utiliz-
ing of the members of a conquered tribe or race
marks a great stage in moral progress, the original
mode of disposing of them having been indiscrim-
inate slaughter. The Levitical law contains vari-
ous precepts of mercy to the slave. The master
who killed his slave incurred the punishment of
death. For a severe injury not mortal, the offend-
ing master was compelled to let his slave go free.
The fugitive-slave law of the Hebrews, as com-
pared with that which cost our country its mil-
lions of precious lives, throws the Congress of the
United States back into comparative barbarism.
" Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the ser-
vant which is escaped from his master unto thee :
he shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that
place which he shall choose in one of thy gates,
where it liketh him best : thou shalt not oppress

SLAVER Y AMONG THE HEBREWS. 183

him." That escape from slavery was very rare,,
we may infer from its being mentioned, after this
law, only twice in the Old Testament, once as
having actually occurred, and in yet another in-
stance, when David and his followers of the free
lance are taunted as being runaway slaves. The
condition of the slaves was by no means one of
hardship. They were employed in confidential
relations and offices, were sometimes made the
heirs of their masters, and sometimes married in
the family to which they belonged. It must be
remembered that the Hebrew law did not create
slavery, but found it already existing and incor-
porated with the whole life of the age, so that
when the Hebrews ceased to be slaves, it was in-
evitable that they should have slaves. In all
probability, too, slavery was a protection and a
benefit to its subjects. It was, therefore, to be
regulated, not abolished. But nothing could have
shown more ignorance or wrongheadedness than
the attempt to buttress by scriptural sanction and
Hebrew example an institution like our negro
slavery, which had not in it a single element of
protection or relief, except when the master was
better than the system, in defence of which the
humane master who wanted to escape ostracism
or worse was compelled to hide his hand in show-
ing mercy. In the later period of the national

184 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

history, we hear so little of slaves as to make it
probable that the institution, unabolished, had
dwindled and decayed; though undoubtedly the
Roman officials, after Palestine came under the im-
perial sway, had families of slaves there, as else-
where.

As regards war, it must be admitted that in the
destruction of the Canaanites and in other horri-
ble barbarities on record, we have atrocities unsur-
passed, but not unequalled, in profane history.
But we are apt to forget that, certainly till the
time of Solomon, the standard of civilization
among the Hebrews was very low. The glimpses
that we have of David's time, and of the manners
and customs of the royal family and of the chief
people in the kingdom, show not many degrees
above the rudest savage state. But the law was
more humane than the people. The legislation
recorded in the Pentateuch furnishes the earliest
instances in which any attempt was made to miti-
gate the horrors of war. It is there enacted, that,
before laying siege to a city, the assailants shall
offer terms of peace, and if they be refused, and
the city be taken, that the women and children
shall be spared. There is also one provision,
which modern civilization has not yet recognized,
— the prohibition to destroy fruit-trees, even to be
employed in a siege. " Only the trees which thou

MAURI AGE-LA WS. 185

knowest that they be not trees for meat, thou shalt
destroy and cut them down."

I am much impressed with the mercy to beasts
in the Hebrew code. The ox that treads the
grain to separate it from the husk must not be
muzzled, but must be suffered to take beforehand
his share of the food that he is preparing for his
owner. The mother-bird is not to be taken with
her eggs or her young brood. 4; Thou shalt not
seethe a kid in his mother's milk." " Thou shalt
not see thy brother's ox or his ass fall down by the
way, and hide thyself from them." These are only
specimens of a tenderly humane spirit towards be-
ings of a lower order that recurs repeatedly in the
Pentateuch. It was so far in advance of the time,
that ages afterward, even St. Paul could not ap-
preciate it ; for he asks doubtingly with regard to
one of these laws, " Doth God care for oxen? "

Another subject which claims emphatic atten-
tion is the marriage-laws of the Pentateuch. It
must be remembered that the Hebrew history
abuts upon that period in the infancy of the East-
ern nations when the marriage bond was so loosely
held that kindred was reckoned only on the
mother's side, paternity being always a matter
of question. In Egypt, the earliest of civilized
countries, the marriage of brothers and sisters was
not deemed unfit for many centuries afterward ;

186 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

and such marriages were contracted by some of
the Ptolemys in Egypt's most palmy days. Simi-
lar marriages were not deemed scandalous in the
mythical history of Greece, which is true to the
conceptions, and therefore, probably, to the per-
mitted practice of primitive times. Even when
the intermarriage of children of the same mother
came to be unlawful, children of the same father,
but different mothers, might intermarry without
discredit. Abraham married his half-sister ; and in
one of the unsavory narratives of David's family,
it is intimated that he would readily consent to
the marriage of one of his sons to his half-sister.
This story might seem to give reason for supposing
that some of the most important of the marriage-
laws were of a date subsequent to the time of
the early kings ; and yet in those days the king
and his family would have deemed themselves
above law, and competent to revive obsolete tradi-
tions and practices.

Leaving the time-question aside, the prohibi-
tion of marriage within certain carefully denned
degrees of kindred, a list which purists of our own
day would enlarge only by adding first cousins,
has nothing that can be compared with it in all
pre-Christian legislation ; and the Romish Church
has done the world incalculable service by adher-
ing in this respect — with a tenacity which lias

POLYGAMY. 187

been so seldom bribed as to make the few instances
marked events in history — to the Levitical law as
of sacred authority and indissoluble obligation. It
is impossible to over-estimate the degree in which
this code has contributed to the chastity and purity
of family relations, whose intimacy might often
lead to temptation but for the ban on undue famil-
iarity which has remained unlifted since the He-
brew law had birth. I am inclined to believe,
however, that in one respect the Church has mis-
interpreted the Pentateuch. I do not think that
the marrying of a deceased wife's sister is forbid-
den or even named in the Hebrew law. What is
forbidden is the marrying of a second sister while
the first is still living. I do not believe that the
marrying of two or more sisters could have been
prohibited in a code which requires a brother to
marry his elder brother's childless widow, — a pro-
vision the design of which, no doubt, was to keep
property from going out of a family.

Polygamy, which was universal among the East-
ern nations, is not forbidden in the Hebrew law ;
but the only two recognitions of it are probibi-
bitions, namely, that to which I just now referred,
and the injunction on the king when there shall
be one, that he shall not "multiply wives unto
himself that his heart turn not away," which, if
it was really given before their time, David and

188 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

Solomon ignored to their shame and bane. The
compiler of Genesis, whoever he may have been,
manifestly held polygamy in the utmost disesteem
and abhorrence, and it was, I think, one of his
special aims to throw discredit upon it ; for he
gives several instances of it, from Lamech on-
ward ; and there is not one of these narratives in
which he does not ascribe dissension, calamity,
crime, murder, to polygamy as a cause. Polyg-
amy gradually faded out of practice among the
Hebrews: but few instances of it are on record
after the Babylonish captivity, and conspicuous
among these is the case of Herod the Great, who
had nine wives, but who owned no law, whether
of man or of God.

Precisely what the Hebrew law of divorce was,
no man knows. It depends on the actual mean-
ing of the word in our version translated " un-
cleanness," which, in my opinion, denotes some
grave moral cause of offence. This, among the
later rabbis, was the opinion of the stricter school,
that of Shammai ; while those of Hillel's school
maintained that it included any cause of dissatis-
faction, however trivial, even a mere whim. How-
ever this may be, the law interposed difficulties in
the way of divorce. The husband was obliged to
give the wife a "bill of divorcement," and in the
days when the art of writing was by no means in

USUBY. 189

common use, a man would have to go for this to
the priest or Levite, — that is, would have to state
his case to a person in authority, who might act as
judge, and refuse to furnish the requisite docu-
ment. It seems to me probable that the law in
its meaning and purpose excluded hasty, wanton
divorce, without grave cause, and that the lax
interpretation of it came only with the decline of
morals.

There is one article of the Hebrew code which
would hardly demand comment, had not Ruskin
recently attempted to elevate it from a special
restriction into a universal law ; namely, the prohi-
bition of interest ou mone}r, which the Jews have
generally interpreted as applying only to loans to
their own brethren, and have indemnified them-
selves by imposing, when they could, all the heav-
ier rates of interest on Gentiles. The law was
probably designed to affect only such loans of
mutual accommodation as might be made between
neighbor and neighbor. It was enacted, undoubt-
edly, at a time when agriculture was the chief oc-
cupation, and there was no extensive commerce,
foreign or domestic. It may have been even in-
tended by the law to prevent the people from the
enlarged and corrupting intercourse which com-
merce would imply or bring. But with the growth
of means of communication, and the increased

190 ETHICS OF THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES.

demand for commodities other than the products
of one's own farm or vineyard, commerce was
inevitable, credits and loans became necessary,
and money, if retained or borrowed, could not but
receive, directly or by some legal fiction, the
market-value for its use, nor could it obtain more.
The worth of its use must always obey the law
that regulates the relations of supply and demand,
and any thing that is required or paid beyond is
in the nature of insurance for an extra-hazardous
risk of non-payment.

In this connection I ought to speak of the stress
laid in the Hebrew law on strict and literal hon-
esty in dealing. " Ye shall do no unrighteousness
in meteyard, in weight, or in measure. Just bal-
ances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin,
shall ye have."

I might, had I time, adduce still other features
of the ethics of the Hebrew law that would illus-
trate its pre-eminent wisdom. I wish that some
careful hand would select from the Pentateuch all
that is ethical, and publish it under its several
leading, heads. It would awaken surprise and
profound admiration. All this is now so inter-
spersed among, and hidden by, ritual directions,
which have lost their interest for our time, that
of lovers of the Old Testament in general, few
know, for instance, what a rich vein of pure and

MORAL CHARACTER OF THE HEBREWS. 191

high morality crops out in almost every chapter of
Leviticus.

The Hebrews, indeed, never lived up to the
standard of their law, nor approached it, unless for
a brief season under Ezra and Nehemiah, and then
again under the rule of the Maccabees. But as
compared with other pre-Christian nations, they
were, at the worst, as a light shining in an else
very dark world. Christianity could have its birth
and early nurture among them, though with scant
reception and stinted hospitality. It may be
doubted whether, at the Christian era, the whole
world beside could have given to the infant Church
a John, a Peter, a James, a Paul, or have furnished
a soil in which the seed of the divine word could
have started into life.

LECTURE VIII.

CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

It is often said, in depreciation of Christian
morality, that it has nothing of its own, nothing
new, — that the sages of the East, the Hebrew
scriptures, the earlier rabbis cited in the Talmud,
the Greek philosophers, Cicero in Rome, had antici-
pated every precept of the gospel. This is nearly
or quite true; but what of it? Suppose that the
contrary were true. Would it not present a strong
a priori case against Christian ethics? Can we
conceive that God would have left the world for
so many thousands of years utterly unenlightened
as to right and wrong, good and evil ? We have
seen that the Right is the fitting, — that which is
conformed to the nature of things. From the very
nature of the case, even without special illumina-
tion from the Spirit of God, which yet I cannot
believe to have been wanting, man with his growth
of knowledge and his progress toward civilization,
must have discovered very many fitnesses, and
shaped them into moral rules. Were Christian

192

PERFECTNESS OF CHRISTIAN MORALS. 193

morality wholly new, it must have been spurious
and non-divine.

What we claim for Christian ethics is not origi-
nality, but perfection. According to the Mosaic
cosmogony, and equally in accordance with the
nebular hypothesis, light existed before the sun ;
but none the less glorious was the orb which col-
lected the wandering fires, and was thenceforth
the centre and source of a radiance clear, in-
tense, and penetrating, instead of that which had
brooded dimly and flashed fitfully over weltering
chaos. Thus, in scattered rays, blended with the
night-shadows, had the antecedent ages seen and
rejoiced in the glimmerings of those daybeams
which in full-orbed glory shine from the Sun of
righteousness into the hearts and upon the lives
of men. A single flaw vitiates a moral system
as inevitably as a small aperture in the bottom
of a tank will make it useless ; for who shall say
what amount or power of evil may insinuate itself
through the avenue left unguarded, through the
ignoring of the one omitted virtue or the sanction
of the one licensed sin? Almost Christian as are
large portions of the ethics of Plato's " Republic,"
the adoption in full of his moral code would make
his ideal republic a pandemonium. He sanctions
some of the worst forms of licentiousness, regards
drunkenness as allowable at the feasts of Bacchus,

194 CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

and recommends the murder in infancy of feeble,
sickly, and deformed children. Zeno, the founder
of the Stoic school, and most of his followers,
regarded suicide as a privilege, or even a duty,
in irremediable adversity or in hopeless illness or
decline ; and Zeno himself set the example, which
was followed by some of his best and most illus-
trious disciples. Cicero, who transcends all other
pre-Christian moralists, lays it down as a funda-
mental rule, that one should do no harm to his
neighbor, unless provoked by injury done to hin>
self. Now, in the morality of the gospel you can
find no weak point, no opening for the intrusion of
any form of wrong-doing. Nor can you conceive
of any condition in life in which the true rule of
action is not prescribed by the precepts, suggested
by the spirit, or clearly indicated by the example,
of Jesus Christ. Still more, you can conceive of
no higher law for heaven, or for any order of beings
below the throne of God. Wherever in the uni-
verse you could embody this law in the lives of all
who dwelt there, you would have all the essentials
of heaven.

The perfectness of Christian ethics may be best
tested by comparing the characters nurtured or
transformed under Christian influences with those
under the best antecedent systems. Jesus well
said of John the Baptist, as representing the cul-

SOCRATES. 195

urination of all previous moral culture, " The least
in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."
There were among the Hebrews some magnificent
characters, such as Ezra, Nehemiah, the heroes of
the Asmonsean family ; yet there is about them a
hardness of fibre, a lack of the gentler elements.
They were the men to fight the battles of Jeho-
vah, and just the men on whom the evangelic
graces, if grafted, would have shown in their
blossoming and fruitage how noble a stock was
blending its sap with theirs. In all history, there
is hardly a personage for whom I have so much
admiration as for Nehemiah ; yet I do not think
that I should have wanted to live with him. But
in the Hebrews we witness, as I believe, the spirit-
ual culture by which the divine Providence was
preparing a birthplace for Christ and his gospel.

Outside of Palestine, before Christ, I do not
find a single type of virtue that we should want
to hold forth as exemplary. Socrates was wise,
and died bravely ; but even without going beyond
Plato's or Xenophon's record of him, there was
about him a coarseness, and a companionable, and
virtually an approving, sympathy with licentious
and profligate persons, which would be at harsh
variance with the purity and delicacy of the Chris-
tian standard ; and it is by no means certain that
his life was, by that standard, free from gross, yet

196 CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

then tolerated, vice. Cato the elder was regarded
by the Romans as their model man. Even Cicero,
who was immeasurably better than Cato, evidently
looked upon him as the cynosure for universal
reverence and admiration. I had occasion not
long ago to study Cato's life ; and it occurred to
me to take my New Testament, and to try how
the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount would
harmonize with his character. I found that there
was not one of them with which his life was not
glaringly in contrast, unless he might have claimed
the blessing on those "persecuted for righteous-
ness' sake," on account of the more than forty
lawsuits brought against him by implacable ene-
mies. He was ferociously upright, bitterly patri-
otic, malevolently courageous. But he was mean
and miserly, horribly cruel, an exacting and tyran-
nical slave -master, unrelenting in his enmities,
and neither severely pure nor rigidly temperate.
Cicero comes nearer the Christian standard than
any other pre-Christian, whether Greek or Ro-
man : yet, while I am among his warmest ad-
mirers, I must confess that there are aspects of his
character and passages of his life which admit of a
less favorable construction than I am inclined to
give them ; and if they belonged to one on the list
of Christian saints, they would make his aureola a
penumbra.

THE PASSIVE VIRTUES. 197

After Christ, we have among non-Christians not
a few specimens of genuinely Christian virtue ;
and in a future lecture I shall attempt to trace its
source. Suffice it now to say that there is a con-
tagion of goodness as well as of evil, and that
when the light shines in darkness, and the dark-
ness comprehends it not, those in the dark may
light their lamps at a flame that comes they know
not whence.

Let us now consider some of the peculiar fea-
tures of Christian morality ; for, however little of
originality there may be in its details, as a whole
it has characteristics of its own, which give it a
just pre-eminence among ethical systems. Jesus
verified in his teachings the prophetic saying,
" Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain
and hill shall be brought low." He reversed the
world's ethical scale, dug valleys where the moun-
tains stood, reared mountains where the valleys
were. What we call the passive virtues were be-
fore his time held in the lowest esteem, or rather,
in no esteem at all. They had not even respect-
able names. The Latin humilis denotes grovel-
ling on the ground ; and its Greek equivalent,
Ta7T€u/o?, has a similar derivation and meaning.
In fine, Christianity had to pick up its best words
from the rubbish and dust-heaps of language, and
to pass them through a baptism of regeneration.

198 CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

But we wrong these virtues when we call them
passive. In their highest form and fullest develop-
ment, they require and indicate a compact, tem-
pered, and accumulated strength of character far
beyond that of the virtues which make more show,
even as the spring which will sustain a continuous
pressure, will bend under an added weight without
breaking, and will recoil with undiminished elas-
ticity when the weight is removed, is of a stronger
as well as of a finer staple than the instrument
designed to strike single heavy blows. These
silent virtues are in their quiet way intensely
active, as are those powers of nature that every
spring noiselessly heave the winter-bound earth-
clods, push up the grass -blades, throw out the
leaf-buds, and without voice or sound renew the
whole face of nature.

These virtues are the most aggressive of moral
forces. Every great cause of human progress and
well-being has had for its most efficient workers
men whose resistance has been submission under
meek protest ; and when force has seemed to
crown the work, as in the great contest with
slavery, success has been made possible only by
men who could not strive or cry, but who could
bear testimony to the True and the Right in loss
and shame, in bonds, and even unto death. In-
deed, it is superfluous to multiply instances, when

HOME. 199

the cross, the symbol of meek endurance, unwear-
ied forbearance, and unquenchable love, has been
the sole power on earth that has never known
decline or retrogression, has from the first hour
pursued its course conquering and to conquer,
holds at the present moment its supreme yet se-
renest empire over its myriads of souls, and gives
sure presage of a sovereignty before which every
knee shall bow, and every tongue shall own the
lordship of Him who bore it, and whom it bore.

It is these gentle virtues that created home.
There were no homes in the ancient world, be-
cause there was no tolerance for these virtues.
The Greek, the Roman, household, was in the best
times a despotism ; in the worst, an anarchy. The
wife, the mother, never had her equal, honored
place, nor had the children the discipline which
recognized at once their needs and their rights,
their dependence and their incipient and growing
power of self-control. Nor yet can the Germans,
or any of the northern or eastern tribes that over-
ran the Roman empire, have moulded the Christian
household from elements indigenous in their rude
life. To be sure, their women had a certain in-
trepid nobleness, and a fierce, aggressive equality
with the men of their tribes ; but it was not such
women that could become priestesses of the home-
altar. Home first came into being when the fam-

200 CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

ily received the impress of the command, " Bear
ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of
Christ," — when the domestic circle was pervaded
by the spirit of the great Master, embodied in the
precept, " Be kindly affectioned one to another, in
honor preferring one another."

We shall find, too, that these gentler virtues
underlie all that is healthful and happy in the
social life of modern civilization, while its defi-
ciencies and faults may all be traced to the imper-
fect way and degree in which they are embodied,
practised, and manifested. True refinement is
made up wholly of these qualities of character.
Society is attractive in the proportion in which it
is pervaded by them. Most of the unhappiness in
the intercourse of kindred, neighbors, and friends,
proceeds from their violation. Without them the
hardier virtues might minister to the public peace,
and to progress in the arts of life ; but it is from
these gentler graces that flow the little rills of
content, happiness, and good cheer, which twine
round home-scenes and social gatherings and quiet
hours, and, as they flow together, swell into a full,
rich stream of beatific influences, whose volume
none can measure and none can over-estimate.

There is another point at which we may claim
originality for Christian ethics. We talk of the
Christian system of morals, — and rightly ; but

TUE FUNDAMENTAL RULE OF DUTY. 201

where is the system ? The Master seemed to give
none. His precepts were dropped by the way,
without connection or arrangement. They met
the case in hand, and often seemed to do no more ;
though I believe that we shall never look into the
full meaning of one of these miscellaneous and
scattered sayings without seeing that it involves a
great law of life, includes an entire class of cases,
and is of enduring validity and worth. But there
is a system wherever there is a great general law
from which all else is deduced, and to which all
else is referred ; and in every science the aim has
been to find such a law. Thus, in mechanics, the
law of gravitation comprehends the theory of all
the mechanical powers, — the lever, pulley, wedge,
and screw; and all the complicated theorems which
define their working are inferences from the math-
ematical formulas that measure the tendencies of
mutually gravitating bodies. In morals, the great
sages of antiquity had their characteristic pre-
cepts, which their disciples regarded as fundamen-
tal. Such was the " Know thyself " of Thales, —
a maxim of most momentous significance and
value, yet not all-embracing. It was with some
such expectation that the lawyer asked Jesus,
" Which is the great commandment in the law ? "
The answer was not Christ's own, but, as the ques-
tion seemed to demand, borrowed, word for word,

202 CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

from the Hebrew Scriptures ; yet he rendered
it peculiarly his own by putting upon it the em-
phasis which it had not before, and making it com-
prehensive of all human duty, so that love to man
is but a corollary from it ; and with this corollary
distinctly implied, we have, in the love of God with
all the heart and soul and mind, every thing that
man is bound to do and to be, — every tiling of
vital interest contained in the Law, or preached by
the prophets, or promulgated by him in whom the
Law is consummated, and prophecy becomes his-
tory. This law gives the only sure directory to
the cultivation of virtue and the attainment of
moral excellence. In defining goodness, it unifies
it. The several virtues are, indeed, to be made
each the object of earnest endeavor and faithful
self-discipline ; but it is to be borne in mind that
there is a virtue which contains them all, and
without which they can have no sure root or
healthy growth. They are to be cultivated suc-
cessfully only through that love of God of which
they are a part, and from which the fertilizing in-
fluence flows into them all, as the life-giving juices
from the root flow into the branches and tendrils
of the vine.

It is equally to Jesus that we owe the unifying
of sin. Sins were recognized before ; sin, first by
him. The Jewish law had its fine or sacrifice for

TIIE UNITY OF SIN. 203

every individual transgression, and the sinner
deemed himself cleansed from the specific stain
for which he had brought his sin or trespass offer-
ing to the altar. The psalmists and the prophets
show some sense of the possibility of a general
defilement from which particular sins must of
necessity proceed. But sin, as a definite quality,
apart from sins, and possible even where there are
no conspicuous sins, is an exclusively Christian
idea ; and it is of infinite moral importance. Sin
is hydra-headed, yet has but one heart. You may
cut off head after head, and each will reproduce
itself, or will be replaced by one more hideous.
Its heart is autonomy, self-will, the ignoring of
the divine will and law, the living without God in
the world, — a condition which, did it produce no
evil, is in itself evil. The fatal stroke must be
aimed at the heart; and when that is stilled in
death, what of life lingers in the heads can be
extinguished, though they may need to be sepa-
rately dealt with ; for, as is the case with mollusks
and reptiles, sin does not die at once in all its
parts, though with its heart they all be death-
stricken. This is the Christian theory of repent-
ance, /xcravota in the Greek, which signifies change
of mind, the first word in the preaching of Jesus,
and the key-word to all that he taught. This is
the idea that underlies what he says about the

204 CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

ceremonial washing of the hands and of the out-
side of the cup and platter, while from within,
from the heart, " proceed those things that defile
a man."

Another feature of Christian morality is that it
is prevailingly positive. Other moralists forbid
more than they command. Prohibition rather
than precept characterizes the Confucian and the
Brahmanistic ethics. This is pre-eminently true
of Buddhism, which is hardly less thorough in its
prohibitions than would be demanded by the
highest Christian standard, and would make its
disciple negatively pure, yet to a very limited ex-
tent actively virtuous. The Decalogue is prohib-
itory. " Thou shalt not " is the form of eight
out of the ten commandments ; the stress of the
fourth rests on the prohibition to work on the sab-
bath ; and the fifth, that enjoining filial reverence,
is the only one that is positive both in form and
in meaning. In this respect the Law was, not the
"schoolmaster " (for the word so rendered in our
English Bible denotes the slave that leads the
children to school), but the servant to bring men
to Christ, — to fit them by abstaining for doing, by
shunning the wrong for practising the right. For
nations and races, no less than for the individual
man, ceasing to do evil must precede learning to
do well. Jesus does not abrogate the prohibitions

UNDUE STRESS ON PASSIVE VIRTUES. 205

of the Law, but he complements them by precepts
of active goodness. The contrast of which I have
spoken reminds me of the Egyptian ritual of the
dead ; that is, the formula of the judgment through
which the dead must pass as they enter the life
beyond death. It is all negative. The man ar-
raigned before the judges who are to determine
his destiny is made to say, if he can say it with
truth, " I have not done violence, I have not de-
frauded, I have not committed adultery, I have
not perjured myself," and so on through a long
list of sins, from which, if he can thus purge him-
self, he is received into paradise. All this Jesus
would have his disciple to say; but if he could
say no more, he would not be his disciple. The
virtues of the Beatitudes are none of them nega-
tive ; or rather, they all are much more than
negative. They are not filled out by the absence
of impurity, of unmercifulness, of arrogance, of
strife. There must be the cherishing of pure
thoughts, the showing of mercy, the meek and
gentle bearing, diligent peace-making.

I am thus led to speak of the Christian ethics
as demanding active no less than passive goodness.
There was in the primitive days of the Church so
much to be suffered, as to give a trend to the
early Christian literature in the direction of
patience, submission, brave endurance ; but it

206 CHRISTIAN ETniCS.

must be borne in mind, that, in times of intense
trial, these become active virtues, demanding the
very stoutest moral fibre, and evincing an inward
might adequate to the most energetic toil. Those
who had nothing to do for their faith but to die
for it, put into the final conflict strength that
might have more than sufficed for a long lifetime
of arduous duty. When the dying sacrifice is no
longer demanded, its place can be taken only by
the living sacrifice of mind and soul and strength
in the service of man, and of God through man.
The Christian is he whose lifework glows and
grows under his hand, who is conscious of an un-
ceasing call for strenuous activity, who takes for
his watchword the great apostle's question, " Lord*,
what wouldst thou have me to do ? "

We wTill now inquire how far Christianity con-
tributes to our knowledge of duty, that is, of the
fitnesses of things, — the knowledge which is not
conscience, but which conscience needs, and may
always, use. When the astronomer wants to pre-
sent a perfectly accurate view of the solar system,
he shows and describes it as it would appear from
the centre of the sun, — gives what he calls helio-
centric angles and distances. In the moral uni-
verse, Christianity gives us heliocentric views, —
shows us things as God sees them. We thus learn
the transcendent worth of the soul, of character,

THE SOWS TRANSCENDENT WORTII. 207

of inward truth, purity and love, as compared
with the body and the material world. Aside
from Christianity, while we might attach a supe-
rior value to the soul's life, yet things spiritual and
things outward would differ less in our estimate
than they do now, and we might deem it fitting
to make some compromise or sacrifice of the in-
ward life for very great outward gain. But Chris-
tianity attaches the value of an actual appraisement
by weights and balances to the question which
has not lost its significance by being supplanted
in the Revised Version of the New Testament,
" What is a man profited though he gain the whole
world, and lose his own soul?" The clear reve-
lation of immortality makes an almost entire
revolution in the realm under the special cognizance
of conscience. Not that there could be, even were
we going to die as the brutes die, any fitness in
vice, or any unfitness in virtue. Yet if our life
here were our whole life, it would undoubtedly be
fitting for us to fill it as full as it could hold with
sober and honest pleasures, and, without neglect-
ing mind and character, to give the body its ample
share of enjo}Tment. But if the body is to last
only a little while, and the soul to live forever,
then there is a manifest fitness in our giving
supreme regard to the furniture and possessions
of the soul, to what it may carry with and in it-

208 CHRISTIAN ETUICS.

self through the death-passage, and attaching a
diminished worth to possessions and endowments
of which our tenure at the best is exceedingly
brief and frail.

Christianity also reveals to us our fellow-men as
related to us by more intimate ties than we might
else recognize, as fellow-children of the Infinite
Father, fellow-subjects of his benign providence,
fellow-heirs of the life eternal. Now, men of dif-
ferent conditions and races diverge very widely in
this earthly life ; and where no other life has been
held in view, there has been little sense of fitness
in the relations between race and race, or class and
class. Among some of the most enlightened ethi-
cal teachers of the old time, including even Soc-
rates as Plato reports him, we find precepts tanta-
mount to the maxim that had become current
among the Jews, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor,
and hate thine enemy." Cut off from collective
humanity its common base and its common archi-
trave, you leave only separate groups with no
more necessary mutual relations than different
races of beasts have. The Caucasian sees no
reason why he may not reduce the Hottentot as
he would the horse to bondage, or hunt the Au-
stralian as he would the ostrich. But when we
trace men with all their diversities, perhaps with
no common earthly parentage (for I do not think

CASUISTRY. 209

that even the biblical narrative implies a common
human ancestry for all men), when we trace them,
I say, back to a common Father whose image is
impressed on them all, and on to a common home
in the many-roomed mansion of that Father, we
see the fitnesses of human brotherhood, which
have been realizing themselves in emancipation, in
the missionary enterprise, in protective coloniza-
tion, and in the establishment of mutually benefi-
cent international intercourse. In these ways
Christianity has very largely increased man's
knowledge of the fitness of things, so that under
its guidance one need never be at a loss as to
what is fitting and right, or as to what is unfitting
and wrong.

Christianity also acts directly upon the con-
science, stimulating it to activity, to watchful-
ness, to keenness. The divine presence, the power
of an undying hope, the example of perfect hu-
manity in Jesus, the feeling of intensest interest
in one's own character, the fellowship of kindred
minds and hearts, all prompt one to the careful
consideration of the right and the wrong in every
case offered for his decision, and thus to even the
minutest scrutiny of whatever may bear upon
the question of right.

The influence of Christianity has had one sin-
gular consequence in the literature of ethics. It

210 CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

gave birth and long life to the science of casuis-
try ; that is, of special cases of conscience. At a
very early period, Christian writers began to dis-
cuss the question of duty in difficult and doubtful
cases, sometimes real, perhaps oftener, imaginary.
In the Middle Ages, among the schoolmen, there
was little writing on morals except in the depart-
ment of casuistry ; and even as late as the seven-
teenth century we have a large volume of casuistry
from Baxter. The discussion of special cases has
almost ceased now, not, as I believe, because men
are less solicitous to know their duty, but because
they have attained to a clearer knowledge of it.
Christianity awakened in the minds of its sincere
disciples everywhere an earnest desire to know the
right, and the aim was to converge the light of
Christ's teaching and life on every separate de-
partment of duty. The result was a series of dis-
coveries in every department, — the creation of
luminous patches where there was dense darkness
before ; and now these patches have run together,
and the light of the gospel rests full and clear on
the whole field of human duty, so that we seldom
need to ask, What ought I to do ? Our one pres-
ent need — never so intense as now — is the ready
will to do all that we know.

This leads me to say that there is still one form
of casuistry that most injuriously affects the Chris-

JESUS, MAN'S EXEMPLAR. 211

tian Church. The question is virtually asked, and
very often, " How little of duty can I do, and yet
remain a Christian? How far can I avail myself
of what Mammon and Belial have to give, and
yet not forfeit my part in the benefits at Christ's
bestowal?" Those who thus strive to make
their way between wind and water often have
hard cases of conscience, while they attempt to
harmonize opposite polarities, and to negative the
infallible words of Jesus, " No man can serve two
masters." But to him who is willing to serve
only one master, Christianity seldom or never
leaves conscience in doubt. While he who at-
tempts to see double finds the light within him
darkness, the single eye is full of light.

I ought to add, as the culminating prerogative
of Christian ethics, that we have in Jesus the em-
bodiment of all that he taught as to human duty,
so that he teaches us even more by his life than
b}r his words. The Gospel of Mark gives but few
of his discourses, and those few abridged ; and yet
there is not a lesson of truth or duty drawn out
at length by the other three evangelists, which we
may not read as distinctly and impressively in
Mark's condensed narrative of Christ's daily walk,
of his intercourse with all sorts and conditions of
men, of the divine humanity from which there is
a perpetual effluence of all that is most winning

212 CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

and endearing, stimulating to the conscience,
fraught with instruction in Tightness. It is im-
possible to separate his ethical teaching from his
life. Here he stands alone. There are great
moral teachers, whose writings would be worth
fully as much as they are if they were anonymous.
There are some, like Seneca, whose works would
be of much greater value were there not a harsh
discrepancy between their writings and what is
known or suspected of their lives. There are
good lives which we contemplate with admiration
and love, but which teach us only what they
themselves derived from Jesus, and which differ
from his life in that they reflect the light kindled
from his spirit unevenly, so that they are models
of some, but not of all, virtues, and even when
such seems not to be the case, that they have
about them the coloring of their country, time,
and circumstances, — that they are not cosmopoli-
tan in such a sense as to be equally impressive,
edifying, and instructive to persons of all ages,
lands, and conditions. But Jesus is at once
identified with and detached from his surround-
ings, and he could not be the one without the
other ; for those traits of perfect humanity that
were in him could have their full manifestation
only in the actual world in which he lived, and
yet they are to that world like the circumambient

THE NEED OF MOTIVE-POWER. 213

air, in contact with every being and substance,
yet never yielding up its specific properties, — with
and in all, yet its identity unchanged. Though
among Jews, he is no more of a Jew than if he
had lived in Arabia. We never feel that the pe-
culiarities, much less the prejudices, frailties, and
follies of his age and people cleave to him, or dim
his lustre as the Sun of righteousness for our
whole race, or make his example any the less the
cynosure for those of all nations, for man so long
as he shall live on earth, so long as he shall live
with God in heaven,

We have seen what Christian morality is. An
ethical system, however, needs more than itself, —
more than principles and rules of duty. It fully
as much needs motive-power. There is a Chinese
legend that illustrates this need. The three great
religious teachers of the Celestial Empire, from
their heavenly abode beholding with profound sor-
row the degeneracy of their people, and mourning
that their lifework seemed so entire a failure, re-
turned to the earth, in order to find some suit-
able missionary whom they could send forth as a
reformer. They came in their wanderings to an
old man, sitting as the guardian of a fountain.
He talked to them so wisely and so earnestly of
the great concerns which they had most at heart,
that they came to the conclusion that he was the

214 CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

very man for the work which they wished to ac-
complish. But when they proposed the mission
to him, he replied, " It is the upper part of me
only that is of flesh and blood : the lower part is
of stone. I can talk about virtue and good works ;
but I cannot rise from my seat to perform any
righteous act." This apologue indicates the moral
condition in which even a perfect ethical system
might leave its disciples. The words which Ovid
puts into the mouth of Medea, Video meliora, pro-
boque, deteriora sequor, " I see and approve the
better; I follow the worse," express the utter
moral inability which is by no means a rare state
of consciousness. Christianity supplies the requi-
site enabling power. It presents in the divine
providence, benignity, fatherhood, every motive
that can flow from reverence and love ; it appeals
to man by the love and sacrifice of Christ, and
by the power of his cross ; it pledges the aid of
Omnipotence to supplement the feebleness of those
who have but the will to do right ; and its worship
and ordinances are oft-recurring remembrancers of
duty, keeping its own working-force in constant
activity, and feeding the strength that might else
be wasted and lost. Its revealed immortality is
a moving no less than a teaching power. It pro-
claims an inevitable retribution, and that by no
arbitrary decree, but by the law of continuity ;

THE STANDARD OF CHARACTER. 215

and as no man can wish to outlive what he most
craves and enjoys, there is no need of any harsh
theology to make men seek in a virtuous life that
which alone can have any heritage beyond the
death-shadow. Thus Christianity furnishes power
to actualize its own ideal, — to make men what it
bids them be.

We can hardly dismiss Christian ethics without
referring to the wide difference between the ethi-
cal standard of the Christian Church and that of
its Lord and Master. I was once visiting a mag-
nificent church edifice with a friend learned in
church lore. I called his attention to the unlike-
ness of the eagle used as a reading-desk to the
eagle of the skies. "Yes," said my friend, "you
are right ; but this is the ecclesiastical eagle, pre-
cisely as it has come down to us from the Middle
Ages." Just so, there is a traditional type of the
Christian that has come down to us from how
remote a time it is hard to say, but certainly not
from the skies, and not from Christ. The Chris-
tian, as such, is expected to do certain things and
to abstain from certain things, to attend public
worship when convenient, to observe Christian
ordinances, and to keep a prudent silence when
Christianity is assailed or vilified. But it is not
regarded as absurd to speak of selfish Christians,
miserly Christians, unforgiving Christians, which

216 CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

ought to be deemed no less self-contradictory
terms than Mahometan Christians or atheistical
Christians. It is easier to account for this condi-
tion of things in the past than to excuse it in the
present. During the first three centuries, when
Christianity was making rapid progress, its very
growth rendered it legitimately less pure than had
it lingered in its work of reformation. A large
proportion of the converts, however sincere in
their adherence to the new religion, brought into
its fold habits and tendencies engendered by their
previous belief and culture, which were not wholly
washed away in their Christian baptism. How
far the cleansing process was carried, and in how
many illustrious examples it seemed complete and
entire, is among the greatest marvels of history ;
and had the Christian faith remained a century
longer under the ban of the empire, its tens of
thousands might have vied in moral purity and
excellence with the little band, wont before the
first Christian Pentecost to meet in the large
upper room in Jerusalem. But when Christianity
became the established religion of the empire, it
had to take on, and found it impossible wholly to
cleanse, the impurities, falsities, and wrongs of
high station, court-life, and arbitrary power. It
indeed modified what it could not remove, and
utilized much which it could not make better.

THE ETHICS OF PROTESTANTISM. 217

But the term, Christian, in the imperial palace
meant less than in the amphitheatre of savage
martyrdom, and conversion to a court-religion
was something very different from a conversion
which might consign the new disciple to the stake.
Then, too, it was almost inevitable that the Church
should assume the power so readily granted by
emperors who made bishops their conscience-keep-
ers ; and this power, in order to maintain itself,
could not but lay the intensest stress on formal
unity in the Church. Hence the paramount im-
portance attached to creed and ritual as the only
means of insuring uniformity, and consolidating
power. Heresy thus became the one unpardon-
able sin ; and orthodoxy, the sole test of Christian
standing.

The Protestant Reformation was one of allegi-
ance and opinion, rather than of morals. The cor-
ruption of the Papacy, indeed, did much to initiate
and energize it ; but civil power, both in Germany
and in England, had too large a part in the move-
ment to give it the ethical character which it
had, and still to a marvellous degree retains, in
Scotland alone. But even there, and wherever
throughout the realm of Protestanism there has
been any thing like religious earnestness, the
prime test of the Christian estate has been con-
formity to a prescribed standard of belief rather

218 CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

than of character. It is impossible that two col-
lateral standards should be of equal validity and
worth. One must be paramount; the other, sec-
ondar}'. Bimetallism is practically as impossible
in the Church as in the money-market. If assent
to a creed be so inexorably required as a title to
Christian recognition and communion, that with-
out such assent the most Christlike man living
will be discarded as no Christian, it is absolutely
impossible that character as a test and standard
should not be held as of comparatively little
worth or significance. Not that the creed will
pass into a church a very bad man ; but it will
put a very moderately and imperfectly good man
in a position in which he will be entirely satisfied
with himself, and will regard himself as fully com-
petent to judge the Christian character of others,
and of those much better than himself.

There are those of a more liberal faith, or of a
broader church, who have done well in renoun-
cing creeds as tests of Christian character. But
they none the less need a test. If they have no
right to account men as Christians for believing
as they themselves do, still less have they a right
to regard common non-beliefs as a ground of
Christian recognition or fellowship. Christlike-
ness should be our sole standard of self-judgment ;
and while we should be very slow to judge our

«
THE TEST OF CHRISTIAN CHARACTER. 219

fellow-men, we cannot account as of the true
household of faith those who claim their place in
it solely on the ground of belief or of non-belief,
but must so regard those only whom, in the exer-
cise of the broadest charity, we can recognize as
bearing, or at least as desiring and endeavoring to
bear, a moral and spiritual kinship to Christ.

LECTURE IX.

MORAL BEAUTY.

Moral beauty is that which produces directly
on the mind an effect closely corresponding to
that which is produced by physical beauty through
the eye. It would beaf painting, would stand the
severest tests of art, and in its pictorial presenta-
tion would impress the beholder with its loveli-
ness. It has often furnished subjects for painting
and sculpture, and the crowning merit of many of
the greatest works of art is that they represent it
to the moral sense as vividly as to the eye skilled
in the science of form and color. They sometimes
give a grace that is even more than beauty to ob-
jects which, by the ordinary standard of judgment,
are any thing rather than beautiful. Thus, in
Domenichino's picture in the Vatican of the Com-
munion of St. Jerome, you might search the alms-
houses of Christendom in vain for so worn, wan,
ghastly, and even squalid, a face and form as are
given to the old saint ; and yet even to the ordi-
nary beholder, much more to one of cultivated
220

BEAUTY IN ART. 221

taste, the figure is made beautiful and glorious by
the glow of sight-like faith in the dying eyes, by
the visible peace of God that rests on the wrinkled
and wasted countenance, and by the suggestive
paraphernalia of the holy rite that is to give the
Christian soldier his viaticum for his last conflict,
in which he seems already to hear the plaudit that
awaits his victory.

On the other hand, there are favorite subjects of
mediaeval art, which no charms of physical beauty
can make otherwise than disgusting. Thus, there
are no more magnificent*female forms than the
Judiths, there is no more fascinating loveliness
than in not a few of the Herodiases ; but the
dripping heads which they carry, and our associa-
tions with the savageness of the one, and the
heartless wantonness of the other, completely neu-
tralize the physical beauty by the sense of moral
deformity.

I have seen almost all the great pictures in Eu-
rope, and I cannot recall one that has left on my
mind the impression of beauty, which would not,
if translated into life and reproduced in action,
be beautiful. To be sure, there are, as in the last
scenes of our Saviour's life, in many of these pic-
tures the figures of persons that are the opposite
of morally beautiful ; but the picture is beautiful,
only when the person or the act that is morally

222 MORAL BEAUTY.

beautiful is made so prominent as to render all
else accessory to its representation. Thus, in
many of the pictures of Christ before the judg-
ment-seat and on the cross, the beauty of the
whole is enhanced, because cunning, treachery,
stupidity, malice, and rage are so grouped and
painted as to bring out into all the stronger
light the loveliness and majesty of the principal
figure ; while in the comparatively few instances
in which art has expended its strength and skill
in representing the Saviour's sufferings rather
than him suffering, the*e is no beauty whatever.
I have said thus much to illustrate the position
that what is morally beautiful is what would make
a beautiful picture, and thus, that the same ele-
ments underlie beauty in nature, in art, in action,
and in character.

As the beautiful in nature is more than the use-
ful, so is the beautiful in action and in character
more than the good. Straight lines and sharp an-
gles do not look beautiful to the eye ; nor in life,
speech, and conduct do they seem beautiful to the
mind. In natural beauty the lines seem continu-
ous, so gently does curve melt into curve. In
character, however good, there is no beauty in
sharp angles, in brusquerie, rudeness, abruptness,
least of all, in fits of goodness which have their
beginnings and endings, with the life, though not

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS. 223

bad, on a lower plane, in the intervals. Even
when there is no lack of continuity, a character
may have inflexible rectitude, literal veracity,
habits sedulously conformed in the smallest mi-
nutiae to the rule of right, and it may have
our entire approval, our sincere though cold ad-
miration, yet may have no beauty. There is a
style of goodness that reminds one of a skeleton
hung on wires, in which conscience is unrestingly
active, but tbe imagination torpid even to death,
— which repels sympathy, and makes virtue un-
lovely. A heaven thus peopled would seem no
paradise. Grim piety may be of subjective worth
to the individual soul, but its objective value
would be represented by a negative sign.

On the other hand, there is a beauty of holi-
ness, in which there are the hardier muscles and
sinews that do the heavy lifework, but filled in
and rounded out in perfect symmetry and grace.
Such are the characters that wear the aureola of
a perpetual sainthood, recognized not by this or
that sect or party, but by all who love what is
good of every type, the Fenelons, the Oberlins,
the Florence Nightingales, those whose names the
heart thrills in hearing, those who cease not
to shine on earth when they become stars in
heaven. It is beauty that makes their sainthood
as precious to man as to God. Without it, they

224 MORAL BEAUTY.

might still be diamonds, yet diamonds in the
rough, of which only the expert can know the
value ; but God, when he " makes up his jewels,"
polishes the precious stones, cuts facets on them
for the multiform reflection of his own ineffable
beaut}% and sets them in the purest gold.

As in character, so in individual acts, there is
goodness without beauty, and there is goodness
that is intensely beautiful. Thus, pity, divorced
from kindness or fellow-feeling, — a worthy senti-
ment indeed, but the same that is felt for a suffer-
ing beast, — may go about doing good, and its cold,
sharp-angled formalism may chill and starve the
souls of those whose bodies it feeds and warms ;
while kindness may be almost empty-handed, and
yet for the loveliness of its beauty be blessed by
the eye that sees and the ear that hears. There
are right and virtuous acts performed from a re-
luctant sense of duty ; and these I would by no
means undervalue, especially as they mark the
first stage toward the condition in which one can
say, " Oh, how love I thy law!" But while we
recognize these acts as fitting and meritorious, we
see no beauty in them. There are other not un-
like acts into which heart and soul are put along
with mind and strength, and these seem as beauti-
ful as they are good.

Indeed, the element of beauty bears a very

BEAUTY IN JESUS CHRIST. 225

large part in beneficence. OVe do good, in very-
great measure, by the virtue that goes forth from
us, by the aroma of character. ) I said in a former
lecture, that, in reckoning the product of benefi-
cence, what we give, or say, or do is the multipli-
cand, ourselves the much larger multiplier. Now,
in that multiplier such grace and beauty of soul as
we may have constitute the principal factor. In-
fluence is often neutralized by the unloveliness of
those who most earnestly strive to exert it for the
Right and the Good. Remonstrances are rendered
unavailing by the lack of a meek and gentle
spirit. Example is bereft of its due power by de-
fect in point of symmetry and gracefulness, and
not infrequently by the clumsiness and awkward-
ness that always disfigure an example that is for-
mally set, even in cases where the same example
left to set itself would be graceful. But genuine
moral beauty will do its beneficent work without
attempting it, or even being conscious of it.
However lowly, it cannot be hidden. It shines
through the thickest veil, and makes the most
opaque medium transparent.

We have the fullest manifestation of the worth
and power of spiritual beauty in the life of Jesus
Christ on the earth. In its gentleness and sweet-
ness, its compassion and mercy, its self-forgetting
sacrifice, its unremitted care for the welfare and

226 MORAL BEAUTY.

happiness of the ungrateful and the sinful, we
have not a mere teacher from whose lips we are
to receive the law of right, nor a mere exemplar
after whose pattern we are artificially to shape
our conduct, but one whom to know is equally to
admire and to love. We cannot become familiar
with his walk among men, and with the heart
whose pulses are all laid open to our view, with-
out our souls being suffused with the radiance of
a beauty in whose incarnation we see the fore-
shining of heaven, — a beauty like that of nature,
infinite and exhaustless, like the flowers and the
stars, the glowing sunsets and the sparkling
waters, the more beautiful the longer and the
oftener we look upon it.

If it be asked what constitutes moral beauty,
I hardly know a better answer than might be
given in the one word moderation, if you will
take into view all that the word means. It is de-
rived from modus, " measure ; " and in its proper
use it signifies not imperfection, or slowness, or
backwardness, but the due proportion in life of
all the elements that go to make up a good life.
Of virtue there can be no excess ; and we have
had, as I believe, the ideal of perfect virtue actual-
ized but once on earth. But individual virtues
may exist in such excess, so out of due propor-
tion, as to cease to be virtues. The beauty of

SUBLIMITY WITHOUT BEAUTY. 227

Christ's character consists, in great part, in its
perfect balance. Probably among those who most
opposed him there were not only bad men and
hypocrites, but specialists in virtue, — men who
nursed some one virtue out of due proportion,
and held others in inferior esteem. Were he liv-
ing on earth now with no external token of
Christhood, among his strongest opponents would
be some of the extremists in morals who call
themselves by his name. I am inclined to think
that their types of virtue would find as little sym-
pathy from him as he would show with the vices
that they denounce.

Aristotle, whose ethics, while defective in fur-
nishing no sufficient basis or ground of right, are
fraught with practical suggestions of enduring
value, makes virtue to consist primarily in the
avoidance of extremes. Each virtue lies between
two vices or non-virtues, — as temperance, between
excess and asceticism ; courage, between rashness
and pusillanimity.

As in nature and art, so in character, there is
sublimity where there is no beauty. A really
grand character, in some respects even grandly
good, may have defects which will not let it be
beautiful. Indeed, grandeur is sometimes created
by such defects, as a steep ravine at its side will
make a mountain look higher than it is. On

228 MORAL BEAUTY.

the other hand, there are characters which escape
being called great only by their beauty, by their
roundness and evenness, by the unbroken uni-
formity of their goodness.

Let us consider some of the things that are not
beautiful. Passion is never beautiful. Its name
defines its nature. It differs from patience, though
derived from the same verb, — patience, from the
present, the active participle, denoting suffering,
and connoting the brave spirit in which it is borne ;
passion, from the past and neuter participle, de-
noting entire subdual and subjection, — a state in
which the man does not possess himself, but the
feeling possesses the man, gets supremacy over his
will-power, and forces him to do what he else
would not do. This position of a human being's
will-power is in itself so unbecoming that it is not
in any of its forms susceptible of beauty. There
is no need of my saying this of the malevolent af-
fections. They are capable of grandeur, nay, they
are almost essential to tragedy, and play a large
part in sensational romances and novels ; but ex-
cept when they are made the background for some
intensely lovely character or act, they exclude the
drama or fiction in which they are portraj-ed from
the catalogue of the beautiful in literature.

But not only the malevolent affections, even
love, while as an affection it is in every aspect

AMBITION. 229

and manifestation beautiful, ceases to be so when
it becomes a passion. In the entire range of an-
cient and modern literature, there are no more
beautiful characters than those of Andromache
and Penelope ; while Helen, though for physical
beauty she wins the prize in competition with the
very goddesses, repels, even in her woes and her
bitter end, the sympathy which we feel so pro-
foundly with the faithful wives. In the ^Eneid,
too, our pity for Dido is largely alloyed with dis-
gust. Love, as an affection, is reserved, modest,
self-sacrificing, utterly unselfish, desiring above
all things that its subject and its object may be
worthy of each other by the highest standard of
excellence. Love, as a passion, is demonstrative,
fierce, truculent, exacting, selfish, or, if self-sacri-
ficing, always ready to sacrifice its object with
itself.

Ambition, as an impelling motive on an honor-
able career, is beautiful, as it maintains that equi-
librium of the higher nature, in which the powers
are evenly balanced forces, and act in harmony
and mutual helpfulness; while it sees in those
above itself goals to be reached, or, if possible,
passed, as mile-stones on the ascending way, not
rivals to be supplanted. But envy, hostile rivalry,
the desire to excel, not by outrunning others, but
by tripping them up in the race, makes ambition

230 MORAL BEAUTY.

hideous and hateful; for then it has become a pas-
sion, without any moral will-power to withstand
or temper it.

Even the most sacred religious affections, when
made passions, or carried to excess, cease to be
beautiful. Fanaticism is sincere and earnest, but
it makes a passion of an affection. Prayer, praise,
and all forms of worship in which a truly devout
spirit seeks its natural utterance, are as beautiful
as they are holy, when they recognize the divine
presence as the one supreme fact of human exist-
ence, and recognize, too, the sacredness no less
than the lovingness of that presence. But fanati-
cism presents an idea of the Supreme Being which
would give us repulsive associations with a human
potentate. His favor is capricious, and needs to
be taken by storm. He has his favorites, and they
obtain their place by noisy importunity, and keep
it by vulgar familiarity. Men are to be heard
for their " much speaking,1' rather than for the
quality of their prayers, or of the hearts that pray.
In fine, there is no point at which there is not the
broadest discrepancy between the fanatic's God
and the Father, equally of all men and of every
man, whom Jesus Christ revealed and manifested,
— whose very presence is a law of beauty, and, so
far as it is felt, must make his worship the beauty
of holiness.

SANCTITY AND SANCTIMONY. 231

There are hardly any two words that from their
derivation ought to be of closer kindred and sig-
nificance than sanctity and sanctimony ; and there
are hardly any two that are farther apart. Sanc-
tity is always beautiful. There have been those on
whom rested visibly the seal of Gcd in lip, and
brow, and mien, whose presence was a benedic-
tion, who never obtruded sacred themes, but made
common themes sacred by the unction from the
Holy One which shed its fragrance over and in all
their social intercourse. We know such persons
now. I have had such guests in my house, and
have had in them all that I could have enjoyed in
angels' visits. I have received such guests as
strangers, and have found that I was " entertain-
ing angels unawares." These are the persons who
literally "pray without ceasing;" that is, devo-
tional thoughts have so incorporated themselves
with their whole inward being, that the conscious-
ness of the present God forms an inseparable part
of their own consciousness, and is thus an insep-
arable element in all that they say and do. Now,
sanctimony, meaning to be a copy of this grace
which cannot be copied, becomes its unsightly and
disgusting caricature. It saddens and lengthens
the countenance which there is no flame of devo-
tion to light ; it substitutes a sepulchral whine for
the strains as from silver bells in which true god-

232 MORAL BEAUTY.

liness finds utterance ; and in air and- manner it
puts on the holiness which it has not taken in,
and the mask fits so ill as to show all its seams
and sutures. It is often a mere shallow pretence,
at the outset devoid of sincerity, and becoming
sincere only in the limited sense in which an actor
grows into the part which he has played often and
long, or in which a mask, that so stuck to the
face that it could not be torn off, would become a
part of the face. When there is in it any degree
of inwardness or of genuine feeling, it must be
the rareness and unfamiliarity of the feeling that
clothe it in so grotesque a garb.

Asceticism is another form of false or mistaken
devotion that is wholly destitute of 'beauty. It
had, indeed, as I said in a former lecture, its origin
in the unlovely conception of the almost semi-
omnipotence of Satan. If you will look through
the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures, you will
find them pervaded by the idea that the moderate,
yet free and generous use of what God has given
us is at least one of the ways in which he would
have us own his goodness. Wanton, needless self-
denial, the refusal on the ground of piety to avail
one's self of benefits and blessings from the hand
of God, is as unbecoming and unbeautiful as it
would be for children to spurn and throw away a
father's or a mother's Christmas presents because

ASCETICISM. 233

they were so tasteful and elegant. Yet for many
centuries, scorn of the comforts of this life was
thought the surest way to heaven. Even the lux-
ury of decency and cleanliness was renounced and
denounced. It was the boast of Thomas a Becket,
that, from the time that he became Archbishop of
Canterbury, no water ever came into contact with
his body ; and among the many blessed tokens
of sainthood in Francis of Assisi, the mediaeval
chroniclers numbered the disgusting fact, that, at
a certain stage of his growth in grace, street-offal
was his chosen food. Self-denial for the sake of
others is always graceful and beautiful ; but even
more so is the sharing of whatever belongs to the
sunny side of life with those who can be brought
over from the shady side, thus creating a commu-
nity of feeling which is often of more worth than
mere gifts can be. The sending to those in need
what the giver deprives himself of for their com-
fort is lovely and beautiful ; but far more so would
be the literal carrying out of our Saviour's exhor-
tation, "When thou makest a feast, call the poor,
the maimed, the lame, the blind." Such a feast
might, I think, make a fair show in Christian art;
and I am sure that it would bring down heavenly
witnesses who would pronounce it beautiful. But
monasticism, cenobitism, and all self-imposed au-
sterities, are unlovely in their exterior aspects, and

234 MORAL BEAUTY.

fully as much so in their meaning and spirit, in
which they are inseparable from the theory that
gave them birth, that of Satan's power in the crea-
tion and government of the outward universe.

To pass to the second great commandment,
philanthropy, when made a passion, loses all its
beauty. Nothing can be more lovely than the
life devoted with perfect singleness of purpose to
the doing of good; and since in this, as in every
department of life, a division of labor economizes
power, and enhances its products, it is certainly
desirable that every servant of man should have
his or her special branch of service and walk of
usefulness. But when one comes to regard his as
the only service and the only work, and his spe-
cific way of doing it as alone worthy of tolerance,
he in his passion makes his work unlovely, his
cause repulsive, and to many undiscerning minds
philanthropy itself odious. As the rapid runner
makes the breeze that stops his breath, so does
philanthropy of the type of which I am now speak-
ing create the opposition with which it wrestles,
and the best causes have often found their greatest
hinderances in their advocates. Such philanthropy
has hatred as vehement as its love ; and whatever
odium it attracts, it receives no more than it
bestows.

Here we see the need and the efficacy of our

SELF-CONTROL. 235

Saviour's making the two laws of love to God and
love to man one and the same law. Neither can
be parted from the other without losing all its
beauty. They are needed to clarify and sweeten
each other. Nay, they are both needed for each
other's fulness. Piety needs love to man, that its
glow may neither cool in its source nor slacken
in its flow. Philanthropy needs love to God to
redeem it from acridness and bitterness. It is
for lack of this union that Christianity has often
been unlovely, and while in fact the most beauti-
ful child of heaven, has dragged her honor in the
dust. The persecution of Christians by Christians
has been often, no doubt, urged by a piety, sincere
after its sort, but not by a man-loving piety. When
human wrongs have been violently wrested into
right, and Satan has been cast out by Satan, it has
been by a philanthropy, however earnest, not God-
loving.

I have spoken of passion or excess as fatal to
beauty in character. This leads me to name self-
government and self-discipline as among its essen-
tial factors. Do not imagine that the self-con-
tained and self-controlled spirit lacks depth. It
is the shallow lake that has a quick, short swell,
and can be lashed into fury by a breeze that will
not quicken the ocean's pulse. The descriptive
terms which St. Paul applies to the character that

236 MORAL BEAUTY.

ought to be, — "steadfast, immovable," — were vir-
tually applied in the Hebrew Scriptures also to the
higher forms of excellence. " He that doeth these
things shall never be moved." There is a repose,
a quietness of spirit, which indicates depth and
fulness, which has no spring-tides because it has
no neap-tides, in which devotion has not its fitful
sojourn, but its settled home, in which not man
collectively, but individual men, whatever their
needs or their sins, can always find heart-room,
in which there is fervor without effervescence,
charity without favoritism, — a walk with God in
which "Our Father," not "My Father," is the
formula of devotion, a walk with men in which
the common divine fatherhood is never lost from
thought ; and in such a soul and life we have
the most perfect illustration of ethical beauty, of
spiritual loveliness, of the type of character which
it was Christ's mission to create among men.

At the close of a former lecture I spoke of man-
ners as an important part of morals. Indeed, I
think that we have reason to regret that we have
in our language different words to designate man-
ners and morals. It were better if, as in the
Greek and the Latin, we had but one word ; for
we are too prone to assign to manners a lower
place, while in a large proportion of the inter-
course of life, manners are the only morals that

MANNERS. 237

we can put into practice. They have a most mo-
mentous aesthetic importance. In a certain sense
and degree they are the outcome of character,
and yet they need thought and care on their own
account. The character that is not beautiful may
have elegant manners, graceful manners, fascinat-
ing manners ; yet still the manners will lack a
grace that can come only from within, and cannot
be put on or copied. I think that we always rec-
nize the outwardness of the manners when they
do not correspond with the character. But a
thoroughly beautiful character may fail to do it-
self justice in manners.

In manners, as in character, moderation is the
law of beauty. There is an overdoing of sincere
kindness which is oppressive in its very ardor and
earnestness ; while kindness may make itself felt in
less demonstrative and more quiet ways. There
is, on the other hand, a reserve cr backwardness,
often proceeding from diffidence, which has much
of the outward bearing of haughtiness or pride,
and which precludes the expression of the genuine
good feeling that is smothered behind it. Now,
while affectation in manners is only and hardly
less displeasing than hypocrisy in character, it
is every man's right for his own sake, and his
duty for the sake of others, to give full expression
in manners to what he is conscious of feeling and

238 MOBAL BEAUTY.

of being ; and therefore manners, not as a substi-
tute for character, but as the sign-language of
character, deserve special heed, and even careful
culture. They have too important a part in the
happiness of society to be a matter of indifference,
and they are often of inestimable worth in open-
ing avenues of usefulness, and making a good life
helpful and serviceable. I am very much im-
pressed with the traits of genuine courtesy in the
life and writings of St. Paul. It evidently was a
part of his plan of duty to conciliate good will in
all matters in which there was no question of
right or wrong, that he might thus gain access for
the truth that he taught; and we have ample
evidence that he thus found an acceptance for
his evangelic message — as among the Athenians,
before Roman officials, on shipboard, and with the
people whom he encountered at Malta — which
could not have been accorded, even to a man of
his undoubted ability and power of persuasion,
had there not been a beauty of holiness in his
address and manners, the counterpart of the quali-
ties which made him in spiritual power foremost
among the apostles of the new faith.

What I want to emphasize, and I would fain do
it by so illustrious example, is the ethical impor-
tance of manners as an expression of character.
Courtesy, which is the sum of whatever is beauti-

SOURCES OF DISCOURTESY. 239

ful in character, deserves its place among the vir-
tues; and in our division of the virtues it properly
belongs under two heads, — under that of justice,
as to its motive and its spirit; under that of order,
as to its means and methods. These methods al-
ways claim careful attention ; for that — be it
word, or look, or posture, or gesture — which has
been habitually used to express a particular feel-
ing, is the readiest and best mode of expressing it,
and the feeling may not be understood or inferred,
if not expressed in the accustomed way.

But the feeling from which courtesy proceeds
demands our foremost consideration, and we may
have a clearer comprehension of it if we consider
the sources of discourtesy. It always comes from
selfishness in some one of its Protean forms, —
self-conceit, usurping a higher than its due place,
and claiming more than its due deference ; self-
indulgence, shirking the restraint and obligation
of watchful kindness ; self-assertion, jealous of
another's worthy claims on regard ; self-love, so
intense as to be unconscious of the boundary be-
tween its own and another's rights; self-exalta-
tion, so inflated as to seize precedence without so
much as imagining that there can be a rival can-
didate for it. " In honor preferring one another,"
is the precept without obeying which courtesy
cannot be.

240 MORAL BEAUTY.

Yet how can this precept be obeyed ? We
have our differing measures of intelligence and
worth, our rightful places, our due claims to es-
teem, regard, and honor. How are we to ignore
these, and thus to misplace ourselves by preferring
others ? I answer, that if we feel our superiority,
we shall not ignore it, and discourtesy will become
our settled habit. If we are not lowly in spirit,
we cannot observe due courtesy in our social re-
lations. But there are views that ought to make
us lowly. The moon and the planets have a very
sensible parallax as seen from different parts of
the earth's surface ; while the fixed stars are so
far off, that they appear at the same, or nearly the
same, point from opposite sides of the earth's
orbit, thus annihilating in comparison with their
immense distance the earthly distances that seem
so vast. So, when we barely look at one another,
we may seem very far apart, and on widely differ-
ent planes ; but our distances dwindle into naught
in our common distance from the infinite God, the
sinful from the Holy, the ignorant from the Om-
niscient, the feeble from the Omnipotent, the
child of the dust and the prey of death from him
whose years are eternity. Such views, while they
elevate our aspirations and our hopes, level our
self-esteem. While they forbid us not to deem
ourselves the brethren of angels, they make us

PIETY, A SOURCE OF COURTESY. 241

more than we else can be, the brethren of all
men.

Then, too, as regards the very advantages the
possession of which is most prone to make us
discourteous or non-courteous to those who lack
them, there may well come to us the question,
" What hast thou which thou hast not received ? "
To say nothing of the divine Giver, the advan-
tages on which men are prone so to plume them-
selves as to withhold courteous observance from
those who have them not, are precisely those which
they have had no agency, or but a secondary
agency, in procuring for themselves. Parentage
and family are not of their own selection. Wealth
either is inherited, or has grown under conditions
often not at one's own command, which, slightly
changed, would have issued in failure. Culture,
for the most part, had its beginnings, its directions,
and its good promise, from parental oversight.
Social position one is oftener born into, or grows
into unconsciously, than he makes it for himself.
He who feels all this will bear his advantages
meekly, and they will be but the measure of the
kind courtesy which he will deem it his privilege
to render.

But, above all, piety toward God, sincere and
pervading, cannot but show its beautifying power
in every form and observance of courteous bear-

242 MORAL BEAUTY.

ing and conduct toward men. We cannot wound
where he blesses. We cannot be rude to those
under the smile of his infinite benignity. We can-
not be unmindful even of minute amenities and
kindnesses where his love flows, not only in the
grand current of a general providence, but in
the slender yet unceasing rills of mercy that rip-
ple by every hearthstone, and gush and sparkle
for the refreshment of every living soul.

But while courtesy can have its perennial
source only in profound religious feeling, it re-
quires, like every other specific virtue, vigilance
and painstaking, that it be guarded, directed, and
nourished. In this matter, as in so many others,
it may be said with emphasis, " Whoso offendeth
not in word, the same is a perfect man." Selfish-
ness, subdued and controlled in every thing else,
is prone to take the tongue for its last stronghold.
We are tempted thus to show our superiority,
though it put others to shame, — our large lib-
erty, though they be scandalized by it, — our wit,
though it be at their expense, and to their keen
mortification. We find it hard to forbear from
what may interest or amuse for the moment, may
help our favorable reception, may win for us
greedy listeners, yet may leave a sting behind,
and inflict a rankling wound. Who is there that
has not been thus made a sufferer? Conver-

COURTESY, WHERE SPECIALLY NEEDFUL. 243

sation is often, under the show of friendliness, a
covert strife, — a mutual attempt to mortify self-
love, unduly strong, it may be, on either side, un-
duly sensitive on both. This gift of speech is a
most perilous endowment, demanding the high-
est, though we are prone to give to it the lowest,
measure of Christian restraint and discipline.
With regard to this, as to every other department
of social life, the sum of courtes}r, and thus of
moral beaut}', is comprised in the law, "Do to
another only that which thou wouldst have done
to thyself." When we thus make our expectation
our rule, it can hardly fail to be a rule of right.
I have given this large space to courtesy, because
the aesthetic side of moral dut}r is neglected or
slighted in most ethical treatises, while next to the
primal duties of purity, soberness, truth, integrity,
and charity, there is no quality of character that
contributes so largely to social and domestic hap-
piness and well-being.

This type of virtue has its claims to the careful
observance of those whose profession places them
in peculiarly delicate relations with society, espe-
cially of physicians and clergymen. To speak of
my own profession alone, there have been, indeed,
great preachers who have been boors, and some-
times almost brutes, in their manners. But such
men are unfit to be seen or heard anywhere save

2H MORAL BEAUTY,

in the pulpit, and there are wholly out of place.
A minister has to meet those under his charge at
those critical seasons when every sensitive fibre is
ajar, when only a hand as gentle as it is firm can
guide them through the stress of trial or of grief,
when only a voice as tender in its utterance as it
is strong and confident in its affirmation of eternal
truths can give consolation and peace. The min-
ister, too, in this as in all that is excellent, should
be an example to his flock. He can gain nothing
except a brief notoriety, which is not reputation,
by rude speech and rough ways. They will give
him no credit where credit is of any worth ; and,
what is of more consequence, they will give no
credit to the religion which he is bound to cherish
and defend, but will only multiply those worst of
wounds, of which it never received more than
now, in the house and at the hands of its pro-
fessed friends.

I have in this lecture spoken of goodness in its
higher forms as always beautiful. Why, then,
may not beauty be taken as the test of moral acts,
so that we should consider ourselves as bound
always to do that which is beautiful, instead of
attempting to determine what is fitting ? I an-
swer, first, that, though the will of a Supreme
Being who loves beauty no less than goodness has
made the good and the beautiful identical, beauty

BEAUTY, NOT A TEST OF THE RIGHT. 245

does not necessarily carry with it the idea of obli-
gation. Because an act looks beautiful, I do not
therefore feel bound to perform it, or self-con-
demned because I omit it. But I cannot perceive
an act to be fitting without feeling that I ought to
perform it, and condemning myself if I leave it
undone. Fittingness has obligation inseparably
bound up with it : beauty has not. Indeed, the
beautiful covers a much wider ground than the
fitting. Though nothing bad is beautiful, there
are many beautiful objects and acts that have no
definite moral character. There are large depart-
ments of art, taste, social refinement, which em-
brace various details of beauty, of even exquisite
beauty, worthy to be prized, admired, sought, and
cherished, yet as to which conscience has no word
of approval, still less, of censure. I may cultivate
the beautiful largely and sedulously on the neutral
ground as to which there is no direct moral obli-
gation, though on this ground, as on every field
which human action can cover, there may arise
questions as to moral obligation.

In the next place, beauty cannot be a moral
test, because beauty is the characteristic of com-
posite and matured goodness rather than of indi-
vidual acts, and when of individual acts, of the
acts and their grouping taken collectively. The
lily is a beautiful flower ; but you are in no way

246 MORAL BEAUTY.

impressed by the beauty of a single petal taken
from the flower. All that you can say of it is,
that it is not the opposite of beautiful. But if
you leave out that one petal, you have spoiled the
beauty of the flower. So, in moral conduct, the
individual right act, especially while it remains
an object of choice, may not impress you with its
beauty, and a very different act in its place may
seem to you more beautiful. But that right act,
as one of the petals of }^our virtue when it shall
have attained its full bloom, will have its part in
the blossoming beauty, and its absence will be a
sad blemish in that beauty. Let me illustrate
what I mean by a supposed case. I have a sum
of money in hand, more than I need for immediate
use, but it may be several months before I shall
again, if ever, have a surplus beyond my necessi-
ties. I owe a debt, which I ought to pay, yet can
postpone, but with some risk of not being able to
pay it. An urgent demand is made upon my
charity, in a case of extreme need and one that
claims my warmest sympathy. If I merely ask
myself what is the most beautiful thing to be
done, I certainly shall give my money to relieve
the distress which craves my aid, and trust, not to
Providence, but to improvidence, for some now
unforeseen means of paying my debt. If I ask
myself what is fitting, I shall pay the debt, and

GROWTH OF MORAL BEAUTY. 247

yet T shall feel at the time that in dismissing this
call of charity I am doing what is not beautiful.
But in the aggregate of an upright life, if I shall
lead such a life, this turning of a deaf ear to the
call of pity will look beautiful, and had I wronged
my creditor to relieve the sufferer, there would
have been a petal wanting in my lily, — a lack of
the perfect beauty, which can be made up only by
parts and pieces, but to which entireness and sym-
metry in all its parts are absolutely essential.

We are, then, to make the fittingness or Tightness
of each individual act our standard, our reason for
doing or for not doing ; while the hope of build-
ing up a character that shall be beautiful in our
own consciousness and in the sight of God may
well be among our foremost motives to individual
acts of duty. We may feel, too, that this inward
beauty is of indefinite growth, — may be constantly
adding to its fineness of fibre, its richness of tint,
its delicacy of outline. Still more, it is its own
beautifier. It constantly suggests ways in which
it may be brought still nearer perfection. Behold-
ing in God the Supremely Beautiful, the nearer
its approach to him, the more clearly does it see
what in itself may yet be corrected, added, sup-
plied, filled in. Therefore is it that those who
are the nearest to perfection are prone to feel
themselves farthest from it, so that even a Paul

248 MORAL BEAUTY.

can say, " Not that I have already attained, or am
already perfect." These saints are not less good
than they seem ; but the perfect beauty of holi-
ness keeps them perpetually aware of what is
still wanting in themselves, and therefore perpet-
ually growing into the perfectness that globes it-
self in ever richer radiance to their view, as they
themselves bear more and more of its image.

LECTURE X.

HEDONISM.

The ethics of the latest physical philosophy
will be my subject to-day. I might entitle my
lecture " The Ethics of Positivism," for I believe
that all the leading positivists of the present time
are evolutionists ; but it has been and might be
otherwise : while it is of the connection of ethics
with one phasis of the evolution-theory that I now
propose to speak. I doubt whether the extreme
evolutionists can be said to have any system of
morals ; for with them the moral faculties are
physical instincts, and nothing more ; but we
want to know how they treat these instincts, and
what they make of them.

Permit me. at the outset, to state my own posi-
tion with regard to the evolution-theory. I have
no objection to it on theological grounds, and, still
more, as in contrast with the old belief in specific
creation, I regard it as embodying the probable
truth as to the lower orders of organized being,
though it seems to me questionable whether it is

249

250 HEDONISM.

applicable in part, and certain that it is not so in
its entireness, to man. Yet if one sees ample
reason for saying u to the worm, i Thou art my
mother and my sister,' " I cannot gainsay him on
any theological or Christian ground. As a matter
of taste, I greatly prefer the genealogy too long to
cite in full, which has for its ultimate links,
" Which was the son of Adam, which was the son
of God." But if I am compelled on adequate
physiological grounds to trace my parentage back
through a line of ambitious apes, frogs of ad-
vanced intelligence, and aspiring tadpoles, to ho-
mogeneous specks of protoplasm, I shall cling with
only the stronger confidence to the last link,
" Which was the son of God ; " for I know that
nothing short of omnipotence could give birth,
growth, flowering, and fruitage to such an ances-
tral tree. Moreover, if self-consistency should
compel me to derive all that Jesus Christ was
" according to the flesh " from such a line of pro-
genitors, I should be only the more imperatively
compelled to own in the divineness of his human-
ity the " Lord from heaven." But, leaving man's
spiritual nature aside, — when I contemplate the
evolution of the universe — suns and systems, in-
organic being, organized life, animals, and, it may
be, the human body too — from pristine star-dust or
star-mist the first thought that suggests itself is

TUE EVOLUTION-THEORY, NOT PROVED. 251

that of a more profound sense of Almightiness
and of Infinite Wisdom than was ever forced upon
me by the popular cosmogony, and it is only with
enhanced fervor that I rehearse the Apocalyptic
song, " Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord
God Almighty."

Yet we must not forget that the evolution-
theor}', though not disproved, is not proved, and
perhaps does not admit of absolute proof. All
that we can say of it is, that it is an admirable
working theory for the investigation of nature.
But it must be confessed, first, that there are in the
alleged chain of development missing links, and
many series of continuous missing links, some of
which may, however, yet be discovered, and add
new weight of proof to the theory ; and, secondly,
that there seems no reason why the several thou-
sand years of authentic human history should not
have witnessed phenomena of the same order with
those that preceded the birth of history. That the
present tendency of scientific belief is in this di-
rection is no argument ; for science has repeatedly
gone off with the fullest assurance on a false scent,
and we have no more reason to place undoubting
confidence in the theories of the nineteenth cen-
tury than in those of the seventeenth. There is
a broad difference between the comparatively lit-
tle that science has actually discovered and the

252 UEDONISM.

inferences from that little that are extended over
realms of fact and being of which there is not
now, and perhaps can never be, clear and accurate
knowledge.

I hardly need say that the evolutionists are di-
vided, as to supersensual conditions, facts, and
phenomena, into two classes. Those of one class
believe that all organic being, man included, has
been evolved from homogeneous protoplasm, but
maintain that man has, in addition to what is of
earthly extraction, a spiritual nature, with corre-
sponding relations and affinities, and that God not
only is, but is in a certain sense and measure cog-
nizable by the human soul. Darwin, I think,
never failed to admit, and to recognize with rever-
ence, the being of a personal God. There are cer-
tainly in his works many passages that can have
no other possible meaning than this. Asa Gray,
who, as I suppose, is now acknowledged to be the
chief expositor of evolutionism, is not only a the-
ist, but a Christian believer, and a devout member
of a strictly orthodox church. Men of this class
do not of necessity have a peculiar system of eth-
ics. They may or may not have one. There is
no reason why they may not ascribe the phenom-
ena of man's moral being to supra-material causes.

But many of the best known evolutionists are
agnostics. Atheists they would not call them-

PLEASURE, AN INSTINCTIVE AIM. 253

selves. There may be a God, for aught they
know ; but they have not been able to discover
Mm by the microscope or the scalpel, and it would
be very strange if they could. Their philosophy
is complete without him. They know how the
present universe came to be what and as it is.
They can account on their theory for every thing
that comes under the cognizance of their senses,
and they are not willing to believe that there
exists any thing of which the senses cannot take
cognizance. It is their system — or substitute for
a system — of ethics that is now before us.

Pleasure, they say, is the instinctive aim of
every sentient being. It was the aim of man's
brute ancestry, which, as they rose in the scale
of being, were able to plan more intelligently for
the procuring of pleasurable and the avoidance
of painful sensations than at earlier stages of
progress. At first, man can have had no knowl-
edge or sense of the ulterior consequences of his
acts. But experience at length taught him that
certain acts which gave immediate pleasure were
followed by much more than the pleasure's worth
of pain, and that there were pains, and especially
labors, not pleasurable in themselves, which were
followed by much more than their counterbalance
of pleasure. The habits of mature and foreseeing
men and women gradually conformed themselves

254 HEDONISM.

to these discoveries ; and there thus grew up an
unwritten code of sanitary and self-protective
rules of living, which were observed by persons
who had a judicious regard for their own perma-
nent well-being, were inculcated on children, and
in some particulars were enforced on the commu-
nity by the governing powers. The acts thus
enjoined were deemed good in the same sense in
which sunshine or a timely rain is good ; and the
omission of them, or conduct opposed to them, was
deemed bad in the same sense in which a pesti-
lence or a famine is bad. In fine, the ultimate
and only meaning of good and bad as applied to
conduct, and to habitual conduct, which is charac-
ter, is precisely the same sense which they bear
when applied to unconscious objects or agencies.

But this is not all. In the lower forms of ani-
mal life, there is no need of parental care for the
preservation of species. The production is so
large, that only a small proportion of the young
are needed to replenish the stock ; while the con-
ditions of life are so simple that parental aid or
oversight would be superfluous. The more ad-
vanced types of animals are less productive ; and
the young need for short periods nourishment
from, or through the agency of, the parent. The
perception of this need gives birth to the instinct
for its supply. The ape-mother finds her young,

PRIMITIVE SOCIETY. 255

for a time, nearly as dependent on her as those of
her savage human descendant will be on their
mother. The instinct grows to meet the demand
made upon it. When the human race has so far
advanced that the child needs clothing and train-
ing, the parent not only sees this increasing de-
mand, but feels the instinctive prompting to meet
it. Growing dependence creates an ever-increas-
ing intimacy of relation ; and with this, parental
love is developed in a way analogous to that in
which home-love is formed from living long in one
home, or in which one becomes attached in feeling
to any oft-recurring association, or posture of cir-
cumstances, or mode of living. With this feeling,
the parent's aim is to preserve the child's life, and
to prepare him to receive the maximum of pleas-
urable sensations that his life can yield. This is
what good nursing and good training mean and
accomplish ; and a good parent is good simply as
the medium of procuring for the child's life, as a
whole, an aggregate of pleasurable sensations and
experiences which could not have accrued to him
under nurture of a different type.

Another stage of human development is reached
as man grows into a knowledge of the relations of
human society around him to his own comfortable
being. Mutual antagonism is the primitive state
of society, inasmuch as every man is liable to

256 HEDONISM.

crave whatever possession or advantage any other
man may have acquired. But mutual hostility
and annoyance must have cost each member of
society much more than they could gain for him ;
and the discovery must have been made at an
early period in human history, that the laiastz
faire, the " let alone " system, was a means of
securing the possession of pleasurable objects in
hand, and of avoiding fear, discomfort, and pain.
Thus there grew up the habit of armed, and gradu-
ally of unarmed, neutrality and non-interfereuce
among neighbors and fellow-tribesmen, and peace
came to be regarded as good, because it was found
essential to the maximum of pleasure and the
minimum of pain ; while war, which was and still
is natural, and to which the native instincts still
have frequent recourse, was acknowledged to be
bad, because it was found to diminish pleasures,
and to multiply pains.

In lapse of time, the interchange of mutual
kindnesses was found to multiply pleasures and to
diminish pains ; and thus beneficence came to be
regarded as good, simply because it blessed the
giver by insuring ample return. Sympathetic
relations grew up from this experience. As there
is more pleasure than pain in almost every human
life, and as pain is lightened when shared, it grad-
ually came to be perceived that mutual fellow-

VIRTUE, PLEASURE-YIELDING. 257

feeling added largely to each one's pleasures by
participation in the pleasures of others, while each
for the pain of sharing in the griefs of others was
fully remunerated by the sympathy that lightened
his own burden in the stress of pain or grief. Be-
neficence, with its whole train of virtues, graces,
and amenities, thus became good, as a multiplier
of pleasures, and a lightener of pains.

There is, according to this theory, no intrinsic
quality in the acts called virtuous that could make
them preferable, did they not insure a preponder-
ance of pleasure. The opposite acts, if they on
the whole yielded more pleasure, would hold the
place of virtues. But society demands of its in-
dividual members the acts and habits which will
yield to society the largest amount of pleasure,
and this demand is all that there is in what moral-
ists call the stress or urgency of duty. Duty has
no meaning, as expressing what is due to any be-
ing or object outside of one's self. But one owes
to himself his own happiness, which he forfeits un-
less he practises what are commonly called vir-
tues. Bain expressly says that external authority,
enforced by penalty or punishment, is the sole
ground of obligation ; and John Stuart Mill main-
tains that the fear of pain alone can create the
sense of obligation implied in the word " ought "
and in kindred terms. Thus, the proper mode of

258 HEDONISM.

impressing a sense of obligation has its type in the
story in the Book of Judges, in which it is said that
Gideon " took thorns of the wilderness and briers,
and with them he taught the men of Succoth."
Our fathers, a century ago, when the sternest do-
mestic discipline was in fashion, were certainly in
advance of their time in their realistic mode of
enforcing obligation by the free and vigorous use
of the rod; and I am surprised that evolutionists
do not recommend the revival of ancestral meth-
ods.

Conscience, according to this theory, is entirely
factitious. It is, in great part, hereditary ; for in
a family, habits of conduct, when general and long
continued, modify the structure of the brain and
the nervous organism, so that the child has a native
propensity to do what his ancestors have done ;
and there is a disturbance of cerebral action, a
flow of nervous fluid or force in opposite direc-
tions at the same time, if he does what his ances-
tors have not done, or omits doing in fit time and
way what they have done. Still further, if his
father and his ancestors have acted counter to
their better proclivities, and have had in conse-
quence this disturbed nervine circulation, he may
inherit equally their disposition to do or to omit
doing and the interior disturbance consequent
upon it. Race-characteristics also have their coun-

THE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 259

terpart in brain and nerve ; and he who acts other-
wise than they would prompt, suffers in brain and
nerve for his dissent from his race. But this, so
far as it goes, is a physical suffering. It has no
more of what most persons call a moral element
in it than dyspepsia, to which in many particulars
it bears a close analogy.

What is called conscience results, also, in part,
from the observation of what is approved or dis-
approved by parents, by society, by mankind in
general. In the direction of their approval, the
nerve-force is well balanced and untroubled ;
while it is disturbed and made abnormal by acts
which they disapprove. Were the habits of so-
ciety such as we call immoral, the physical con-
science would be in their favor. If it be not a
myth that the Spartan boys were educated to
steal, and received the highest praise for stealing
adroitly, it would have been the honest boy that
had the troubled conscience.

This theory, of course, dispenses with religious
sanctions. Religion is a development of fear.
Fear prolonged deepens into awe. Awe of things
distant, grand, immense, rises into reverence.
These sentiments were originally felt for the
whole realm of the unknown, and for whatever
was mysterious or unknown in objects partly
known. Thus religion, in its rude beginnings,

260 HEDONISM.

when man was profoundly ignorant of all things,
attached itself to every object. But as man's
knowledge advanced, the mysterious receded, and
had for its objects of dread and awe things either
incomprehensible or beyond human control ; and
as even these gradually became the objects either
of accurate knowledge or of plausible hypothesis,
religion changed its ground to an imaginary realm
of being, wherein were the still unknown and un-
imagined causes even of familiar objects and phe-
nomena. But polytheism was still inevitable ; for
nature was full of contrasts, antagonisms, con-
flicts, indicating separate and even discordant
divinities. These gods, having finite natures and
human passions, could be appeased and flattered
by worship, and propitiated by offerings. Hence
the entire paraphernalia of images, shrines, tem-
ples, priests, and sacrifices. Not till the harmo-
nies of nature were discovered, and glimpses were
obtained of the cosmos as a whole, did monothe-
ism begin to enter timidly and tentatively into
the speculations of a few far-seeing philosophers,
still scorned and scouted by the multitude. But
more frequently, especially in the East, even with
advanced philosophers, monotheism recoiled before
the unsolvable problem of evil. Hence the dual-
ism — the tokens of which still linger within the
precincts of Christianity — which shares omnipo-

THE EVOLUTION-THEORY OF MORALS. 261

tence between rival and opposing divinities, Or-
muzd and Ahriman, God and Satan, the supremely
good and the supremely malevolent. A still
higher philosophy expels both from the realm of
thought. The innate power of combination and
development in primitive atoms is sufficient to ac-
count for all the phenomena of the universe.
Given the original nebulous world-mist (how that
came into being, these philosophers do not pretend
to know), given the world-mist and a past eter-
nity, self-organization in the lapse of ages was in-
evitable. When this is clearly seen, man will be
ultimately emancipated from religious belief into
full faith in the omnipotence of automatic nature.
This happy condition has as yet been reached
only by a few precursors of the race, — prophets
they, destined to be the fathers of a new era of
a philosophy wholly material and terrestrial,
which will believe only what it can see, handle,
analyze, and label, and which will in due time
extend its sway over the entire realm of things
seen, and will spurn the existence of the unseen
as the superstition and fable of ages of darkness
and ignorance.

The most plausible argument for the evolution-
ist-theory of morals is that it seems to correspond
closely with certain obvious and well-known facts
of observation and experience. What is called

262 HEDONISM.

virtue is undoubtedly productive of a preponder-
ance of pleasure, and a perfectly virtuous world
would be a perfectly happy world. On the other
hand — it is urged by the evolutionists — were
not virtue the surest way to happiness, it would be
unfavorable even to the continued existence of the
race ; for it is only by a preponderance of pleas-
urable sensations that life is made endurable and
desirable, while under adverse conditions the race
would gradually die out. Thus, were not virtue
necessarily pleasure-yielding, the prevalence of vir-
tue would be fatal. This statement of the case is
not entirely true; for it has been found that
when, from other causes than virtue, life becomes
hardly worth living, the rate of growth for the
population is increased, in the absence of all pru-
dential checks upon early and improvident mar-
riages. But these philosophers are right in saying
that virtue is pre-eminently pleasure-yielding; and
there are two reasons why it must be so, even
though it have intrinsic properties of its own, en-
tirely independent of its capacity to yield pleas-
ure. In the first place, what is virtuous is fitting,
and we should antecedently expect that the fitting
would yield more pleasure than the unfitting. Sec-
ondly, if the Supreme Being himself recognizes
the fitting as the Right in his administration of
the universe, his providence cannot but favor

THE MORAL FACULTY IN MAN. 263

those who make the same choice and obey the
same law with himself.

But there is reason to believe that there is in
man a moral faculty, peculiar to him, native in
him, and not to be traced, even in its rudimentary
forms, in the beasts that else approach the most
nearly to him. We discern in these beasts no
sense of the intrinsic fitness of things. We must
admit that they have general ideas, and are there-
fore capable, in a certain sense, of abstraction. A
horse can evidently practise the logical processes
of induction and deduction sufficiently to know as
a stable a building that he sees for the first time.
But we have no proof that any of these animals
have ideas corresponding to other than material
objects. We can detect in them no traits or
tokens of moral self-consciousness. They seem to
have no original sense of right and wrong as qual-
ities of acts; and with them so far have all symp-
toms of a moral nature been wanting in the higher
stages of development, that man's reputed nearest
kinsman, the monkey, were he deemed a subject
for moral characterization, would be regarded as
totally and unredeemably depraved. Of all the
beasts with which man is ever brought into close
relations, this creature is the very one on whose
honesty, good behavior, and trustworthiness he
places the least dependence. Nor in beasts of the

264 HEDONISM.

best nature and the most pliant susceptibility of
training do habits that have almost a moral aspect
leave any permanent traces in the character of the
race. Take the descendant of a long line of those
noble St. Bernard dogs that have been employed
for centuries in the most humane services, and
give him to a brutal owner, — it will require but a
month or two to make him as savage as his mas-
ter, ready to spring at the throat of the transient
wayfarer, or to bear a gleeful part in any act of
lawless depredation, and he will show as much
self-complacency in so doing as his ancestors ever
did in drawing a benighted traveller from a snow-
drift. Nay, give one of these beasts to a Christian
gentleman, who will train him in all humane
and courteous ways, if there be a flock of sheep
within running distance, he will slink off by night,
and slay, not one lamb for food, but as many as
he can kill, in mere wanton sport. Docility and
obedience are the nearest approach to morality
that any beast has ever made, and there are never
any tokens of relenting or recalcitration under
any mode of training or type of required service.
There are, in the next place, facts in human na-
ture and history for which it is impossible to ac-
count on the theory that pleasure is man's sole
good, and pleasure-seeking his highest aim, — a
theory to which I will give the name by which it

THE PARENTAL RELATION. 265

is often called, hedonism,1 from the Greek ffiovrj,
pleasure, I cannot see that this theory accounts
for parental love, even in beasts, still less, in
human beings. It is, indeed, necessary that the.
higher races of animals should be cared for ; but
the care is in a large part pain, and beings whose
very nature is more than all things else pleasure-
loving and pleasure-seeking could hardly be ex-
pected to court pain. The theory signally fails as
to birds, when we consider the foreseeing labor of
nest-building for the sole purpose of sheltering the
young that are to be, the untiring vigilance of the
male and the unwearied patience of the female
bird during the incubation, and the judicious as
well as painstaking choice and preparation of food
for their progeny. All this looks like, not merely
mind and purpose, but a love that even anticipates
its object. It is instinct indeed, in a certain sense
blind instinct, but, according to the hedonic theory,
by no means a natural development. All that we
can say is, in the spirit of the old classic dictum,
Deus est anima brutorum, " God is the soul of the
brutes."

To pass to the human parent, by the theory of

1 A terra first employed to denote the philosophy of Aristip-
pus and the Cyrenaic school, according to which virtue has no
characteristics of its own, but is to he sought and valued only for
the pleasure which it gives, pleasure being man's sole aim.

266 HEDONISM.

hedonism parental hatred would be inevitable.
The first impulse of hedonism would be to put
the child out of being ; or if there were some hesi-
tation at the thought of infanticide, the minute,
incessant, annoying labor which the child's neces-
sities crave could create only disgust and abhor-
rence ; for enforced labor is pain, and whatever
gives pain is, on the hedonic theory, an object of
dread and hatred. Even were it contended that
the mother's intimate relation to the child would
make her love her offspring as offspring, as virtu-
ally a part of her own being, no such consideration
could account for the father's love, care, and self-
sacrifice. In fine, the theory under discussion
reverses all conceivable conditions. That love
should prompt painstaking labor, and make it
appear necessary, seems and is perfectly natural.
But that the necessity of preserving the species
should prompt beasts at a high, or man at a low,
stage of development to painstaking labor which
serves no selfward end, and that this labor should
generate love, is what we can hardly conceive of
in the nature of things, if that nature be sponta-
neous evolution, and not a Supreme Will. More-
over, that parental affection is not co-ordinate with
the degree of physical and mental development,
and is therefore not natural in the merely physi-
cal sense, may be seen from the fact that it has

THE TESTIMONY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 267

been at a very low grade in countries and times
of advanced civilization and refinement, so that
St. Paul hardly exaggerates the known condition
of domestic life in Rome itself, and in the age im-
mediately post-Augustan, when he speaks of the
heathen as " without natural affection." Infanti-
cide was then common in the Roman Empire, and
was thought no crime ; while, in the ages deemed
retrograde in civilization and refinement that suc-
ceeded the Christiauization of the Roman Empire,
we have reason to believe that children's lives
were held sacred.

The theory of hedonism is, I cannot but think,
false to the inmost consciousness of those who pro-
fess it. If one of them would recall his earliest
remembered self-consciousness, he would find that
he had a sense of the Right before he began to
anticipate any other than the immediate physical
consequences of his acts ; that he felt it wrong to
lie before he knew whether lying would do him
good or harm ; that the sense of the pleasurable
and that of the Right, though generally coinci-
dent in their objects, have in themselves been
always separate, and sometimes divergent ; and
that, except when he is reasoning on the sub-
ject, he habitually thinks of the rightness or
the wrongness of acts, without thinking of their
pleasure -yielding qualities, and, conversely, of

268 HEDONISM.

the pleasurableness of objects, without thinking
of their moral bearing or character. Moreover,
there is an inverse proportion between the in-
tensity of conscience and that of the hedonic
impulse. In little children, who, if they love
pleasure, have not yet learned how to seek it for
themselves, conscience is often exceedingly quick
and tender, — often so in a painful degree, which
ought not to be the case with an hedonic faculty.
Among adults, too, it is the least pleasure-seeking
who are the most conscientious ; and there is
never brought to the tribunal of conscience the
question of pleasurable or painful, but only that
of right or wrong, without reference to conse-
quences. So far as we can trace the sense of right
back to its source, it certainly seems to be innate ;
and the distinction between the Right and the
Wrong would not seem to us, constituted as we
are, otherwise than clear and reasonable, were
they equally pleasure-yielding. On the supposi-
tion that a man could be persistently false, treach-
erous, intemperate, or unchaste, and be therefore
none the less happy in this world or in the world
to come, there would still remain in the conscious-
ness of moral agents precisely the same feeling
that now exists as to the intrinsic wrongness of
these vices, and the intrinsic rightness of the oppo-
site virtues. Probably there is no more distinct

PRE-EMINENT VIRTUE. 269

consciousness of the intrinsic difference between
right and wrong than in the minds of those who
find pleasure only in the wrong, and regard virtue
as uncompensated self-denial. They know that
there is a radical difference between the Right and
the pleasure-yielding ; and it is because there is no
natural or intrinsically necessary connection be-
tween the two, that they are so blind to their
general coincidence in their methods and objects
under the ordering of a Providence both right-
loving and joy-giving.

To pass to another head of argument, there is
an entire upper realm of virtue, in which hedonism
bears and can bear no part. There are many self-
restraints and self-denials, not required even by
the highest hedonic standard, which can by no pos-
sibility yield any selfward revenue, yet in which
men will persist, with not the slightest expectation
of pleasure from them. There are philanthropists,
patriots, martyrs, who know that they are yielding
up every thing pleasurable in this world, yet who
shrink not from the severest torments and the
most horrible modes of death. Nor can it be
said that it is the hope of heavenly happiness that
forms their inspiring motive. They would spurn
indignantly the idea of purchasing heaven by
earthly doings or sacrifices ; and except where the
alternative is denial of one's faith or martyrdom,

270 HEDONISM.

they would not suppose their heavenly happiness
contingent on special, unusual, unrequired modes
or acts of self-devotion. I have no doubt that the
hope of heaven often bears a large educational part
in making them the brave men that they are ; but
the mere love of pleasure, or quest of happiness,
could never give birth to these exalted virtues
and these noble characters. Still further, not only
those who sacrifice themselves for existing institu-
tions, interests, and faiths, equally the pioneers
in moral progress, give the lie to the hedonic the-
ory. They plant the standard in advance of their
brethren at the risk, when not of life, of reputa-
tion and of worldly well-being. The foremost
ranks, like the forlorn hope of an army, are sacri-
ficed for the victory which they expect that not
they themselves, but their successors on the field,
will win.

In fine, virtue, in its highest sense, begins where
pleasure-seeking ends. This I think that we shall
see the more clearly, if we will analyze our own
consciousness of merit. There is, you will un-
doubtedly admit, a sense of merit entirely distinct
from, and bearing no kindred to, the sense of suc-
cess in pleasure-seeking. When you have per-
formed a dut}T, your consciousness is not, " I have
gained a new pleasurable sensation," but, " I have
done what I ought to have done." Suppose that

THE SOURCE OF RELIGION. 271

your life were so mapped out before you, and you
so wise, that you could plan your conduct with a
single eye to the attainment of the maximum of
pleasure, and there were not an item of that con-
duct which was not right, yet if you pursued that
course simply and solely because it was going to
give you the maximum of pleasure, would not the
consciousness of merit be entirely wanting? and
would you not lack the very thing in which you
really take more pleasure than in aught else, the
ability to say to yourself, " I have done right " ?
You would feel that there could be no merit in
doing right for the revenue that it will bring. If
virtue is really the offspring of selfishness, then
is the sun the child of Erebus, and the moon the
daughter of Night.

Religion, too, disowns the parentage assigned
to it by the evolutionists. So little has fear to do
with it, that it may be said to be hopefully begun
in the individual soul only when fear ends. In
all the higher forms of religious consciousness the
element of terror is entirely wanting. It is equally
wanting in the initial stages of judicious religions
culture. There is no purer religion than in the
heart of the child whom his mother has taught to
love, but never to fear, his unseen Father. His
only thought is that of a genial, beneficent pres-
ence, of which his mother is the type. He prays

272 HEDONISM.

in his innocence to that Father, and has not a
doubt that his prayer is heard as lovingly as it is
offered ; and no shadow of dread passes over his
spirit till he comes into contact with those who
make religion a terror, and under whose influence
his religious feelings, so far from being quickened,
are, more probably than not, enfeebled or dissi-
pated.

These higher faculties, the moral and religions,
are, then, if of brutal parentage, cut off from their
ancestral tree, and show no token of their lineage.
They manifestly have no affinities with brute in-
stincts, and cannot by any possibility have been
derived from proclivities which are entirely earth-
ward, — which belong only to beings that have
their destiny rounded off in this world, and to
man solely in his earth-limited being.

Carlyle wrote many years ago, " There is in
man a higher than love of happiness : he can do
without happiness, and instead thereof find bless-
edness." Spencer, in his " Data of Ethics," ridi-
cules this saying, which perhaps is not logically
accurate, yet is profoundly true in its real and
only possible meaning. What Carlyle calls bless-
edness is undoubtedly a happy state ; but it is a
type of happiness of which neither the desire nor
the fruition can be brought within the range of
the evolution theory. I could tell you of suffer-

HAPPINESS IN SUFFERING. 273

ers whom I have known, whom I still know, who
have been for years, in one case for thirty-eight
years, deprived of the power of locomotion and of
self-help, with never an hour of undisturbed sleep
or a painless moment, and with no hope of recov-
ery ; in one such case that I well know, the priva-
tions and anxieties of extreme poverty are added
to those of bodily infirmity ; and these sufferers
have been among the happiest of persons. It has
been impossible to create a gloomy atmosphere
about them ; the sad have been made cheerful in
their presence ; and a settled serenity of mien and
aspect has evinced that the cheerfulness in the
presence of friends was not the result of spas-
modic effort, but the fixed habit of the soul. This
is a happiness or blessedness — call it which you
please — which shows that there are phenomena
of human experience for which physical evolution
will not account. These thoughts of peace, these
emotions of trust and gratitude and immortal
hope, cannot have their origin in mere sensation,
which in some of these cases is unceasing torment,
so that life is made endurable only by closed and
bandaged eyes, and the noiseless tread and sub-
dued voices of attendants ; nor yet in associations
with these blurred and muffled sensations ; nor
yet in the remembrance of sensations, which in
some instances have from infancy or early youth

271 IIEDONISM.

been more or less painful ; nor yet from the nerves
themselves, which have become a rack of incessant
torture. The entire realm of physical nature can
have made no contribution to the happiness of
these sufferers. They live in a world of affections
and supersensual experiences, and from this world
are poured in upon their strained and pain-
stricken nerves the emotions that make their life,
and peace, and joy.

These phenomena do not, indeed, belong imme-
diately to the department of ethics, and yet they
have a most momentous bearing upon it ; for they
demonstrate that human experience has a hold on
a supersensual sphere ; that it is susceptible of
affections and conditions of feeling that cannot be
brought within the line of evolution, and, still
more, that there are states of mind or soul which
so far transcend the pleasure or happiness that
can be evolved from physical sources and by the
physical organism, that the sufferers would gladly
buy this blessedness at the cost of continued suf-
fering, and would not resign it even for the prom-
ise of perpetual health and undecaying vigor.
Now, it is in this region — not of necessity in its
empyrean, but within its precincts — that morality
has its place. If man, the sufferer, can scorn suf-
fering for a higher than physical joy, man, the
doer, is equally capable of spurning pleasure in

REMEMBRANCES OF CHILDHOOD. 275

the discharge of duty, — of incurring even what
seems to him evil beyond remedy, that he may
preserve the testimony of a good conscience.
Moreover, though the elevated condition of reli-
gious trust, peace, and joy, of which I have spoken,
be not a frequent experience, I think that we shall
find in our own consciousness that in all virtuous
conduct there is experience differing from this,
not in kind, but in degree. Virtue, the hedonists
say, conduces to happiness. Of this I have no
doubt; but in a very large number of instances, it
is pleasure-yielding solely because it is virtue, and
but for its property of Tightness would give us no
pleasure whatever.

We may test this statement by the remembered
consciousness of our early childhood. Did we not
then often perform very wearisome tasks at the
bidding of our parents, go on their errands when
we might have been on the playground, and put
all the strength that we had into such assistance
as we could render to them ? And were we not
always happy in thus doing? But it was the
Tightness of these things alone that made them a
source of happiness. They were not things that
we should ever have thought of doing in the
quest of pleasure. Farther on in life, the youth
of sound principles avoids the beginnings of evil,
parts company, it may be, from more agreeable

276 HEDONISM.

companions than are left to him, shuns recreations
and indulgences that are intensely appetizing, not
because he is afraid of pain from what he foregoes,
or because he doubts — however much reason
there might be for his doubting — that he could
be sufficiently moderate and self-restraining to
prevent all unpleasant consequences from cautious
and measured transgressions of the law of right,
but solely because what he shuns is not right ;
and he is happy in making his wa}~s clean, and
keeping his youth undefiled, not because such
conduct in itself yields superior pleasure, but be-
cause its rightness does make him immeasurably
happier than it is in the power of the whole phys-
ical universe to make him. He has made himself
a citizen of the supersensual realm, which yields a
happiness that eludes, because it transcends, all
physical standards of measurement.

In like manner, all along in life, the man who
means to do his duty has to do many things the
opposite of which would yield him more sensible
pleasure, and very many more things the omission
of which would conduce to his ease, comfort, and
enjoyment ; but they make him immeasurably
happier than he could be made by omitting them
or doing their opposite, solely because he feels
their rightness ; and he knows no happiness — or
blessedness he might prefer to say, notwithstand-

THE EIGHT, THE SOURCE OF HAPPINESS. 277

ing Spencer's cavils — that can be brought into
momentary comparison with the consciousness of
Tightness in his lifeway, and with the thoughts
and purposes that give the trend and the impel-
ling force to this lifeway.

In point of fact, we may turn the tables upon
the hedonists. So far is its pleasure-yielding ca-
pacity from constituting the Right, that the Right
by mere virtue of its Tightness is the supreme
pleasure-yielder. Still further, when we do right
for the good that will come to us from it, for the
income that it will bring us, we forfeit the income :
for the Tightness thus motived is on too low a
plane to deserve to be called right. It is only
when we do right because it is right, that we
reap what is called in Holy Writ "the peaceable
fruit of righteousness" in a happiness than which
we can desire or imagine nothing higher or better.

LECTURE XL
THE ETHICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

I propose to give you, in this lecture, some
account of the Stoic philosophy of morals, of its
founder, its principal luminaries, and its influence.
I single out this from other ancient systems for
special description, because we have in the ethics
of the Stoics the germ and partial development of
the moral philosophy which underlies all modern
systems that discriminate right from expediency.

The founder of the Stoic school was Zeno, a
native of Cyprus, who came to Athens about 820
B.C. He lectured in the arod ttoiklXt), or u painted
porch," a covered walk near the market-place ;
and this gives the name to his school. He was a
man of singular simplicity, uprightness, and purity.
He reached an advanced age in sound health of
body and mind ; but having met with a slight
accident, — the breaking of a ringer, — he took this
as a warning of Fate that his work was over, and,
in accordance with his own teaching, killed him-
self, in this respect leaving an example which was

278

ZENO. 270

followed with sad frequency by some of the great-
est and best of his disciples.

According to his system, conformity with nature
is the supreme good ; that is, conformity, not with
one's own nature alone, but with the nature of
the universe. This conformity is virtue, and it is
happiness. The reason is the faculty by which it
is to be ascertained what nature requires. Wis-
dom is, therefore, essential to virtue, nay, practi-
cally, is coincident with virtue ; for it is impossible
to have a clear knowledge, a vivid perception,
what we, in our common speech, term a realizing
sense, of what is conformed to nature, without act-
ing in accordance with it. The perfectly wise
man, then, must be a perfectly good man. Just
at this point there is a striking parallelism, yet
with a difference, between Stoicism and Chris-
tianity. The Stoics maintained that the perfectly
wise man had not made his appearance upon the
earth. They denied this title even to Zeno. The
Christian ideal has, in like manner, been ap-
proached by unnumbered aspirants, realized only
in Him from whose life it is drawn.

Zeno maintained that there are no degrees of
good or of evil either in character or in individual
acts. The truly wise man has an intuitive knowl-
edge of the right, and needs no teaching other
than his own. He who is not wise is incapable of

280 THE ETHICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

the right as such, and it is by mere chance that in
conduct he sometimes conforms himself to nature.
All acts not wrought by a truly wise man are
equally bad. Here we have a close parallelism
with the Calvinistic dogma, which Genevan in-
fluence foisted into the Articles of the English
Church, in the words, " Works done before the
grace of Christ and the inspiration of his Spirit
are not pleasant to God ; yea, rather, we doubt not
but they have the nature of sin." There are,
according to Zeno, no comparative degrees of
moral excellence.

Pleasure, it was maintained, is not to be con-
sidered as a good. It may accompany virtue, not,
however, necessarily or always; but it is not a
motive to virtue. Were it so, virtue would be its
slave. Virtue and pleasure differ in essence.
Pleasure may attend immoral conduct, and is its
most frequent motive. Virtue requires labor, and
may bring loss, pain, and suffering. The virtuous
man is happy ; but his happiness is rather nega-
tive than positive. It consists rather in the con-
sciousness of freedom and the just equilibrium of
all the powers and the affections than in what is
commonly termed enjoyment. He who is in any
way or degree dependent on outward circum-
stances cannot be happy ; for he is always inse-
cure. But he whose only cherished property is

UNIVERSAL DEPRAVITY. 281

the consciousness of virtue, is perfectly happy,
because he cannot be moved or reached by any
vicissitude of outward fortune.

The highest good, that is, perfect conformity to
nature, is a law. The mere perception of it con-
stitutes obligation. Emotions, whether of pleasure
or desire, care or fear, are disturbing forces, befog-
ging the reason, and, therefore, to be extirpated
and abjured. The wise man is emotionless. Pain
he must endure without yielding to it. Slander
or abuse he ought not to feel, for it cannot affect
the substance of his being. He has no vanity,
and, therefore, he can be neither elated by honor
nor depressed by dishonor. He has no pity for
others ; for what they endure would be to him of
no account. How can he have compassion for
that in others which in himself he would not feel ?

According to the definition that has been given,
virtue is, of course, one and indivisible. The sev-
eral virtues differ not in their nature, but are only
names for the kinds of occasions on which the one
virtue is to be exercised.

From what has been said, you will see that the
doctrine of universal human depravity, though
commonly called Augustinian, is older than Chris-
tianity. The Stoics regarded all men as naturally
depraved, and those of them who admitted the
possible existence of a truly wise man believed in

282 THE ETHICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

instantaneous conversion. Up to a given moment
a man belonged virtually to the depraved section
of the human race : at that moment he passed into
the permanent consciousness of sinlessness and
of inability to sin. Extreme as this statement
seems, is there not something like truth in it?
Though the change of character is generally grad-
ual, must there not be in the consciousness of
every one who has been addicted to evil, a crisis,
almost momentary, when the scale turns, when he
virtually says to himself, " I will henceforth will
only what God wills " ? The error of the Stoics
was in accounting wrong-doing after this crisis as
impossible, even as the Christian Perfectionists
maintain that sin after sanctification is impossible.
The Stoics also believed at the outset, though
some of their great teachers afterward thought
differently, that the wise, and therefore perfect,
man, could never fall away from his estate of
perfect wisdom, — a doctrine corresponding to the
Calvinistic dogma of the perseverance of saints.
You will mark how many parallelisms there are
between Stoic and Calvinistic dogmas, making
Calvinism seem almost a Christianized Stoicism.1

1 This constitutes no objection to Calvinism. If I were a
Calvinist, I should find confirmation and comfort in my beliefs,
as I do with regard to certain great principles and laws of ethics,
in their seeming to be part of God's unwritten revelation to the
greatest and best minds and souls of the pre-Christian ages.

OBJECTS OF DESIRE. 283

As to outward objects of desire, the Stoics
recognized three classes. There are, first, those
which, not good in themselves, may be auxiliary
to virtue, as health, strength, wealth, social posi-
tion, and the like. These, while not to be sought
as ends, are not to be spurned as means. They
are to be prized, yet not in or for themselves, but
solely because they multiply opportunities for the
exercise of virtue, and often add to its efficiency.
Secondly, there are objects and pursuits which are
directly contrary to nature ; and these are, of
course, to be shunned. In the third place, there
are objects and pursuits so entirely indifferent
that they cannot by any possibility be the objects
either of choice or of antipathy. Objects of the
first class, while they are never to be coveted,
when possessed, are to be made availing, and to be
resigned whenever they offer the slightest hinder-
ance to the pursuit of the supreme good.

As regards society, the early Stoics attached
very little importance to the family or to the
state, but the utmost importance to the solidarity
of the race and to the fraternity of its members.
On this ground they advocated the humane treat-
ment of slaves. They also laid intense stress on
justice in all its forms, and on mercy, too, not as
the impulse of pity, but as a part of justice, —
as a debt which man owes to his fellow-man.

284 THE ETHICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

Passive submission to destiny, including under
that head not only what we term the acts of
Providence, but equally human tyranny, oppres-
sion, and wrong-doing, they regarded as of strict
obligation, with two exceptions, namely, first, that
it is a wise man's duty to take his own life rather
than to 3'ield to unmerited indignity or dishonor,
and, secondly, that it is a wise man's privilege to
escape in the same way from irretrievable calamity,
incurable disease, or the failure of the active
powers of body and mind inevitably consequent
upon declining years.

Some of these dogmas were modified in the
lapse of time. Degrees of demerit were recog-
nized, and thus, virtually, degrees of merit, though
still the perfectly wise man alone was pronounced
virtuous in the highest sense ; but while he existed
only in theory, those the nearest to him were
deemed abundantly meritorious. Then, too, there
came to be recognized a class of secondary duties
called "common" (communia), also "interme-
diate " (rnedia), as midway between the perfect
duties of which only the wise man is capable and
the acts that are absolutely opposed to nature.
These secondary duties were regarded as within
the competency of persons not perfectly wise ;
they could be embodied in precepts, and incul-
cated by teachers ; and by the discharge of them

CICERO'S "DE OFFICIIS." 285

one could grow into the condition of the per-
fectly wise. For the performance of these duties,
men deserved to be characterized as good, though
not as wise or perfect. Nor did the later Stoics
treat outward goods with the utter disdain with
which the early disciples of Zeno affected to
regard them ; and though they still contended
that the perfectly wise man could be perfectly
happy without them, they did not deny their
value, when rightfully obtained, as factors in the
happiness of those who made the nearest ap-
proach to perfect wisdom. These modifications
were made before Stoicism obtained a permanent
foothold in Rome.

The earliest Stoic philosopher of whom we hear
in Rome was Diogenes of Babylon; but the
member of the school who had the greatest in-
fluence in the imperial city was Panaetius, the
intimate friend of Scipio Africanus the Younger,
whose treatise on "Duty," long since lost, was
the source from which Cicero drew most ot the
materials for his "De Officiis," the first and second
books of which he himself characterizes as a free
translation or paraphrase of the work of Pan ae-
tius. The " De Officiis " is the best statement of
the Stoic ethics of its time, and is also in some
important particulars the master-work of all time
in ethical philosophy. Strange to say, Cicero was

286 THE ETHICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL. '

not a Stoic. He professed to belong to the New
Academy, whose system was a hybrid of Platonism
and Pyrrhonism ; but he wrote this treatise for
the benefit of his son, who — then at school in
Athens — had been wild and dissipated, and had
given his father a vast deal of trouble and appre-
hension. Cicero evidently thought the Stoic
morals better for the youth than the somewhat
looser code provisionally maintained by the phi-
losophers of his own school. It was very much as
if a Mahometan sage or a Jewish rabbi were to
write for his son a treatise on the Sermon on the
Mount, as likely to do the youth more good than
the moral teachings of the Koran or the Talmud.
The " De OrBciis " is more Christian-like than any
other pre-Christian ethical treatise. I could count
on the fingers of one hand the sentences which a
Christian might not have written ; and the division
is so exhaustive, and the arrangement so perfect,
that there is room for the insertion of such
maxims and principles as can be derived only
from Him who " spake as never man spake." It
professes to treat of the secondary or intermediate
duties, which are, in fact, by the Stoic theory all
the duties incumbent on the perfect man, with
only this difference, that the perfect man is a law
to himself, and in no need of teaching, while
those on the lower plane, or rather on the upward

STOICISM UNDER THE EMPERORS. 287

acclivity, need to have the steps of their ascend-
ing way clearly defined. The treatise is divided
into three books. The first treats of the Right,
as derived from and shown by nature, under
substantially the four divisions which I designated
as cardinal virtues. The second has for its sub-
ject the Expedient ; and its aim is to show what
outward goods may be secured, and how, consist-
ently with the Right. The third discusses cases
in which there seems to be a conflict between the
Right and the Expedient, and maintains that the
conflict is only seeming, never real, and that by
no possibility can the right ever be inexpedient,
or the wrong expedient.

Not a few of the best men among Cicero's
coevals were of the Stoic school; and pre-eminent
among them was Marcus Porcius Cato, who per-
ished at Utica, — who, though as to his domestic
relations he could hardly claim approval by the
Christian standard, was regarded as the most in-
flexibly virtuous man of his time, and of whom it
was, that, as to the civil war in which he slew
himself rather than accept the pardon and peace
which Julius Caesar wanted to offer him, Lucan
said, " The victor cause had the approval of the
gods ; that of the vanquished, Cato's."

Under the Roman emperors, Stoicism obtained
growing ascendency in the best minds. With the

288 THE ETHICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

inrush of luxury, prodigality, and sycophancy, the
opposite polarity had an irresistible attraction for
characters of a better mould. A very large pro-
portion of the victims of imperial jealousy and
proscription, especially under Nero, were of this
school ; and there was a glorious array of noble
women, too, some suffering with their husbands,
others not attaining this privilege, yet by their
courage making those dearest to them feel that it
was far better to yield up life than to sacrifice in-
tegrity or honor. In the darkest times, there
were Stoic philosophers who played the part of
propagandists and missionaries, and others who
went from house to house to minister strength to
the death-doomed and consolation to the bereaved.
We have instances on record of their having been
sent for in crises of need and peril, as Christian
ministers are now often called to the bedside or
the house of mourning. In better times they
found access to the throne, and no complacency
for the purple or the diadem made them reticent
as to the responsibility and the obligations of a
ruler over men.

I propose now to give you some account of the
leading Stoics in imperial Rome. First of all was
Seneca, both greatest and least of all, — greatest
as a writer, least as a man. His eulogists main-
tain that he was a man of pure character; but he

SENECA'S CHARACTER. 289

was repeatedly brought into such close proximity
to evil, and incurred so many and diverse charges
dishonorable to his reputation, that it seems diffi-
cult to make of him a consistently good man.
Where there is dense and continuous smoke, there
must be fire, even though you cannot see the
blaze. Seneca was born in Spain, came to Rome
in his childhood, studied rhetoric and philosophy,
and acquired considerable reputation as an advo-
cate. He was banished to Corsica by Claudius
on the charge of a criminal intrigue with the em-
peror's niece ; yet the charge, it is said by his de-
fenders, was fully as likely to have been invented
to account for the banishment as the banishment
to have been the consequence of actual guilt.
After eight years he was recalled through the in-
fluence of Agrippina who had just married Clau-
dius, and was made tutor of her son Nero. It is
claimed, on the one hand, that the good promise
of Nero's early youth, and the mildness and clem-
ency that characterized the beginning of his reign,
were due to Seneca's healthful and intenerating
influence ; while it is alleged, on the other hand,
that the debaucheries at which his tutor connived
were the first stages on his vile and fiendish career.
It is claimed for Seneca that he remained at Nero's
court in the hope of exerting a salutary restraint
on his lust and passion ; but the restraint cer-

290 THE ETUICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

tainly left no traces in the record of Nero's reign.
Whether Seneca counselled or abetted Nero in the
murder of his mother and his own benefactress,
does not clearly appear; but there can be no
doubt that he wrote Nero's letter to the Senate,
charging his mother with a conspiracy against
him, and asserting that she committed suicide.
Seneca was very rich, and lent money on what
now seem usurious rates of interest ; but it may
have been that large emoluments of office came to
him without his seeking them : and, as for usury,
I doubt whether, in any age or state of society,
money will ever command a higher rate of interest
than may be measured by the profit of the bor-
rower and the risk of the lender; and this last
item under Nero must have been a very heavy
one, as suspicion and the trail of the informer,
who hardly ever failed to be a defamer also, fol-
lowed all the routes where money made its way,
and rested wherever money was to be found.
When the tyrant had made all the use he could
of the philosopher, and Seneca knew that his
official career was over, he sought, by retiring
from the palace, and offering to give up his prop-
erty, to save his life ; but, under the undoubtedly
false pretext of his complicity in a plot against
the emperor's life, he had the alternative pre-
sented to him of dying by another's hand, or by

SENECA'S ETHICAL WRITINGS. 291

his own. He chose the latter. His closing hours
were tranquil, as became his philosophy. His per-
sonal habits were, at least after his return from
Corsica, severely simple, almost ascetic ; and his
mode of living, though he was surrounded by
splendor and luxury, could hardly have been more
self-denying had he been dependent on casual
alms.

Seneca's ethical works comprise treatises on a
wide range of subjects, besides a large collection
of letters to Lucilius, a young man to whom he
stood in a relation like that held by spiritual di-
rectors in the Roman-Catholic Church. His moral
precepts and the tone in which they are given are,
for the most part, so thoroughly evangelical as to
Jiave led to the unauthentic tradition that he had
made St. Paul's acquaintance, and had derived
from the apostle the pervading sentiments of his
moral writings. The tradition is very little to the
credit either of the apostle or of the philosopher ;
for St. Paul ought to have made a more loyal con-
vert than Seneca can possibly have been ; while
Seneca, if he had known Paul, might in some
form or way have interposed in his behalf, — a
step which would have left some record of itself
in Christian history, if not in Seneca's own writ-
ings. Whether Seneca believed in the immortal-
ity of the soul, is a matter of doubt. He speaks

292 THE ETHICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

not infrequently of the future after death ; but it
is hard to say whether he means that men live on
in fame and influence, or in their own proper
selves.

Epictetus, a little younger than Seneca, was for
many years the slave of a freedman and favorite
of Nero. He was treated brutally by his master,
who amused himself by twisting his slave's leg
with some instrument of torture, and at length
broke the leg, and lamed him for life. While still
a slave, having undoubtedly brought from his na-
tive Epeirus the germs of liberal culture, he be-
came a Stoic. How he obtained his freedom does
not appear ; but after he became free, he lived in
a dilapidated hovel, and gave his instruction, with-
out price, to all who were willing to be his,
learners. When Domitian banished all philoso-
phers from Rome, he returned to his native coun-
try, and lectured there. If he wrote any thing, it
is lost. What we have of him was written from
notes taken from his lips or from memory by his
pupil Arrian. He was universally esteemed for
his purity and loftiness of character; and after his
death he was held in such reverent remembrance
that his lamp of coarse pottery was sold to a relic-
hunter for three thousand drachmas, — a sum
equivalent to seven or eight thousand dollars.

Epictetus summed up human duty in two words,

EPICTETUS. 293

which might be rendered, " Bear " and "Forbear ; "
that is, endure bravely whatever comes upon you,
and refrain from whatever can becloud your rea-
son, impair your freedom of soul, or degrade you
in your own esteem. There is not the slightest
token of his having had any knowledge of Chris-
tianity or of its sacred books; and had he been
acquainted with them, it is hardly possible, that,
with a soul so well fitted for continued being, he
should not have welcomed the revelation of im-
mortality, which was manifestly beyond his belief
and hope. But he evinces a profound and con-
trolling sense of the divine presence, and a cheer-
ful and loving trust in the divine providence.
His idea of the true mission of the public teacher
of philosophy is at once so lofty and so just that
it might well serve in spirit, though not in its
details, as an efficient charge to teachers of reli-
gion under Christian auspices. Non-Christian, in-
deed, we call him ; but he certainly belongs among
those of whom Jesus Christ says, " Other sheep
I have, who are not of this fold." Take as a speci-
men the following passage : —

" Know, first of all, that whoever engages in so
great an enterprise without the help of God be-
comes the object of the divine displeasure, and
will only cover himself with shame in the eyes of
all. Above all things else, he who is going to be

294 THE ET1IICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

the preceptor of the human race must take him-
self in hand, must extinguish within himself his
passions, must purify himself, must say to himself,
4 My soul is the raw material which I must work
up as the carpenter does the wood, or the shoe-
maker the leather.' Thus prepared, he must know
that he is an ambassador of Zeus with men. He
must preach by example ; and to the poor, the dis-
inherited, who complain of their lot, he must be
able to say, ' Look at me. Like you I am without
country, without house, without goods, without
slaves. I lie upon the ground. I have neither
wife nor child. I have only the earth, the sky,
and a cloak.' Take counsel of God ; and if he
encourages you in your enterprise, know that he
wishes you to grow great by suffering. The phi-
losopher may be beaten like an ass ; but if so, he
must love the very persons who beat him, as a
father and a brother of all men."

Epictetus equally wins our sympathy in his
pious and fervent adoration of the Supreme Be-
ing. In one passage, after enumerating the ben-
efits received from God, and lamenting man's
ingratitude and indifference, he bursts into what
needs only rhythm to become a hymn of praise.

" Since you, men, are most of you blind, is there
not need of one to sing for all the hymn to the
Deity? What can I do, old and lame as I am,

TIIE STOIC EMPEROR. 295

but to sing God ? Were I a nightingale, I should
play the part of a nightingale ; were I a swan, that
of a swan. I am a reasonable being: I must sing
God. It is my business, and I do it. It is my
part, and I will perform it as well as I can ; and I
beg you all to sing with me."

From the slave we pass to the throne. The
Stoic philosophy had been, while Christianity was
emerging from obscurity into the broad light of day,
the only antiseptic which had preserved Roman
society from utter and loathsome corruption ; and
its last triumph is in a Stoic emperor, Marcus
Aurelius, who, together with the traits that render
him truly great as a commander of men at home
and in the field, manifests the simple virtues that
would have made private life illustrious. In him
the hardness of the old Stoicism has entirely dis-
appeared. His philosophy is a gentle, tender, lov-
ing spirit, full of resignation, trust, and piety in
its Godward aspects. He, of course, had no in-
terior knowledge of Christianity, with which he
could not have become acquainted without recog-
nizing it as at every point in harmony with his
own spirit. He persecuted it on political grounds,
as threatening the unity of the empire ; and he
probably had no knowledge of the character of
the Christians. He was educated with the utmost
care, and under the happiest influences, and —

296 THE ETHICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

what is of at least equal importance — he seems
to have inherited the finest traits of character. I
have repeatedly spoken of heredity as a factor of
character. I can hardly illustrate my belief on
this subject better than by quoting from Marcus
Aurelius his resumS of his obligations to those
who had transmitted even more than formed his
character : —

"From my grandfather [who brought him up]
I learned good morals and the government of my
temper ; from the reputation and memory of my
father [who died in his early boyhood], modesty
and a manly character; from my mother, piety
and beneficence, and abstinence not only from
evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts, also sim-
plicity in my way of living, far removed from the
habits of the rich ; from my grandfather, not to
have frequented public schools, and to have had
good teachers at home, and to know that on such
things a man should spend liberally," — this last,
at first sight, not a matter of heredity, yet virtually
so ; for Marcus Aurelius, while frugal, equally as
to both personal and public expenditure, spared
no cost in the encouragement of learning and of
learned men.

He was, in the highest sense possible for those
who had him in charge, consecrated from his in-
fancy. At the age of eight he was made a priest

LIFE OF MARCUS AURELIUS. 297

of Mars, and as such sang hymns in the temple,
and took part in religions processions. At twelve
he was already a professed Stoic, and commenced
practising the ascetic usages and wearing the cos-
tume of the teachers and advanced disciples of
that school, who formed what bore much of the
semblance of a monastic order. He, at first, slept
on a bare board, and only at the importunity of
his mother consented to make use of the simplest
and hardest of mattresses. When he became head
of the empire, he had already had large adminis-
trative experience as the colleague of Antoninus
Pius, whose adopted son he was. His reign was
distinguished by rigid impartiality in the admin-
istration of justice, and by clemency wherever
mercy could be a virtue. He gave personal atten-
tion to whatever affairs were brought under his
cognizance, and availed himself of every opportu-
nity of learning the actual needs of his people,
and the ways in which those needs were met by
his subordinates. The empire was declining. In-
ternal grangrene was, indeed, checked to a great
degree under his rule ; but it had already become
incurable. Outside barbarians were constant^
crossing the frontiers, and encountering ever
more feeble resistance. The army gave hardly
less trouble than the enemies, composed as it was
of various and discordant races, — mere merce-

298 THE ETHICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

naries, with no show or pretence of patriotism,
and virtually holding the controlling power of the
state. Marcus Aurelius was, during a considera-
ble portion of his reign, absent from Rome on dis-
tant and arduous campaigns ; and though the days
of Roman glory were passed, he displayed as a
commander an energy and skill worthy of the best
times of the republic.

Of his writings we have, besides a few letters,
his " Meditations," — a journal probably intended
for no eye but his own. In accordance with the
practice recommended first by Pythagoras, and
after him by philosophers of various schools, he
was accustomed at the close of each day to pass
its events and experiences in solemn review, that
he might mark for correction or supply whatever
had been wrong or defective, and might take his
bearings for the next day's lifeway. The " Med-
itations " are the outcome of these hours of
self-recollection. They consist, very largely, of
self-examination, of reflections on the duties and
on the mysteries of life, and, especially, of tenderly
devout aspirations, indicating a firm and loving
faith in the divine providence, and a sense of
close spiritual union with the one Supreme Being.
There is a constant recognition of the heavy
responsibilities resting on a monarch's conscience,
showing that his imperial dignity was regarded as

PLUTARCH. 299

a sacred trust for his fellow-men, but for himself
as a burden to be submissively borne, rather than
as an elevation to be coveted. A pensive spirit
runs through the entire book, as of a soul weighed
down and weary. There is no clear expression
of a faith in immortality ; yet it is very evident
that he had visions of a life beyond death, and
longed to find them true. This diary was con-
tinued during his campaigns ; and it would seem
that no weariness, anxiety, or peril was permitted
to interfere with his nightly soul-shrift.

He survived his senior colleague in the empire
nineteen years, and died of a camp-fever near the
site of the present city of Vienna, shortly after
having obtained a signal victory over the rude
German hordes that infested the eastern borders
of the empire. In him Stoicism may be said to
have found its consummation, and his is the last
great Roman name that is specially identified with
the Stoic school ; though of the distinguished
jurists in succeeding reigns, there were several
known to have professed allegiance to the philoso-
phy of the Porch.

At an earlier date, there was a Greek, who,
though not professedly a Stoic, was so in principle
and character, and whom I want to name as fore-
most among all the non-Christian ethical writers
of antiquity, namely, Plutarch, a native of Bceo-

300 THE ETHICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

tia, who would probably have called himself an
Eclectic, perhaps, a Platonist, who wrote against
the Stoics, but only against those extreme dogmas
which never had currency in Rome, and whose
ethics are in most respects as closely conformed
to the doctrines of the Stoics as if he had never
had a thought beyond their pale. He was born
about the middle of the first Christian century, and
died at about the time that Marcus Aurelius was
born. His " Lives " were written with a mani-
festly ethical purpose, " for reproof, correction, and
instruction in righteousness." He evidently felt
and mourned the degeneracy of his time, was pro-
foundly aware of the worth of teaching by exam-
ple, and was solicitous to bring from the past
such elements of ethical wisdom as the records of
illustrious men could be made to render up.
True to this aim, he measures the moral character
of such transactions as he relates by the highest
standard of right which he knows, and that is
always virtually the Stoic standard, namely, truth
to nature, or what we might, perhaps, more aptly
term the intrinsic right ; and no person or act is
suffered to pass without the clear-cut stamp of his
approval or censure. The only seeming excep-
tions are when, in a person renowned for really
worthy traits of character and noble deeds, he
is inclined to ascribe what is bad or wrong to

PLUTARCII'S "MORALIA." 301

defective knowledge rather than to defective
principle.

But the " Lives," though the best known, are
but a small part of Plutarch's works. The treatises
included under the general title of " Moralia " are,
most of them, on distinctively moral subjects,
and cover a very wide range of topics, discussing
at length what are commonly, though wrongly,
called the minor morals, that is, the evils that
infest and disturb the happiness of families and
of social life, and their opposite virtues, and no
less full and thorough on the reputedly larger
subjects usually treated in works on moral philoso-
phy. Thus we have, on the one hand, essays on
Idle Talking, Curiosity, Self-Praise, and the like ;
on the other hand, such grave themes as "The
Benefits that a Man may derive from his Ene-
mies," and " The Best Means of Self-Knowledge."
There is in these essays a blending of common
sense and of keen ethical insight ; and so little
does human nature change with its surroundings,
that a very large proportion of Plutarch's coun-
sels, cautions, and precepts are as closely applica-
ble to our own time as if they had been written
yesterday. There are, too, letters of consolation,
rich, sweet, and tender, and breathing so firm a
faith in immortality as to be hardly transcended
by the most glowing utterances of St. Paul when

302 THE ETHICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

the crown of martyrdom seemed close at hand.
There is a letter to his wife on the death of a
daughter two years old during his absence from
home, which contains very little that a Christian
father might not have written, and which seems
to me to surpass in elevation and purity of thought
and feeling, in spirituality and heavenly-mind-
edness, all other writings of the kind that I
have ever seen. I cannot but feel that somehow
Easter-morning rays had struggled through the
dense Boeotian atmosphere, and that Christ had
spoken to the receptive hearts of those whose
ueyes were holden so that they could not see
him."

The most remarkable of alt Plutarch's writings
is a dialogue on the "Delay of the Divine Justice,"
or retribution. It treats of what from the earli-
est time has been a mystery to serious minds, and
an objection urged both by malignant irreligion
and by honest scepticism against the supremacy of
the divine justice in the government of the world,
namely, the postponement of the penal conse-
quences of guilt, sometimes till there are no wit-
nesses of the crime left to behold its punishment,
sometimes till the offender himself has lost the
thread between the evil that he did and its
retribution, sometimes till the offender has gone
to the grave in peace, and left innocent posterity

PLUTARCH, ON RETRIBUTION. 303

to suffer for his sins. Plutarch, with his unques-
tioning faith in immortality, doubts not that guilt
has its due retribution in the life to come. But,
as he says, retribution, though it may have its
consummation in the future life, is never delayed
till then. It seems late because it lasts long.
The sentence falls upon the guilt when it is com-
mitted ; and however its visible execution may be
postponed, the sinner is thenceforth a prisoner of
the divine justice, awaiting execution. He may
give splendid suppers, and live luxuriously, yet it
is within prison walls from which there is no
escape.

This is universally and inevitably true with ref-
erence to deliberate guilt and to continuous de-
pravity. Yet there are cases of a different kind,
in which the delay of retribution has a directly
merciful purpose. As the most fertile soil may
produce before tillage the rankest weeds, so in the
soul most capable of good there may be, prior to
culture, a noisome crop of evil, and yet God may
spare the sinner for the good that is in him, and
for the signal service, which, when reclaimed, he
will render to mankind. Plutarch gives several
instances of this, to which Christian history might
add many more from St. Augustine down to our
own day.

Then, again, as Plutarch says justly and impres-

304 THE ETHICS OF THE STOIC SCHOOL.

sively, by the delay of visible judgment God gives
men in his own example the lesson of long-suffer-
ing, and rebukes their promptness in resentment
and the hot haste in which they are prone to
revenge injury.

Still farther, when the penalty appears to fall
on the posterity or the successors of the guilty, and
a race, a city, or a people seems punished for the
iniquity of its progenitors, Plutarch brings out
very fully the absolutely essential and necessary
solidarity of the family or the community, which
can hardly fail so to inherit of its ancestors in
disposition and character as to invite upon itself,
and to merit for itself, the consequences of an-
cestral guilt. At the best, the alternative will
be the guilt, or the punishment which may deter
from sin and issue in the purging away of in-
herited evil.

This treatise is all the more valuable because not
written by a Christian. It shows that the intense
stress laid by Christianity on a righteous retribu-
tion lasting beyond the death-change is not a
mere scriptural dogma, but the postulate of the
unsophisticated reason and conscience of devel-
oped humanity.

LECTURE XII.

THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS
ON ROMAN LAW.

Christianity must very early have acquired
an influence in the aristocracy and the governing
classes of Rome and the Roman Empire. To be
sure, its profession was at first almost wholly con-
fined to Jews and slaves. But the very banish-
ment of Jews from Rome by Claudius — a decree
the force of which was soon spent — shows that
they were an important factor of Roman society :
and as large numbers of the Jews not in Judaea
were merchants, and many of them persons of su-
perior culture, their ideas and sentiments could
easily have obtained currency among both the
speculative and the active members of the com-
munity. Moreover, though the social relations of
Jews in Rome with persons of high office or posi-
tion cannot in general have been intimate, we
have record of some very close intimacies of that
kind, as of the Herod family in all its branches
with the family of Pollio, and with those of other

305

306 CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND BOM AN LAW.

chief men of the state. In the Roman mind it
was long before Christianity assumed a form dis-
tinct from Judaism; and it is by no means im-
probable that among the few Jews who lived in
terms of familiarity with distinguished Roman
families, there were some Christians.

That there were many Christian slaves in Rome
during the first Christian centuries, we very well
know. It must be borne in mind that slavery,
though absolute in its sway, and often abject in
its condition, gave numerous special opportunities
of extended and enduring influence. The offices of
secretary, amanuensis, librarian, and instructor of
youth were generally filled by slaves, as were the
nearest and most confidential relations of domes-
tic service. In very many cases the slaves were
the most intelligent and the best educated mem-
bers of the family. St. Paul, writing from Rome,
speaks of the saints, or Christians, in Caesar's, that
is, Nero's, household — slaves, of course, or freed-
raen — as persons well known and highly respected
in Christian circles, who must have been capable
of exercising a somewhat extended influence.
Now, in what form would this influence have been
exerted? Seldom in any direct attempt at prose-
lytism. For the most part, not even in an open
profession of the despised and suspected faith ; for
there was doubtless sincere loyalty to Christ in

STOICISM AFTER CHRIST. 307

many a soul not ambitious of the crown of martyr-
dom, — in men who would not for their lives have
denied their Master, yet were not unwilling to
shun needless publicity in their adherence to their
religion. The genuinely Christian body -servant,
scribe, or instructor would rather have availed him-
self of his familiarity with the teachings of Christ
by giving utterance to a higher ethical wisdom
than the world had known before, by breath-
ing and diffusing a more humane, tender, philan-
thropic spirit, and, wherever it was safe to do so,
by giving prominence to that idea of brotherhood
and equality in the sight of God which so strongly
characterized the precepts and spirit of Christ.
Such ideas would have taken root and fructified
in contemplative and philosophic minds, and would
have manifested themselves in literature before
they could find embodiment in legislation, thus
modifying the administration of the law before
they could obtain distinct recognition in its text.
Stoicism at and after the time of Nero bears this
imprint, having passed, in the Latin phrase, per
saltum, " by a sudden bound," rather than by insen-
sible gradations, from a hard and coarse asceticism
into an ethical system pre-eminently humane, gen-
ial, fraternal, and catholic. As I said in my last
lecture, there is no reason to suppose that Seneca
ever saw St. Paul, or had any knowledge of Chris-

308 CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND ROMAN LA W.

tianity as such, though there is extant a spurious
correspondence between them, evidently a fig-
ment of the Middle Ages ; but that both he and
Epictetus, and equally Plutarch in Bceotia, had
ethical notions derived reall}*, though indirectly,
from Christian sources, I have no manner of
doubt; and as for the Romans whom I have
named, the position of Seneca as Nero's tutor and
prime minister, and that of Epictetus as the slave
of one of his freedmen, would, not unnaturally,
have brought them sometimes under the wordfall
of Christian lips. Moreover, the Stoic philoso-
phers, in reigns when philosophy was not under
the ban of the empire, were generally public
teachers, and at all times exercised quite largely,
as Epictetus did after his emancipation, a ministry
not unlike that of the Christian pastorate. In
ways like those which I have specified, I think
that we may justly ascribe to the indirect agency
of Christian sentiment a gradual preparation of
the more intelligent and virtuous non-Christians
for the improved legislation under the Christian
emperors. Here we cannot but recognize the ap-
propriateness of the figure, trite only because so
very apt, by which Christ is called the Sun of
righteousness. The sun cannot mount above the
horizon without its light penetrating into recesses
and depths which its direct rays can never reach.

SLAVERY IN ROME. 309

So the morning beams of our unsetting Sun were
reflected upon regions of humanity in which the
name of Christ was utterly unknown, and on
which its direct rays shone not till it had
ascended far toward the zenith.

The efficient reformers of the Roman law were,
all of them, nominally Christians. Constantine,
in the interior, spiritual sense of the word, can
hardly be called a Christian, certainly not, if
judged by the aggregate of what is known of him ;
but he called himself a Christian, and his im-
proved legislation was dictated by bishops who
were his conscience-keepers. Justinian, the great-
est legislator of all time, was a zealous Christian,
in some respects only too zealous ; for he was an
unrelenting persecutor of heretics, Jews, and
pagans. Of the series of Christian emperors in
the early centuries, there was hardly one whose
decrees and enactments did not bear the impress
of his faith, and effect something in vindication
of the rights of long-oppressed humanity. To ver-
ify this statement, let us consider under several
heads the influence of Christianity upon Roman
law.

To begin with slavery, there has never existed
elsewhere in the civilized world a system of
slavery to be compared in point of barbarity with
that of Rome, — all the worse because its victims

310 CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND ROMAN LAW.

were so often the equals or superiors of the en-
slaving race, and capable, therefore, of feeling its
indignity to the full. It was the general custom
of Roman commanders, in taking a city, to put
into the slave-market all the inhabitants that they
did not slaughter; and prisoners of war, when not
slain, redeemed, or exchanged, were always en-
slaved. Romans themselves might be made slaves.
By a law of the Twelve Tables, of the repeal of
which we have no record, though the last clause
probably fell into disuse, a debtor who remained
insolvent after sixty days' imprisonment might
be sold as a slave, or killed, and his body divided
among his creditors. The master's power over
his slaves was unlimited. The slaves had no
legal rights. Their testimony was taken only by
torture, and they could be scourged or branded
at the master's pleasure. They were often killed
on frivolous pretexts, for slight offences, for the
amusement of guests, as targets for archery, for
the fattening of lampreys, in passion or in sport,
on groundless suspicion, or to gratify the pique
or whim of an imperious mistress or a spoiled
child. If a master were murdered by an un-
known hand, it was lawful to kill the entire family
of slaves on the contingency that one of them
might have been the murderer; and there were
instances in which hundreds of lives were sacri-

CRUELTY TO SLAVES. 311

ficed under this law. The slaves had no property
except by sufferance, and what they were per-
mitted to have became the master's property when
they died.

Under Nero, yet certainly not out of his own
heart, but very probably from the prompting of
some of the Christian influences that must have
been at work in his court, it was enacted that a
magistrate might receive the complaint of a slave
against his master ; and it is on record that re-
scripts of Antoninus Pius, in whose reign Chris-
tian influence was already largely felt, declared the
master who killed his slave guilty of murder, and
ordered the sale to other masters of such slaves
as took refuge in temples or under the statues of
the emperor, in case the magistrate ascertained
that the charge of cruelty was well grounded.
But these ordinances must have been mere dead
letter, for there is not the slightest mention made
of them till they are cited in Justinian's u Insti-
tutes : " and though the literature of the first three
Christian centuries throws a most ghastly light on
the horrors of slave-life, and though Seneca is
unsparing in his denunciation of cruelty to slaves,
there is before Constan tine's time but a single
instance of any penalty imposed on a cruel or
tyrannical slave-owner ; and that is the case of a
young girl who was condemned by Hadrian to

312 CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND ROMAN LAW.

banishment for the atrocious torture of her female
slaves.

Constantine, after his nominal conversion, issued
the first edict for the protection of slaves which
seems to have had any actual efficiency ; and
from that moment a new era took date, and the
slave thenceforward lived, like the free man, under
the shelter of the magistracy and of the imperial
power. Constantine enacted that the master who
killed his slave, or subjected him to any one of
several species of torture specially enumerated
and defined, — all so horrible as to be unfit for
quotation, and showing how little difference
there is between humanity at its worst estate
and the popular conception of the arch-fiend, —
should be arraigned and punished as a murderer.
He also made the manumission of the slave a
religious act, to be performed in the church,
with the attestation of the bishop ; and in the
spirit of this edict, when in process of time
other business came to be prohibited on Sun-
day, manumission, as a religious duty, was not
only permitted on the Lord's Day, but was re-
garded as specially appropriate to its conse-
crated hours. Constantine also granted to the
clergy — thus showing the mind of the clergy
in this matter — the privilege of emancipating
their slaves by mere verbal concession, without

SLAVERY IN THE CIIURCII. 313

legal formality ; and the clergy in great numbers
availed themselves of this privilege.

Under Constantine, also, the freedmen obtained
for the first time the full rights of citizenship.
They had before been obliged to perform certain
prescribed services for their masters, and to sup-
port them if they became impoverished ; and if
the freedman died intestate, his entire property
became that of his former master. But Constan-
tine completed their enfranchisement.

Justinian made numerous provisions in favor of
emancipation. It is impossible to say at what
date, but not far from his time, it became a maxim
of the unwritten law, recognized in all the courts
of the empire, that the child followed the for-
tunes of the father, so that the acknowledged
child of a free man by a slave mother was free, —
a maxim which was generously extended to all
cases of doubtful parentage, — humanity often
finding easy tolerance through a legal fiction.

From the very first, slaves were admitted to
holy orders without reference to their servile con-
dition, on the ground that the gospel treated with
equal honor, as Jew and Gentile, so bond and free ;
and we have the names of several men of high
rank in the Church who were ordained as slaves,
and of several eminent martyrs, some of them
canonized saints, who were slaves. The Christian

314 CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND ROMAN LAW.

emperors, from Constantine onward, encouraged
and facilitated the emancipation of slaves ill
orders, till at no late period a bishop or priest was
pronounced free by the mere fact of his ordina-
tion. Slaves that anyhow became the property of
churches, as they often did by legacy or gift,
were almost invariably set free ; and slaves were
not infrequently bequeathed to churches, with an
express view to their emancipation under conditions
that would insure to them sympathy, protection,
and help. At an early period it became discredit-
able to an ecclesiastic to hold slaves.

The Christian clergy from the very first dis-
couraged the vague and irregular matrimonial
unions which prevailed among slaves, and we find
before Constantine's time tokens equally of their
strong feeling and of their almost utterly inef-
fectual action in this behalf; while under the
Christian emperors, though they were always in
advance of the law, the law followed their lead,
until, long before the cessation of domestic slavery,
slave-marriage was under the same legal restraints
and sanctions with the marriage of free men and
women.

As regards labor, the Christian emperors ex-
tended to the slaves the same prohibitions that
were imposed on free men. Constantine forbade
all labor on Sunday, except such as might be

GENERAL EMANCIPATION. 315

necessary to save exposed and imperilled crops
and fruit. Valentinian prohibited labor, also, on
Christmas, on Epiphany, in Holy Week, and on
the festivals of St. Peter and St. Paul. At the same
time, under directly Christian influence, largely
aided by the legislation which it prompted, labor
was clothed with dignity and honor ; industry be-
came respectable among free men, which it had
long ceased to be in Rome and its dependencies ;
arts, trades, and manual labor in agriculture, were
no longer regarded as menial, and the slave ceased
to be degraded by industries which, in the earlier
days of the empire, had been tokens of disgrace
and infamy.

Thus, in many and diverse ways slavery was
ameliorated long before it ceased to be ; the dis-
tinction between the slaves and the free was grad-
ually obliterated ; and at the same time the number
of slaves was constantly decreasing, till about the
time when the power of the Church reached its
culmination the last vestiges of chattel-slavery van-
ish from history, and the great curse is exorcised,
the crushing burden rolled off from all Christen-
dom, to re-appear only when Christ and the earth-
spirit are in conflict for supremacy in our New
World, and the arm of the Church — not unready
to bear part in the struggle — is too feeble to
wield its power across the intervening Atlantic.

316 CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND ROMAN LAW.

We will next consider the action of Christianity
on the Roman law as to the sacredness of the mar-
riage covenant. The legal liberty of divorce on
the part of the husband, even in the purest days
of the republic, was unlimited, though then hardly
ever exercised. As Rome grew rich and luxuri-
ous, divorces became frequent, and were made on
the most frivolous grounds. Paulus iEmilius,
who was eminently virtuous in the estimation
of his contemporaries, divorced his confessedly
blameless and excellent wife with no other excuse
than, " My shoes are new and well made, yet I
must change them, — no one but myself knows
where they pinch." In Cicero's time, divorce had
become so common among men of good repute
that Cicero's own case was a rare one, inasmuch
as he could give plausible reasons for divorcing
his thirty years' wife and the mother of his chil-
dren, in her bad temper, her extravagance, and her
disposal against his interest of some separate prop-
erty of her own, as also for the divorce of her suc-
cessor Publilia in her lack of sympathy with him
in his grief for the death of his daughter. You
are all familiar with the story — too disgusting to
be repeated in its details — of Livia's forced di-
vorce, to be married to Augustus Caesar. From
his time onward for three centuries, no husband
whose personal endowments, rank, or wealth

DIVORCE, IN JUSTINIAN'S CODE. 317

made him an object of desire could escape the in-
trigues of shameless women seeking to supplant
his wife in his household. Meanwhile marriage
cum conventions in manum (so called), the only
marriage by which the wife became legally a mem-
ber of the husband's family, was almost disused,
and marriage sine conventione, that is, without a
legal change of the wife's family relations, gave
her the same right of divorce which the husband
had always possessed. Accordingly, wives were
on the watch to improve their condition ; and we
read of women who reckoned their husbands by
years, and changed them as often as the munici-
pal elections came round.

This freedom of divorce was bemoaned and
denounced by the Christian Fathers, and was not
tolerated in Christian society ; but it received its
first legal check from Constantine. He issued an
edict, by which a wife could obtain divorce from
her husband, only if he were a homicide, a magi-
cian, or a violator of tombs, whether for plunder
or with sacrilegious intent ; and a wife could be
divorced only if she were an adulteress, a dabbler
in the black art, or a procuress. Edicts still less
favorable to divorce were issued by Honorius and
other later emperors ; and Justinian's code left the
law of divorce, if somewhat less rigid than that
of the New Testament, still in a much more

318 CHRISTIAN ETI11CS AND ROMAN LAW.

healthy condition than prevails at this moment
in any part of the United States. In all the
countries of Southern Europe, whose codes were
founded on the civil or Roman law, under the
growing ascendency of the Church, the law of
Justinian's code was so far modified as to make
adultery the only ground of divorce, and to inca-
pacitate the divorced husband or wife from form-
ing new matrimonial relations.

As to the definition of the degrees of kindred
within which marriage was authorized, I know
not of any prohibitory legislation in pre-Christian
Rome; but custom had in this respect followed
the leading of nature, except that there were in-
stances of the intermarriage of uncle and niece.
But the Christian emperors very early made the
prohibited degrees of the Levitical code the sub-
ject of positive enactment.

Another important department of legislation is
that which relates to the patria potestas (so called) ;
that is, the father's power over the child. By
the old Roman law this power was unlimited,
extending even to the child's life. Our common
phrase, " to bring up " a child, is derived from the
Latin tollere, to " lift up " from the ground or the
floor ; for in the early time it was by this symbolic
act, or its omission, that the father signified his
determination whether the new-born child should

INFANTICIDE. 319

live or die. The father, so long as he lived, had
sovereign power over his child's destiny, services,
earnings, and domestic relations. The only ex-
ception was that of the peculium castrense, that
is, the wages of military service^ which under Au-
gustus, and not earlier, was made the son's own
property ; and this exception was due, not to any
sense of the fitness that men in their full maturity
should have something that they could call their
own, but to the desire to enlist larger numbers of
native Roman citizens in the army, which had be-
come to a dangerous degree, and continued to be,
for the most part, a band of mercenaries from
remote provinces.

While adult children might still continue sub-
ject to a father's tyranny till they themselves were
old men, the practice of infanticide remained with-
out legal check or hinderance ; and, at the begin-
ing of the fourth century, Lactantius speaks of it
as a common practice, to which was attached
neither penalty, reproach, nor shame. It was not
till near the middle of the third century, that the
right of the father to kill his adult children was
legally repealed, though we find no mention of its
exercise after the reign of Nero ; and the last in-
stance of it on record, was one in which the father
hardly escaped with his life the indignation of the
public. Until near the close of the third century,

320 CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND ROMAN LAW.

a father might sell his children, of any age, into
slavery. Diocletian limited this right to the
sale of new-born children by parents in extreme
penury. Of course there was little demand in
the slave-market for slaves of so very tender age.
Children had previously been, to a very consid-
erable extent, bred for the slave-market ; and this
edict of Diocletian multiplied largely the cases
of the exposure of children with a view to their
perishing.

In this whole field of legislation, Constantine
was a vigorous and efficient reformer. He issued
the first edict, so far as we know, in the whole
Gentile world, which made infanticide a crime ;
and he placed it as to penalty on the same footing
with any other form of murder. He also enacted
the earliest poor-law on record, except those in the
Hebrew Scriptures, — a law by which the children
of parents too poor to support them were provided
with food and clothing from the public treasury.
He also extended the exemption of military wages
from paternal control to the compensation of the
numerous functionaries employed in the imperial
household ; and his successors enlarged it still
further, so as to include all public and quasi public
charges, whether civil or ecclesiastical. Constan-
tine also made children the sole heirs of their
mother's property, which had previously been

LAWS OF 1NUEEITANCE. 321

merged in the father's estate. Gratian made the
children of a deceased wife the immediate heirs of
their maternal grandparents. Justinian secured to
children the entire control of whatever property
or revenue might accrue to them independently
of their fathers, limiting the father's control to
such property as might have come to the child by
the father's gift, which he was at liberty to reclaim
or control at his pleasure.

I might specify in this connection the laws of
inheritance and succession, whether as regards
the rights and limitations of testamentary be-
quest, or the disposal of the property of intes-
tates ; but it would involve technicalities better
suited to a law-school than to a general audience,
and at the same time these topics seem to have a
less directty ethical bearing than those which I
have brought before you. Yet they have an
ethical significance and value ; and in this entire
branch of legislation, wherever principle is con-
cerned, we see very clearly the influence of Chris-
tian ideas as to domestic relations, and as regards
the mutual rights and duties of kindred. The
old Roman law of succession and inheritance was
vitiated throughout by the ramifications of the
father's absolute power and by the legal non-
entity of women. Under Constantine and his
successors this whole department of law was pro-

322 CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND ROMAN LAW.

gressively modified, so as to invest the adult son
with all the rights of property that belong to
manhood, and to make the woman, whether virgin,
wife, or widow, capable of holding and trans-
mitting property on an equal footing with the
man. There can be no question that in all matters
relating to the transmission and inheritance of
property, the countries that have derived their
jurisprudence from Roman sources have made . the
nearest approach which legislation has anywhere
made, and I might almost say, the nearest ap-
proach that mere legislation can make, to the
Christian standard of right ; and in England and
the United States the progress of law in this entire
department has consisted chiefly in the adoption
of principles and maxims derived from the civil
or Roman law.

It is on account of the perfectness of the Roman
law as compared with other codes and systems,
and because, as I said in a former lecture, law
has the moral education of the people for one
of the most important of its functions, that I
have thought fit, in a course of ethical lectures,
to show in this conspicuous instance what law
owes to Christian ethics. There can be no
reasonable doubt that the Roman law derived
from Christianity the very traits in which con-
sists its pre-eminence, its perpetuity, its adapta-

SOURCES OF LAW-REFORM. 323

tion in principle and spirit to our time and to all
time.

But it may be asked, Was not the civil law, as
matured under the Christian emperors, the natural
and inevitable outcome of the genius of the
Roman people, as a people from early time, so to
speak, addicted to law, law-making, and (except
at revolutionary epochs) law-keeping? I answer,
first, that the Roman people had ceased to give
law to the world, and, as to unmixed nationality,
had ceased to be. The seat of the Roman Empire
had been transferred to Constantinople, which
was peopled by the confluence of adventurers
from the whole civilized world and beyond it,
among whom Roman traditions and the corre-
sponding mental and moral habitudes had but a
very limited currency. In the second place, not
one of the law-reforming emperors was of Roman
birth, parentage, or lineage. Constantine and
Justinian were both born on the eastern coast of
the Euxine Sea, and the others were of various
races which two or three centuries before would
have been accounted as barbarians at Rome.

Then, too, the reformation of law took place in
precisely the directions in which Christian thought,
teaching, and writing had confessedly led the
way. The Christian Fathers, including the apos-
tolic Fathers (so called), so far as the works that

324 CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND ROMAN LAW.

bear their names are genuine, laid intense stress
on the equality of all men in the sight of God, on
the inviolable sacredness of the marriage cove-
nant, and on the relative rights and obligations
of the members of the Christian family ; and their
writings, especially those of Tertullian and Lac-
tantius, abound in lamentations over the very
evils against which the legislation of these em-
perors is chiefly aimed. We might fill a volume
with exhortations, denunciations, pictures of soci-
ety as it was, and as it ought to be, under the
several heads which I have specified in this lec-
ture. The same writers are also mindful of the
laborious and humble callings of the apostles, and
of the traditions which represented their Lord
and Master as having himself worked in Joseph's
carpenter-shop previously to his baptism and
his public ministry ; and they accordingly always
attach dignity and honor to labor, and are sedu-
lously anxious to relieve it from the menial associ-
ations which had clung to it in the classic nations
and ages, — deeply feeling, as we are prone not
to feel, that such associations cast shame and
reproach on the Founder of their religion and
on his foremost followers. The Church was thus
thoroughly leavened with the principles which em-
bodied themselves in laws as soon as the empire
became nominally Christian. It must be remem-

THE CANON LAW. 325

bered, too, that the law-reforming emperors, —
Constantine and Justinian, more worthily sur-
named Great than nine-tenths of the sovereigns
that have borne that appellation, and the others,
some of them men of signal administrative ca-
pacity,— while differing widely as to the evidence
which they gave of personal piety, were all of
them what is scornfully called "priest-ridden,"
and priest-ridden to the best possible purpose.
Their improved laws were suggested by their
ecclesiastical advisers, and often dictated to them
with the exhibition of formidable weapons from
the well-stocked arsenal of ecclesiastical pains and
penalties.

In fact, in all matters that could be common
to the two,1 the canon law and the civil law were
identical in Justinian's time, the latter being little
more than an authoritative registry and promulga-
tion of the former. The canon law subsequently
became encumbered with subtilties, anomalies,
and absurdities, due in part to the growing igno-
rance and incapacity of the clergy, in part to the
same cause that is now constantly creating muni-

i This statement includes laws relating to marriage, domes-
tic relations, wills, and all the matters within the jurisdiction
of our probate courts. There was a body of canon law with
reference to offences strictly ecclesiastical, which had attained a
considerable growth before Justinian's time, and which existed,
and in great part still exists, independently of municipal law.

326 CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND ROMAN LAW.

cipal law not written in the statutes, namely, the
converting of particular cases into precedents of
universal application.

It may be objected to the agency which I have
ascribed to Christianity in the ethical superiority
of the Roman law, that in the legal writings of the
great jurists prior to the age of Constantine, such
as Gaius, Paulus, Papinian, and Ulpian, there are
to be found many traces of an humane and phi-
lanthropic spirit, and many maxims that seem to
have a Christian trend ; and yet none of these
men are known or supposed to have been Chris-
tians. I would answer, first, that several, if not
all, of these writers were Stoics ; and I have al-
ready given my reasons for supposing that leading
Stoics under the empire had unconsciously, or
perhaps consciously, imbibed ethical notions from
Christian sources. In the next place, these men
were not legislators, but commentators, without
authority when they wrote, and elevated into au-
thority only under later Christian auspices. We
have no proof, and no reason to believe, — on the
other hand, in the wording of Constantine's edicts
we have ample reason for not believing, — that
the maxims of these writers had before the age of
Constantine any influence in the administration
of law. Still further, we have no proof that some
or all of these men may not have had, and it is

INFLUENCE OF THE ROMAN LAW. 327

intrinsically probable that they had, actual conver-
sance with Christian teachers, and with the Chris-
tian Scriptures, which, after the middle of the
second century, must have been sufficiently dif-
fused and circulated to attract the curiosity and
interest of cultivated men. Indeed, Ulpian says
so many things, not only of a Christian type, but
even in a Christian-like style and manner, that we
can hardly imagine him to have been ignorant of
Christian writers, or unfriendly to their religion.
Lactantius, indeed, speaks of a certain Domitius
as unfriendly to the Christians ; and Ulpian's first
name was Domitius. But that cannot have been
an uncommon name, and Lactantius may have
been speaking of some other man. If not, all
that is laid to the charge of his Domitius is the
recital, in some work of his, of certain imperial
rescripts against the' Christians ; and this cer-
tainly does not imply approval of them. If they
were a part of the municipal law of his time, he
could not have left them unnoticed.

We have reason, then, to believe that Christian-
ity was a chief forming element in the civil law as
shaped under the early Christian emperors into
the most perfect legal structure of all time, — a
structure which has long outlived the empire that
gave it birth, has insured the rights and liberties
of nations that had not then begun to be, and is

328 CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND ROMAN LAW.

destined to exert an extended influence for ages
yet to come.

It is impossible to over-estimate the moral power
of the Roman law ill creating all that is most pre-
cious in modern civilization. The civilization of
the old Roman world was in intense need of re-
generation. It was draining the life-blood of the
nations within its pale, enervating them, even de-
pleting their numerical strength, and very rapidly,
too, so that it was incursion and immigration from
races that had till of late been deemed almost sav-
age, that kept up the population of the empire.
The dark ages were inevitable, because the oil
that fed the light of the Old World was burned
out. The only light left was that which is des-
tined never to expire, but was not as yet far above
the horizon. Even the Christian religion, as a
religion, can hardly be said to have survived, ex-
cept as the wokian in the Apocalypse who had u a
place prepared of God for her in the wilderness."
The ritual remained ; and there was, undoubtedly,
the true apostolic succession that never ceased,
though hidden in the fastnesses of the Apennines,
and beyond the reach of papal ban or sword. But
happily, before Christianity had lost its identity,
its ethics were embodied by the great imperial
lawgivers. Because their laws were Christian,
the Church had them in charge. The clergy had

777 J? DARK AGES. 329

a monopoly of such scanty intelligence and learn-
ing as remained ; they had unlimited power over
sovereigns and rulers ; and thus the great princi-
ples of ethical right were, for the most part, held
in reverence, and the laws founded upon them
were executed as regarded the people at large,
though immunity from them could often be pur-
chased by the rich, or enforced by the powerful.
In particular, the marriage laws, which lie at the
foundation of all social well-being, were held with
great strictness by the Church ; and dispensations
from them were so costly, and involved a process
so long and tedious, that they were seldom sought.
Had the darkness come on before these laws
were enacted, it is easy to imagine the utter depth
of depravity into which the world would have
sunk, almost beyond the possibility of redemption.
By far the greater part of the homes in Christen-
dom were, during the (so called) dark ages, built
after the Christian model, with parents united in
irrevocable wedlock, and children growing up
under the shelter and guidance of parental love ;
and society thus ordered, to however low a plane
of intelligence it may have fallen, has in it the
prophecy of a resurrection, the elements of prog-
ress. In fact, during that period there was a
perpetual growth under the cloud. Humane prin-
ciples and maxims were taking root and gaining

330 CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND ROMAN LAW.

strength; the spirit of honor that had its embodi-
ment in the institutions of chivalry was nurtured
and cherished ; respect for woman became a per-
vading and ruling sentiment ; the savage laws of
Avar were ameliorated; the claims of conquered
enemies began to be recognized, and mainly
through the agency of Christian ethics embodied
in the civil law the world that emerged from ob-
scurity with the foregleams of the Protestant
Reformation showed an immense advance in all
the elements of Christian civilization beyond the
world that had passed into the age-long sleep.

But while we justly attach this transcendent
value to law, it must be remembered that it was
expressly religious institutions that preserved the
law, — that maintained its working-power and its
place in the reverence of the general mind. There
were the clergy, in all the orders of the imposing
hierarchy ; there were the mysterious rites that
enforced their authority by the powers of the
world to come ; there was the fearful array of
penance and punishment, in which the arm of
flesh was always ready to strike where the sword
of the spirit directed and aimed the blow.

We are perhaps too prone to undervalue mere
religious institutions, but, if so, wrongly. In the
first place, they never are mere institutions.
However perverted and corrupted they may be,

JUSTINIAN'S AIM AS A LEGISLATOR. 331

something of their spirit still broods over them.
Then, too, they would not remain in being were
they not reverenced ; and reverence itself has an
ethical value, even though its objects be dimly ap-
prehended. There is, also, always a possibility of
revival in spirit while the institutions remain.
There is a hearth on which to light the fire. But
without a hearth, how shall the fire be built, and
how shall it be kept burning?

One word in conclusion. In what I have said
about the Roman law as more nearly perfect than
any other system, it must not be inferred that it
was wholly free from defects and faults. There
were individual enactments, both laws and penal-
ties, that belonged to a less enlightened age than
ours. But what I mean to say is, that in its fun-
damental principles, in its foremost aims and in
its pervading spirit, it left, as codified by Justin-
ian, a structure of law that needed not recon-
struction in any essential department or element,
but only improvement with enlarged culture, and
adaptation to altered conditions. Moreover, while
for some of the emperors called Christian we
must say less, Justinian was a firm Christian be-
liever, and, with many faults of character, still
manifestly had a Christian ideal before him in his
legislation. His aim was to embody Christian
ethics in the laws of the empire ; and Christianity

332 CIIBISTIAN ETHICS AND RdMAN LAW.

has been the salt that has preserved the civil law,
and has made it a perennial agency in public
order and social well-being. The work was slow ;
but there was no slackening or retrograde move-
ment. Justinian came to the throne about two cen-
turies after Constantine commenced his career as
a Christian legislator. Next to the first Christian
century, those two centuries were of more moment
for human happiness and welfare than any other
period in the world's history. They gave the
world its first specimen of laws which had for
their foundation the principles of the eternal
Right, — principles which must underlie all insti-
tutions and enactments that will live and last,
while those that rest on any other foundation
must meet the fate of the house built on the sand.

INDEX.

Abstinence, when a duty, 134.
when wrong, 135.
Alms, public, of harmful influence,

126.
Ambition, when beautiful, 229.
Aristotle, the ethics of, 227.
Art, beauty in, analogous to moral

beauty, 221.
Asceticism, devoid of beauty, 232.
Attention, ethical value of, 17.
Aurelius, Marcus, character of, 295.
" Meditations " of,

298.
death of, 299.

Baptism, why to be observed, 42.
Beauty, moral, defined, 220.

in character, 222.
in individual acts, 224.
self - government es-
sential to, 235.
not a test of the Right,

244.
its own beautifier, 247.
Beneficence, a part of justice, 125.

to the lower orders of
being, 127.
Bentbam, ethical system of, 68.
Brutes, lack of the moral sense in,
263.

Calvinism, analogies of, with Stoi-
cism, 282 n.
Cannibalism, how accounted for, 89. I

Carlyle, ridiculed by Spencer, 272.
Casuistry, defined, 209.
Cato, the elder, character of, 196.
Causation, conception of, due to con-
sciousness, 4.
Character, how formed, 13.

how re-formed, 17.
standard of the Christian,
215.
Christianity, influence of, on Roman

law, 323.
Cicero, ethics of, 194.

the De Officii* of, 285.
Conscience, defined, 82.

province of, 83.

not an active principle,

84.
infallible, 85.
how far capable of edu-
cation, 87.
universal, 88.
relation of, to law, 94.
counterfeits of, 101.
growth of, 106.
according to the hedonic
theory, 258.
Consciousness, testimony of, valid, 8.
testimony of, against
hedonism, 275.
Courage, physical and moral, 129.
Courtesy, beauty of, 237.
sources of, 241.
in speech, 242.
333

334

INDEX.

Coveting, why specially forbidden in

the Decalogue, 176.
Customs, standard of, 152.
vis inertice of, 153.
duty with reference to right,

160.
duty with reference to
wrong, only by excess,
161.
duty with reference to ab-
solutely wrong, 162.

Decalogue, divine origin of the, 165.
completeness of the, 166.
precepts of the, sepa-
rately considered, 167.
Diogenes, the Stoic philosopher, 285.
Discourtesy, sources of, 239.
Divorce, growing facility of, 121.
plea for, groundless, 122.
among the Hebrews, 188.
in pagan Rome, 316.
under the Christian emper-
ors, 317.

Epictetus, character of, 292.
philosophy of, 293.
piety of, 294.
Epicurus, philosophy of, 67.
Ethics, Christian, not new, 192.
perfect, 193.
of universal valid-
ity, 194.
no formal system

of, 200.
the fundamental
principle of, 201.
positive character

of, 204.
demanding active

duty, 205.
supplying the
knowledge of
duty, 206.
direct action of, on
the conscience,

Ethics, Christian, motive-power of,

213.
Eucharist, the, why to be observed,

40.
Evolution - theory, religious aspects
of the, 249.
probability o f

the, 231.
two classes o f
disciples of the,
252.
ethics of the, 253.
Expediency, an inadequate ground
of right, 69.
office of, 75.

Falsehood, when seemingly expedi-
ent, 71.
in extreme cases, 73.
Family, the, the norm of the state,

175.
Fanaticism, never beautiful, 280.
Filial piety, enjoined in the Deca-
logue, 174.
the pre-requisite of na-
tional well-being, 175.
Fitness, the ground of right, 29.
Fortitude, defined, 127.
Freedom, human, proved by con-
sciousness, 15.
human, not incompatible
with divine foreknowl-
edge, 18.
human, pre-supposed in
the divine influence on
the soul, 20.
human, limited under low
conditions of culture,
24.

God, the will of, not a ground of

right, 35.
positive commands of, why

valid, 39.
Growth, a principle, 139.

Habits, how broken, 13.

INDEX.

335

Habits, created by rules, 148

labor-saving virtue of, 150.
of thought and feeling, 152.
Hebrews, poor-laws of the, 178.

marriage-laws of the, 183.
polygamy among the, 187.
law of divorce of the, 188.
Hedonism, defined, 265.

negatived by conscious-
ness, 267.
Heredity, power of, 21.

not irresistible, 22.
recognized in the Deca-
logue, 168.
the law of, beneficent in its

effect, 169.
illustrated in the life of
Marcus Aurelius, 296.
Hobbes, ethical system of, 68.
Home, created by Christianity, 199.

Ideals, objects of volition, 27.
Ignorance, sins of, 33.
Image-worship, why forbidden in the

Decalogue, 168.
Imprisonment for debt, 96.
Infauticide, lawful in pagan Rome,
319.
made a capital crime by
Constantine, 320.
Inheritance, laws of, 321.

Jesus Christ, the exemplar of his own
ethical system, 211.
moral beauty of, 225.
Jews, in Rome, 305.
Justice, defined, 119.

Knowledge of the Right, discrimi-
nated from conscience, 92.

Law, relation of, to conscience, 95.
as to debts, 96.
as to intoxicating liquors, 98.
as to crimes of violence and of

lust, 99.
ethical character of the Hebrew,

191.

Law, perfectness of the Roman, 322.

the canon, 325 n.
Love, a principle, 141.

Manners, good, a part of good mor-
als, 135.
an element of moral
beauty, 236.
Miracles, possible, 6 n.
Moderation, a constituent element of
moral beauty, 236.
the law of good manners,
237.
Morality, independent of religion, 44.
Motives, office of, 10.

not necessarily determining
conduct, 12.
Mysticism, annulling moral obliga-
tion, 48.
ethical tendencies of, 51.

NeceBsarianism, defined, 1.

degrading to human
nature, 2.

prima facie case in
favor of, 4.

arguments for, ap-
plicable to God us
well as to man, 6.

Obstacles, ethical value of, 128.
Order, defined, 131.
in place, 132.

Paley, ethical philosophy of, 65.
Panaetius, the Stoic philosopher, 285.
Pantheism, annulling moral obliga-
tion, 52.
two types of, 53.
Parental love, according to the he

donic theory, 2M.
Passion, never beautiful, 228.
Paternal authority, in ancient Rome,
318.
limited under the
Christian e m -
perors, 320.

336

INDEX.

Patience, how nourished, 130.
Pentateuch, authorship of the, 164.
Philauthropy, when a passion, not

beautiful, 234.
Piety towards God, a part of justice,

119.
Plato's Republic, ethics of, 195.
Pleasure, the evolutionist standard
of right, 250.
according to the Stoics,
280.
Plutarch, character of, 299.
" Lives " of, 300.
Moralia of, 301.
essay of, on " The delay of
the Divine Justice," 302.
Principles, defined, 136.

in morals, 137.
Prudence, defined, 116.
Punctuality, a duty, 132.
Purity, a principle, 137.

Quantity of being, the object of prov-
idential discipline, 128.

Religion, hedonic theory of, 259.
Reverie, moral power of, 15.
Right, defined, 28.

the ground of, 29.
relative and absolute, 31.
various theories as to the
ground of, 34.
Rules, moral, founded on principles,
141.
use of, 142.

to be made for our-
selves, not for oth-
ers, 143.
not to be changed with
circumstances, 144.

Sabbath, the, a law of nature, 170.

necessary for religious

culture, 171.
ante-Hebrew and extra

Hebrew, 172.
how to be observed, 173.

Sanctimony, discriminated from sanc-
tity, 231.
Selfish theory of morals, the, defined,
55.
the, exclud-
ing obliga-
tion, 56.
grounds for
rejec ting
the, 57.
the, annul-
ling v i r-
tue, 60.
the, destroy-
ing merit
and de-
merit, 61.
Self-seeking, when and how far justi-
fied, 79.
Seneca, character of, 288.

ethical works of, 291.
Sin, unified in Christian ethics, 202.
Slavery, amoug the Hebrews, 182.
in Rome, 309.
ameliorated under Constan-

tine, 312. +
ameliorated uuder Justinian,

313.
vanishing from history, 315.
Slaves, Christian, in Rome, 306.

influence of, 307.
Smith, Adam, ethical theory of, 45.
Society, progress of, 157.
Spencer, sneers of, at Carlyle, 272.
Stoics, ethics of the, 278.

in imperial Rome, 288.
Sunday, why to be observed, 42.
Sympathy, au inadequate ground of
right, 46.

Temperance, a department of order,
132.
progress of, in New
England, 154.

Usury, among the Hebrews, 189.
Utilitarianism, the two forms of, 55.

INDEX.

337

Utilitarianism,
power, 68.

deficient in motive-

Veracity, as tested by expediency, 71.
obligatory on the ground of
Intrinsic right, 124.
Virtu, meaning of, in the Italian,

110.
Virtue, Paley's definition of, 65.

derivation of the word, 109.
various meanings of, 110.
oneness of, 111.
division of, 113.
heroic, 269.

Stoic definition of, 279.
Virtues, the cardinal, defined, 113.

the cardinal, essential to one

another, 115.
the passive, characterized,

197.
the passive, the aggressive
power of, 198.

Virtues, the passive, influence of, in
home-life, 199.
the passive, value of, in so-
ciety, 200.

Virtus, primitive meaning of, 110.

Volitions, collective, 13.

War, Hebrew laws concerning, 184.

Xenophon, the biographer of Socra-
tes, 195.

Youth, ethical consciousness of, 275.
consecrated, of Marcus Aure-
lius, 295.

Zeal, religious, a substitute for con-
science, 104.
Zeno, the advocate of suicide, 194.
character of, 278.

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Renewed books are subject to immediate recall.

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